Stop thinking of them as alternatives to passwords. That is something they do, incidentally. Really, they are an alternative to normal TOTP 2FA (and shudders SMS 2FA). Those were already dependent on an app on a single device, or a password manager. And now, you can have the security of that, automatically used with biometrics. It is only because they are so secure, due to being a cryptographic key, that they can replace passwords.
They really should come up with a way to transfer them across devices/password managers though.
No, there are quite a few models which are smaller, more accurate, and faster. For example Parakeet TDT v3 is half the size, way faster, and lower WER. There's also Voxstral, which is much larger but also even more accurate.
But the ecosystem isn't as mature, so Whisper is still a valid option, even now. For example Parakeet uses Nemotron framework (made by Nvdia), normally you need CUDA, so you need to use an ONNX version instead on AMD. Meanwhile Whisper has VLLM and desktop apps like Buzz.
There aren't many benchmarks and they often don't have all the models, since STT doesn't get nearly enough attention as normal LLMs, but this is one of the more complete ones:
https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-text/non-streaming
I just think it's funny to see the juxtaposition of new, hand-crafted, high quality CSS & JS sites next to... let's just say "minimalist aesthetic" sites.
And then there's mine, just a Jekyll template... Maybe I should learn some webdev.
Same, nix seems like such a perfect solution- but it's prohibitively hard. Sure, I could use it and sink 12 hours into reading the documentation, or I could just install pyenv/nvm/etc and be done in 1 minute.
Look at Python with Nix: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Python
And then consider the simplicity of `pyenv install x.x.x` and a requirements.txt.
> I appear to be paying a lot of money for products that I could buy for cheap on random websites is starting to piss me off a bit at this point.
It seems like if you bought an accessory that's just a PCB (which means excluding headphones, storage, etc) within the last 5 years, there's like a 90% chance of it being dropshipped.
At this point, I've just given up and ordered right from AliExpress. I can't even name any good accessory manufacturers off the top of my head.