Cockroach doesn't offer strict serializability. It has serializability with some limits depending on clock drift. Also CockroachDB does not provide linearizability over the entire database.
You’re describing compare and swap which is a good solution. You’re pushing complexity down to the database, and remember this is distributed locking. When you have a single database it’s simple until the database crashes leaving you in state of not knowing which of your CAS writes took effect. In major systems that demand high availability and multi datacenter backups this becomings pretty complicated with scenarios that break this as well around node failure. Usually some form of paxos transaction log is used. Never assume there is an easy solution in distributed systems… it just always sucks
That’s kinda what aws tells people when its services go down. If your backend can’t take a short outage without weeks of recovery then it’s just a matter of time.
This argument doesn't hold up to any scrutiny if you try to apply it to any other kind of portable software.
Spotify is a music player that uses the Electron framework and it doesn't run on iOS.
Outlook is a email client that uses the WinUI engine and it doesn't run on iOS.
Netflix is an applet that runs on the Microsoft Silverlight engine, and that doesn't run on iOS.
There is something that feels wrong about Apple's restrictions for browsers but different platform necessitating different, often fundamentally different, implementations isn't quite it.
Spotify's distinguishing feature is not "using Electron". Same for all of the other apps you mentioned.
Chrome's distinguishing feature is "not being Safari or Firefox". It has this distinguishing feature on all other platforms like Linux, Mac, Android and Windows. Only on one platform is this feature missing, and that is why it is emphasized so much.
Well even on iOS Chrome is a different app from Safari and Firefox. Mozilla has two different browsers — even on iOS where all browsers are "the same" Mozilla sees enough differences to have two separate ones.
You're just restating the premise. I think Outlook could make a case for just being a wrapper for Apple Mail. Valve could make the case that Steam's distinguishing feature is lacking on iOS. Again, there is some signal here but I've never heard anyone be able to really explain it.
Outlook could make a great case that Apple’s own email client has access to all kinds of great iOS APIs that are only available to Apple and not to third party email clients. Apple mail has deep OS integration that is impossible for third party email clients. Apple Mail can fetch in the background at will while Outlook has to build that on top of mediocre APIs.
the engine it’s running is the safari one, chrome on iOS is just an alternative interface with different syncing semantics.
that said, this thread of reasoning has started wrong, there is no market for web browsers on iOS just like there’s no market for phone diallers on your in-car stereo system.. What you get is what you get, and that’s always been the case and Apple products are the only devices that can run Safari…
if you keep thinking of apple devices as computers instead of like consoles or appliances, then you are going to get upset.
There is a market for web browsers as soon as Google is able to ship a “real” Chrome for iOS and half they start breaking things gently on the web for other browsers. Just like they did over the timespan of a decade.
Once Chrome can ship on iOS you will see everyone’s market share crumble and Chrome becoming the only browser.
That is anti competitive and not even addressed in any kind of way by the DMA.
On the contrary, it is the end game for the OWA, which is largely a front for “let’s make sure Chromium will dominate the web so that Google can push project Fugu down everyone’s throats.”
I find this difficult to reconcile with the case against Microsoft, which I understood to be about pushing IE on Windows.
Are you saying that the case against Microsoft wasn't based on anticompetitive attempts to dominate the market for web browsers, that the law has changed since then, or that Windows is somehow different from iOS legally?
Another distinction is that the EU has figured out something in between.
That the US has been waging an economic wars and used unconventional warfare techniques, corporate espionage, corruption, and weaponized the US dollar.
That US businesses have been lobbying and interfering with politics in the EU to provide themselves with competitive edges.
Lobbying is itself illegal in many EU nations hence done undercover, thus is plain bribery and corruption of government officials
EU has started retaliating, that's all. At least in using the justice system the way the US has instrumented its own to serve US businesses, helping them win certain markets, and fine competing foreign to the US businesses, fortunes, and ruining them whenever possible.
Still, not letting side loads, imposing to be an intermediary and payment gateway between all publishers and their audience, taking an outrageous commission rate, plus a fixed developer licensing fee, plus forcing all developers to build the published binaries exclusively on Apple made hardware, plus disallowing third parties to repair, plus circumventing the right to repair bill, altogether is without doubt abusing a position of dominance and deploying anti competition tactics.
Saying these are measures to keep users safe is a fallacy and an insult to educated consumers, all it says really is a reveal of how Apple considers its consumers at large.
Not when the company told the existing engineers they can’t afford raises and have to lower bonuses. Then they openly offer much larger payouts to all the new folks.
Might or might not be worth it, but there’s no way that doesn’t create massive resentment.
I doubt all of those 700+ employees are ML Researchers. For the majority of that employee base there would be an equivalent role already in MS. That wouldn't go well with them.
Eg. There would be atleast 1 web-developer in OpenAI who would have written the ChatGPT UI. That person for all we know might be better payed that the web-developer folks working on Bing UI.
I'm excited about them making it faster to produce. I finished the most recently published audiobook in a series this weekend. The author posts unpublished chapters to a site called Royal Road. I listen to books while running and driving, so it's a non-starter to visually read them. It would be nice to have that pipeline accelerated.
Now, I just want to talk about my little weekend project... I spent a couple of hours scraping Royal Road and trying to get TTS working. Eventually, I settled on:
1. `wget --recursive` filtering only the chapters
2. A python script to strip extraneous html like advertisements and the headers.
3. Pipe into pandoc emitting plain text.
4. Copy it to my phone for TTS: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.danefinlay.ttsutil/
I really wanted to use all local tools, but I just couldn't get any of the Linux tools to sound as good or work as fast as Google TTS services. Also, the TTS paid services I found were just too expensive to justify (20hr book for ~$70).
I'm more than happy to additionally purchase the audiobook when it is published. I just don't want to wait.
Yeah, it isn’t so much that I want publishers to have a cheaper way of making an audiobook that avoids the (apparently minimal) cost of employing a voice actor.
I don’t want to wait for the publisher to decide they want to do an audiobook.
For what its worth, most of the cost of audiobooks doesn't come from paying talent. For intermediate level actors, the going rate is around $50-$100 per finished hour (PFH) and experienced actors it can be around $250-$300. This page does a decent job of laying out pay structures for audiobooks: https://speechify.com/blog/whats-the-meaning-of-per-finished...
An 8 hour audio book might cost the author/producer about $1800-$2k.
Just talking about Audible exclusively, they take about %50 of sales. But it's kinda wishy washy about exactly how much an author will earn in royalties. It's not as much as you might think. Good article from an author here that lays out some sales numbers: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/how-audiobook-authors-are-p...
The other way that a narrator can get paid is called royalty share. That means the author/producer doesn't pay the narrator anything up front and the voice actor then relies on a small percent of each book sale to get paid. Theoretically, if an audiobook ends up really taking off then the narrator potentially could make a lot of money. But that rarely happens. Most audiobooks that you find on Audible have very, very low sales volumes.
To sum it up, it doesn't occur to lost of audiobook fans but voice acting is a very competitive industry. It takes a lot of work to make a name for yourself, and even then the most successful actors probably aren't making much more than a highly paid software engineer. For most wannabe voice actors (including myself), its something you do more for love than necessarily to make a career out of it. Though of course, lots of people do but not the majority.
This is all why I'm personally not a fan of these voice generation models. It's going to eventually make this niche industry non-competitive for real humans except for the talent that is already established. People keep blaming the actors as being too expensive when most are barely making it without secondary jobs.
Voice acting seems to be really bad career, so eliminating that job is desired, if you can deliver same quality/better product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be underpaid.
I know it sucks for people in that industry, but technical progress always eliminates jobs. Calculator used to be a job, now it’s a device.
> if you can deliver same quality/better product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be underpaid.
This almost never happens. Cheaper? Yes. Same or better quality? Not a chance. Automated solutions tend to allow reducing quality way below what humans workers would want to do, or even could cheaply and reliably (i.e. doing worse job than a careless one takes actual effort/skill). Like with every other case of automation replacing humans, expect the quality to be pushed down to minimum tolerable levels, as this is the point that maximizes revenue.
I think you’re romanticizing quality of human work. World is full of employees who couldn’t care less and will take the path of least resistance to get a paycheck. Removing humans from the loop often directly leads to improved quality. Of course, those are same humans that make decisions about how to use automation, so it’s not a panacea.
There’s tons of things where quality improved immensely due to automation. Engines, drugs, batteries, just to name few.
I'm not romanticizing quality of human work. I'm not claiming people give more shit than it seems. I'm claiming that with humans doing the work, quality can only get so low[0] - and automation lets you punch through that floor, achieving much lower quality standards.
Or, put another way:
> Removing humans from the loop often directly leads to improved quality.
Yes, but improved quality for the same price means leaving money on the table, so approximately every business immediately drops quality to the baseline and pockets the difference - and from that point on, competition will optimize the quality further down.
> Of course, those are same humans that make decisions about how to use automation, so it’s not a panacea.
It's not the humans being replaced that make that decision - it's their bosses, who rent or own the automation, that make this call.
> There’s tons of things where quality improved immensely due to automation. Engines, drugs, batteries, just to name few.
Sorta, kinda. In areas with strict regulatory standards? Yes. In areas where automation improves both cost and quality, and the competitive pressure isn't very strong? Sure. With products not yet commoditized? Often enough. When it enables market segmentation? Of course.
But then you have commodities, or automation replacing people directly on the "critical path" of value chain. That's where products and services go to shit. Bonus points if automation allows to engage customers in "self-service" - i.e. outsource work to the customers.
Case in point: automated checkout machines in stores. They reduce jobs, but in theory, they could reduce queues, increase throughput, and make shopping more pleasant - win-win deal for everyone - even the cashiers could be shifted to oversight/support jobs, ensuring increased throughput and more profit for the store, for the same number of employees.
In practice, it turns out the optimal setup for the store is deploying way too few machines, and instead of having dedicated employees for oversight/support of the machines, those responsibilities are just tacked on to the workload of the existing (reduced) work force. As a result, queues are longer, customers are frustrated, overall shopping experience is shit - but the store knows perfectly well the customers will endure it anyway[1].
The market optimizes for profits, not quality or happiness. It's not just greed - money is the lifeblood of companies, and without it they die. As a result, however, competitive pressure ensures that any value or virtue that can be sacrificed to improve profits, will be sacrificed. Those who refuse get outcompeted by those who make that sacrifice. The ratchet turns, and the sacrificed value is lost forever.
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[0] - There are many limiting factors. If the business is pushing down quality of human work too hard, they'll eventually have to deal with employee frustration, or hit limits imposed by OSHA or labor law, or just a soft limit where producing a fixed amount of goods/services costs X in labor, and there's no point in trying to save 0.1X on quality if it requires workers to put effort, which will make them produce less per unit of time, or increase variability of output, or both.
[1] - There are many reasons for it, including customers being price sensitive to the point of irrationality, usually valuing their free time at 0, and being easy to confuse with constant churn of deals. Stores also know that frustration is a fleeting feeling, while well-crafted product selection makes a store/chain sticky. Notice how automated checkout machines tend to proliferate in grocery stores and drogeries, and are seldom seen anywhere else: that's because they work best in places where customers are susceptible to factors I described earlier - and thus will endure bad experience and still come back for more. It's not like there are alternatives - competitive pressure ensures all competitors offer equally shitty experience. The ratchet made a turn, there is no going back.
> Case in point: automated checkout machines in stores.
I don't know where you live, but I've never seen automated checkout machines. I only have seen self checkout machines. It requires the customer to do the cashier' job and that's all.
The only reason it's not good is that it's not automated enough (if at all -- for me the self checkout machine is literally zero automation more than a regular cashier)
> The only reason it's not good is that it's not automated enough (if at all -- for me the self checkout machine is literally zero automation more than a regular cashier)
That's the point. But you are not the buyer of that automation, the store is. That automation displaced human cashiers and lowered the quality of service for customers, while generating better margins for the store (promptly eaten by competition). From your POV, i.e. customer's POV, it's not automated enough - but it's not going to be for quite a while, because there is no incentive to do it. The store doesn't stand to benefit much from additional automation, not enough to justify investment. Whether or not customers like it is irrelevant, as long as they're still coming in anyway.
I really wonder whether you have seen Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT or any other the recent trendy AI things.
You can't find an illustrator who could "cheaply and reliably" do illustrations at Midjourney's level. You just can't. If you could you would have been the biggest contractor company in the world long time ago.
"Midjourney's level" is precisely the quality I'm talking about. It's impressive for what the computer can do, yes. It's not impressive when you find it coming out of a black box labeled "commercial commissioned art", not when compared to what used to come out of that box for about the same price. The images are... almost OK. But there's always something. A missing finger here, a tiny extra eye there, some psychedelic pattern faintly visible in the negative space, etc.
But what can you do? Every black box labeled "commercial commissioned art" is now returning similarly off images, almost but not quite there. They all dropped their prices a little, so there's that - while the few black boxes offering the quality that used to be normal now cost 2-3x of what used to be normal. Hard pass.
(Meanwhile, people operating the black boxes - i.e. companies or in-house departments churning out commercial graphics cheaply - are swimming in money made on firing all their minimum-wage artists, replacing them with Midjourney or SD, and pocketing the difference. Sure, they had to drop the prices a little to clear out remaining human-powered competitors, and they will have to drop them way further once the competition restarts in the earnest - but for a short moment, they all get to make small fortunes on selling shit output, that's 100+x cheaper to produce, at roughly the same price as mediocre one before.)
Can AI be used to generate much higher quality at the same cost as human art? Sure - you'll need to spend what you used to pay an artist, whom you just fired, on generating variants and a (cheaper, at least per unit of output) human select best ones - but yes, AI can give you much better quality for the same price. But AI can also give you same quality as before for cheaper, or somewhat worse quality for much cheaper. Which is the best option to choose?
The answer, I claim, is that there is no choice - competitive pressure will force everyone to go for shittiest quality the market can bear, sold almost at cost. This will satisfy enough demand that "standard quality" offering becomes something very expensive or outright unavailable, as economics of using minimum-wage factory artists suddenly stops working.
Perhaps it's not the bar the GP was applying, but I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers. Consider all of the people that can't currently afford Audible, but who would like to listen to audio books while they commute to work, for example.
And of course, nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.)
Extrapolating further -- if the commoditized version of audio books is AI generated voice, perhaps the new job for voice actors is human narrating/acting of AI-generated content for personalized stories ('Ractives from Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age"). Who knows, human voice actors could become more in demand, not less. To be clear I wouldn't forecast this as the most likely outcome, just pointing out that there are many possible outcomes.
> I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers.
That's the thing though - it's not as empowering as it seems longer-term, because the "good enough" quickly drops to "barely fit for purpose"/"if it were any worse, it would be illegal to market or sell". This has been the case with most established classes of products I can think of, including pretty much anything that's been fully commoditized.
And so
> nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.)
Nothing stops me today. But even if the quality differential exists, the dropping price on the low-quality version will reduce demand on the moderate-quality version, pushing its prices up and reducing number of suppliers (here, voice actors). The end result seems to always be a bifurcation: there is not enough demand to sustain a business doing decent quality work for a reasonable price, so all companies move to providing either low quality work cheaply, or high quality work at a hefty premium. The middle disappears.
In the specific context of this thread, the middle in question is the current quality of audiobooks with voice acting. The quality level available to most consumers will be below that, and the next step up will be niche recordings at high cost.
If they make it better for the reader, they can potentially raise the price. If they can make it cheaper to produce, they can potentially increase their profit without raising the price.
Usually on balance this falls somewhere in between -- more value for less money for the consumer, and more profit on each marginal unit of production for the producer, which is how technology progresses across most consumer goods.
Yes, but they're not going to pass on costs from not using a voice actor. They're just going to charge what they normally would have, and not worry about having to give so and so a cut.
Niche stuff has always been economically viable. Niche stuff also tends to get publisher support. Realistically these days the only reason why books don't have an audiobook format is due to not wanting to support Amazon/Apple, or because they just don't want it. Voice actors literally are not expensive for audiobooks. You can absolutely afford one if your tiny $9 book hits more than 200 copies.
Unless you're talking about illegal niche, in which fair but I highly doubt stores are going to accept those. All generation helps with is content that will be free.
I think you’re underestimating how much work goes into hiring and producing something. Making it more self-service will go a long way toward making it more accessible to small creators. And my impression is that many books don’t sell 200 copies.
I've been watching the text-to-speech space for a while, waiting/hoping for something both open and better than CoquiTTS. ElevenLabs sounds amazing but is super expensive for something like a book, and tortoiseTTS is so slow as to be unusable.
I wrote a quick python script to read an ebook using coqui and the end result sounds pretty good. It's come in especially handy for books I want to listen to while doing yard work and stuff around the house.
I've been working on that for my hobby writing project. I'm using Elevenlabs' API and homegrown scripts to automate audio-generation and synchronization between text and audio. I have separate voices for the characters (and the narrator, when the narrator is third-person speaker). Below, there are some links to a section of a chapter that you can download and judge for yourself.
This is a huge boon for independent authors, until AIs replace us as well :-) .
Things I have learned:
* A good human narrator could do much, much better, but the quality obtained this way is not totally terrible.
* The possibility to produce a section in a matter of minutes is a huge plus. The thing with a book is that it's never totally finished. If you discover a problem after you have submitted your text to a human narrator and paid $ XXXX, there is nothing you can do.
* Currently, there is no platform that I know of distributing and selling books like this. Audible only accepts audiobooks narrated by humans. To my knowledge, platforms that accept ebooks don't handle epub with media overlays. Well, Apple Books say they do but I haven't gotten it to work. There are no alternative platforms for audiobooks that I know of, but I haven't done a ton of research there.
* The possibility to have more control over emotions expressed in the speech could be a bonus, particularly for small, overly dramatic parts of the narration. Coqui TTS new editor is a step in the right direction, but their TTS doesn't sound yet as good as Elevenlabs. Voicebox seems promising, but there is no way to use it at least for now.
* Cost is a big deal 1/3. With my scripts, I pay almost nothing when I fix a typo, since most of the audio is stored in little bits in the database, and only what changes is submitted to the API. But the human time of a narrator costs much more, as it should.
* Cost is a big deal 2/3. As a reader, I have learned that how much a book sells tells me nothing about how much I will like it. But only books that have a potential to sell can afford audiobooks. If I want to listen to a story too quirky to be mainstream, or from an independent author that I follow in Twitter, the chances I'll find it as audiobook are next to none.
* Cost is a big deal 3/3. Voice narration is not the only aspect one needs to pay for. A good story needs an army of editors, proofreaders, and designers. Generally, the more an author or a publisher needs to disburse on those, the more bland and mainstream the book must become to sell and justify the investment.
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Note that this is a WIP. Book chapter with automatic narration:
An epub with media overlays. It requires an epub reader that supports that standard feature of the epub 3 specification. Currently, and that I know of, there is Thorium and BookFusion for iOS.
Seems like unnecessary shade to throw on the helpline. There was a viral thing a bit ago making rounds on social media accusing them of it but its far from reality. There are like 50k of 3 million calls a year that result in contacting the authorities, but its extreme scenarios.
Its a rare thing and highlighting it as the default scenario is spreading FUD and possibly keeping people from getting the help they need. It is true though that if you call and describe an immediate plan to kill yourself there is some legal, ethical, and liability requirements that mean they will call authorities. Exact same thing if you tell your doctor or therapist.
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