This is the major issue with the majority of this technology at the moment. Theres a plethora of options available and soon to be unveiled by several startups who are talking up their tech... but they are almost all for "editing"/"after the recording" work. You have to have a complete recorded track you can pass into their software (usually by uploading to their service) and then it will crunch away at the file and work their magic.
The current real time options I've found are... lacking, they are mostly fake/toys (not actually using voice cloning, just old school pitch shifting) or tech demo videos, with a scattering of research papers which are highly variable in terms of "how easily can i reproduce this", ranging from "sure if I want to waste money on a google colab instance, to "only works with specific model of video card due to reasons"
If you know of any real-time (audio stream in -> audio stream out) voice cloning/transform/replacement tools, feel free to post about them in a reply, this is an area of tech I'm trying to keep on top of and I'm only human so I have no idea what new company or research I might miss.
Hey - ElevenLabs dev here. The quality above works with <1s latency that for some real-time apps is already sufficient. On smaller chunks of text it can be as quick as ~500ms.
I actually interned at EA Mythic in summer 2007 and remember everybody out there being talented, obsessed with games (I miss those lunch chats, people would work on games and talk about games when not working on games) and great to work with. It felt idyllic at the time, didn't at all match the "EA spouse" experience I was half-expecting. Maybe it was too early in the studio's relationship with EA for that to become reality.
Too bad Warhammer Online ended up flopping and sealing the company's fate, given all of the hard work put into it. Not clear if the market had room for one more ultra-successful MMO after WoW at that point.
This is actually what Sweetwater does too when it comes to music gear.
I've gotten a few duds from Amazon in the past, but smaller, focused online stores like Sweetwater will inspect your gear for you before shipping it out to you, will give you a direct line to a sales+support person. In fact they'll even give you the email of the entire executive team of the company if you want to contact them directly.
As much as I like free Prime shipping, for higher end gear I'd much rather have access to a real person with expertise in the gear I'm purchasing, and a brand name and reputation to protect. I was not a believer at first, staunchly sticking to Amazon, but everything I've gotten from them has been top notch and without any defects, so I became a convert.
Startup idea: create a high quality camera gear buying and selling experience for the web, with many protections and conveniences built in. Selling your gear on Craigslist and meeting with random strangers at McDonald's and Starbucks is pretty much the only real alternative right now and gets old pretty fast.
This was an issue for music gear too, but somehow reverb.com managed to address it and make it a pretty painless experience. Their customer service is excellent, and if one of the two parties are unsatisfied, they'll intervene and try to find a compromise. They send you boxes to ship your gear in, they set up shipping for you, they automatically track the shipment as it gets picked up etc. I've been hoping to find something similar for camera gear, but have had no luck so far.
The only downside is that the prosumer camera equipment world seems to be rapidly shrinking, so it might be not a great idea to step into this space right now. Whereas there doesn't seem to be a dearth of people buying guitars, drum kit pieces and effects pedals.
Keh (https://www.keh.com/) is sort of like this, except that they function more like a second-hand shop--you sell them your gear, and they hold inventory that other people can buy, meaning you never actually interact with the eventual buyer. Because of this though, I imagine they take a larger cut than Reverb does (and certainly more than eBay).
As a buyer I've had zero problems with Keh the couple of times I've used them.
I've gotten quotes through a few of these sites in the past, and I was getting at best 50-70% of the value I would have gotten by selling in person through CL. I imagine it's in part because you ship it over to them, they have to inspect the items etc.
I think those services can be useful for buyers, but sellers who want to get the most for their gear will avoid them. Like you said, something like Reverb could compete on taking a smaller cut.
Yeah its a good concept and I would love an easy, secure way to sell items however they are quoting $965 USD for my Nikon Z6 which is out-of box new and retails for $1,996.95 USD. That's pretty hard to swallow. For that I'll put in the time to sell it locally, meet and try in person, cash only.
Same with the area around Golden Gate Park in SF, being close to so much well-maintained and curated nature is delightful. The place is a real treasure.
The words "well-maintained" and "curated" don't usually rhyme very well with "nature", IMO. Real nature is by definition unmaintained. When it's maintained it becomes a park/garden, and loses more or less all its diversity. Fine, if you just want to look at some green leaves (which is great in a city) but we shouldn't call it nature just because something is alive there.
The Bay Area is also home to MIDI co-inventor Dave Smith and his hardware synth company Sequential. You can see his office and generous collection of synths from the street, if you roam around San Francisco's North Beach long enough.
Slack does quite poorly on accessibility, so anyone using assistive measures from their operating system or separate application (voice instructed navigation, screen readers etc) will have a much harder than the average blog post or mailing list.
Based on the context, it's pretty clear to me that the parent comment was not referring to accessibility in the a11y sense, but more of the "Slack is a private company and therefore inherently closed and evil" slant.
I personally find Slack to be utterly abysmal at actually keeping information, stuff that scrolls up beyond the fold is effectively lost. Maybe that's what GP meant?
Old content in Slack is not available through search if you are not on a paid plan but I was more referring to the public open web and people trying to find answers through search engines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much.
And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.
Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
Yes. Different jobs paid different amounts, and people were paid for overtime. (With a bunch of malarkey about what exactly qualifies as overtime.) Some jobs had a harder time attracting workers, because of relatively poor conditions + poor pay, compared to others.
Most prices for essential goods (Basic food, housing) was set by the government to be very low. Many well-paid people had money, that they couldn't really spend in the official system.
> Was everyone given ration cards?
Yes. There were a large number of consumer goods (meat, vodka, butter) that were rationed. Other goods, of which there were no real shortages of (In the post-war period), were bought at regular stores. If you weren't a drinker, you would often trade your vodka ration to someone who was.
For yet other goods, of which there were shortages of (Fresh vegetables, for instance), the government encouraged private production of them. Some Russians had plots of personal land.
You could have a plot of personal land in one of two ways. You could either be a collectivized farmer, and, after you met your annual slave-like obligations to the collective, you could work on farming your small personal plots. Alternatively, you could be a well-off city resident, owning a datcha (A small summer home, often with a small plot of land.)
You could then grow produce on your personal plot of land, and sell it at farmer's markets. Due to shortages, and artificially low prices in the official system, food at farmer's markets cost many times what it would cost at a grocery.
> Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
Official government prices for food were very cheap, and if you weren't picky, there was no shortage of cheap calories that you could buy. So, people weren't starving to death, but if you wanted more then your 500g of sausage, and 90g of butter/month, you needed to spend money in the private markets.
Party members in good standing had access to party-only stores, which sold more limited items.
> I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
No. You see, the Soviet Union never actually reached communism - for its entire history, it claimed to be in a transitional period, from capitalism to communism. Once communism would be reached, there would be plenty for all, and money would, obviously, be irrelevant! (Or not. The powers that be weren't super-clear as to how exactly that would work, and none of the citizens really gave a shit, because it was clear to everyone with a room-temperature-or-higher IQ that communism would not ever be reached in their lifetimes, and that it's better for your mental and physical health to not ask too many questions about it.)
But, in the meantime, as people were working their way towards communism, money was still necessary as an incentive for good work. State-ran businesses did financial accounting, they would purchase raw goods from other state-ran businesses, would sell their products through state-ran stores. For consumer goods, there would be multiple competing brands, with different quality, and pricing.
The difference between the USSR and the USA, in this sense, is where the profits would go, and how much of the accounting was 'real'. The government would often place economic orders that it wouldn't need to pay for (If the army needs to move a 50 soldiers from Moscow to Vladivostok, it doesn't pay the transportation department the price of 50 train tickets.) It would also do financial malarkey with the profits of state enterprises (To subsidize things like staple foods, housing, education, medical care, etc, which were provided to the citizenry at below-cost prices.)
PS: Bonus point:
You may ask: Well, what did people who had extra money/vodka/etc do with it?
There were a few things you could spend it on - there were some non-essential consumer goods that had vastly inflated sticker prices. Luxury goods (Which you might buy second-hand from a party member, who bought theirs from an official, party-only store), and domestic appliances were one example. Cars, were another - they would cost multiple years of wages - and also came with a multi-year, sometimes decade-long waiting period.
Bribes were a third one - with a large bribe, you could often shave a few years off your waiting period for a car.
The black market was a fourth one - a lot of people in the Soviet Union stole from their workplaces. And I do mean a lot. There weren't department stores, you couldn't go into a Lowe's, and buy a bunch of new roof shingles for your datcha. Yet, everyone who cared about the roof of their datcha had new roof shingles. How was this possible?
The answer is, of course, elementary. What you would do, is get in touch with an alcoholic who works at the roof shingle factory, he will arrange for a pallet of shingles to fall off the back of the delivery truck, and you will arrange for him to get fifty rubles, and four bottles of vodka. He will be drunk for two days, the truck driver will buy a radio for his girlfriend, his workplace will do some accounting bullshit to try to avoid blame, the government construction site that expects these shingles will have to delay work for a week, and the Regional Minister of Construction Supplies will give a radio speech about how if we only worked really hard, to produce enough roof shingles, in a few decades, we will finally attain communism, and we might have department stores, where private citizens could go to, and purchase shingles for their datchas.
It's all insane, of course, but I've yet to live in a country which wasn't.
Only during the very tail end of it. But I have asked all of these questions to my parents, and all four of my grandparents.
Between all of us, we had two cars, one datcha, one relative who was an agricultural auditor (and, therefore, recipient of food-related bribes), one black and white television, one vacuum cleaner, a few people with the status of 'victims of political repression' (awarded post-1991), one four-room apartment with a solarium (for six people), and one three-room apartment (for five people).
So, all-in all, we were quite well-to do. (Thanks to my grandparents, who were factory workers. My parents, who were physics professors, were not making very much.)
My earliest memories include standing in bread lines during the transition period in the early 90s, reading through textbooks with pro-communist pages crossed out, and listening to TV news announce a higher and higher dollar to ruble exchange rate on a day-over-day basis.
It depends who you're talking to. If you're talking about what the founders of modern Communist theory thought Communism is then you're incorrect; Marx sets out in Capital specifically what he considers to be wrong with money and wage labour in general - its genesis in commodity exchange, as Engels said, money is contained "in embryo" in the fact of commodity exchange.
The USSR, as a matter of fact, operated under mostly capitalist conditions, capitalism distinguished by:
* The predominance of wage labour in the economy
* The goal of economic activity as the accumulation of capital
* Private ownership of means of production (this is the "mostly" part - the USSR did not have much private ownership, which sets it apart from other capitalisms, but Marx was careful to point out that even under simple "public ownership", society becomes a "general capitalist")
In short: if there is wage labour, it is most definitely not "Communist". Money in its function as money in the circuit of capital, that is, C-M-C', remains money, not merely a symbolic "voucher". Socialists have proposed the idea of non-exchangable labour vouchers, but this is a far cry from real money which was what the USSR had. The ruble was just as much money as the dollar.
Nit - the goal of economic activity in the USSR was not entirely the accumulation of capital - it was production of what were considered necessary goods. Televisions, automobiles, bombs, tanks, that sort of thing.
This is, in some ways different from economic activity for the purpose of making more money (Which, in addition to producing things like television, automobiles, bombs, and tanks, also ends up producing things like advertising.)
That's a good point, but according to my knowledge this was a matter of degree rather than quality - almost all countries have or have had such production in whole or in part, implemented through subsidies and especially during wartime or other hardships. It's also to be expected when production is at least nominally democratic and central, it's not all about simple appearances. But what distinguishes a socialist society from any other is that goods would no longer be produced as commodities - i.e they are not imbued with the form of labour which tailors for exchange over use. Capital tends to totalize all labour into that which works for exchange over use, e.g. it has subsumed artwork and non-tangible goods from things of use into things with exchange value and a use-value. But exchange value tends to prevail and even changes the concrete form of labour, e.g. advertising as you suggested, and also, for instance, music sold on platforms like Spotify to maximize revenue, such as shorter, highly-replayable and segmented songs. Capital exists no less for the state, which will tend to share the same motivations as other capitalists, especially since it must buy and sell to other states or private individuals abroad.
Ruble wasn't quite as much money as a dollar -- it's value, both relative to other currencies, and relative to goods, was completely artificial.
Also, that value was different for different people. I.e., if you were an average citizen, you could spend on bread, maybe meat, and vodka. Once a year you might get a "zakaz" (literally, it means an order, as in mail-order, but in practice a way of distributing some scarce goods to people deemed worthy; you'd still have to pay for it, of course) with maybe a piece of imported salami or a can of pineapple. If you were, say, a driver for Central Committee member, you could get into a different store, which at least had all the staples all the time. And if you were a Central Committee member, you would just shop in a store that had some pretty nice stuff, at a prices that werre set in 1930s and haven't changed since then. Obviously, your ruble would go much further in that case.
That obviously depends on the communist you ask. I don't think many would support privately owned real estate – that is, land you own but don't use it yourself but rent it out or use wage labor to do something with it. Personal property – property you use yourself like a house you live in – is a different matter.
A transition state towards communism. That's what the government officially called it. The country spent 74 years in that 'transition' state.
It had little in common with the socialist democracies of Europe, nothing in common with the communist proscriptions of Marx, and some in common with the much maligned state capitalism of today's China.
When Ivan was a boy, he asked a Party Man, "How will we know when true communism has been acheived?"
The Party Man thought for a little bit, and said, "The shops will be full of goods, and there will be no money."
Decades later, in the early 1990s, Ivan is now an old man. He looks through the windows of the department stores, and sticks his hands in pickets. He smiles to himself, and whispers, "At last, true communism!"
My grandfather visited Moscow after chernobyl on invitation by some radiation chemistry prof he knew. You had to stand in line to buy a weight quantity of bread and other basic necessitys like cheese, butter oder meat. There was only one type of bread. They ate their eveninglunch in a park. I can not tell how the food was for official delegations but this was what a privat dinner with a relative well off friend looked like.
I'm not saying there aren't any reasons. But since the people nominally owned the Soviet economy, it's odd to assume by default that the people is charging itself.
They got away from that idiocy once they starved 10mil+ people to death. Money was there and barter(vodka as premium item that could get you anything, like seeing good doctor, getting car fixed, getting caviar). Also those stores also sold from the back to their friends
Well I think a certain amount of food should be free, and only really communists talk about that kind of thing historically. I was curious if that had been implemented there. For example in present day japan individuals do not pay for medical care. I wondered if the soviets ever tried to do that with food.
I’d like to see free food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and internet access made available to all people. I just wondered if the soviets tried any of that.
