I mean... buy the book from Amazon and have a screen reader read the text to you? I know the processing power in a phone may not be enough just now to make it convincing but surely isn't this already solved? Seems like adding an AI-driven text-to-speech to the Kindle app or whatever would solve this problem.

As for Audiobooks; leave them alone. Continue making Audiobooks the traditional way and we as consumers just purchase them separately. I already do; I own both versions of a number of books because a good narrator can bring something to the table that isn't in the original books. It wouldn't be the first time I've purchased a book not because it was from a writer I loved, but because it was narrated by someone whose previous narrations I have loved... and through that I have discovered new authors I then follow. Most narrators tend to be "themed" as in they usually get brought in to narrate a book that's somewhat related if not in genre then in themes to other books they've previously narrated. Science fiction narrators tend to stay in science fiction, fantasy in fantasy and so on... though they do crossover frequently and sometimes narrate books that are quite different but tangentially related... and sometimes I find a new interest that way.

Discoverability of new works is already difficult enough these days. Moving audiobooks to AI narration instead of human beings just removes yet another avenue to discoverability. Sure, it's cheaper... but at what cost?

I should add I do keep a Windows laptop around that's now running Windows 11. That's mostly for work when I'm traveling. While I definitely don't mind supporting a Linux desktop "on the move" there are certainly Windows-specific apps I need when I'm in the field. As a result, I have that Windows machine and it's fine. My next laptop might be more powerful to allow me to run some Windows VM's for use in-the-field and run Linux (probably Ubuntu) on the hardware, but I'm in no rush to refresh this one (circa 2019 Latitude 7400 2-in-1)

I can tell you that I do a lot of audio work myself and have done for years. I had dabbled with the Linux desktop many times but this most recent time I put Ubuntu 18.04 on my primary machine back in 2018 and have actually been incredibly happy with it. As you noted, with Jackd2 and PipeWire for high-quality audio work Linux is definitely right there and in some ways better than Windows. My desktop now runs Ubuntu 20.04 with the -lowlatency kernel and for both my audio work and the little bit of video editing I also dabble in it's been amazing, solid, stable and predictable.

And I don't know if I'm just not a demanding gamer, but just about every game I've thrown at this setup has worked great as well... now granted I don't do a lot of multiplayer and every game I have these days is on Steam... but even big AAA releases seem to just work most of the time. In fact, most of the problems I have with games tend to be the small indie developers or the single developers. The only recent examples I can think of that required either fiddling or just plain didn't work for me were Exo One and Starship EVO... again, small studios. But even then a few updates later both worked straight out of the box and I have no issues with either now. Yes, most of my games run under Proton rather than native... but I don't typically see any problems with these running.

I will admit I run the proprietary NVidia drivers... but Windows users do too. So if you're a complete nut for "untainted open source" then yeah you're going to have a hard time... but having said that if you're going for fully open source why are you trying to get inherently closed-source games to work anyway? I do very occasionally hit performance issues with games, but they are vanishingly rare at this point and seem no worse than performance issues reported on similar hardware in Windows. I might not be getting the absolute maximum framerate out of every game, but over 60fps I am not sure I've ever actually cared all that much except for "bragging rights". The games look and move fine by my standards and I can play them. Maybe with my age my eyes just don't care all that much any more :) Simply put; my video card can drive my 120hz widescreen monitor just fine for everything I throw at it; why should I care about a few more FPS?

As for sound drivers, that actually tends to be a pretty solid support experience in Linux. Sound just isn't being developed or advanced the way graphics are; there's just no need. There's little that needs to be done with audio that really will make a significant difference to the finished product because human ears haven't changed and computers frankly were well able to do audio work decades ago. Sure, more CPU horsepower means I have more channels to play with and better DSP's can help make my final mix cleaner, but the truth is that the technology didn't plateau but certainly reached the "flattening of the curve" part of it development a long time ago and most new hardware is merely incremental improvements and usually actually using the same hardware with a few new interfaces attached. I literally can't remember the last time I plugged in a new bit of sound hardware and it didn't just work out of the box, even if it said it was for Windows and I couldn't find any specifics about whether or not it was supposed to work. In fact the only problem I have with Linux and audio is that I have so many inputs and outputs in my machine that every now and again it gets confused about my defaults and I find myself jumping on a conference call where noone can hear me or I can't hear them and I discover that it's trying to use some other audio device that's not immediately preferred for the meeting. Fixing that takes me 10 seconds in the Ubuntu mixer.

I can do math. 300 million confirmed infected so far, 5.5 million dead. That's more like a 1.8% death rate. I'll grant you that the number actually infected is a lot higher than 300 million, but in order for your 99.96% survival rate to be even close to valid even right now, there would have had to have been 14 billion confirmed infections, or almost twice the human population of the planet.

This is still a developing situation so it's fluid so frankly neither of our numbers will be valid when it's all said and done. But the death toll has already been horrific by human standards. We are already at 3 times the number of people dead than died in the Vietnam war and have even exceeded the death toll of the Korean war. Even with a softening of the curve we are already looking very seriously at World War 1 levels of death, and if we're really unlucky World War 2.

He's vindictive against the Post Dispatch because it's a centrist newspaper that skews left, that's been pretty critical of his administration since the start. And rightfully so. He doesn't like the PD because they don't particularly like him and tend to call him on his bullshit.

That's all this is about. I'm not sure he even cares if he gets the prosecutor to bring charges, or whether they get a conviction. He only cares that he's had a couple of months of being able to badmouth the Post Dispatch to his base who lap that shit up because they are primed to pretty much believe anything he says.

Source: Live in St. Louis.

As an ex Dell employee (got hit by a "Workforce Reduction" last year) I will say that Dell has always been a proponent of WFH for the majority of its staff. Since a large portion of Dell's employee base is in sales, technical or other similar roles they can absolutely WFH more effectively than at an office. Hell, in St. Louis we only had an office for a short time because EMC had one that they had just renewed the lease on. Guess which office closed last year and isn't coming back?

Yes, there are plenty of roles still at Dell that are better with people on-site. A lot of engineering is pretty hands-on, but from my friends still at Dell I hear a lot of the admin staff (HR, Accounting etc.) are virtually all WFH with an "As needed" office option which few people ever exercise.

I do miss working there... it was a fun place to work. But I've done better in the last year anyway doing my own thing on contract :)

... I should add that I did have more than two stops, but the additional ones were relatively short 10-15 minute stops where I just topped up enough to get to the next stop. Perfect to use the facilities, grab myself a cup of coffee etc.

How long would you stop to eat during that trip? You can plan your charging stops around when you stop to eat. I did a 600 mile drive 10 days ago in an EV (non-Tesla and not the most efficient on the market either) and the charging was a non issue. I stopped, plugged in and walked to a nearby restaurant in the two stops I had for long stops, and it was ready to go when I was. Actually, before I was.

It's also worth noting that unlike an ICE car, with an EV you don't charge to 100% every time; you plan your charging stops such that you charge enough to reach the next charging stop with a 10-15% buffer remaining. Range anxiety isn't a thing if you plan better, and virtually every EV I've driven has great trip planning built in to get to the next charging stop easily, and many of them integrate nicely with cloud services to they can even tell you how many stalls are available.

Now, I'm not going to claim an EV is perfect for every use case but the reasons not to use an EV for trips are diminishing rapidly. There's certainly a certain stratification of EV's right now in that you have the expensive, near-luxury or luxury cars that can easily do road trips, and the lower cost "city-focused EV's" that aren't quite as good (lower range, slower charging speeds). There are cars coming soon that will fill out that "middle ground" quite nicely like the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Genesis GV60 that are going to be more cost effective but still have good range and good charging speeds.

Nah. Parson saw an opportunity to pander to his base using scary words like "Hacker" because he peddles in fearmongering. The Post Dispatch is a well known left-leaning newspaper in Missouri and is often critical of the Republican leadership of the state so Parson has his favourite target in his sights and just wants to de-legitimize the media he sees as his "enemy"

That's bizarre... every single reference in the cheat sheet is in the first ~30 minutes of the movie. Like, spelled out.

This... holy shit. I mean, Google could literally have just rebranded Google Play Music as "YouTube Music" with a lick of paint on the app and that honestly would've been fine. Instead they killed it for an app with half the functionality working in opaque and unpredictable ways or just flat out missing/broken. And instead of rolling in some of the code from Music, they just killed it to force users onto their new platform?

I still never got that decision. I used GPM all the time. As soon as I saw what a trainwreck YTM was (especially on Auto... my God the Auto experience with YTM is still fucking terrible) I moved my entire library to my Plex server and started running PlexAmp instead. Much happier with that.

I don't think anyone is arguing in good faith that it's supposed to be equal. It's the disconnect between what he says and what he does that has people angered, not the fact that he did it.

Hell, if he even announced that he has changed his mind on remote work and started to offer that perk to his employees then this tempest in a teacup would wane rapidly, but he didn't. He basically for years said "Remote work doesn't work" and then sent a tone-deaf email that said basically "I still believe remote work doesn't work, but I'm doing it anyway because fuck you."

Lead by example.

Promotions? In Corporate America? They haven't been a thing in years. The way you get ahead is you move on to other opportunities... heck it's virtually always been that way in the tech field.

I'm self-employed. I promote myself whenever I like :)

The actual number of people who get or need hands-on with prototypes at Apple HQ is in the single-digit-percentages. Most of their workforce is software and design; two things that CAN be done from home... even the design and prototyping doesn't require hands-on all the time either.

Remember, Apple hardware is DESIGNED in the USA, not made.

With an attitude like that, no wonder his business is on life-support and probably terminal.

Well, I know one co-working company I won't be doing business with. Ever.