...a cassette???

“That happened on Earth once,” said Louis Wu. “A yeast that could eat polyethyline. It was eating the plastic bags off the supermarket shelves. It’s dead now. We had to give up polyethyline.”

- RINGWORLD, Larry Niven

"Henceforth, all beef cattle must be grass-fed or fed a diet to minimize the output of methane. Furthermore, all cattle must be individually fitted with an Automated Collection and Methane Extraction (ACME) system, and each individual shall be indelibly tattooed with its methane creation license number, as issued by the Department of Homeland Flatulence, the Social Security Number or Taxpayer Identification of its owner, and the production records of each individual shall be submitted to the DHF. Overproduction shall be cause for termination of the genetic line. All costs will be borne by the owner of the cattle..."

It's a bad sign when the world is catching up to my sarcasm...

Curious correlation of the fortune in the footer:

"Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years."

That sounds like a bribe, to me.

Just sayin'.

Any product that "indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions," wrote the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, represents a "threat to US national security."

So CASH is a threat to national security. Good to know.

They reinvented PIT?

AI applied to audiobooks is simply the next step in the same progression of AI and skilled labor, as applied to audiobooks, that we see everywhere else in our society.

I have been listening to TTS books since before 2008, when I used eSpeak to make an audiobook of the Shon Harris 4th Edition Complete CISSP Study Guide. I have since used eSpeak for gigabytes of fiction. However, now I listen to the Google TTS on Android, using AlReader.

eSpeak sounded like a "drunken robot", and I hid some of those errors by using an accent that was not my own--in my case, a UK English voice. Listening to eSpeak required you to train your ear to the inflections of the robot, but while it was mechanical, it had remarkable pronunciation and moderately good inflection. It handled commas, colons, semicolons, periods, question marks, and exclamation marks with reasonable choices for stresses in the generated voice, better than other TTS voices AT THAT TIME. What it couldn't do was sound natural.

AlReader uses the Google TTS voices on my phone, and handles ePub, mobi, text, and some other formats. It still stumbles on some words; "CO", as "Commanding Officer", is regularly read as "Colorado".

An indicator of how TTS has improved is that I no longer use UK voices unless the narrator is British. The American accents don't jar me the way they used to. And the inflections have improved; are the performances less than perfect? Yes. However, I would say that the Google TTS performances are better than a bad Librivox effort, almost equivalent to a poor commercial effort. One significant advantage: the TTS voices NEVER get tired. The accent doesn't change across chapter breaks. If it mispronounces something, it ALWAYS mispronounces it the same way.

But THESE have been mechanical reproductions, without AI contributions. I expect that AI reproductions will begin to sound even better, so that their efforts will be as good as a good LibriVox recording, BETTER than a poor commercial recording.

But one thing eSpeak COULD do was follow markup language for voice synthesis. I experimented once, and found that I didn't know quite what I was doing--but the Russian speaker had a deep voice with a Russian accent, while another character had a British accent, and another...if the markup language was made available with the Google TTS engine, you might hear something quite remarkable.

The AI impact on copyright and voice performance and reproduction rights is going to take years to shake out, and I'm not going to even TRY to predict where it's going. But cars are built by robots, now.

You took the words EXACTLY out of my mouth!

So is your son arglebargle_xiii?

If you apply Sturgeon's Law, and Pareto's Principle, then 66% noise is actually pretty good...

Polychron was foolish for suing because of Amazon's Rings Of Power; it was a prequel that was at least founded in canon.

Fellowship of the King, OTOH:

""Publisher Description (https://fable.co/book/the-fellowship-of-the-king-by-demetrious-polychron-9798986410456#about)
Long before Annatar, the original Rings of Power were forged by the Elven Lord Celebrimbor and the Dwarven smith Narvi in Eregion near the Misty Mountains. These first magic Rings were far more powerful than those that came after and were corrupted by Sauron to be fought for in the War of the Ring.

Elanor, daughter of Samwise, is nervous the night before her debutante party in the Shire. In the 22nd year of the Reign of the High King Elessar the Blue Wizards return from out of the East bearing perilous news: the rest of the Rings of Power have been found and they are in deadly danger. Thus begins the War Of The Rings To End All Wars Of The Rings. Before it is over Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Men and races long forgotten or never seen before will join the Quest to find Celebrimbor's originals and the last of Sauron's corrupted Rings of Power.

Elanor and two Hobbit friends join the Crown Prince Eldarion, his Elvish uncles Elladan and Elrohir, and the wizard Alatar in a war across Middle-earth battling for their lives. If they fail they will witness the return of the Vala Morgoth, the source of Evil and former master of the long defeated Sauron. With all the Rings of Power at his command, Morgoth will enslave the whole of Middle-earth - forever."

Lots of problems here: the other Rings were LESS powerful than the One Ring; Morgoth was long since destroyed; all the elves took ship at the Grey Havens and left Middle Earth while Elanor was an infant; Sauron captured the other rings, except the three elvish rings, long before. There's probably more...

So Polychron's book is a non-canon mish-mash, and suing Amazon for the prequel was stupid. Including the Tolkien Estate was BEYOND stupid.

"Electrifying U.S. vehicles wipes out the equivalent of our entire current power demand."

Their first point: We must expand our existing electrical grid 35-40% to accommodate electric vehicles. It wipes it out in other forms, not electric. And while efficiencies increase, we still have finite transmission capacity.

The resources I got by googling "How much does the US electrical grid cost?" indicates that "decarbonization" would cost about $5 TRILLION dollars; doubling its capacity would undoubtedly be in the same price range.

"In contrast, renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower capture energy directly from infinite sources."

Wind, solar, and hydropower are NOT infinite resources. Nearly every economically-feasible location for hydropower has been exploited, at the expense of the destruction of communities, habitats, ecosystems, and species. The best locations for wind have already been exploited, at the expense of local habitability and wildlife, especially avian. Solar power is hovering around 35% efficiency, but requires fairly exotic materials for higher efficiency. These are often obtained in strip mines in 3rd world countries. Disposal of solar cells and panels is also shaping up to be a major ecological issue.

It doesn't fix the transmiision issues, either, unless you put solar cells directly on the cars--and the numbers don't work for cars made of steel. They're too heavy.

Another major issue is balancing out the supply and demand. Solar input is zero when demands for lighting and heating go up at night, and wind is a right fickle source--ask any sailor. There is a fixed, minimum baseline demand that is is supported by large coal and nuclear plants that are hard to start and stop; and variable demands that are met by gas and oil. If you want to support the huge baseline demand, you need a large storage system. Right now, that's batteries.

Electric cars require batteries, too. They are made of hard-to-obtain exotic materials. We already have international and range wars shaping up over battery and semiconductor source stocks. And disposal of exhausted batteries is another environmental disaster visible on the horizon.

Gasoline has about 100x the energy density of batteries; to quote topspeed.com, "Warp coils seem closer to reality than a battery with the energy density of gasoline".

In short, both electric and fossil-fueled vehicles are needed, and will be for some time. Electrifying our entire fleet of vehicles will almost certainly take longer than they think, cost more than they think, be harder than they think, and be less effective than they think, and it will come with its own set of unintended, unexpected, and unwanted consequences. The same will also be true of decarbonization of our electrical system.

By 2030? No way. Go ahead and start planning, working, and building; but pie-in-the-sky still has no nutritive value.

Have these people never heard of handicapped access and the Americans with Disabilities Act? Or trip hazards?

can I take over this extension and spam their server with site visits that are so ridiculously random that it poisons the profile it builds of me and the ads it serves up?

FLoC: "Hmmm. This is one of those techies who thinks they can confuse me. Put them in THIS cohort..."

This was a triumph! I'm making a note here...HUGE success!
Anyway, this cake is great--so delicious and moist!