crank

Back in the day I was a big Usenet fan. What’s the modern solution to the spam issue? At the time, folk wisdom was that the demise was being caused by spam, and that due to the nature of the protocol it was somehwhat unsolveable.

I also wonder to what extent activity pub is the barrier to offline use? For reddit, the Slide client had offline reading and iirc posting. I have been disappointed it isn’t available for Lemmy. My guess has been it simply isn’t a priority for the devs. Maybe eventually we will get it.

I think it would be cool if RSS got put into Lemmy clients. Example you could make a unified inbox for all accounts by automatically getting the private RSS for incoming messages for all logged in accounts. I have manually set this up a couple of times but its tedious. Completely lacks smoothness when it comes to clicking a link, replying etc. But a client could add a little finesse to fix that.

Some of my kitchen stuff, hand tools and a few ornaments come from my grandparents place. Ive been handling/seeing them my whole life. Add x years to that before me.

i guess satisfies the requirements:

1. you like to share
2. we may not know about

I think it is true because if they get the tech right the market could be saturated and voice actors will be in lower demand.

And the situation is already terrible for these workers. >90% of people buy and consume books via Audible which is owned by Amazon. As I’m sure you can guess there is lots of shady stuff going on. Such as (but not limited to) the “Audiblegate” campaign where workers discovered Amazon was engaging massive systemic wagetheft. As situation which is still ongoing to the best of my knowledge.

• Audiblegate - main website for “audiblegate” campaign
• Audiblegate Campaign: Fair Deal for Rights Holders - The Alliance of Independent Authors
• #Audiblegate: ALLi Campaign Update — Self-Publishing Advice Center from the Alliance of Independent Authors
• The Truth Behind Audible Subscription Earnings (2023) - this page has detailed information including correspondence, spreadsheets etc if anyone really wants to dive in - however it appears to have been republished from another source which I can’t identify

Some further context about Audible:

• Cory Doctorow is a Bestselling Author, but Audible Won’t Carry his Audiobooks - talking about the tech side, DRM and so-called Intellectual property

Back in the 19th century when unions were powerful and innovative, a lot of people had jobs where they had to sit and do repetitive tasks in a room all day. A lot of it was handwork that didn’t have big loud machines.

So one of the demands made by workers in such situations was that the employer would pay someone to come in and provide entertainment such as reading a book or giving talks on subjects of interest. The book or lecturer of course being selected by the workers via the democratic process of the union. And then of course the workers became way more educated because they suddenly had 8-12 hours daily to read books together. Since knowledge is power, the workers became stronger and more decisive in their collective actions.

When you are listening to audiobook at work you can know you are in a long tradition of workers exercising power over their job conditions. Although now it is individualized in the implementation. The desire to have your mind even though the job has your body and some concentration is universal.

Totally true about the librivox readers. They are doing their best. :) There are some total gems in there. But I have definitely given up on a few of them. OTOH I have given up on professionally read audiobooks too for all sorts of reasons.

Well you can always pay someone to read it for you. Blind people do that.

Are any of these books public domain? If so the print version could be eligible for inclusion at Project Guttenberg. PG has very specific docs about eligibility for this. You could probably get a scan from archive.org if you don’t have one. You would have to clean up the OCR by hand.

Then it would eligible to be requested from the volunteer (human) readers who have been pumping out Libra audio books for years at LibriVox.

Recently I saw Gutenberg has a collab. They are producing and distributing Libre guidebooks generated by AI. I believe I read on one of the pages they have 4000 done. I haven’t tried it out but I guess I should.

Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.

I assume this is also a great benefit as fertilizer down at the old AI content farm which is otherwise totally run over with reddit shitposts.

If anyone tries it let me know how it goes.

And it tells others so much valauable information about you