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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • No offense taken, but thanks for the comment! If someone was offended and they saw your comment, I think it would probably help

    I thought it was like the way one’s brain is wired that causes them to have slightly different perception than the rest.

    I’m no expert, either, but this is a solid explanation IMO. It’s why autistic people are prone to sensory overload; their brains don’t filter out noise (like the hum of the refrigerator, the sounds of people chewing, or background conversations) the way that most allistic people’s brains do. It also definitely could have been the reason, or at least contributed to, why the woman from your post was confused - particularly if she was trying to figure out why allistic people did something.


  • Sorry, that’s incorrect.

    Autism is commonly comorbid with mental health disorders (aka “mental illnesses”) like anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc., as well as with intellectual developmental disorders, but autism is still considered, at worst, a neurodevelopmental disorder, regardless of where an individual falls on the spectrum.

    Both the DSM-V and ICD-11 are in agreement about this, for what that’s worth, but you could also just do a search for “Is autism a mental illness?” on Duckduckgo, Kagi, Searx, Bing, Google, or whatever, if you want to confirm.



  • Copyright applies to unfinished works, too. There are many reasons it might not protect an unfinished work, but those reasons are still relevant even for finished works.

    If someone steals your physical drawing, that’s theft. If they take a picture of it, then use the picture - or your picture + modifications - without your permission, particularly in a commercial work, then that’s copyright infringement, but not theft. If they steal your physical drawing and then take a picture and so on, then it’s both theft and copyright infringement.

    Most likely this wasn’t considered copyright infringement because the allegedly copied art isn’t copyrightable, e.g., game mechanics; or the plaintiff didn’t own the copyrights themselves and thus couldn’t sue (possibly the arts were still copyrighted by the original artists, having never been purchased; possibly they were stock assets that were re-purchased by the defendant). There are any number of reasons. However, “the work wasn’t published” isn’t one of them.

    On the other hand, it’s quite likely they were able to sue for theft of trade secrets for that very reason. And they might have chosen to do that simply because proving copyright infringement is much more difficult.








  • Is your goal to create things that can be published or used in a project, or to create audiobooks for yourself to listen to?

    For voiceovers for text, I use Kokoro Fast API, which has a web frontend. The frontend is only compatible with Chromium browsers on desktop or Android, which sucks as my daily driver is Firefox and an iPhone (there are workarounds in the thread) but it supports voice mixing, speed changes, etc… It also has an issue where it keeps the models (about 3GB) in memory; I keep the CPU version loaded normally and swap to the GPU version if I need it to be faster. If you want something similar for Bark, check out Bark-GUI.

    I’ve also dabbled a bit in some TTS features that have Comfy nodes, though at this point mostly just in terms of getting them set up. For my purposes thus far Kokoro has been fine (and I prefer the FastAPI project over the Comfy nodes for most of my uses), but I’ve found nodes for Kokoro, Dia, F5 TTS, Orpheus, and Zonos.

    Autiobooks and audiblez both look promising. A few weeks ago, I used the Kokoro FastAPI web frontend to create an audiobook for an ebook I worked on that used entirely self-hosted AI generation for the outlining and prose. Audiblez, which I found about like two days after that, looks like it would have simplified that process substantially. Still, I’d personally like something more like an audiobook studio, where I can more easily swap voices back and forth, add emotions, play with speed on a more granular level, etc… I’m thinking about building something that contains that at some point myself, but it’ll be a minute - hopefully someone else will beat me there.

    I posted a comment here a few weeks back on a similar topic. I’ve since used OpenReader-WebUI and like it, though that’s not for producing audiobooks, but for a read-along experience. Reproducing the comment below in case it’s helpful for you:

    If you want to generate audiobooks using your own / a hosted TTS server, check out one of these options:

    • OpenReader-WebUI - this has built-in read along capability and can be deployed as a PWA that can allow you to download the audiobooks to your phone so you can use them offline
    • p0n1/epub to audiobook
    • ebook2audiobook If you don’t have a decent GPU, Kokoro is a great option as it’s fast enough to run on CPU and still sounds very good. If you’re going to use Kokoro, Audiblez (posted by another commenter) looks like it makes that more of an all-in-one option. If you want something that you can use without an upfront building of the audiobook, of the above options, only OpenReader-WebUI supports that. RealtimeTTS is a library that handles that, but I don’t know if there are already any apps out there that integrate it. If you have the audiobook generation handled and just want to be able to follow along with text / switch between text and audio, check out https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/

  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoComic Strips@lemmy.worldThe Witch's Curse
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    8 days ago

    The witch turned the creep into a woman and the spell was complete by the time she flew away. Unfortunately, like many women, the creep was born with the body of a man (she’s AMAB). Maybe the witch could have changed her body, too, but that would have made things far too easy, given that the point of the curse was to teach her empathy.



  • Your comment wasn’t in a meta discussion; it was on a post where they were venting about people complaining about them having a women’s only space. There was certainly no indication that the regular community rules didn’t apply, nor any invitation for men to comment.

    Commenting that it’s hostile for them to have a women’s only space might be ironic, but couldn’t possibly be good faith, in that context. And if the same mod banned you from multiple communities, then either it was out of line and you could appeal it, or it was warranted due to the perceived likelihood of you causing problems in those other communities and the perceived low likelihood of you contributing anything of value to them.

    Even now, you’re acting like the mod(s) banned you because of her / their emotions. You don’t see how that’s misogynistic?

    It makes logical sense for bad actors to be preemptively banned. Emotions have nothing to do with it.







  • It’s a shame that the people involved with this lawsuit are either ignorant or intentionally misleading their audience.

    And over the last 20 years, we have seen over a 1000% increase in spite of the fact nothing’s changed with the drug. The cost to produce it has gotten lower. But we are getting screwed hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars a month.

    “Insulin” is more than just one drug. Traditional (short lasting) insulin is relatively cheap. A “Novolin N or R ReliOn vial” (which I just learned is available over the counter) with 1000 units of insulin is $25. Rapid and long lasting insulins are what’s expensive, but those are recent advancements. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7864088/ for a list of some of these.

    It’s weird that he says prices have gone up 1000% over the last 20 years. According to https://www.goodrx.com/healthcare-access/research/how-much-does-insulin-cost-compare-brands prices went up 54% from 2014 to 2019 and dropped 10% from 2020 to 2023. Is he really suggesting that prices went up 590% from 2003 to 2013? I wasn’t able to verify that claim. According to https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0X22B0/ the price went up 197% from 2002 to 2013. Added up that means prices have gone up 310% in the past 21 years. That’s still a lot but also: inflation since then is 73%. Account for inflation and that 310% increase drops to a 140% increase - a 7th of the alleged 1000% increase. That’s basically how much housing prices have gone up in that same time period. That’s still a lot and it’s still shitty, but if you have to make up numbers to get your point across, I question whether you’re the best person to be conveying that point.

    According to https://diabetes.org/tools-resources/affordable-insulin both Sanofi and Lilly have programs that cap out of pocket expenses for most people to $35 a month, and that includes the new drugs. If someone you know is struggling to pay for their insulin, make sure they know about these programs. They’re getting a lot more marketing now that the federal government negotiated the $35 cap for medicaid/medicare patients, but those programs have been around for a while. It’s frustrating to see so many discussions about how pharmaceutical companies are exploiting people without anyone sharing (or even mentioning) the resources that can help them.

    It’s also frustrating that all of the claims about companies colluding are completely unbacked. Is there any evidence of this? I don’t find it hard to believe that pharmaceutical companies price their products as high as they can because they like money. I certainly don’t trust a person who’s already shown his other statements to be demonstrably untrue when he makes a statement that can’t be verified one way or another.

    The anti-R&D arguments are also exhausting. Pharmaceutical companies do spend a ton of money on R&D - according to https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060115/how-much-drug-companys-spending-allocated-research-and-development-average.asp Lilly spent a quarter of their revenue on R&D in 2020 (I didn’t see the other names mentioned). No, that’s no 80+% like it’s made out to be, but it does mean that the most prices could possibly be reduced without negatively impacting innovation is to a quarter of where they were in 2020, and that’s assuming that someone else pays for all the other expenses (manufacturing, distribution, marketing, education, etc.). According to that article, “The average R&D to marketplace cost for a new medicine is nearly $4 billion, and can sometimes exceed $10 billion.” According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8855407/ the top end of that range is more like $6 billion, but still. Either way, that money has to come from somewhere.

    It’s good to see PBMs mentioned, though. They’re literally middlemen who provide 0 value. Even if they’re not doing anything illegal they should still be outlawed.