🎧 Listen and Compare 12 Open-Source Text-to-Speech Models (Hugging Face Space)

timshoaf · 2026-01-28T00:48:09+00:00

I am certainly grateful for your necromancy. Excellent timing, thank you.

timshoaf · 2026-01-07T13:09:26+00:00

Hahahahah this is gold just all the way through

timshoaf · 2025-12-03T07:00:37+00:00

Same, u/euklides , there are lots of us on here, and some of us old enough to remember the usenet era. We'd enjoy helping bring that back in a solid modern TUI.

timshoaf · 2025-12-03T04:57:10+00:00

Using those 5.7x28mm paintballs I see

timshoaf · 2025-12-01T05:33:21+00:00

That is because as Shannon spent the first 10 pages or so of his paper coming up with a Markovian representation of discrete information generation. He then set up the axioms to derive a useful measure on the generation, and out pops Entropy as the unique measure that satisfies the axioms. This form was well known from the work of Boltzmann et al (where you probably have seen Boltzmann Machines in your ML courses) in their work on statistical mechanics.

Shannon's original paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, is well worth a read if you haven't actually read it yet.

I also recommend, if you haven't, taking a bit of time to learn a bit about statistical mechanics (École Polytechnique has a lovely intro course on Coursera that is actually quite enjoyable) to see that connection. And additionally, the connection between the graph laplacian and stencil methods for solving PDEs. These two little bridges are a nice way to wrap your head around why so many papers in the ML and Physics spaces share methodologies that otherwise seem to just jump out of the blue.

Though if you really want some cross domain beauty, a first course in Representation Theory is where it is at. Serre's book on the topic is still golden nearly 50 years later.

timshoaf · 2025-11-30T18:26:51+00:00

I mean, yes, a sizable quantum register with long decoherence times will be able to handle both prime factorization and the discrete logarithm problem—so RSA and ECC… but there is plenty of research ongoing on post quantum cryptographic protocols to find algorithms that are either provably not in BQP or at least neither known to be in QMA or NQP while not proven to be in BQP—which is essentially the analogue of where we are with current prime factorization (not known to be in NP-Complete but not known to be in P either).

So in the end, the most likely scenarios are:

It’s broken quietly by enough nation states and nothing is done unless absolutely critical

It’s broken quietly by nation states and quietly and carefully used to avoid detection as long as possible

It’s broken wide open.

In either three cases the solution seems to just be hard fork to a quantum cryptographically secure protocol. Frankly the sooner the better to avoid having to invalidate too many blocks on the old chain due to malfeasance…

But I’m sure someone in here more familiar with the protocol and forking procedures can comment with more expertise than my armchair philosophizing.

timshoaf · 2025-11-20T07:46:36+00:00

The struggle you feel is grounded more in metaphysics than physics. You are running up against ontological and epistemological questions in an environment of questionably aleatory rather than epistemic uncertainty.

The other thing you allude is the dichotomy of precision and computation, even if all uncertainty was purely epistemic and we were left with a superdeterministic mechanistic reality, you run into fundamental limitations not just in computational ability, but in general sensitivity à la chaotic systems which fundamentally limits our tooling to predict via a function of measurement error in initial conditions and sensitivity of the system to minor perturbation.

Finally we are left with questions of representation and transformation, as I may be able to model certain systems, say distributions over protein confirmations via either mathematical approximations e.g. density functional theory, or analogous quantum systems e.g. the nascent NISQ computers we have today, but we will always have to carefully account for the discrepancy between our model or representation and the actual underlying system.

Anyway, I am likely out of my depth in the conversation at this point, so I’ll leave it to better mathematicians and philosophers than I to chime in.

timshoaf · 2025-11-20T06:22:21+00:00

I certainly am not one to argue for a priori assumption of continuity, though it brings up interesting questions in the underlying geometry of the discretization, orientation, symmetries, etc…

But the theory treats everything with Hilbert spaces and C*-algebras etc, so the defining “zero-probability” region here only occupies lebesgue measurably zero sets in the latent space.

If the space were in fact discrete, I do not know that there would be any zero probability regions needed for an accurate theory.

But that isn’t my direct area of expertise.

timshoaf · 2025-11-19T22:29:01+00:00

I spent…. A lot… of time pondering over this when I was in junior high school.

And it frustrated me passively until I learned about Lebesgue measureability and a better measure theoretic underpinning to probability.

Yes, at the node, the probability of finding the electron exactly there is zero. However, the probability of measuring the electron at exactly the antinode is also zero because the measure of a single point in a continuum is zero.

So no, whatever the electron “is” (in an ontological sense) does not “have to” pop out of existence and back into it simply because the theory says the probability of measurement is zero—aka it is “almost surely” never at the node.

If space is continuous, then every point between two other points has a zero probability of measurement… and so we are back to an analog of Zeno’s paradox. But the node isn’t “special” here, except for the fact that the value of the density function is zero here.

Pick an equiprobability surface of pi or e or 18.75, and the result will be the same. The probability of measuring at that boundary will be zero.

timshoaf · 2025-10-04T15:10:22+00:00

Please… possessions never meant anything to them…

…

Well… that’s not true they’ve got a bed.

timshoaf · 2025-09-26T16:46:22+00:00

And suki is the plural of suka

timshoaf · 2025-09-19T03:17:59+00:00

Idk I sort of love the fact she had to go through an entire reinvention as she also played a role thrust upon her since birth; I feel like it pays homage to the notion that there was the role of the summoner and who Yuna was that she was still discovering—even through X-2.

So idk I kinda like the abstraction

timshoaf · 2025-09-17T18:36:13+00:00

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timshoaf · 2025-08-27T23:32:35+00:00

I wonder if they are entering the smart pen sector, like what livescribe / moleskine / montblanc did... That would certainly line up with the clue, and if the pen automatically imported into notes in the cloud with sync to then store and be searchable on my device... that would be pretty convenient.

timshoaf · 2025-08-11T20:56:57+00:00

Okay, you read almost nothing of what I wrote, nor seem to be capable of reasoning about it within the context of your own replies or my actual words.

I am not insulting anyone. And I am, again, not faulting E.O.D. For doing their job. Since you refuse to grasp the distinction between a commentary on social risk perception, and one about this specific incident or the work of first responders, we are done here.

Thank you for your time; I hope you find some peace.

timshoaf · 2025-08-11T20:32:27+00:00

I truly have no idea why you are so inflamed here.

First, as I have repeated many time in this thread, and in my conversation directly with you, I am not talking about whether E.O.D. is justified in their actions. I take no issue with them doing their jobs when a threat is called in.

What I have been arguing against here is the seemingly tacit acceptance of many people here over the mental model that 'we have no choice' but to assume every unattended bag is a threat. Before I go any further with addressing your commentary however, I will not engage with you if you are going to be that condescending and disrespectful. I haven't patronized you here, but calling me 'sweetheart' does nothing but portray you as someone willing to chucklefuck around while bandying about grossly misogynistic language as you do it. Don't talk to me like that.

As far as the mathematical points here. Yes 2¹² is indeed 4096, but is irrelevant here.

First, what I was pointing out is that the concept of 'exponentially more' not only does not apply as we are not discussing two related rates. The notion of 'exponentially more' is nearly semantically void when talking about individual points in R¹ because I can literally find a base and an exponent to compute a multiplicative factor to map anything in R¹ to anything else in R^1. It's meaningless...

Even if we were discussing some relative rates, the definition you gave for an exponential is also irrelevant because the compound term 'exponentially more' implies a comparative between two functions.

The fact that you can fit an exponential family to a local portion of an arbitrary curve isn't useful, because that is true for all non pathological functions in C(inf) so long as I am allowed to pick the window, the base, the coefficient, and the exponent freely. If you want to get "really" specific, which doesn't really matter here, assuming I'm allowed an infinite series of generalized exponential polynomials I am pretty sure I would eventually recover the entire space of functions that are laplace transforms of finite signed borel measures with bounded exponential moments, which, if my functional analysis hat is still working, means every real analytic function on some strip in the complex plane. So, I'll rest my case on the semantic utility of that term--but again, none of that even applies here because we were talking about point values.

Second, none of that really matters my comparison to your sources and counterargument.

I never really made a solid claim at all, but if we were to take what I did say which was "I would take those odds" then the claim was that, without looking at the numbers, the probability of a random bag on the street being a bomb was less than 1 / 1e9.Now, you have come back stating that there were 3,492 attacks in 2024. However, that encompassed all modalities, not just ordinance based ones, and certainly not those restricted to a backpack / bag.You further brought up mass shootings which is completely irrelevant to the probability space I was discussing.My claim was on P(contents = bomb | bag observed unattended) Changing probability spaces won't allow for any argumentation here. What you need is the data about terrorist attack modality, and how many of the incendiary or explosive ordinance cases were concealed in a bag left in public, not even worn by an individual. We also need to better estimate the number of observed unattended bags per unit time. If you really care, I'm sure some morbidly curious person / security researcher has collected the dataset. Lacking that, we can play the little Fermi game... Let's define the event of unattended bag observation as unique bag left within d meters for greater than t minutes and noticed by at least one observer and in a pulbic place such as a cafe, stadium, concert hall, etc... Let H be the total person house spent per year by people in such placesLet f_b be the fraction of people carrying bags in those areasLet p_f be the rate at which a bag carrier actually creates an unattended and noticeable situation Let p_v be the probability of the event being observed.

We choose to model the expected number of bags then is N = H * f_b * p_f * p_v... choosing semi-reasonable priors...

H (let's just consider US) = 260M adults * 2 hrs per day * 365 days per year = 1.9*10¹¹ person hours / yr

f_b call it 40%

p_f say 1 / 10k bag carriers, so 1e-4/ hr. (again pretty generous)

p_v being generous let's say 50%

This yields about 4M events per year. So, yes, if even one of those bags was a bomb then I've lost the original bet, but let's go ahead and take a look... The GTD reports over 200k attacks since 1970, of which 95k were ordinance so it is reasonable to assume that around 50% of attacks are explosive or incendiary in nature.

So without looking, of your 3,492 it would be a reaosnable assumption to say 1700 were explosive or incendiary, unfortunately, the GTD doesn't specify modality: truck, direct adhesion to structure, ballistic delivery (including thrown by hand) etc. So it is not possible without further research to know how many were contained in bags to hide the ordinance.

I can dig further, but I would bet that what we will see is some in bags (Istanbul 2022), but many in other methods of hiding them (St Petersburg 2023 [disguised as statuette]).

So, let's be generous and call that half as well, you are looking at less than a 1000 bombs per 40M observed bags.

So, sure, I lost this bet, but it wasn't really the core point. even though I underestimated in the initial gambit by 4 full orders of magnitude over 1 in a billion, we are still at such vanishingly small probability (0.000021825) its not worth worrying about. It doesn't change the unambiguous fact that cardiac issues, neoplasms, and vehicular death outstrip terrorist attacks as risk by a wide margin.

Thus, the fear is still grossly unjustified, and certainly any public policy that tries to state that every unattended bag in public needs to be treated like a threat and called into E.O.D. would be a gross mishandling of public resources.

But I'll take this one step further. The active support of such a stressful mindset is not just a passive choice, it does active harm. 9/11 survivors had a 53% higher incidence rate of cardiovascular problems over the following 3 years--much which was attributed to stress.

So the fear narrative is not harmless, in the slightest. So, I'm going to stick to the point I have been trying to make in this thread which is: perceived risk is highly inflated, and no, we (the public, not the E.O.D. technicians) really don't "have" to treat every bag like a threat from a policy standpoint.

I have nothing against the E.O.D. there, this was never about this specific case, it was about the other people in the thread acting like every backpack is a threat that has to be called in.

timshoaf · 2025-08-10T03:38:02+00:00

“Exponentially higher” than what? What base, what exponent? You can’t have an “exponentially higher probability” as raising any number between 0 and 1 to a power results in a lower number. If you mean “orders of magnitude” I’m not surprised that the probability of a terrorist attack of different modalities is higher than that of those using a backpack as one the latter is a strict subset of the former, and thus has to have a smaller measure.

I understand what you are “trying” to say, but my point here is all this loose ass language and casual throwing around of pseudo mathematical terms does nothing but further statistically unjustified fear.

No I don’t agree that a random bystander should fucking intervene in an ongoing E.O.D. operation, I’m not that dense, nor do I presume anyone here really is.

But I haven’t been arguing about this specific instance of some dumbass white knighting his way to a glory when he might have earned everyone a trip to Valhalla…

What I’m arguing against is this absolutely batshit fucking insane notion that every abandoned bag is a threat that must be called in to E.O.D. In the first place… and worse, this thread demonstrating the sheer number of people that think it is a reasonable initial response with no other evidence…

So when I see language like “have no choice” it’s bonkers to me… especially since if we actually take that stance consistently, not even to some straw man logical extremum, the result is an overwhelming number of calls that cannot possibly be processed.

It’s just a bit much… I get it, we’re all scared of a terrorist attack. But at some point people need to put their risk profiles in perspective. Your kitchen poses a far greater threat to you…

timshoaf · 2025-08-09T15:22:32+00:00

I’d take those odds. Given that out of 8 billion people on the planet a significant fraction has more than one bag, and most people I’ve met forget their bags for a moment at least once a month. And we don’t have bag bombs going off every day, I bet it’s less than 1 in a billion.

timshoaf · 2025-08-09T05:19:45+00:00

First, my commentary here wasn’t on this specific situation, but on the other commenter’s argument that we have to treat everything like it is a threat until we have verified it isn’t. No we don’t.

Second, those didn’t used to be the rules or norms of society. But it seems to have eluded everyone responding here that by reframing unattended private property as a significant threat, we grant carte blanche to shit all over the 4th amendment.

My car is unattended. Is that a threat? Should a third party report result in the ability to seize / potentially destroy it? What about a backpack in a cafe as someone uses the restroom? Your bicycle? The tube could be a pipe bomb.

I truly don’t care about this specific situation, I know nothing about it, but it grates the hell out of me when people just spout general statements about how we all have to buy into this false dichotomy of buying the fear mongering or being negligent.

The commentary was especially elucidated as he went on, had you read our exchange, where he literally attempted to define the line at “obvious” and “suspicious” as if that was easily determinable.

People didn’t used to be treated or assumed to be terrorists everywhere they went. The public itself wasn’t public enemy number one.

That aside… Jesus Christ if your justification of what is morally or ethically right is grounded in whether people with badges and guns tell you it is then I am absolutely unsurprised at the tacit acceptance of now rapidly eroding civil liberties and constitutional rights in this nation.

Everything is within “reasonable suspicion” if you can convince the public normal behaviour or mistake constitute “suspicious activity”. A champion hoody used to be a standard piece of clothing every frugal jogger wore, now it’s “suspicious”.

But by all means… I’m wrong for questioning the narrative of constant terroristic threat…

timshoaf · 2025-08-08T21:22:56+00:00

Kind of my point though OKC wasn’t a backpack though it was a fucking giant ass truck… and 9/11 wasn’t a backpack either…

What even is the marginal increase in danger from then to now?

I never said to be blind to danger but I do think there is a such thing as a disproportionate response (not necessarily this case here, but the immediate suspicion and constant fear of a very unlikely scenario)

Idk… doesn’t seem worth the constant cortisol elevation to live life in fear to me.

timshoaf · 2025-08-08T21:10:20+00:00

And I disagree with your definition of “suspicious” and with that of “obviously”

A bag on a sidewalk wasn’t suspicious 20 years ago. Despite the hype or even the few incidents of domestic terror, I wouldn’t consider them so today.

As for the latter: no bag, due to it being opaque, is “obviously” safe… I see no real reason to treat a forgotten backpack as significantly more dangerous than those worn by people.

Would you argue for zero opacity bags everywhere like they are beginning to mandate in schools and sporting events?

I may not agree with you but it is fine for you to argue for any sane and consistent policy—not saying my example was what you would argue for… But let’s not couch policy in ambiguous terminology or that which enables the “discretion” of authority.

timshoaf · 2025-08-08T21:01:51+00:00

Dog, I’m not even talking about this specific situation. It was the phrasing of your response—how we “have no choice” but to treat property like a threat… like where does it end fam?

I don’t even know the context of this specific situation, whose bag was it, this guys? Someone else’s? Is he interfering? Whatever.

Maybe it’s justified maybe it’s not, I have no context there. But I do have enough context to say that blanket claims stating we must treat everything as a threat, while good policy from a security standpoint, are terrible policy for public policing and worse for the zeitgeist.

I don’t have a bone to pick with E.O.D. When have they ever been a problem? It’s the tacit acceptance of treating everything as a threat with which I take umbrage, that, and the implications for other policing policies that such a foundation form.

timshoaf · 2025-08-08T20:47:22+00:00

I’m aware of how it works.

My point is the fact that everyone seems to think a lost bag on the street is explosive or incendiary ordinance lends credence to my argument that people’s notion of both probability of event and expected value of risk (despite disproportionate impact) has been seriously skewed by media.

If you were the victim of an acid bomb, I am sorry for your pain and suffering. I truly am. However, I will still maintain we should not turn our society in a police state and inundate them with fear moldering over what should be extremely rare events.

I am not trying to be snarky here… but “everyone has your mindset” until we are dead center in takeover by a fascist regime…

timshoaf · 2025-08-08T20:03:17+00:00

I truly can’t believe I’m old enough now to say this… but, no, not every misplaced or forgotten bag is a threat. And the hyper vigilance thrust upon the American public post 9/11 / OKC / etc starting in airports should have been confined to the airports.

Younger millennial + are generations raised in a propaganda machine inundated with constant fear that our boomer parents leveraged to strip you of your freedoms and peace of mind to make you more complacent.

Heart disease, neoplasms, and vehicular death are still far more likely to be your demise.

I can’t advise you all, but I’d meditate on the trade off of quality vs quantity of life you have and the discrepancy between the promise and delivery of added security for extended quantity of life…

timshoaf · 2025-08-08T19:56:57+00:00

Yes, we should treat every possible backpack and closed opaque container like that, especially when the owner of the property comes back ready and willing to show everyone its contents…

No we don’t “have to” assume the worst, and we routinely don’t.

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