• 0 Posts
  • 316 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • You know wrong.

    Even in the early days (97-01), they’ve used venture funding (approx $80mil) for the DVD mailing business.

    And the reason they didn’t really go the VC funding way later is because they had an IPO in 2002, which meant instead of relying on VC funds, they took on massive amounts of debt to allow the takeoff of streaming.



  • No, that’s the evolution of venture capitalism.

    Step 1: groundbreaking service comes in that fills a market hole

    Step 2: people flock to service

    Step 3: service gets VC funding to continue operations, subsidising the users

    Step 4: service gets “copied”, competitors crop up, use VC funding to eke out their own marketshare while making things worse for everyone but themselves

    Step 5: expansion plateaus as interest in service generalises (basically, everyone who could be interested, is already using it)

    Step 6: VC funding depletes, company has to start making a profit - leading to price hikes, which is followed by other players in the market as that’s how capitalism works

    Step 7: price hikes not being enough, service tries to capitalise on their userbase (think restricting features to a higher paid tier, introducing new tiers that strip away features, introducing ads, etc.)

    Step 8: market is saturated with plateaud services, user movement is minimal, and everybody hates it because it’s expensive, and reintroduced the same problem the initial innovative service meant to fix.







  • I think this topic is actually ripe for debate.

    On one hand we know that Majel specifically recorded phonemes so her voice can be used for Star Trek purposes after her passing. While not a direct consent of “do whatever you want with my voice”, the intent of similar purposes as OP’s has been clearly present.

    There’s also Paramount’s refusal to use her voice in new Trek, aside from a few snippets here and there (mostly Picard for the throwback value). Which kinda goes against the spirit of Trek.

    On the other hand, the entire area of voice cloning is gray as fuck. It can very easily be used for nefarious purposes, yes - let that be corporate greed or fraud or propaganda. But if I make my own voice system, do I really hurt anyone by using their voice? I am not profiting off of it, I am not sharing the end result, it lives on my computer and that’s it.

    But, let’s say I want to do the same. There’s this TV show from some 20 years ago called Eureka. In it is one of the earliest representations of a smart house with an AI governor, called SARAH. SARAH is voiced by one of the recurring cast members, in fact it’s an ongoing joke that the house is voiced by this guy “talking like a girl”, and that he’s trying to get Sarah Michelle Gellar to do the proper, final voice…

    Now, the voice itself is pretty unique, but it isn’t the voice of the actor, it’s been heavily digitally edited. It’s also a pretty unique voice but not something 99.9% of people would recognise. I make my clone from my own BR disk collection, with a set of automated and AI tools to get the right audio, clean it up, split by talker, and process all 77 episodes, manually selecting the right samples, manually tagging and labelling each; and finally, fine-tuning my own model for my own use. It will never leave my home, I won’t sell or share it, and technically, with me owning the BR collection, this would fall under fair use.

    Which is still quite different than, say, a corporate entity trying to sell more product by using your voice.


  • I think this topic is actually ripe for debate.

    On one hand we know that Majel specifically recorded phonemes so her voice can be used for Star Trek purposes after her passing. While not a direct consent of “do whatever you want with my voice”, the intent of similar purposes as OP’s has been clearly present.

    There’s also Paramount’s refusal to use her voice in new Trek, aside from a few snippets here and there (mostly Picard for the throwback value). Which kinda goes against the spirit of Trek.

    On the other hand, the entire area of voice cloning is gray as fuck. It can very easily be used for nefarious purposes, yes - let that be corporate greed or fraud or propaganda. But if I make my own voice system, do I really hurt anyone by using their voice? I am not profiting off of it, I am not sharing the end result, it lives on my computer and that’s it.

    But, let’s say I want to do the same. There’s this TV show from some 20 years ago called Eureka. In it is one of the earliest representations of a smart house with an AI governor, called SARAH. SARAH is voiced by one of the recurring cast members, in fact it’s an ongoing joke that the house is voiced by this guy “talking like a girl”, and that he’s trying to get Sarah Michelle Gellar to do the proper, final voice…

    Now, the voice itself is pretty unique, but it isn’t the voice of the actor, it’s been heavily digitally edited. It’s also a pretty unique voice but not something 99.9% of people would recognise. I make my clone from my own BR disk collection, with a set of automated and AI tools to get the right audio, clean it up, split by talker, and process all 77 episodes, manually selecting the right samples, manually tagging and labelling each; and finally, fine-tuning my own model for my own use. It will never leave my home, I won’t sell or share it, and technically, with me owning the BR collection, this would fall under fair use.

    Which is still quite different than, say, a corporate entity trying to sell more product by using your voice.



  • “The best” depends on what you really need.

    Authentik and Authelia are two of the top most quoted solutions, but they aim to be an “everything in one” package, with tons of features a simple homelab will rarely need. They’re aimed more at enterprise-like setups.

    On the other end of the spectrum you have e.g. Pocket-ID, which only does OIDC by itself (you can hook up an LDAP server as user database though); but that tradeoff means it uses little to no CPU time, and, in my experience, around 130MB RAM. Given RAM is getting more expensive than gold, one needs to consider memory footprint, especially for older homelab setups. We can’t all be running 256GB nodes after all.

    So instead of hunting the mythical “best” solution, decide what features you really need, grab a list of providers that cover those features, and compare them to see what fits your needs best.



  • The recommendations so far are quite solid.

    I’d also add that crowdsec with the right collections as a primary filter within your reverse proxy setup can be extremely useful, potentially even better than fail2ban, as CS delivers a literal “scan every packet and put them against these rules” approach - where the rules are crowd sourced, thus are more up to date than any manual blocklists, filter list etc. can be, and can spot even 0day intrusion approaches.




  • I’m actually working on an all in one solution that sort of fills the roles of Readarr AND Calibre - without all the baggage of the latter.

    Oh, and of course a KOReader library plugin that foregoes OPDS and works like the Kindle interface (“available books” synced from this backend, one tap downloads them, plus potentially adding series handling too in the future).

    But right now it’s mostly manual downloads + CWA ingest + OPDS via KOReader.