JZL003

Hah! Nice, I've never experimented that far. I seem to remember even audacity had trouble with >4x speed (but don't remember if I just couldn't keep up at all, or if it was just choppy quality)

Because I do this trick a lot of places, almost all these players use the default <video> tag of the browser for the actual decoding/playback. So you can use that tag's control's manually even if they don't give a button

So for this, something like: $("video").playbackRate = 2

or whatever. It's nice even for players with controls (like YT) if you want more than 2x speed

Also you can just look at the video tag's internal URL and just download and play however, offline :)

Adjacent but related to this topic, I also use an RSS reader and I think it's something which a lot of non-programmers would really appreciate more. There are a lot of techy reasons why I like it (self-hosted is always nice, back-search is fun, I like the customization, etc) but especially during these stressful times, it's a great way of limiting obsessive scrolling in newsfeeds. I follow 300+ feeds, most only semi active so I can very easily get caught up on all the new article titles. Once I'm caught up, it's much easier for me be done and not keep scrolling. This is in stark contrast to other newsfeeds, and the control I have over the rss subscriptions means I don't get algorithmically manipulated to the same extent as other places. There are niche feeds I love and it's great having them collated

So three things: 1. talk to your friends about it, I've been advocating it to a lot of people and lots of them are interested. Feedly is relatively easy to setup for a layperson and showing them cool lesser-known feeds is a great way of getting them started (as you all know, there are niche blogs lots of places and the act of self-curation is really empowering). But if you self host, maybe offer to give them an acct...

2. I think gReader was a start but it was a slightly different newsfeed environment. Now everyone I talk to understands the dangers of newsfeeds and algorithmic manipulation, but they don't know what to do. I think there's a space for a RSS startup (or even feedly) to really press their advantage on self-curated feeds and no infinite scrolling that would appeal to a lot of people. The little RSS advertising I see are not focused on this

3. One thing people might miss is some twitter/fb/etc accounts which they know they like, and want to bring to their readers. I think a lot of people know the difference between the people they follow who they actually care about and the ones that are just on the same platforms. I'm thinking especially about Cory Doctorow's Adversarial Interoperability (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6c-cory-doctorow-on-adve...) but if the platforms won't do it, having a free/open source twitter/fb/etc scraper that is reliable would be a huge win. I've tried some but a lot of them are buggy or expensive and it's annoying for a layperson. This could definitely be improved and I wish some of the platforms would export rss feeds too (e.g. youtube did and then it got weird). Also having easy integration to html-diff non-RSS websites would be great. I've used it to check for job postings, cdc news, etc, and I think a lot of people would like it.

All of which is to say, we have this old technology that is secretly adopted by a lot of websites (especially because of wordpress/etc which make it a default) and which could solve a lot of deep problems that a lot of people are struggling with. I think HN type people could really make impact here in expanding the userbase

Related but more handmade, I have a quickArchive filter which is for all these transactional emails, automatically made by lots of "from:..." (If you're on a lot of list servs "-to:PRIMARY_EMAIL" is also great. So when I go through email, i first search for quickarchive emails in my inbox and mostly just skim the subject line to be sufficient. Then archive them all and go back to the inbox. It's often half of the emails

There are also Gmail filter generators so you could run this analysis once and then generate the filters for future use

I agree - I've been using google's TTS api for audiobooks and it's great. I switch off between professional audio books (overdrive is amazing and free by public libraries) and TTS and, while professionals can add something, you get used to TTS pretty fast. Google's TTS gives 1 million free characters a month, which is pretty generous for a single person and it sounds pretty good. I read books with pretty weird character names (like the Wandering Inn web serial) and it never explodes. Sometimes it spells out character names but even for very non-standard names, it does fine.

I've experimented with some of tacotron TTS/espnet to do the TTS on my computer and they work alright. Sometimes you get weird edge cases and it makes some pretty weird sounds (and even if your laptop doesn't have a GPU, google co-lab works well for quick audiobook generation). I don't hit the million characters that often so it hasn't been a big deal but I'll probably move to home-made just because I like tweaking it.

The way I think about it is that the written word doesn't have much intonation anyway so as long as the audiobook doesn't offend me, it's a pretty good solution (and helps prevent eye strain after working on a computer all day)

Yeah I think so

I also read somewhere (can't find the link now) that there is an internal gDrive client used by google employees (maybe an (ex-)employee can comment) but which was never released

This is mostly aimed at night-time reading and is an extension of f.lux but on linux you can apply custom glsl scripts to the screen with the compton compositor. I invert the screen and then highly red-tint it. This way I get 'native' darkmode on everything black-on-white, without having to depend on developers making a dark mode, buggy userscripts, and it works on all applications, even videos. (https://github.com/JZL/linux-color-inversion)

I have a script which changes my terminal and texteditor colorscheme then calls this script

From what I understand, having followed them (and used them happily for a few years) is (1) they don't employ that many people. And, TBH, having used librarything for many years, very little has changed for probably 7+ years. I imagine maintenance is hard but they keep it slim.

And (2) they focused heavily on the medium-scale market with tinycat (an online catalog for "tiny" libraries like community centers/etc) and (3) used their extensive user-generated data to help 'enrich'/recommend/etc books from bigger libraries. These are all cool niches that were under-developed, especially b/c goodreads with amazon wanted to keep as much data as possible to themselves.

I do which they would update the main website more (it doesn't even have a mobile version of the site, although 2 stripped down apps). But they do have an API which is amazing and very useful. I use it for a lot of stuff (find books I want to read in my library/overdrive, find new books my authors I've liked, etc)

I wrote a little personal messenger bot and it's amazing. I wanted it to be slightly numerical, mostly text, and easy for me to customize and access. So the messenger bot mostly is a wrapper over pushing to different Google sheets or docs (depending on if it's a daily diary, logging exercise/headache/etc)

Having a customized not that's always on my phone has been surprisingly helpful

What do you mean by deobfuscator? It's de-minifier that just makes it pretty-printed (with the "{}" icon?)