Technology

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7563423

RentAHuman is a new digital marketplace connecting AI agents to humans who don't mind taking orders from the computer.

(For starters, please don't respond "Just go to anna's archive" or something like that; they have a lot of stuff, but they don't have everything, and sometimes the quality of their scans are less than stellar).

I'd like to be able to be able to easily scan some of my books and get decent-looking PDFs as a result.

I have a flatbed scanner, but in my experience, you have to really really really mash the book flat up against the platen and practically break the spine to get a good quality image. Even doing this often requires several tries to get it right. I can do this, but it's very labor intesive, very time-consuming, and probably not great for the book being scanned.

I would love to have a dedicated book scanner—a scanner specially designed for books; I've seen some for the academic market that have /\ shaped platens that automatically turn the pages and so forth, but they often run to the tens of thousands of dollars.

I've also seen scanners that look like an oversized itty-bitty book light that are placed above the spread of an open book; I don't have any experience with these, but I'm not sure how good the end result is.

Well, so if anyone can recommend a relatively easy and quick way to scan my books and get a decent output, I'd be happy to hear from you.

P.S. I didn't mention epubs anywhere because I can't stand them (if they work for you, great, but not for me!)

Looks like FM is proprietary (?), is based in a 5-eyes country, and has its servers in the US, but, uh, apart from that...?

• Reid Hoffman (2,658 Files)
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• Peter Thiel (2,281 Files)
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• Larry Page (314 Files)
• Sergey Brin (294 Files)
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• Eric Schmidt (193 Files)

1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks' pocket money.

Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we'd copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.

How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you'd need to start over.

(If you're wondering what happens if you're colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)

Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination...

It was a good game, with some great music, but really really hard.

(Credit to https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue45/2/1.html for the picture, and the page also goes into more depth)

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2498813

• Clone any voice with just a 3-second audio sample
• Fine-tune parameters (temperature, top-k, top-p) with quality presets
• Generate complete podcasts from just a topic – AI writes the script, assigns voices, and synthesizes everything
• 10 languages supported (Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

Currently uses gpt5.2 for script generation, but the architecture is modular – you can swap in any local LLM (Qwen, Llama, etc.) if you want fully local.

https://archive.ph/Qnh6q

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2486567

okay, first off: hey, what the fuck?

mozilla has a A THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED MILLIONS of dollars? what were all them cookie sales for thunderbird? oh yeah, they have this shell game of interlinked but not really entities so you can play whack-a-mole till the death of the universe.

and they wanna burn it dicking around with AI? fuck each and every ghoul steering that ship into the abyss, and they can take Gnome's fucking shaman or whatwasit with them.

is everybody insane, "silicon valley" was supposed to be a satire, these cretins make mike judge seem like a prophet...