As China ends decades of rapid economic change and growth, it will be interesting to see the reaction of its youth. From The Guardian.
Author: Steven Guccione
The big idea: is convenience making our lives more difficult?
I was thinking about this just yesterday with a slightly different spin. Many of my own conveniences are either wasteful, bad for me or bad for others. Sometimes they are even not so convenient. When technology works, it’s often great. When it doesn’t, it can be a huge time waster and a frustration. There is an old song with a line I always liked: “people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent”. From The Guardian.
The big idea: is convenience making our lives more difficult?
‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber
I’ve read a bit of Grabers stuff but will have to look for more. I have always thought people lack imagination, that where we are was inevitable. Maybe partly true. But only partly. From The Guardian.
‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber
El Pais in English
i’ve been enjoying getting some of my news from the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Recently I posted a link and I have since found it is a US-specific El Pais America news site. There is a Spanish El Pais with more local (Spanish) news. My browser, or perhaps the site, gives me an English translation though. Both parts of the site are a good read.
Voice Assistant Project
Have been looking at what it would take to make a small voice assistant similar to Amazons Alexa. We have one (several, actually) but all we use them for is streaming music and the occasional kitchen timer. I was wondering if there were some pieces out there that could be put together on, say, a Raspberry Pi to do something similar. This is very early stages but wanted to put these bit out now, mostly for future reference. I realize there are a few similar projects out there but I didnt see any that looked like what I wanted. But they are a good place to start getting ideas. Some obvious bits:
Voice Recognition: I dont have a microphone on my desktop Raspberry Pi 4 but I found ancient USB camera that has a built-in mic. It sees to do the job. I looked at a few packages for voice recognition, but they tend to be expensive and complex. The one that looks the most interesting at this time is OpenAI Whisper. It as some quirks, like having to pad everything to 30 second sound clips, but it will be fun to play with. It also seems like a stable project likely to be around a while.
Text to Speech: we will also need a way for the system to communicate back without a permanent terminal / keyboard interface. I havent done much in this area either but this used to require specialized hardware i.e. “soundcards”. I know, that was a long time ago. Looking around I found eSpeak ready for install on Ubuntu. It has a bunch of different voices and was easy to get it up and running and it seems solid. My wife said it sounded too robotic though (not her words).
Sound Output: The Raspberry Pi 5 doesnt have a dedicated sound output like the old versions, but I have a bluetooth speaker I use for playing music. It works just fine with eSpeak.
Text Search: comparing a text string to other text strings, especially for non-exact matches is not something I want to code up myself. Again, lots of stuff out there, but I want something simple and stable. I also probably want something directly in python. FuzzyWuzzy looks good and popular as does FuzzySet and the more standard SequenceMatcher. All seem to use the difflib and Levenshtein distance. Sounds good to me. There are probably some newer AI-based approaches but I want to keep it simple.
Wake Word: One problem is “waking up” the assistant. There is usually a “wake word”. This more or less means listening 24 / 7 until this word is spoken. Will have to see how this works. A simple loop will probably be good for starters, but maybe a bit wasteful. But that might not matter.
Commands: I figure a table of expected voice commands mapped to actual Linux command line commands is the easiest. Need to figure out how best to get to things like Spotify, but that is another problem. I assume running some streams will be set up using things like ffmpeg and will require a little knowledge, but it should also be pretty simple.
Music Search: I expect to have my MP3 library either locally of remotely hosted. Getting an actual song or album from test to a file(s) location might require a scan and some sort of simple database (maybe just a table). Havent thought this one out much yet.
Thats about it for now. Will probably do this in pieces on my desktop and then eventually deploy on a smaller dedicated system.
The Election
Tomorrow is the big election. Hard to watch anything on TV without getting saturated with ads. But I have tried to avoid reading about this one, mostly because I’m not seeing any new or interesting information. My gut feel here is about the same as it was for the 2022 midterms (Sweeping Gains). Books will be written about all of this but I will keep it simple: this will be another Post-Roe election.
In every election since the Supreme Court struck down Row vs Wade, the polls have consistently undercounted Democratic support, sometimes by shocking margins. I see lots of energy among Democrat / women voters, lots of new registrations and lots of small donor fundraising.
I am going to leave it at that. As far as numbers, a few months back in a discussion with a friend I threw out the rough estimate of 10% margin for Democrats in the popular vote and taking 40 states. All just seat of the pants with no data, mostly because the data has been completely unreliable of late. That’s my stake in the ground. We will know soon enough.
Billionaires Buying Elections
The numbers are coming in on campaign spending. 150 billionaires families have spent almost $2 billion, with almost 80% going to Republicans. The headline misses that last bit about where the lions share of the money went. From The Tax Decode.
Billionaire Clans Spend Nearly $2 BILLION On 2024 Elections
Nukes Cost 10x Solar and Wind
With our billionaires looking to nuclear power for their emerging AI data centers, I was wondering about costs. Found some data in various places and it was looking like nukes were 9x the price to generate electricity compared to wind and solar. Then I found an article on the new Georgia nuclear plant that does the math for me. It’s 10x. And nuclear is getting more expensive while renewables are rapidly decreasing in price. When you figure in operational costs of nukes are 20% it is starting to look like shutting down existing plants could be a big saver. Well, a saver for energy users. A big problem for people who own the debt used to finance those nuke plants. Whoops!
Georgia’s new nuclear plants drive US power sector clean-up
The End of the Mexican Dictatorship
While I don’t follow it too closely there seems to be significant changes happening in Mexico. As Llosa famously said:
In 1990, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa famously described Mexico under the PRI as being “the perfect dictatorship”, stating: “I don’t believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, nor the USSR, nor Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.” The phrase became popular in Mexico and around the world until the PRI fell from power in 2000.
Since the final losses of the long empowered PRI party, Mexico has seen a legalizing of abortion, a woman president and now an undoing of the lifetime powers of their supreme court. From The Guardian (UK).
Mexico supreme court judges resign over reforms to allow voters to elect judiciary
US Gun Deaths
i would call it a sobering report, but it’s worse than that. From the Commonwealth Fund via the Guardian: Comparing Deaths from Gun Violence in the U.S. with Other Countries
The interesting bit is some US states have higher gun death rates than countries at war or with significant civil unrest.
For instance, Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war.
Steven A. Guccione 