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Comment by two-sandwich | Hacker News Reader

I am intrigued by the header, and it seems like this has some good points. However, I'm struggling to parse this content. There's a full image in between almost every sentence. In most cases, I don't find the image adds significantly to the point of the preceding or following sentence, so it just looks like filler for colour.

I could put this into an AI but then what's the point of the article in the first place?

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Seems like slides from a presentation talk.

Beyond the stated changes the author believes are necessary for citizens to make: stop externalizing responsibility, stop going along with social norms that perpetuate surveillance capitalism, and indulging in anger as a substitue for action; the other actionable takeaway to me is: "Unless we have real representation in our government. Companies don’t have vested interest in protecting privacy."

I interpret this as meaning citizens need to support advocacy groups that lobby elected officials to create/improve regulations that would limit the ability to implement surveillance capitalism. This aligns with the author's own words: "Responding to National or Regional calls for safety: Calls to support initiatives, or bills to increase security at the expense of freedom, make us less safe. Trading security for freedom reduces our ability to act."

Yes, the formatting made it very difficult to read and follow.

> what's the point of the article in the first place

Jump to the end, to the summary.

The position of the submitted is that there would be psychological constraints in that certain type of population that inhibit the perception of risk.

And he seems to be wanting to trying to built it up as a creeping subconscious notion through a "story", instead of going "TL;DR" (which is part of facts and of a different "psychology") and clarifying the points immediately.

He believes that that would be the way to deal with the non-adults.

I read and read and read and he never got to a point other than some nebulous "this is wrong and we can change it" without specifics. DNF

That is the point. Nebulous however that has more to do with the multifaceted approach of those behind these activities trying to show that there is not just one bad actor. The purpose is to get you to click on those links at the bottom to learn more. If you got that far and did not feel the need to learn more then you have already chosen a side in this discussion.

tangent but i vibe coded a webapp that pulls article texts and runs tts via kokoro. Its interface allows me to read the article text while the current paragraph is highlighted + autoscrolled while the audio is playing. All of this runs on a cheap vps. Works surprisingly well, as long as you are fine with consuming it "later" (conversion needs some minutes)

Link please

I've been very happy with @voice aloud on Android to convert a page, (but most often for me) a PDF into spoken audio, sometimes I'll watch it auto scroll what it's converted. It's robotic but I've gotten so used to it I don't really worry much anymore (though I have played with voice clone stuff some and have really been tempted to use that). Anywho just reminded me of the app I have been using for probably a decade (don't quote me ;)).

Having the option on my desktop might be nice tho!

How is your voice handling pipeline emojis and "leftwards rounded arrow with hook" bullshit any AI slop will contain and any reader will insist on fully reading aloud? I gave up reading webpages because of this, I can't focus on the actual text because of all formatting embellishment. I sought and sought but haven't been able to find an Android app or browser extension able to AI-filter through webpage garbage yet - and I'm too lazy to try to vibe-code something for myself.

I've not used it excessively on webpages, the ones I have, I start reading then change my mind and decide to listen, but haven't observed the emoji issue. Then again, maybe I tend to skip over listening to AI generated (or at least overtly obvious?) content. I also have dealt with listening to technical content on PDFs and it sometimes tries to read out x's and o's from a plot, particularly annoying driving ;) guess it hasn't ever bothered me enough to just not use it. I have slowly experimented here and there looking to build a pipeline of text ingest (thinking I could use LLM) to convert certain text (like a plot in my earlier example) into a verbal description, a plot about this thing with emphasis on showing this fact. Or basically hey take this text and make it more digestable by audio, but I haven't experimented a ton.

Ultimately yes garbage in garbage out, but I've found enough value in using it, it's been good enough for me to suggest it's use, and hasn't caused me to search for another variant of tts on phone.

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