Simorgh

The only OAuth I'm comfortable with is Github.

As someone who has worked with speech to text, I can tell you from personal experience that audio seems to be broken across the ecosystem.

Bluetooth as an example is very buggy. Siri, as a voice-to-voice intelligence, fails to work most of the time for me.

I think that developers find it hard to ensure a seamless UX for anything that uses audio.

I used to love dark mode, but in the summer months, I came to feel that it's overly depressive, possibly affecting my mood.

In the winter months, it's slightly more usable because of association with lower lighting, darkness and even coziness. However, I think it can affect mood irrespective of the time of year.

Nowadays, I'm often experimenting with the idea of displays which are backlit with colours other than pure white or pure black.

Sign-up / in via the power-button in the top-right!

It's a really simple game.

You can use geneva:interface to play. Hopefully, it is the best chat-interface out there for winning (not just playing).

State-of-the-art, voice-first and very, very fast for computation, compared to chat LLMs.

Currently running Mistral.

Try your best. If you're doing really, really good, especially via geneva:interface or otherwise, feel free to email me via the winter delta dot com homepage, and I will create a leaderboard for the top performers.

Let's see who can do the best!

Hint: Have you tried writing a /POST route? ;-)

Thanks! I use Athens as a personal voice-memo copilot. It’s much harder to use it for sharing ideas with others; e.g. for presentation…

It’s voice-first so you have to express what you’re trying to communicate solely via speech to text. I think that’s part of the challenge. ‘Thinking in voice’, for presenting ideas is quite hard for me.

Got it — it’s interesting how a text model can generate compelling visual representations that are essentially style-matching.

Matching styles using vision models is not that easy, especially if you want to capture the core subject of the prompt.

Is it using a model to generate the ASCII art?

It’s quite clever.

I know it’s an aside but I’m so impressed with the quality of this (linked) page:

https://capsul.org/

The UX is exceptionally strong. It’s like you’re on a ‘real website’ — it’s quite enveloping in terms of its vibe, palette, ease of comprehension and the colour palette is so cool.

Definitely a tilt in favour of boldness with colour on web.

This is a really understated point — especially for western democratic societies.

I would argue that we should not be supportive of regimes (e.g. Israeli Likud) that are accused of violent hostility to war reporting and journalists.

Without open conflict-journalism, not only are war crimes harder to uncover (or easier to get away with) but sensitive voters and their democracies (everywhere) are threatened by a risk of subversion

I would posit that even the suspicion of collaboratively concealed war crimes disperses a planet-scale chilling effect throughout the ‘global social fabric’ of society

I would argue that the risk of extended damage to this fabric was the real motive for the Iraq War.

Maybe we should be challenging Israel much more deeply. We have not applied military pressure upon them, w.r.t. the current conflict…

Hey — working on Athens — it’s a messaging-interface primarily but it does fulfill a lot of these checkpoints — the interface is voice-first and VAD is handled pretty well! Open Banking connection is coming for advanced correlation between messaging and your fin. goals — awesome for the side hustler within!

My email in my profile is there; if you’re interested to call

I use Granola, I’m not affiliated with them. They create detailed meeting notes from whatever I type during the meeting, it uses the transcript and AI to flesh out my notes. It’s a great idea and their tiering is nice. 25 meetings free iirc. I sometimes chat with past meetings and find it useful to deep dive into the narratives.

The bigger issue I have is to do with messaging and clientele-communication itself. I’m building Athens to help me shift more things to voice ai. I think voice computing is the way forward. There are a lot of benefits, it’s essentially more ‘human’ and personal - things get resolved quicker, decisions are better and made faster. I am being asked about meeting integrations for it and that’s on the roadmap.

Here’s a link if you’re interested:

https://athens.winterdelta.com/playlist/536a9778-cd9d-4491-8...

Hi HN! This is me publishing some of my recent thoughts in relation to infra (tech as well as public) and how that intersects with economics.

The article (playlist) itself was recorded via the athens interface - which is something I'm building! Keen to hear your thoughts...

I have also used Rhodia notebooks in the past. I think they are manufactured in France. Which for me is a plus since one assumes the manufacturing process is kinder and to a high standard.

Rhodia pricing is also really good!

I’ve been a customer of Phind for a number of months now, so I’m familiar with the capabilities of all the models they offer.

I found even Phind-70B to often be preferable to Claude Sonnet and would commonly opt for it. I’ve been using the 405B today and it seems to be even better at answering.

I’ve found it does depend on the task. For instance, for formatting JSON in the past, GPT-4 was actually the best.

Because you can cycle through the models, you can check the output of each one, to get the best answer.

Working on a voice-interface for messaging. Type-free and voice-first with GPT-4o-mini baked in. Dolby Enhancements on the audio, too.

I’m using it personally as a transcribed voice-note system.

https://athens.winterdelta.com/playlist/536a9778-cd9d-4491-8...

I’ve struggled with improving my executive functioning.

I think it can be negatively affected by mental health issues and can take time to recover and get back to parity.

I’ve found that voice-memos are particularly effective in assisting me. I’ll talk through a problem and usually find solutions quickly, eg debugging.

Am currently working on a (transcribed) voice-interface to improve in this area, right now.

I might try out his formula tomorrow, possibly in voice.

This is a serious point. I knew dozens of high-skilled tech-based Europeans who left the UK due to Brexit and felt both hurt and offended.

Not sure if you’ve heard of Privateer, which generates a viz. of all satellites functional or otherwise. It’s in a similar vein.

https://wayfinder.privateer.com/

SEEKING WORK | Manchester / London, UK | Remote

I'm an experienced front-end and full-stack developer, with AI (e.g. LLM) / ML experience. I have a keen eye for design and use tools such as Figma, and more recently Spline.

Technologies: Typescript, Javascript, Node.JS, ReactJS, NextJS 13, Vercel, AWS, PlanetScale, FaunaDB. Python as well.

Voice interfaces and GPT-4 interfaces are some of my more recent commercial areas of focus. I seek to develop performant interfaces for users and stakeholders alike, which offer state-of-the-art functionality (as an example, features powered by GPTs) with 'off-the-shelf' reliability.

I'm happy to chat - either a greenfield (from scratch) project or something more established would be of major interest to me.

My contact info is in my HN profile.

The Janissary were a part of the Ottoman Empire - which was on 'other end' of Europe, geographically. The Janissaries were not eunuchs.

Eunuchs were also an element of society in Ancient Rome. I'm pointing out that it was not considered in previous ages, as it is today. As an example Italians would castrate boys prepped for singing opera - castrati - until the 1800s, it seems.

Is the idealism of a successful society ever not of the elites and the rulers?

I have read somewhere that the monarchs of Al-Andalus often had Visigoth (i.e. Spanish) lineage. Arabic may have been their lingua franca, but their society may have been essentially Spanish in many ways, just not 'Christian Spanish'.

I think that the decline and fall of Al-Andalus may have been mostly a result of internal divisions, conflict and civil war. The Reconquista was however from without, the terror of the Spanish Inquisition was what followed, for the newly conquered.

I've not heard of this letter - and would also be curious to read it!

Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) is considered religiously tolerant by modern historians in the context of the experience of Jewish citizens, especially when compared to contemporary parts of Western Europe.

As an example, it seems there was an expulsion of around 100,000 Jews in Christian France in 1306 and in England in 1290 of several thousand. I've not come across any such comparable events in my readings of Al-Andalus.

As a direct point, if Maimonides thought that France and so on would have offered more freedom or a better quality of life, then he could have moved there when Cordoba was experiencing political turmoil. He instead migrated through the Maghreb, towards the Middle East - it seems he was employed by Saladin at some point.

I've recently been enjoying 'Tales of the Alhambra' which are folk stories collated by the American writer, Washington Irving. He visited Andalusia and gathered stories from the citizens of the region which harken back to the time of the Al-Andalus.

I cannot recommend the book enough! The societies that he describes feel magical, enlightened, inspiring, thoughtful, advanced and romantic.

I often wonder, 'how inspirational was Al-Andalus for contemporary Europeans?' The discovery and founding of America by Europeans itself has many parallels to the much earlier establishment of Al-Andalus. It too was an idealistic colony. Coincidentally, the word California - which symbolically marks a 'boundary of the west' of sorts - has an Arabic root!

There is that classic western maxim that evil triumphs when ‘good men do nothing’, but I no longer think this is true.

Evil triumphs when ‘good men’s’ efforts fail.

Climate change represents an inherent risk to humanity, but some climate change mitigation strategies represent a risk to short-term profit incentives.

We are starting to see economic agitation globally as institutions everywhere begin to question the logic of our systems.

This and other factors has led us to a multi-polar world, which is itself creating new problems that inhibit global synchronisation on this issue.

It is a planetary scale problem. It needs a planetary scale solution.

Speaking here with some experience of mental health services, professional misdiagnosis and incompetence within the service is so normalised that that wouldn’t be my main concern.

If someone is experiencing mental health, and chooses to open up and have a chat with such as AI, that itself is a positive sign. That the AI could be on demand only makes it more valuable as a tool.

I personally enjoy using WeWork, the offices are miles beyond anything I’ve seen in the corporate world, in terms of decor, style and design.

They’re not particularly social, however. I’d honestly expect them to be able to ticket networking events, for the actual members. I’d probably be interested in attending, it’s not that easy to find or meet professionals in the same city, with similar interests…

This is the question! Is there anything anyone would recommend on security grounds?

Enterprise may resonate with something with Signal level e2ee.

Has anyone tried Element IO, as an example, in a commercial setting?

Asking for a friend.

Could simplify further by just referencing the count of the number of Xs:

E.g. 1, 2 and 3.

Or for further clarity, each entity could in fact be denoted by a key feature, e.g. Messenger, AI Shop, etc.

Any particularly memorable phrase may do well to differentiate the specific entity from others in the market. All kinds of analogies can be used here creatively!

I totally agree with you here. The use of a chatbot becomes advantageous when the cost of delivering intelligent responses is prohibitive in terms of quality and / or speed.

The author bio at the bottom of the page mentions work with the US Fed, NYT, FT and Pentagon.

He may be privy to privileged information and discussion.

Well, what would be considered a high-value target?

Even if warrants are initially mandated for a specific search, couldn’t this erode into, ‘it’s just a quick scan’?

What if it’s ‘useful’ to ‘quick scan’ their own President? ‘Confirming their security’.

Could this evolve into a subtle shift in the balance of power? In other words, a political crisis?

Where the intelligence agencies have informational advantages over any elected office.

From information into knowledge, you could easily have behind the scenes figures who have unmatchable insight and ability to coordinate.

Suddenly every target has value…