1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem, and copying all the Owen Wilson "Wow" audio (.ogg) files.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive full of Owen Wilson "Wow" clips. Most people I know e-mail "Wow"s to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to listen to them, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
1. re: the first part, many people want something plug and play. and even if they were plug and play, the problem is that the user experience (on windows at least) with online drives generally sucks.
windows for sure doesn't hide latency well (CIFS is bad, SIMBA etc. are worse), and most apps are written as if the disk was local, and assume, for example, accessing a file only takes a few ms. if the server is 80ms away, and you do 2 "wow" accesses per second (e.g. the open file common dialog listing a directory and poking files for various attributes or icons) serially, suddenly your UI locks up for _seconds_ (joel spolsky summarizes this well in his article on leaky abstractions.) ditto saving any file; how can you stay updated on the ever growing wow library? sure for some random memes of a few hundred k it's fine, but doing work on large repertoire of Owen Wilson "WOW"s on an online drive feels like walking around with cinder blocks tied to your feet. anyway, the point of that rant was that WOW API uses an _online_ hosted version which resolves within 20ms, much faster than using the mouse to find files in an online mounted drive, which is an important difference :)
2. true, if you're both not at your computer and on another computer without net access, this won't replace a usb drive :) but the case i'm worried about is being, for example, on a server you own, and the wow api will let you get the most recent version of your wows at the time, and will work on any scripts and crons you write (without you having to physically copy anything or really do anything to your server rack.)
3. there are some unannounced viral parts i didn't get to show in there :) it'll be a freemium model. up to x gb free, tiered plans above that.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
That points that you make are sound, and for a prototype or MVP you can certainly get started more quickly with a usb drive or scriptable ftp site.
But my experience of integrating Owen Wilson wow effects into a wide variety of applications over many years is that you inevitably hit a point where there are things you can't do unless you have access to a good REST API.
Ultimately, if your app needs Owen Wilson wows then it's best to architect it to use an API from the start.
1. This API is convenient since it already exists and you don't have to find all of the clips yourself.
2. This API will likely be used by websites / bots hosted in some data center and not on your local machine. Also it would be possible to cache the video / audio locally.
3. I agree that as just an API it's not really something that can go viral. Something built on top of it could be. I also agree that it would be hard to generate income since most users probably only want to use it for a short amount of time as a joke. I think it is intended to just be a fun API that others can use.
I don't see how that would happen. This forum is paged text only. 9gag is images and infinite scroll. Joke subissions on the HN frontpage almost always has some intresting merit other than the joke.
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could before you even knew what you had.
Is this 'just' an insane amount of manual effort? I'm not particularly up on ML, but suspected it at first partly just because 'insane amount of manual effort', but also because many seem clipped too short. But the repo makes it seem very much just like a manual clip collection; acknowledges a 'listicle' of Wilson 'wow' films with 'wow' counts (slight reduction in novel manual effort.. but no timestamps).
100% manual effort, you're right. Took me about three weeks to compile all the clips and data in my spare time and upload them all to Contentful. I'm aware of three clips that others had told me to make a bit longer - I Spy, Drillbit Taylor (second wow), Shanghai Knights (third wow.) If there are others, feel free to let me know, the more input, the better.
Basically, I had just finished coding a Twitter bot called @BreakingCasting which posts fake movie remake casting announcements. I really liked using the TMDB API for that so I figured I'd make another small project along the lines of movies/actors/Hollywood until I came up with something more substantive.
I'm pretty sure I came up with this Wow API in the shower and figured it'd be fun and easy - it ended up being fun and tedious. I started working on it on Valentine's Day, finished in early March. The main motivation to finish was my current project, Hollywoodle (https://hollywoodle.ml/), which I refused to start until the Wow API was done.
@BreakingCasting is really cool, congratulations. One suggestion which you are probably already aware: It would be nice if the bot can choose actors of proper age, depending on the difference between the years of the original and the remake. Warren Beatty is older than Harrison Ford, for example!
> In 2015, YouTuber Owenergy uploaded a video showing a supercut of movies (in chronological order) in which Owen Wilson says the word "wow." This video claimed that Owen Wilson has said the word "wow" a total of 102 times (spanning the years 1996-2017) over the course of his film career.
> Many of the scenes mentioned in Owenergy's famous video mistakenly count phrases such as "oh," "whoa," and "pow" as "wow" occurrences and are therefore not included as part of the Owen Wilson Wow API - the total "wow" count of which stands at 91 as of 2022. Additionally, many of the "wow" scenes in Owenergy's YouTube video are out of order and are corrected in this API.
As someone who needs closed captioning at this point in their life, but can still understand most things, let me tell you how bad closed captioning is. I would not rely on cc to be more than 65% accurate.
I am sorry and surprised to hear that. I would think especially now it wouldn't be too hard to auto generate a good portion.
My experience is very limited but sometimes people ask me to turn on subtitles and they are usually perfectly fine, even the ones that random people on the internet contribute for free - can you elaborate?
> even the ones that random people on the internet contribute for free - can you elaborate
these typically are the best available, but not always quite right.
the cc provided by wgbh are usually pretty good as well, but they are mission focused on delivering good closed captioning - it's just that not everyone wants to use them (or they can't schedule? not sure)
unfortunately, once you leave those two, it's a craps shoot as to whether they make sense or truly convey the message that the audio is conveying. some of them seem to go by what I'm guessing is the original script, which can be fairly close in meaning to what they're saying, others are just a mish-mash of words that are misspelled and don't necessarily convey the meaning that the audio is trying to.
the worst is live sports, which really don't have to be: I've been to conferences that were extremely inclusive and have had real-time (remote) closed captioning - seeing how good those can be make me shake my head in wonder when I see the typical sports closed captioning. eek.
I'm stuck in the middle where I can still hear and interpret most words, so have a lot of incongruence when I am relying on both the cc and the audio when they don't match.
You ever try google docs voice dictation? It is surprisingly good, I think they pushed an update recently. I know it isn't quite the same thing but it seems like such a solvable problem considering they have all the bits.
Youtube CC is hit or miss but sometimes is perfect. I figure a narrow domain like live sports is immanently solvable. Maybe it is time to promote audio captchas. Hmm. This is a bummer, thank you for sharing, would not have guessed.
I've done some commercial CC work recently for a studio and it is REALLY, REALLY hard work. Way harder than it looks to get it right.
Some pieces I would do would have computer-generated first pass. This would be good in places where the words were very clear and the vocabulary was regular. But TV and films can use a lot of weird domain words (see e.g. sci-fi or fantasy) that the computer can't track. And the computer has serious problems with proper nouns and names.
On top of that you have to assign each phrase to a character who might or might not be visible when they are speaking (which sucks in a whole room full of people with similar voices), and you have to time it correctly.
I got fired over an argument about comma placement.
Closed captions on blu-rays and DVDs are stored as bitmap images, so it wouldn't be possible to search those, although I'm sure the scripts are somewhere on the internet.
Does something like this fall under fair use because the clips are short? At what point would it not? Say this site became viral and was making money off ads? Would it become a copyright violation at that point?
[{"movie":"The Big Year","year":2011,"release_date":"2011-10-14","director":"David Frankel","character":"Kenny Bostick","movie_duration":"01:43:09","timestamp":"01:08:23","full_line":"Wow, and here I thought I was the bomb at 728.","current_wow_in_movie":3,"total_wows_in_movie":3,"poster":"https://images.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/pCjGOhbTCQVjLRN9zT...}]
It's pretty cool but like what's your business model here? I don't think you've really thought this through properly. What you probably want is a free-tier "wow" level (like 1 wow per week or something), a "Personal" tier (more wows + you can do some but not all the api calls), and finaly "Enterprise tier" (all you can eat wows + sso).
A bit off topic, but: What’s a funny test api that allows put requests?
I have a personal cheat sheet that I refer to when I need to make JSON/REST api request using base Python or Curl, since I don’t do this enough to actually remember how. Right now my examples pull chuck norris quotes, but it would be nice to have examples that aren’t just `get` in my tool box.
There are "curl builders" that provide UI for dummies like myself to create a curl cmd and then you can use a "curl to {golang|ruby|python}" [0] to generate code from the curl.
As a wow amazed individual I had made this guess the wow to the movie game a couple of years back [1] ... this would have made that work a whole lot easier than the painstakingly slow sourcing I had done :D
Yes! I obviously took a lot of the general front-end design and CSS formatting from the Chuck Norris API - that's why I credited it in the GitHub repo!
"The Owen Wilson Wow API is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with Owen Wilson, or any of his subsidiaries or affiliates."
That's just sad. Interjecting myself into a movie star's position, but if someone made a site like this based on my work in a fun light hearted manner like this, I'd endorse it. It's only an ignored request or a polite no response away, or a full endorsement. You just gotta ask (assuming there was no ask and this is just a boiler plate CYA bit of text).
Honestly, an endorsement by Owen Wilson would be amazing. Unfortunately, I wouldn't know how to reach him even if I wanted to. If anyone has any way for me to personally reach out to Owen Wilson, though, that would be dope.
![https://images.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/pCjGOhbTCQVjLRN9zT...](https://images.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/pCjGOhbTCQVjLRN9zTwIi/ce7cdf4b40f3549326d881697aa468a1/The_Big_Year_Poster.jpg","video":{"1080p":"https://videos.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/uOdKu6VANHZjtwZXeBU8M/bf1f0f44c7bc01faa648a1b97b1205d3/The_Big_Year_Wow_3_1080p.mp4","720p":"https://videos.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/y9wR96fHZaNnZr367mjyI/1262c2af0400cb1dc8528c3c8e6a83a4/The_Big_Year_Wow_3_720p.mp4","480p":"https://videos.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/55z94kbUxNFIL0rYb1i2mH/ca0505ca5e2017b663f18cca8af571b2/The_Big_Year_Wow_3_480p.mp4","360p":"https://videos.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/6moRL0SzmkTGzgEuZeVByI/c63fa33d0992c0594ecbaed4fcd7e891/The_Big_Year_Wow_3_360p.mp4"},"audio":"https://assets.ctfassets.net/bs8ntwkklfua/1dXEYZQP1Fl6CX1roy7ZAH/f31b90a6f961dcc16c16b294f4faf664/The_Big_Year_Wow_3.mp3"){kind=link}
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem, and copying all the Owen Wilson "Wow" audio (.ogg) files.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive full of Owen Wilson "Wow" clips. Most people I know e-mail "Wow"s to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to listen to them, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?