It's important to remember that these upscalers will hallucinate new content. Especially when law enforcement tries to use these to find suspects from blurry photos. See this example from the lower left of their front-page demo where it adds a person to the boat: https://imgur.com/a/Vo3zlO3
I'm thinking the right way of doing it is to embed in a viewer. So that the original stays untouched but visible quality gets better with new technologies.
I've got to chime in here, because of how much this overlaps with the project I've been working on called Haven[1].
A lot of these problems go away with a decentralized/open-source private model. If your posts aren't public then there is no spam. If everyone runs their own node of open-source (or better yet: open-protocol, ie RSS) software, then there is no centralized entity able to have incentives of profiting off the platform.
Information propagation speed is a good call-out as dangerous. Even with all the spam/shilling/trills removed, it still leads to the girl who's having a great time on her snowboarding trip until she posts pictures on Instagram and drops into a foul mood because not enough people immediately liked her posts.
I'd love to connect and share thoughts, feel free to reach out[2]/
I've been working on Haven[1] as an open-source self-hostable alternative to give control back to people. I actually wrote a blog post about how the move from "see what your friends/family are doing" to "just keep scrolling" was a pretty blatant bait-and-switch[2]. I think any alternative will fail in the same ways as Facebook has unless there are different incentives. I'm hoping that by making Haven open source and decentralized there won't be a path for me to make money off of it (beyond maybe hosting fees?) if it gets broader adoption.
Most ebooks have embedded cover images that Calibre will automatically extract. I know of https://isbndb.com/ which has covers of some resolution but I've never tried using them before.
Right now books are sorted by author name (eek, I think first name--calibre has an author_sort field I should use), then series name, then series index.
This looks awesome! For written Portuguese, how different is Brazillian vs European? I've been trying to learn European Portuguese and it is challenging to find resources that differentiate between the two.
Thanks! Basically the language and the rules are the same, but there are a few differences. For example, in European Portuguese, a silent 'c' and 'p' are often retained in words like "acção" (action) and "óptimo" (optimal), whereas in Brazilian Portuguese, these letters have been dropped to become "ação" and "ótimo". Also, there are some words that are different like the word for "bus" in Brazil is "ônibus," whereas in Portugal, it's "autocarro". Overall, european portuguese is more formal, and brazilian, more casual.
Other differences that stood out to me in visiting Lisbon and the Azores:
(1) European Portuguese usually fully preserves "tu" (including distinctive verb forms), while in Brazilian Portuguese, it's often only used in oblique forms "te" and "ti", or regionally as a subject but often with the third person verb form. For example, in much of Brazil you would see "você tem" (even when speaking to a close friend or family member); in some parts of Brazil, like in Rio Grande do Sul, you would see "tu tem"; and in Portugal you might see "tu tens".
(2) European Portuguese uses "a" + infinitive where Brazilian Portuguese uses the present participle: "estou a fazer" versus "estou fazendo", or "está a falar" versus "está falando". This distinction is very strong and consistent.
(3) Pronunciation can be very different. The first thing you would notice is that the <d> before <e> and <i> is not pronounced as /dʒ/ and the <t> before those letters is not pronounced as /tʃ/. So for example <diabo> 'devil' or <diagonal> 'diagonal' start with /dʒ/ in Brazil but with /d/ in Europe, or <sede> 'thirst' ends with /dʒi/ in Brazil but /dɨ/ in Europe. Or especially the adjective ending <-mente> will be /'mẽtʃi/ in Brazil but /'mẽtɨ/ in Europe.
The word-final vowels in European Portuguese often seem to get dropped entirely (or to be pronounced very softly or briefly), so you might even hear that adverb ending as /mẽt/ (approaching French!!).
I found it fairly challenging as a non-native speaker.
The pronunciation is different inside Brazil, like some NY accents versus standard american english for instance, or when I try to follow someone from Texas versus someone from New Zealand.
All your points are correct! Awesome observation!
I'm from south Brazil, living in Rio, and I have some weird situations following people from the north when they talk fast. I need to spend more energy paying attention or ask again the same question, but it's a nice exercise.
It's closely related to the immigrations, for instance the city I lived in the south had a bigger immigration from Azorians, along with different proportions of europeans on the entire state, including my (grand)grandparents from Poland.
When I started looking at the cultural origins it made more sense, it's also a beautiful topic to look at.
I ran into this building search for a family tree project. I found out that Rails provides `ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate()` which I could use for normalization.
