Rad.FM maker here. Thanks for at least trying it. A) the web app is still in alpha. B) Rad needs your location to make what it says to the listener relevant to where you are and your current time. Also, news & weather need your location.
Thanks for the feedback though, I'll delay the location request to later in the flow + add a popover which explains why it's needed when we get to beta.
As much as I agree with that and want see that happen, I predict people will get away with not so much as a slap on the wrist. Phrases to look out for are "collective responsibility", "I was only doing my job", "must preserve the reputation of the institution", "limited liability" etc.
1) The lack of muckraking agents in this whole affair - individuals, investigative bodies, the media, non-governmental agencies, British billionaires who have the wherewithal to finance private investigative operations etc. The sheer magnitude of that shortfall is just worrying. For those that are not fully familiar with the scope of the issues here :
Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 3500 staff employed by the state-owned
Post Office service were accused of fraud, theft or malicious accounting.
Almost 700 of them were convicted in courts and some 230 were jailed.
Most were legally compelled to repay the amounts they were accused of
fleecing, resulting in bankruptcies, marriage failures, substance abuse and
even suicides.
There was just one not-so-little problem – virtually all of those people
were innocent.[1]
I mean how does something like that go on for so long! Especially when lives have been torn apart! Its one thing for public money to be pilfered & squandered. That happens everywhere. But those people have been wrecked, if that article is to be believed.
2) Whats more concerning is the larger question :
a) if people have been made to put up with these kinds of horrendous miscarriages of justice for
so long, in a postal services affair, what other miscarriages of justice are there that go
unnoticed, uninvestigated and unpunished.
b) is this "part and parcel" of middle income British life? do the Brits put a large amount of
trust in their unimpeachable public institutions? do they pull themselves back, short of calling
into question the integrity of those that are tasked with such jobs? (atleast more so than is
the case in the United States and elsewhere). I ask because I've come across things that seem to
buttress exactly that :
It is also forcing everyone to pay higher taxes for worse
public services: The great British Middle Class live in
a world of petty crime that goes un-investigated let
alone punished, over-crowded emergency health services,
and ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists (Britain has one
of the lowest ratios of doctors and hospital beds per
patient in the whole of the OECD).
I have come across this kind of uniquely British reluctance to call a spade a spade, in quite a few other instances as well. Dr. John Campbell of Youtube fame comes to mind but I digress.[3]
[1]
Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government
I appreciate the response. I should have clarified; I'm a solo entrepreneur, and eventually plan to hire others to mainly take over the dev work. So mostly the latter.
Have they alluded to what they're using for that voice? It's Bark/ElevenLabs levels of good. Please god, let them release this voice model at current pricing....
It's actually sounds better (has a narrative oomph Eleven Labs seems to be missing). They say it's a new model. Think they'll be releasing for API use.
Yeah, agreed. I use Eleven Labs a lot but this was a very compelling demo to consider changing. Also, curious that you mention Bark - I never found Bark to be very good compared to Eleven Labs. The closest competitor I found was Coqui ( imo ), but even then, the inflection and realism of EL just made it not worth considering other providers. ( For my use case, etc. etc. )
I've been a paying subscriber to Kagi for over a year and I'm sad to say it just gets in my way and I often find myself just wishing I was using Google.
I've kept it thus far because I believe in the mission but man... I get why other promising search engines have fallen to Google.
If you follow Youtubers like Jim Browning that tackle this sort of scam-based cybercrime operations then this will come as absolutely no surprise to you.
Scam-based cybercrime is an offshoot of the BPO and Call Center industry. This is why cities with a weak software scene but strong BPO scene like Kolkata are highly represented.
This is a rampant industry in the US as well. The Telemarketers mini-series shows how these call centers operate, the scams they run, how police associations are involved, and how the government is basically complicit with what they're doing. This must be even easier and more profitable to operate from a more corrupt country with no regulations or law enforcement of these activities.
AI will make this industry even more successful. Telemarketers read from a script anyway, so it's only a matter of time until these scams are fully automated. We're starting to see some of this already, but it will be fully adopted in a few years.
There is regulation for this in India (eg. Each call center needs to be licensed, needs an actual registered owner/point of contact, etc) but if you are doing this with political cover you might be protected. For example, if I am running a scam call center in Kolkata, I'd need to pay off the political party that controls that state - the TMC. And similar stuff happens in other states among all parties.
That said, scam calling is a uniquely large industry in Bihar and West Bengal as neither have a significant tech industry, and see very little foreign investment, so there is less incentive for state politicians to crack down on something that generates easy money. Most BPO and Software outsourcing companies in Kolkata and Patna tend to be the old school Indian outsourcing companies that got priced out of Bangalore/Gurgaon/Hyderabad/Pune because they have low margins, and thus pay lower salaries (around $3-7k a year compared to $20-70k a year in Tier 1 cities or product driven companies)
I just want to write Svelte and get native apps out the other end. I know we have SvelteNative but that's not great and is a big abstraction. React here is a bit of a bummer i'm not going to lie.
This sounds like the inevitable slow death of RN to me. Web developers simply moving on to new tech that's better/more common on the web while RN languishes as the massive set of open source libraries required are abandoned
Don't confuse HN bleeding edge hipser tech with the real world. The world of react-alternatives is fragmented and lib-incomplete, React still gets more installed than its most popular rivals combined[1].
I have worked across these frameworks and React is the only one where I find the lib ecosystem satisfiyingly large (and still growing most steadily).
