Daily Tech News 23 August 2023

• SeamlessM4T is an AI speech recognition, transcription, and translation service from Facebook that understands nearly 100 languages and speaks 35. (Facebook)
  
  And you can download it.
  
  The whole thing is on GitHub.
  
  The code is pretty small - SeamlessM4T itself is 272kB, and the libraries it uses are less than 4MB in total. The model that makes it work is a lot larger at 10GB - still only about about 40 cents worth of SSD space.
  
  Facebook is one of the few honest actors in AI research right now, and even if they're doing it out of spite - firing open-source torpedoes at rival companies - it's still welcome. I'm not going to shed a tear if decades from now submersibles are taking vacationers to the wreck of OpenAI at the bottom of the Atlantic.
  
  
  

• Why does the US government want to ban TikTok? Because it's a tool of Chinese intelligence - or because it's not a tool of US intelligence? (Gizmodo)
  
  Surprisingly, given the facts presented and not Gizmodo's spin, it appears to be the former. The draft rules are not to spy on TikTok's users but to monitor TikTok itself - to spy on the spies.
  
  
  
• In which The Verge takes a short break from hating Elon Musk to hate Ron DeSantis. (The Verge)
  
  The article is about YouTube's deal with Universal Music Group to block otherwise legal creation of music using AI reproductions of the voices of artists signed to that label.
  
  You can't copyright what you sound like, but YouTube will take the music down anyway, just as they took down unapproved narratives regarding the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, something you will not find five thousand word diatribes published about at The Verge.
  
  So what does Ron DeSantis have to do with all of this?
  
  Absolutely nothing. The Verge is off its meds again.
  
  
  
• Hookworms may help stave off type 2 diabetes. (New Atlas)
  
  The paper by Australian researchers, published in Nature, suggests that the anti-inflammatory response triggered by the parasitic worms helps counteract the metabolic processes that lead to diabetes and other health conditions.
  
  Hookworms have also been suggested as a treatment for autoimmune diseases for much the same reason.
  
  Yes, it's bloody Aussies again. I suppose that living on a continent where all of the animals and most of the plants are actively trying to kill you makes a parasitic worm infection seem less of an issue.
  
  
  
• What happened to The Wirecutter? (The Atlantic) (archive site)
  
  Short version: They got bought by the New York Times.

  Once, Lam assigned a reporter to review bike locks by talking with prolific bike thieves; the writer ended up interviewing a man who'd very likely stolen his old bike. The piece was a hit. "Every extra hour we put into a piece, I still argue it added to the revenue a post would generate," Lam told me. "The better it is, the more money it brings in over time." Wirecutter paid freelancers hourly, often spending thousands of dollars on sprawling features that generated money through the site's affiliate-link model - commonplace now, but a drastic departure from the banner advertising that was standard at the time.

  Quality reporting? Not at this newspaper!

  In 2016, the site sold to the Times, as a service-y complement to the newspaper's own journalism. It didn't take long for Wirecutter staffers to realize that the Times' ambitions for the site far exceeded Wirecutter's own expectations of moderate, steady growth. According to multiple former employees, whom I am keeping anonymous because they still work in the industry, the Times' leadership wanted the site to double the amount of content it produced in order to juice revenue. Those employees said Wirecutter's top editors argued that the site's business would not scale directly, because a minority of articles, many of them for big-ticket items such as appliances, generated the bulk of the company's revenues. But the mandate remained: Wirecutter would need to double its staff and double its output.

  If your site depends on affiliate links for revenue, reputation is everything. So the new owners threw that out the window.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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