Now that I'm playing with it, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN or Reddit.

- The Slate Culture Gabfest - probably the most consistently fun podcast on my list. It's like sitting down at a table with your smartest friends from grad school to talk about movies, books, and music. The endorsements at the end are always good

- Switched on Pop

- If Books Could Kill

News/Current Events:

- Slate Political Gabfest

- Slate Money

- CBC World Report

- NPR Up First

History:

- Well, There's Your Problem - "a podcast about engineering disasters... with slides"

- The History of Rome

- Revolutions

- We're Not So Different

- The Fall of Civilizations

Although raising interest rates tamped down inflation on the demand side, we don't give enough credit to Carter for attacking the supply side by deregulating energy markets.

Carter typically doesn't get credit because prices didn't really ease until he was out of office. However, it looks like energy prices wouldn't have decreased if Carter hadn't deregulated the oil and gas industry, which allowed domestic producers to become competitive. (Ironically, Carter thought deregulation would raise prices and foster a move to alternative energy. Instead we got shale oil and fracking. Unintended consequences.)

- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.

- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.

- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)

- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen

Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.

Looks like there's an effort to keep an actively maintained fork here, though: https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS

  Coqui is shutting down.
  
  It's sad news to start the new year, but I want to take a minute to recognize everything we accomplished and thank the great people who made it possible.
  
  First things first: the Team
  
  I'm honored to have worked with such brilliant, dedicated, and inspiring individuals. We were a small team, but we left our scratch on the earth's crust. Our accomplishments stand on their own, but when you remember we were just a rag-tag team with limited compute... now that's special.
  
  Big tech had orders of magnitude more compute, data, and researchers, but we gave them a run for their money. We didn't just replicate the state-of-the-art... we created it! That wouldn't have been possible without this exact team.
  
  We were spread across five continents, native languages, and backgrounds... and we built something great. I'm sure that we built great tech because of that mix of perspectives.
  
  I will deeply miss our team, but I'm also excited to see what they do next. Whoever gets them on-board will be a lucky duck :)
  
  What we accomplished
  
  Way back in 2016, it all began as the Machine Learning Group at Mozilla. First was DeepSpeech, then Common Voice and TTS. Crazy how far the field has come since then. We spun out as Coqui in 2021 in order to add rocket fuel to our mission.
  
  One of our biggest accomplishments at Coqui was XTTS. The state-of-the-art took a huge leap forward when we openly released model weights for XTTS v1... and v2 was even better! I'm thrilled to see where AI is heading, and proud that we could make some of that progress available to everyone.
  
  Here's a tiny snapshot of what we accomplished at Coqui:

   2021: Coqui STT v1.0 release. Coqui Model Zoo goes live. SC-GlowTTS released.
   2022: YourTTS goes viral. Tons of open-source releases. Building the team.
   2023: Coqui Studio webapp and API go live. First customers. XTTS open release.
  
  I can confidently say that we pushed the state-of-the-art for generative speech technology... before it was called "generative" :)
  
  Thank you

  It took a village to make Coqui possible, and I want to thank everyone who gave us a shot.
  
  The real rockstars are the team, as I said above. Thank you!
  
  A huge thanks to the community. You have always been our core. From the Mozilla days on IRC to the current Discord server. The community has contributed, supported, and made building in the open a joy. Thank you all!
  
  Thank you to our investors. Coqui simply wouldn't have been possible without you. You believed in us before anyone else; you took a chance on us. More than just an investment, your thoughtful insights and discussions made Coqui a better company and a better product. I'm extremely grateful for your support. Thank you!
  
  Thank you to our customers. Everything we built was for you, and I hope we managed to give you something you loved. Especially thank you for your feedback: both the good and the bad. We did our best to hear you and build you something better everyday. Thank you!
  
  Lastly, thank you to our partners over the years. It's a long list of great folks I've been lucky enough to collaborate with. We worked on open science, open code, and open models. From joint research to hackathons, it was a blast! To the great folks at HuggingFace, Mozilla, Masakhane, Harvard, Indiana University, Google, MLCommons, Landing AI, NVIDIA, Intel, and Makerere University... thank you! Forgive me if I've left anyone out.
  
  What's next
  
  I can't yet say what comes next... but generative AI in 2024 is going to be bigger than ever. Generative voice will only get better, faster, cheaper, and easier to fine-tune... open-source will be a huge part of that.
  
  Speaking of open-source... Coqui TTS is on Github. Do something awesome with it!
  
  Thank you all

At the time (2018-ish), it was really impressive for on-device voice synthesis (with a quality approaching the Google and Azure cloud-based voice synthesis options) and open source, so a lot of people in the FOSS community were hoping it could be used for a privacy-respecting home assistant, Linux speech synthesis that doesn't suck, etc.

After Mozilla abandoned the project, Coqui continued development and had some really impressive one-shot voice cloning, but pivoted to marketing speech synthesis for game developers. They were probably having trouble monetizing it, and it doesn't surprise me that they shut down.

An equivalent project that's still in active development and doing really well is Piper TTS (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).

Apple doesn't make a product that costs less than $430 (the SE). If you need a cheaper phone, you have to go Android. For lots of people, $400 is a lot of money (especially if you're also buying phones for your kids, who are likely to break whatever you buy them). In lots of families it's iphone for the grownups, android for the kids. And that's just within the US.

On a global scale, if you're selling phones outside of the US and European markets, some part of your product lineup has to be in the sub $200 range (in addition to the flagships you sell everywhere). For example, in India, Xiaomi sells the Redmi 9A for Rs 8,000 (about $100). They're competing with Samsung phones we don't see in the US, like the Galaxy M series, which are in the same price category. Those phones exist because (a) people need cell phones (especially in places where a phone might be your primary access to the internet) and (b) Apple is choosing not to go after those customers.

Even though Samsung makes a more expensive flagship, the average income of Android users will always be lower because (a) there are more poor people world-wide than rich people, and (b) Apple isn't making phones for poor people, while Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, etc. are. Apple's strategy is totally working for them (selling a luxury product at luxury prices works well) but it also means that most poor people (which is most people) won't ever have one, so the average income of an iOS user will always be higher (along with the other things that go along with a higher income, like higher spending).