What are your pain points, folks? Stuff that you hate doing or dealing with, or problems you can't find a good solution to? Stuff that other people might be frustrated with, too.
I'm looking for a way to make myself valuable to other people, as a way to both help people and also earn an income to feed my family in the process.
One thing I can do really well is create reliable software to automate rote tasks, generate financial/statistical/other reports, or calculate difficult solutions. Think it can't be done without LLMs? I might surprise you!
I can go into more detail about why all the options are bad if you want. But this is the sort of problem that eats years of your life, requires advanced mathematics (digital signal processing at a minimum), and advanced linguistics, on top of being a good systems-level programmer.
@fastfinge I just so happen to be an (unemployed) machine learning researcher by trade, with advanced mathematics, linguistics, and programming skills. Maybe not systems-level programming, but I could probably find someone who does that and work with them.
Given that the first two responses I've gotten were both about accessibility, there might be more of a market for this than you think, and also, it might make a good way to demo my skills even if it isn't paid work.
@hosford42 The sourcecode for dectalk is out there. Unfortunately, It's...legally dubious at best. It was leaked by an employee back in the day, and now the copyright status of the code is so unclear that nobody can safely use it for anything, but also nobody can demonstrate clear enough ownership to submit a DMCA and get it taken off github. GNUspeech is also pretty close to what's needed, but it won't even compile without all the NeXT development tools, I don't think. So at best all that would be is a base for something else; modernizing it would probably effectively be a complete rewrite anyway.
It looks like both DECtalk and DECtalkMini are being actively maintained, with commits as recent as 1 to 2 months ago. I was hoping the copyright for the "mini" version would be unencumbered, but no such luck. It would have to be a re-implementation from scratch using this code as a guide. That's a lot easier than implementing a new system out of nothing, though.
@hosford42 I also have no idea about any associated IP or patents, though. Wouldn't whoever does it need to be able to prove they never saw the original code, just its outputs? Otherwise you're still infringing, aren't you? In this regard, it's probably actually a bad thing that the dectalk sourcecode is so widely available.
And most of the commits seem to be about just getting it to compile on modern systems with modern toolchains. I dread to think how unsafe closed-source C code written in 1998 is.
@fastfinge hmm, patents do complicate things. I could search and see if there are patents on it, I suppose. Or I could just try to implement from scratch.
