The Gemini podcast is going to condense your text and make it conversational, but it will necessarily lose detail in the process. A better recommendation is the Eleven Labs Reader, it’ll just read any text or file you throw at it with top tier voice models. Can use it for free and they have paid plans for more use. They also have a “podcast” generator option like Gemini, but I haven’t tried it so can’t vouch for the quality.

I use Eleven Labs all the time for things I want to read, like email newsletters, industry publications, etc but never find the time to sit down and read. Now I can have AI read them to me while I walk the dog. Super handy imo

deemed controversial and antisemitic

The first reads, “Kill all Jews.”

Hmm, I guess I could see how some might read that as controversial and potentially antisemitic.

Some do. My library has a play area set up for littles and another area set up for infants. On Saturdays they have a sing along story hour thing, and other events like that throughout the week. We also have plenty of local parks with playground equipment. No free place with indoor slides and ball pits though like McDonald’s used to have.

Google scanned millions of books and made them available online. Courts ruled that was fair use because the purpose and interface didn’t lend itself to actually reading the books in Google books, but just searching them for information. If that is fair use, then I don’t see how training an LLM (which doesn’t retain the exact copy of the training data at least in the vast majority of cases) isn’t fair use. You aren’t going to get an argument from me.

I think most people who will disagree are reflexively anti AI, and that’s fine. But I just haven’t heard a good argument that AI training isn’t fair use.

We continue to recommend Wyze lighting, since we consider them lower-risk, lower-impact devices—a security breach of a light bulb, for instance, wouldn’t give someone a view of your living room.

Call me paranoid, but I don’t want a company I don’t trust plugged into my network at all.