Application of artificial intelligence by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-18 +Created 2024-08-10
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-18 +Created 2024-08-10- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan I delved into a bit of Wikipedia drama on the page of Scott Hassan, initial coder of Google Search, which I created an am the main contributor.Originally I had added some details about this messy divorce which saw coverage in major publications such as the New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html and Scott used puppets to remove those at several points in time over the years.Those removals were then reverted by other editors, not myself, indicating that editors wanted the details there.While preparing to finally decide this through moderation, I ended up finding that the divorce details should likely have been left out according to Wikipedia rules, because Scott is "relatively unknown" and a "low profile individual":and so I ended up removing them myself.This is yet once again deletionism on Wikipedia weakening the site, and making @OurBigBook stronger :-) Here is the uncensored one: Scott Hassan
- unix.stackexchange.com/questions/256138/is-there-any-decent-speech-recognition-software-for-linux/613392#613392 cool to see that the Vosk open source speech recognition software by twitter.com/alphacep now has a convenient command line interface called vosk-transcriber!It allows you to just:
vosk-transcriber -m ~/var/lib/vosk/vosk-model-en-us-0.22 -i in.ogg -o out.srt -t srt - video.stackexchange.com/questions/33531/how-to-remove-background-from-video-without-green-screen-on-the-command-line/37392#37392 tested this AI video background remover github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover by @nadermx. It had a few glitches, but I had fun.
unix.stackexchange.com/questions/233832/merge-two-video-clips-into-one-placing-them-next-to-each-other/774936#774936 I then learned how to stack videos side-by-side with ffmpeg to create this side-by-side demo. It also works for GIFs! stackoverflow.com/questions/30927367/imagemagick-making-2-gifs-into-side-by-side-gifs-using-im-convert/78361093#78361093
Posted at: - Just found out that my Lenovo ThinkPad P14s has an infrared camera, and recorded a quick test video on Ubuntu 23.10 with:
fmpeg -y -f v4l2 -framerate 30 -video_size 640x360 -input_format gray -i /dev/video2 -c copy out.mkv- mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/112261675634568209
- twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1778981935257116767
- www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/pfbid027M3n2p8snE9otAWdHtJ3ig2AhrXoDGv4h68o1z8agHceQBbFHZpEoxg7KZbiWAgWl
- www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7184755892410576897/
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1ZeR6pmf6o
- commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Infrared_video_of_Ciro_Santilli_waving_recorded_on_Lenovo_ThinkPad_P14s_with_FFmpeg_6.0_on_Ubuntu_23.10.webm
Figure 1. Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared.
I tried to use every single free offline text-to-speech engine that would run on Ubuntu 24.04 without too much hassle to see if any of them sounded natural. pico2wave was the overall winner so far, but it is not perfect.
I've been noticing a gap between the "AI" SOTA and what is actually packaged well enough to be usable by a general audience.
Also played a bit more with OpenAI Whisper: askubuntu.com/questions/24059/automatically-generate-subtitles-close-caption-from-a-video-using-speech-to-text/1522895#1522895 Mind blowing performance and perfect packaging as well, kudos.
When doing "innovative" things that seem "smart", you often end up noticing that they were actually "old" and "dumb", and that you should instead be doing another "innovative smart" thing.
Therefore, there is always a possibility that at some point Ciro Santilli's intended project for donation money will change halfway.
Ciro however makes the following pledge: everything that comes out of donation money work will be:as always.
- openly licensed
- amazingly documented
- STEM focused
This does not apply to contract work obviously, only donations.
Bibliography:
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact