I'm enjoying tracking the local wildlife with my bird listening station.

There's also an excellent alternative to BirdNet-Pi that runs well on non-Raspberry-Pi machines: https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go

Birdnet-go is really good and actively maintained. Shout out to tphakala.

Even in the commercial space, there’s a lack of production grade ASR APIs that support diarization and word level timestamps.

My experiences with Google’s Chirp have been horrendous, with it sometimes skipping sections of speech entirely, hallucinating speech where the audio contains noise, and unreliable word level timestamps. And this all is even with using their new audio prefiltering feature.

AWS works slightly better, but also has trouble with keeping word level timestamps in sync.

Whisper is nice but hallucinates regularly.

OpenAI’s new transcription models are delivering accurate output but do not support word level timestamps…

A lot of this could be worked around by sending the resulting transcripts through a few layers of post processing, but… I just want to pay for an API that is reliable and saves me from doing all that work.

I wonder if you could run multiple models and average out the timestamps, kind of like how atomic clocks are used together and not separately

Isn't Elevenlabs the best in this?

They can have issues with the timestamps: https://github.com/elevenlabs/elevenlabs-python/issues/707

I've not tested their speech-to-text yet, but based on the docs it looks promising. Thanks for the suggestion!

It's fantastic, and their diarization is spot on as well.

I’ve found CIS Controls v8.1 to be good and sane, with actual benefits to security. Level 1 is a solid base, and Level 2 is good for picking from depending on where risks exist in your business.

CIS Benchmarks are worth a look too: They’re best practices for securing typical cloud platforms, SaaS and OS.

Can you write a bit more about your workflow? I've been thinking about doing the same, but since I'm very non-interior-design minded have struggled to ask the right things.

Like... What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos? Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?

Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?

I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr

super interesting - can you share some of the other elements. screenshots of the sketchup model, the AI image output, etc?

would you recommend this workflow to others, or just noting that it is what you did? any regrets, road blocks, frustrations?

a ball park price would also be interesting: total cost of sketchup license + ai token cost + fivver modeler + draftsman etc. I assume under $1k?

$20k for permit-ready building docs.

Mine was far more lightweight, but u just uploaded pics of my yard and prompted manually a bunch of times. Sometimes id find reference images to give as context, draw on the image to call out specific areas, etc.

It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.

Have you by any chance tried this with GPT 4.1 too (also 1M context)?

We had intense aurora in Berlin, Germany. Green clouds dancing in the sky levels. Started around 22:10 local time or a bit earlier, and at this point there's only a faint red/green glow remaining.

Yeah, there were auroras even as far south as Munich. Maybe not as intense, but it's the first aurora I ever saw, so I can't really judge...

I am south-west of Munich and with a perfect clear sky I could only see stars, one meteor, and that's it.

It was visible in the 22:00-23:00 time window. Here in the south west, the sky started turning green around 22:30.

We also had them in Grenoble, south of France.

Can confirm, I've seen pink/green glow over Berlin Sky (and pictures as well)

Just spend an hour outsite (Northern Germany, 01:00 MET). Unfortunately nothing to report, neither visual nor on camera. Maybe I just went to late and missed the show. I hope you habe more luck in Canada and the US!

I'm Berlin was around 22-23 o'clock visible

It's pretty subtle right now here in NL but I can still see it with the naked eye. Mostly greenish haze that fades in and out.

ahh I just went outside (south of Utrecht) and saw nothing. Maybe too much light pollution.

I'm lucky in that I was close to the IJsselmeer.

I was just out at a dog park and saw nothing! We have clear skies. I can't believe I missed this.

Next time take a long exposure picture with your phone. You might be able to see it that way.

Also seen in the Netherlands!

I tought I was seeing aurora borealis here at 4 am local time in the neighboring Grand Duchy of Luxemburg but it was just visual pollution due to lights from a city.

Could you see it from the inner city or only closer to the edges?

Friends who live in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain could see it pretty well. I'm a bit further south within Berlin where skies are minimally darker, but between 10pm and 11pm it was so bright that light pollution didn't matter.

Funnily enough, despite having lots of alerts set up it was my mom who texted me from northern Brandenburg as she spotted it after getting an alert from RegenRadar, of all apps...

It's amazing to hear it's visible in such a big city. I don't have a good intuition for all the metrics that describe how strong this storm was/is, but when put like this it hits home.

Nice to hear earth weather apps also work great in space haha. I'll keep that in mind when I set up my own notifications. Hopefully I have time to look into it before the next storm hits.

Saw it in Fhain as well over Ostkreuz station

Oh really? Oh no I missed it! Is it going to happen again today?

Anecdotally, my APP3 have worked much better then expected when I worked with a drill and jigsaw this weekend. No weird noises and much more NC than the 2 had.

Might be worth trying different ear tips or asking for a replacement if software updates don’t improve it.

In Germany, regulations around asbestos are quite strict: You're not allowed to "seal it in" by e.g. putting floor leveling compounds on top of old asbestos-containing flooring. If there's asbestos found during renovations, it needs to be removed professionally.

When we re-did our kitchen we found asbestos-containing glue under a new-ish layer of tiles one of the previous owners of the apartment just laid on top. I wish regulations would already have been stricter back then (and that they would have been followed - another story...) as this surprise find caused massive delays to the construction and forced us to temporarily move out during the removal and decontamination.

One of the best ways to make DIY-ing in buildings built before 1994 (when asbestos was banned for construction in Germany) safe has been to buy a H-filtration class shop vac. It can filter out asbestos fibers and many other fine dust particles that aren't healthy to inhale and was barely more expensive than a comparably good vac.

Generally yes. I asked my primary care physician and would have been able to get the vaccine dose from the pharmacy (paying for it myself) and she would have administered it.

I am not (usually) photosensitive, but the animated static noise on your websites causes noticable flickering on various screens I use and made it impossible for me to read your article.

For better accessibility and a safer experience[1] I would recommend not animating the background, or at least making it easily togglable.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/G...

Removed- sorry, and thank you for the feedback.

Love your responsiveness here!

Edited to add: I am, in fact, photosensitive (due to a genetic retinal condition), and for my eyes, your site as it is very easy to read, and the visualizations look great.

Thank you!

Love that you included the judge prompts in your article.

Please let me know what you would like to see more of. Evals are something we take serious, I think this post was ok enough given our constraints, but I'd like to produce content people find useful and I think we can do a lot better.

Nice,