Thinking about how to reinvest the Google Open Source Peer Bonus
| bloggingI received a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for my contributions to GNU Emacs, which was a pleasant surprise. Thanks!
I'm thinking of ways to reinvest the ~USD 250 award into Emacs and the community to see what a little money earmarked for that could do. People have already donated enough to EmacsConf to cover hosting costs, so that's all sorted out. People have also already sent me more than enough to cover my hosting costs using my ancient pay-what-you-want resources. I wonder how I could use the money to help me make more blog posts and videos.
Speech recognition: Paying for cloud usage will let me do tiny experiments without upgrading my X230T1 for now. I could start with speech recognition as a way of fleshing out ideas and getting them into text faster. Deepgram charges USD 0.0048/min for batch-processing with Whisper Large and USD 0.0059/min for streaming with their Nova-2 model, so that's… umm… ~860+ hours I could process. Over the past couple of weeks of experimenting with this idea, I've recorded about 1-2 hours of audio braindumps a day, so that's still well over a year of being able to play around with this. (And actually I still have USD ~187 of free trial credits with them, so…)
AI: I might also be able to use AI for outlining/summarizing/cleaning up my audio braindumps. I just have to figure out the right prompts for ChatGPT. Here's one I've been experimenting with so that I can get things into roughly an Org Mode format while still letting me easily look things up in the transcript:
Outlining prompt
Reorganize this rough transcript into an outline of ideas.
Format it like this:
- item 1
- details
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- details
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- details
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- verbatim quote from transcript
- more details
- item 2 ...
Drawing: The kiddo uses the iPad a lot for reading, but maybe I can squeeze in some time to tinker around with different apps for drawing and animation.
Video editing: Maybe I can learn more about video editing or figure out what gear makes sense to add to my setup.
If you have other suggestions for low-cost experiments that might pay off in terms of making more useful blog posts or videos, I'd love to hear them!
Footnotes:
The X230T is a lovely computer. This particular one is a donation from Matthew Darling, and it has an i5-3320M. I occasionally get tempted to upgrade to maybe a desktop with a GPU so that I can do more experiments with Whisper, ffmpeg, or local AI models, but since I still only have a tiny sliver of computing time each day before the kiddo wakes up, it doesn't make sense to buy a powerful computer that will sit idle most of the time. He also gave me a Surface Book with an i7-6600U, and I can probably run stuff on it. It has a 1GB NVIDIA GPU, even, so maybe I should figure out how I can ssh into it since it runs Windows at the moment. There's a W530 with an i7-3820QM around here with a 2GB NVIDIA GPU that also tends to be idle. That one dualboots between Windows and Linux, but it tends to be in Windows because the kiddo uses it to play Minecraft Bedrock. I've just set up SSH access to WSL on both of them, so that should be promising. I'm surrounded by excess compute resources that I could use for making videos either through interactive applications like Kdenlive or through text-based workflows using my Emacs Lisp functions. Besides, it makes sense to focus on very short videos for now (or even blog posts with more screenshots and animated GIFs). Maybe I just need to spend some time this winter break to figure out some workflows. Hmm…