[HN Gopher] His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent
___________________________________________________________________
His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent
Author : kens
Score : 162 points
Date : 2023-04-01 17:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inverse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inverse.com)
| codetrotter wrote:
| Thought for sure this would be about TempleOS
| cfq wrote:
| Me too. Whoever decided on that title must have known about
| Terry and TempleOS.
|
| I miss him so much. R.I.P.
| retrac wrote:
| It occurs to me that a program like this can be effectively
| complete. And stand alone. I'm sure there's a few bugs and of
| course always more features are possible. But this software would
| probably be usable as-is in 100 years for Torah study just as it
| is today. It's quite a shame we still haven't come up with a way
| of packaging software in a way that makes it relatively future
| proof, even if the legal issues could be resolved.
| asdff wrote:
| We kind of have. Buy a new mac today and you can run a 40 year
| old sh program fine. Its just that most people aren't being
| trained on these standard unchanging technologies in computing
| unless they take an active interest in it. They are being
| trained on $newapp and how to navigate $newwebsite and become
| beholden to those patterns of software design sensibilities,
| because in this attention economy this obviously generates a
| lot more money than having the masses use some simple bash code
| to solve a lot of their problems.
| rendx wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/Trope_Trainer_Kinnor_Software_In...
| thank you Jason Scott! :)
|
| Maybe someone wants to try to get this to work in a VM (or Wine
| even), report back (and email the author of the article if
| successful)?
| calibas wrote:
| The CD says making unauthorized copies are a violation of
| copyright and Torah law...
| sterlind wrote:
| I think it should be okay, even a mitzvah, to preserve the
| program since preserving knowledge of the Torah is hefsed
| merubeh when it's in real danger of being lost. but I'd
| definitely want to heck with the rabbi he was working with
| first. but even if the copyright status is murky there's
| enough sofek and it's for a good purpose.
|
| (disclaimer: not actually Jewish)
| Animats wrote:
| Yes, archive.org has an .iso file. Someone posted an activation
| code for the program there. Windows 7 programs should run fine
| under Wine on Linux. So if anybody really wants to run this, it
| shouldn't be hard.
|
| But listening to chanting from _DECtalk?_ Here 's "Happy
| Birthday" via DECtalk.[1]
|
| There was apparently a 90s thing for religious DECtalk files.
| Here's an archive of them.[2] Here's "The Old Rugged Cross" in
| DECtalk input format.[3]
|
| This mysterious program that represented so much work is
| probably mostly a DECtalk player and a big collection of
| playable religious DECtalk files. If someone were to extract
| the files, that would recover the content. There are players
| for DECtalk files; there's one at the links below. Converting
| them to a better text-to-speech system would help.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150310175636/http://theflameof...
|
| [2] http://theflameofhope.co/SONGS%20FOR%20PC'.html
|
| [3]
| http://theflameofhope.co/dectalk%20speak%20window/GOSPEL/OLD...
| neilv wrote:
| For anyone who doesn't know, DECtalk didn't always sound like
| that Happy Birthday song. Think more like Stephen Hawking.
|
| I got to play with DECtalk around 1999, when it was already
| old, and IIRC required us dusting off an old SGI workstation
| that could run it in software.
|
| We had a school homework assignment to hand-tune DECtalk
| encodings of famous lines of speeches by US statesmen, for
| dramatic delivery. "Essential liberty", "shall not perish
| from the earth!" etc. Prosody, stress, etc.
| classichasclass wrote:
| "Please do not make copies of this CD to give to others. It is
| a violation of copyright and Torah law. Not intended for use on
| Shabbat or Holidays."
| microtherion wrote:
| Ah, it's not like the G-d of the Torah is known to be
| vengeful, is he?
| rendx wrote:
| Good thing it is merely a copy of the contents of the CD, not
| of the CD itself!
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I 100% thought this would be about Terry Davis. Rest in peace
| Terry.
| westmeal wrote:
| Good night sweet prince.
| sambapa wrote:
| That's why FOSS is the way.
| matt1555 wrote:
| [flagged]
| shp0ngle wrote:
| From the title, I thought this was about TempleOS and Terry A
| Davis.
| willcipriano wrote:
| A former contributor here if you had show dead on
| elzbardico wrote:
| Different fairy tales it seems. I fail to see why this is
| important
| officeplant wrote:
| Hate religions all you want, but software like this is neat
| from a cultural/historical perspective and seemed to be an
| interesting solution to a community's problem. It also makes
| me wonder how we can use technology to save others that are
| rapidly dying like Native American languages and oral
| traditions.
| b800h wrote:
| I recommend "Atheist Delusions" by David Bentley Hart for
| reasons that your materialist beliefs might not be so well
| founded.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| It's a good story. But the things that make it a good story are
| also just plain wrong. At the end of the day it's software. It
| could be ran in a VM or even using windows compatibility layer.
| It could be decompiled and recompiled as a WASM web app. I also
| highly doubt the code for the voice engine is 4 million lines.
| The story calls the creator a genius, but really it's just a guy
| that had a passionate project. It's a good story, but anyone who
| doesn't think computers are magic can see right though it.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'll be devil's advocate.
|
| > It could be ran in a VM or even using windows compatibility
| layer.
|
| The overwhelming majority of folks using this software seem to
| be extremely non-technical. Any of the options you listed would
| work for HN readers but not the general public. If it doesn't
| "just install" it's useless.
|
| > The story calls the creator a genius, but really it's just a
| guy that had a passionate project.
|
| Arguably, creating software that nobody else has managed to
| create that is beloved by its users is genius. He was clearly
| an exceptional engineer to have made the software and
| exceedingly business minded to get it into the hands of users
| and delight them. It's not hard to make mediocre software, but
| it's a terrific challenge to make it so good that your users
| are lost without it. You don't need to be in the running for
| the Turing award to be a genius.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Agreed. Most non-trivial, production-grade software is
| created by teams, not individuals.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| A matching or best-effort decompilation would be quite slow and
| difficult to complete successfully, especially if the program
| was obfuscated. I'd think the source code is effectively lost,
| except if someone puts the time into recreating it off the
| binaries.
| eschneider wrote:
| No reason to decompile/reverse engineer the software. What
| it's doing isn't at all mysterious if you know Hebrew or
| studied Torah for Bar Mitzvah.
| aftbit wrote:
| If so, why is the new version not taking this route? Just
| failure of imagination?
| temporal828 wrote:
| Whew boy -- the reminder of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is
| powerful on this one.
|
| I can't imagine it would not be more than a few minutes of
| downloading the image from archive.org and running it on any
| VM - I would be a bit surprised if this had any kind of
| sophisticated VM countermeasures in it.
|
| Meanwhile, I can believe there is some 4 million line code of
| something (maybe it was written in assembly!) - in any case a
| horrible unmaintainable mess that nobody at this software
| company wants to deal with anymore. Rather just rewrite it in
| some web based shit like half of this site does for a living.
|
| Also on actually reading TFA - it's rife with errors - at no
| point in history was the DECTalk the only game in town for
| speech synthesis - let alone 1999! - and the idea that it was
| the only one with controllable pitch is hogwash as anyone
| with a early 90s Mac can attest.
| microtherion wrote:
| MacinTalk 3 (what you probably think of when you say early
| 90s Mac), i.e. voices like Fred, is technology closely
| related to DECTalk, and in fact the audio sample in the
| article sounds eerily close to a Fred-turned-orthodox.
|
| But the article's description of how Siri synthesizes
| speech is grossly inaccurate.
| temporal828 wrote:
| Well, sure it's related (and MacinTalk is _still_ builtin
| to modern macOS and iOS - you can use them for the system
| TTS voice). But DECTalk and MacinTalk weren 't the only
| speech synthesizers available in 1999 by a long shot.
|
| I had to chuckle about the genius of being able to
| program C and Lua as if typing English - I mean that's
| pretty much any reasonably proficient dev.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Even if they did, they couldn't publicly admit to it. To do
| so would be admitting copyright violations. The 'new' version
| does not seem to be sanctioned by any inheritors, and it
| deliberately capitalises on a name without a defender.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| My guess is they can make more money off a subscription, and
| it's easier to develop and deploy a web application with a
| subscription model.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| From the title I thought this was going to be about TempleOS and
| Terry Davis.
| zen_1 wrote:
| Same
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't see where it's indicated why this software wouldn't
| continue to run in a VM forever?
| vxNsr wrote:
| It sounds like the software pulled the trop you wanted from a
| server. So unless you already downloaded everything, there is
| nowhere that has it. And even if you have the install file,
| it's not that useful because you can't download the trop files.
| bombcar wrote:
| Ah, that's much worse, and sadder. More and more "desktop"
| software is just streamed intentionally or unintentionally
| from various SaaS servers, which will go dark at some point.
|
| Gamers have dealt with this for years now, but it's going to
| affect more and more things. The era of emulators being able
| to preserve software is coming to an end.
| c22 wrote:
| It's okay, for the next generation of emulators, forward-
| thinking users will train ai models on the service to
| replace the remote functionality with a local imitation.
| officeplant wrote:
| Heard about this ordeal on NPR a while back. It's crazy how
| dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at
| the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open
| sourcing that software.
|
| Especially with all the passion and work Tom put into the program
| and his work with multiple Rabbi's to tweak in their slight
| changes and localized traditions. This feels more like much
| needed historical preservation that the community could have
| guided.
|
| What a massive blunder of closed software.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen it multiple times; the sole company/developer often
| considers the software "their baby" and doesn't want to "let it
| go" for a number of potentially quite valid reasons, such as
| fear of loss of livelihood, disagreement with others on the
| direction, etc.
|
| Tarn Adams has a similar situation with DF. But hopefully they
| realize that at least having some sort of 'make available on
| death' could be valuable.
|
| We have already lost untold countless relatively custom
| software packages for niche markets that you've never heard of
| - and people just continue or go back to doing things by hand.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Last I heard Tarn Adams is considering open-sourcing at least
| parts of it in the long term now that they are more
| financially independent. The Steam launch was probably the
| best case scenario for both developer and community.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Software escrow exists for this reason. I was honestly
| surprised when I discovered it existed when a customer
| demanded it.
| bsder wrote:
| > It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of
| software and at the same time no one takes measures on
| preservation or open sourcing that software.
|
| It's almost always because it's a labor of love and isn't worth
| the money.
|
| Richard Douglass created Ballroom Dancing competition judging
| software because, as a competitor, he was wasting vast amounts
| of time with crappy judging and software (especially because a
| lot of software wouldn't deal well with garbage network
| connections). https://www.douglassassociates.com/
|
| It has roughly 300 uses per year. It charges roughly $1000 per
| use. That's about $300K per year for taking the support calls,
| managing the credit card bridge, and updating any features due
| to the OS makers breaking shit.
|
| They have a plan to release the code when he passes. However,
| that probably isn't enough. It's likely nobody has the
| programming _AND_ ballroom dance competition experience
| necessary to keep it going.
| VintageCool wrote:
| I suspect that every dance competition community has
| equivalent software.
|
| The West Coast Swing community has:
|
| * steprightsolutions.com
|
| * danceConvention.net
|
| and probably others that I'm less familiar with.
| bsder wrote:
| All with: "Contact Us For Pricing"
| hgsgm wrote:
| $300K/yr isn't a labor of love, it's skimming money from dues
| payers by being friends with corrupt leadership.
|
| Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who
| could build this as a class project, and any programmer who
| knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write
| software to automate it.
|
| "Garbage network connections" are trivial to deal with with
| modern web app practices.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| What an amazing jump to go from software that is clearly
| desirable enough that people are paying for it to "skimming
| money" and "corrupt leadership". To take issues THAT STILL
| EXIST in 80%+ of software and call them "trivial".
|
| Yes, the tools to build this product and make it function
| obviously exist. If you can do it cheaper, then do it and
| undercut him!
|
| I don't think you want to handle billing, support (for VERY
| non-tech savvy groups) and build and customize the software
| fulltime for <300k revenue (not profit!). Especially not at
| the "$1k a client project" price. Anyone can crank out a
| webform, very few people can integrate software into a
| client and have the client continue to want to pay them!
|
| Accusing someone, without merit, of skimming and corruption
| is bordering in the libel territory. Doing it in this case
| is also rude and shows a lack of experience.
| mangosteenjuice wrote:
| Then why hasn't it been done?
| bsder wrote:
| > Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students
| who could build this as a class project, and any programmer
| who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and
| write software to automate it.
|
| Feel free to write it. People have been complaining that
| they want something better for quite a while (in both the
| US and EU). This project has been around since 1997(!) and
| someone _could_ have replaced it over _25 years_. And yet,
| no one has.
|
| This isn't a _technical_ problem and it absolutely
| stupefies me that people can 't seem to wrap their heads
| around this.
|
| You _will_ field customer support calls. A lot of them.
| Ballroom competitions tend to have lots of non-tech people
| in them. You will field _irate_ calls because something
| went wrong in the middle of a competition (even if none of
| it is your fault).
|
| All for $1000 a _competition_. Not per competitor--per
| _competition_. Roughly speaking--the price of tickets from
| two competitors.
|
| I look forward to seeing your replacement.
|
| (Note: In fact there _ARE_ other "more modern" solutions
| in the space. And they all say "Contact Us" when you start
| looking for pricing. Translation: we're going to charge
| _way_ more than $1000).
| calebio wrote:
| FWIW it may need a patch to make it actually work.
|
| From the article it seems like it attempts to connect to a non-
| existent web service on startup.
|
| Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of
| course. Just wanted to point out that it may _run_ but not
| _work_ as expected without changes.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of
| course.
|
| Or patch it to skip that check.
| kulahan wrote:
| As always, XKCD has touched on this [1].
|
| 1: https://xkcd.com/2347/
| wvenable wrote:
| This a bit of generational divide -- I think as more
| developers, even those starting out later in life, just live
| with open source software as the norm the more of them will
| just consider opening their code now or when in inevitable
| happens.
|
| I think we take for granted the obviousness of open sourcing
| something and having a community potentially continue
| development when you're gone.
| kragen wrote:
| this is why f-droid warns you about some applications, 'undesired
| features: promotes non-free network services'
|
| free software is a good start, but as long as it's dependent on a
| centralized service, it's not a guarantee this won't happen to
| you
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I used TropeTrainer to study for my bar mitzvah! Brings back
| memories. A shame it's gone now. I wonder if the source code was
| ever in any sort of repo online, or if it was only ever on the
| guy's computer, in truth.
|
| So, speaking from an ethical standpoint - and I mean purely
| philosophically, not in terms of legalities - what would be wrong
| with reverse engineering this program and finding a way to get it
| running again, for those who paid for it? If it's just a matter
| of spoofing a couple web requests and maybe bypassing some
| activation checks, I suspect it could be done.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Legally Grey, ethically fine.
| [deleted]
| david422 wrote:
| I have a bunch of software/websites that I run. If I were to get
| hit by a bus, they would all go offline and there would be many
| confused users. There is no-one that could pick up where I left
| off.
|
| I have on my todo list to make a dead man's switch. If I don't
| flip the update after a couple of months, a maintenance message
| is put up, and if I still don't update it, then an end of life
| process is kicked off before all my domains expire. Maybe I'll
| get to it some day.
| AvImd wrote:
| Would you like to open source your apps when this happens? Is
| the absence of updates the only signal you wish to rely on, or
| should confirmations from other people be involved somehow in
| the decision?
| [deleted]
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| Beautiful story
| reiichiroh wrote:
| This is from March 2022. The whole site stopped publishing
| September 2022.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Was this another Joshua Topolsky project?
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| > Friedman explains that he had previously developed another web
| application, but says he can't tell me what the app was called
| because of ongoing legal issues.
|
| Does anyone have any insight into this?
| vxNsr wrote:
| Wow, it's an impressive story, but hard to imagine learning from
| that software if the sample is accurate. I learned to lein and
| the most important thing was having a clear and clean recording
| of the trop.
| jejones3141 wrote:
| Has anyone tried to run it under WINE?
| ryukafalz wrote:
| This is the way, for software like this that's stuck in time. I
| just recently helped my fiancee get a piece of old
| bioinformatics software running that wouldn't run on Windows
| 10. WINE on Ubuntu on WSL2 works fine.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Did turning on Windows compatibility not work?
| BirAdam wrote:
| This is the way.
|
| Win32 is now, more or less, the Linux software development api
| via WINE. Nothing else is stable in the sense of not-
| constantly-changing.
| dmonitor wrote:
| How does Windows have a reputation for "backwards
| compatibility" when every single piece of legacy software that
| people want to use shits itself on the latest Windows version,
| yet somehow runs on WINE.
| simonw wrote:
| If it's out there as an old Windows 7 .exe what are the chances
| that someone could get it running in WebAssembly eventually,
| similar to how https://infinitemac.org/1998/Mac%20OS%208.1 works?
| neilv wrote:
| This project sounds important to a large community of people. Yet
| it sounds like many of the people mentioned in the article were
| in some ways outsiders, even within that community.
|
| I don't know whether the reasons are the same, but we used to
| often see situations like that in open source software, and in
| computing in general before that.
| [deleted]
| krossitalk wrote:
| Not a single original thought. How this isn't about Terry A.
| Davis is disappointing
| sweetjuly wrote:
| Terry's work is remembered not really because it was
| exceptionally _great_ but because it was just pretty odd in an
| interesting way. Plenty of people make hobby operating systems,
| custom programming languages, and more.
| canjobear wrote:
| Terry's software still works.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Probably because he got the New Testament update. Thomas
| Buchler is still running the legacy code.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| Christianity is a fork. That doesn't make Judaism legacy.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| It's a shame that some parts of Islam are still in the
| pre-alpha
| vanillaicesquad wrote:
| With a 24% successful deployment rate I would say it's
| already in production
| b800h wrote:
| I mean, someone could port Trope Trainer to Temple OS.
| makeworld wrote:
| This immediately reminds me of Llull from
| https://unsongbook.com/, a (fictional) program that finds the
| names of God by iteratively speaking Hebrew phonemes.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| > "Meh," I said. "Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh."
|
| > That was the part that led to the apocalypse.
| namaria wrote:
| I have been trying to find this for ever! Lost track of the
| bookmark in an older notebook and could never search it
| properly... Thank you!
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| > "Not everybody keeps all 613 commandments"
|
| I thought this was a beautiful perspective.
| dunefox wrote:
| If you can just pick and choose what commandments you want to
| follow they're not commandments and therefore pointless.
| giaour wrote:
| At least a sixth of the commandments haven't been followed by
| anyone since 70 CE.
| hgsgm wrote:
| It's not just the Law; it's also a good idea.
| mistermann wrote:
| This applies to non-religious people with their
| ethics/morals/facts/etc as well.
|
| As with faith, sin also comes in many forms, from a semiotics
| perspective. But, one is probably best of not getting into
| too much detail as it can interfere with living one's best
| life (of which high self-esteem is a crucial component).
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Well, that's certainly a popular opinion lately.
| shliachtx wrote:
| https://chabad.org/torahtrainer has a similar (free) web based
| program, but it appears to use a recording instead of a
| synthesizer.
| LegitShady wrote:
| This one has two problems.
|
| 1) the way he's enunciating every word and then pausing stops
| this from flowing nicely as a tune. Maybe its good for teaching
| but it doesn't sound as nice as flowing nicely would, and the
| tune ends up helping you memorize it better than the trop
| (since reading at the actual torah scroll doesn't have the
| trop).
|
| 2) while he has good overall sound and reading of the trop, the
| interface isn't highlighting the trop involved - you can
| memorize the reading but it isn't doing a good job teaching the
| tune of each trop to someone who needs the help enough to use
| it. It needs some re-work to make sure people associate the
| correct trop with the tune it creates.
|
| still totally usable but a student needs to know to make an
| effort to connect the words smoothly and not pause as this
| person does.
|
| edit: listening to some of this I also notice some
| inconsistencies in how he treats some of the trop. It might be
| a different style issue but I don't think so.
| fieryskiff11 wrote:
| [dead]
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(page generated 2023-04-03 23:00 UTC)