5 ms·

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 usin

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.

themaninthedark 4y ago
There is a lot of focus on the ... human aspects .. of the people in the story but in turn it makes some of them look really bad. The quote about 4 million lines of code and how could they it would be impossible for them to share it because it is too large for email... I think the program's creator was a great guy, doesn't seem like he was really thinking about his death seriously. His friends loved him and miss him but do not look to continue his legacy by helping the community. The worst thing is that all the little dialects that were preserved by this are now at larger risk of being lost.
aftbit 4y ago
If so, why is the new version not taking this route? Just failure of imagination?
- bhhaskin 4y ago
  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.
- temporal828 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
  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.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
bastawhiz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Agreed. Most non-trivial, production-grade software is created by teams, not individuals.
datajake1999 4y ago
The code for the version of DECtalk that was used in TropeTrainer was released some time ago by one of the original developers as part of a project to preserve and revive DECtalk. The code can be found on the internet archive. https://archive.org/download/DTK_SRC/hebrew_mac_2016_09_04_latest.zip https://archive.org/download/DTK_SRC/hebrew_mac_2016_09_04_l...

themaninthedark 4y ago

There is a lot of focus on the ... human aspects .. of the people in the story but in turn it makes some of them look really bad. The quote about 4 million lines of code and how could they it would be impossible for them to share it because it is too large for email... I think the program's creator was a great guy, doesn't seem like he was really thinking about his death seriously. His friends loved him and miss him but do not look to continue his legacy by helping the community. The worst thing is that all the little dialects that were preserved by this are now at larger risk of being lost.

aftbit 4y ago

If so, why is the new version not taking this route? Just failure of imagination?

bhhaskin 4y ago
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.
temporal828 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
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.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

bastawhiz 4y ago

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 4y ago
Agreed. Most non-trivial, production-grade software is created by teams, not individuals.

datajake1999 4y ago

The code for the version of DECtalk that was used in TropeTrainer was released some time ago by one of the original developers as part of a project to preserve and revive DECtalk. The code can be found on the internet archive. https://archive.org/download/DTK_SRC/hebrew_mac_2016_09_04_latest.zip https://archive.org/download/DTK_SRC/hebrew_mac_2016_09_04_l...