Genius

I'm looking for a good software I can use to turn nonfiction e-books into audiobooks. Doesn't have to accept pdf input, but that would be a convenient feature. Post inspired by Speechify, but I want to do it ethically. Free open source software, running on my own computer, not some datacenter in what used to be the Amazon. Clear speech quality is the most important metric to me beyond that, performance isn't much of an issue. I'd be happy with something I have to leave running in the background for a few days to get good results.

Fun fact: I tried looking for a community to put this question in dbzer0, because they love AI, and there wasn't one! I thought for sure they'd have some kind of general AI community where I could ask for a TTS recommendation, but no. It's literally just image generation over there. Thanks programming.dev.

I'm gay. I'm agender, and I like enbies better than men and women.

The other day in an argument I got frustrated with someone and told them to call me a homophobic slur. One part sarcasm, one part hoping they'd actually do it and get in trouble. Instead, I got punished for using the word. I wasn't expecting that, because I'm gay. If I call myself a f-----, I didn't think that was anyone else's problem.

Was I right? Is it okay for me to use that word, talking about myself?

CachyOS looks really good, and I want to try it. But what's the effect of being sponsored by cloudflare? Is it FOSS? Does it collect data? What's Cloudflare getting out of the sponsorship?

https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool?countries=israel

Should I switch to using Arthur.Sulzberger@nytimes.com instead?

Bit more context:

I tried explaining my problems with tankies without calling them tankies. In fact, I used their own terminology to describe my disagreement with them. It, uh... well it doesn't make a lot of sense.

George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the Marxists. His army was betrayed by the Marxist-Leninists. After that experience, he wrote 1984, in which a totalitarian government uses "newspeak" to suppress dissent by suppressing the very ideas that people are capable of communicating. I don't think it's a coincidence that Marxist-Leninists describe their disagreements in terms that turn criticism of them into gibberish. I think it's exactly what Orwell was writing about based on his experiences.

Explanation: A lot of Internet People say that The Incredibles is objectivist (Ayn Rand's ideology) because the heroes fight against a revolutionary who wants to make everyone equal by giving people superpowers.

What they miss is that this "revolutionary" is a billionaire who made his fortune selling weapons to world governments under the table, and his only motivation for saying he'd sell his weapons is to make money and spite his enemy. There's no reason to think he would follow through, and selling powers doesn't mean everyone gets them. It means everyone with money gets them. Syndrome is proposing a world where rich people have super powers. That's just the plot of Vampire: The Masquerade.

Syndrome is co-opting leftist rhetoric to make himself look like a hero, while not actually understanding it, because he's not a leftist. He's a capitalist billionaire. And the Internet People who think this movie is bad because it praises hypercapitalist ideology... fell for the capitalist's rhetoric.