Kitten TTS – Tiny Voice AI with a Catch

First off, there's this new AI called Kitten TTS. It's a text-to-speech model, right? But the crazy part is it's only 25MB and runs just on your computer's CPU, no fancy graphics card needed. People were stoked about how good it sounded for something so small.

But then, some folks in the comments pointed out the downsides. One person said it's pretty much unusable for an actual assistant because it can't do anything shorter than 5 seconds or longer than 30 seconds, and it gives you a random voice every time. Another guy complained the text it generates is too "flowery" – like, he just wants the facts, not some marketing fluff.

AI Job Rejection Drama

Then there was this whole thing titled "I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me." It's a blog post from a developer who built a super popular product, like, seriously popular, applied for a job, and got filtered out by an AI system without a human even looking at his application. Talk about frustrating!

The comments were buzzing about how messed up hiring processes are getting with AI. People were debating if building a popular product even means you're a "great engineer" anymore, or if it just means you can handle cloud costs. Wild stuff.

Japan Telling Apple to Chill Out

Big news for iPhone users: Japan is telling Apple they HAVE to let other browser engines on iPhones by December. So, no more forcing everyone to use Safari's WebKit engine for all browsers. This could be huge, man. Finally, Chrome, Firefox, whatever, can run their full engines on iOS.

The comments were a battleground, as expected. Lots of folks blaming "lazy web developers" for only optimizing for Chrome, and others saying Safari's just bad. And, of course, the usual "iMessage is the only thing chaining me to Apple" came up.

Google's New AI Coding Assistant, Jules

Google launched this new AI coding assistant called Jules. It's supposed to be an "asynchronous coding agent." Sounds fancy, right?

But the comments were pretty brutal. One person, who apparently tried it during the preview, said it was "pretty terrible" and the "worst" of all the cloud coding assistants. They were surprised Google even made it a real product. So, maybe don't hold your breath for this one.

US Constitution Website - Missing Sections?

This one's a bit of a head-scratcher: people noticed that the official US Constitution website seems to have removed some sections. Like, parts of the actual Constitution just gone. Someone posted a diff showing the changes.

Naturally, everyone's suspicious. Is it a "coding error" like some claim, or something more intentional? People in the comments were debating if critical parts related to current political discussions just "happened" to vanish. Pretty wild if it's not just a bug.

Open Source Dev Archiving His Project

This was a bit sad, actually. The developer behind Picocrypt, an open-source encryption tool, is archiving it. He's basically done with it. Part of his reasoning was companies using his free software without giving anything back, and also the tough job market right now.

It sparked a huge debate in the comments about open-source licenses like GPL versus MIT, and whether developers should even expect anything from companies. Some also brought up AI's impact on people who like to write "artisan code."

EU Wants to Scan All Your Private Messages

And finally, this is a big one for privacy: there's an EU proposal to scan all private messages, and it's gaining traction. This means they want to look at your encrypted chats, dude. People are obviously freaking out about the privacy implications and how it could totally undermine encryption.

The comments were full of outrage, with people pointing out that it's a massive overreach and a huge threat to personal communication. Some even mentioned how the EU has quietly passed other controversial laws, like mandatory age verification for online pornography.

So yeah, that's the gist of it for today. Pretty eventful!