Weekly Web Harvest for 2026-02-01

A unified Text-to-Speech demo featuring three powerful modes:

Voice Design: Create custom voices using natural language descriptions
Voice Clone (Base): Clone any voice from a reference audio

Source: Qwen3-TTS Demo – a Hugging Face Space by Qwen

In 2021, researchers at Harvard University applied this framework to AI-assisted decision-making, testing interface designs that reintroduce friction. One required users to commit to an answer before seeing AI’s suggestion. Another imposed a delay before revealing recommendations. These designs reduced overreliance on AI, not by helping users perceive which struggles were productive but by creating conditions that tend to help regardless of perception. The catch: People hated them. They rated the most effective designs least favorably and performed best in the conditions they liked least. Any tool that preserves productive struggle will probably lose in the marketplace to tools that eliminate it. 

Source: Betting blind on AI and the scientific mind | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.

Source: Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism

ai can’t touch grass. you can. get paid when agents need someone in the real world.

h/t Jeff E.