SuttaCentral Voice v1.0.0 Released 😍

[Aminah]

No, but it is on the list of things.

[karl_lew]

@SarathW1

For instance I want to go to MN 2 after reading MN1 with ease.

I have this rather odd sudden vision of SarathW1 under a tree for days (and days and nights) quietly listening to ALL of MN without interruption.

[SarathW1]

Just a general question.
I have two laptops.
One is just a cheap one for access internet and the other one is a ThinkPad. Downloading speed of ThinkPad is few seconds slower than my old cheap laptop.
What is the possible cause?

[karl_lew]

@SarathW1

What is the possible cause?

The first download of any sutta is always the slowest because SCV has to talk with both SC and AWS.

Throw away the times for the first downloads and average out three downloads for each laptop. They should be about the same since most of that time is waiting for the internet. Also, you should get faster downloads on direct internet vs. wifi. And the fastest downloads are from a laptop in Northern California or Oregon (because of the speed of light).

Lastly, SCV deletes downloads older than an hour to save space. Creating a new download takes a few seconds.

What you have shared is actually good news. A cheap laptop works fine. That is the best for all. Thank you.

[SarathW1]

@karl_lew

get faster downloads on direct internet vs. wifi.

I try to connect directly to the net but it is still same.

[sabbamitta]

Let's read Bhante Sujato's Sutta translations

Wow, @karl_lew, this is a challenge! I just listened to MN 1, and—my goodness!—you’ve expanded the whole thing across all sections! With Pali and English, this would be a listen of 4h 5m!! This proofed too discouraging even for me. Even with English only I found it too long. Maybe another time when I feel inclined to sit for 1h 30 and get immersed in earth, water, fire, and air… This time I cheated a bit by just jumping through the segments.

Maybe I have another feature request concerning this recent experience: Would it be an idea to make this sort of expansions optional (and, of course, is this technically possible)?

[karl_lew]

@sabbamitta

sort of expansions optional

Yes. Currently that option would only work for MN1. Auto-expansion for all the suttas would require a lot of work. The suttas are quite inconsistent with expansions. So I gave up after MN1. Note that MN1 expanded is shorter than DN33 unexpanded.

[sabbamitta]

@karl_lew

Currently that option would only work for MN1.

I’m wondering about the word option. I can’t see any option to either expand or not, but it is expanded by default.

Would it be possible to make this for the user to select?

[karl_lew]

@sabbamitta

Would it be possible to make this for the user to select?

Yes it would be possible to make that option. It is also more work to make the option than to simply disable the expansion for all. The choices are:

1. Do nothing (0 day)
2. Create a settings option for users to turn off the expansion that only works for MN1 (0.5 day)
3. Turn off the expansion for MN1 for all of us (0.1 day)

[sabbamitta]

@karl_lew

• Do nothing (0 day)
• Create a settings option for users to turn off the expansion that only works for MN1 (0.5 day)
• Turn off the expansion for MN1 (0.1 day)

I guess this is now up to Aminah to decide.

[Robbie]

I vote for option 3!

[Aminah]

So, in the other thread, I wasn’t joking (well, except for the converting to Christianity bit): I found the expanded MN1 a challenge, but I also think it has real genuine potential for benefit.

I think before making a decision we should consider how likely will it be that we’ll get round to doing any more expansions (Karl is it now just MN1 and DN33 that are expanded? I know from a question I asked Bhante ages ago—well before SCV was even a twinkle in your eye—that expansion can be prohibitively complicated, but equally the task is not something outside the realm of ‘reasonable to consider’; Karl, from your previous look at this, would you say there are easier and harder cases to expend (that we might pick off the easy ones), or that it’s all just difficult?)

If there is some chance that others might be expanded then I think option 2 would be better. If not, given that one of the most awesome things about SCV is its power to lower the threshold of entry to the suttas, on balance, I think we’d probably have to go with option 3; but not before allowing anyone interested in the expended suttas to download them (eg Gus has expressed the value of the expanded versions in the other thread), and therefore for now we should go with option 1.

So there we have it, all three options!
   
Do I win a prize?

[sabbamitta]

@Aminah

So there we have it, all three options!

Do I win a prize?

Oh, at least one!

@Aminah

If there is some chance that others might be expanded then I think option 2 would be better. If not, given that one of the most awesome things about SCV is its power to lower the threshold of entry to the suttas, on balance, I think we’d probably have to go with option 3; but not before allowing anyone interested in the expended suttas to download them (eg Gus has expressed the value of the expanded versions in the other thread), and therefore for now we should go with option 1.

This was actually a thought that just came to me too!

[karl_lew]

@Aminah

I think before making a decision we should consider how likely will it be that we’ll get round to doing any more expansions (Karl is it now just MN1 and DN33 that are expanded? I know from a question I asked Bhante ages ago—well before SCV was even a twinkle in your eye—that expansion can be prohibitively complicated, but equally the task is not something outside the realm of ‘reasonable to consider’; Karl, from your previous look at this, would you say there are easier and harder cases to expend (that we might pick off the easy ones), or that it’s all just difficult?)

MN1 brought light into my life. It made me laugh. And after reading it again and again, I found myself frustrated at the abbreviations. Those ellipses cut short the wonder. Indeed, the ellipses seemed almost dismissive in the curtness of their three little dots. I wanted so much to hear the words that were missing. But I spent days thinking and coding until I could finally hear MN1 in its entirety. And then one day I succeeded and I listened to all of MN1. It was blissful to hear all of it. Blissful.

I no longer listen to MN1.

I have eaten that meal and washed my bowl. Now I listen to DN33. DN33 is not expanded. But it could be expanded. I have thought about it. And yet an odd thing has happened to me. I no longer need to hear the expansions. When DN33 skips the third absorption, I know that the ellipses do count it in. When I hear “second absorption … fourth absorption”, my mind automatically adds in the third absorption. It just happens and I don’t need the expansion any more.

This experience over the past year has been peculiar. I have seen both the need for and lack of need for expansion. My choice of MN1 to expand was a personal one that mattered to me. It was an idiosyncratic choice. I certainly do not regret expanding MN1 and I am very glad I did expand it. MN1 is regarded as an “advanced sutta.” I’m not sure why that should be so. It is perfectly clear to me. And SN12.23 is NOT an advanced sutta, but I feel the need to study SN12.23 a lot. In other words, I cannot answer the question of whether MN1 should be expanded for others.

The expansion of MN1 proved that auto-expansion is indeed possible. The code to auto-expand is idiosyncratic however. It is idiosyncratic because all the ellipses throughout the Pali canon and the translations are used in slightly different ways. If we decide that some suttas should be expand-able, I will gladly help with that effort. It will not, however, be a sweeping fix for all 3999 suttas. We will, instead, need to choose which suttas should be expandable. Then we can write code to expand the chosen few.

I hope that all of the above has provided more information for future directions. I no longer want expansions personally, but I do remember that urgent need to expand and see the whole sutta. I know that others will or are now feeling that need to hear the expanded suttas. I will support that needs as I can as it arises.

Until then…

@Aminah

we should go with option 1.

@Aminah

prize?

[sujato]

@karl_lew

And yet an odd thing has happened to me. I no longer need to hear the expansions

Great story, thanks! It’s easy to forget how subjective and impermanent our responses are.

I also applaud the idea of using auto+ expansion: evolve a script that will do the basics, and tweak it as we go on a per-sutta basis.

Dealing with such a large and complex all the time, I am always on the lookout for ways to keep things simple and repeatable.

Now, this is very speculative: I wonder whether it might be possible to, over time, evolve an expansion formula that applied to all the suttas? One that took into account the different kinds of expansion? Say, for example, that experience showed that expansions had to be calculated in four basic ways, we could mark up the text to reflect that. There would be individual exceptions, too, like the peyyala series which no sane person is going to want to listen to. So once such a formula is worked out, it could be applied on a general basis to produce expanded and unexpanded versions of the texts, in any format/

[SarathW1]

MN16 - 17.23.3
are hard to come by. …
Read as dot ,dot at the end.

[sabbamitta]

@SarathW1

Read as dot ,dot at the end.

On the list.

[sabbamitta]

@SarathW1

MN16 - 17.23.3

Actually, SarathW1, I found the incident in MN 17. Is there another one in MN 16, and where exactly?

[SarathW1]

Is it possible to go back to Sutta Central page from SCV?
Just a nice to have things.

[SarathW1]

@sabbamitta

Is there another one in MN 16, and where exactly?

Now I listened to it twice and I could not detect it.