ISC is hiring! We are looking for two additional engineers for the Stork team. We are developing a powerful, scaleable and easy to use Open Source graphical management tool for DHCP and DNS. These are both 100% remote, work from home jobs and ISC is a great place to work.
Some of you are looking for new jobs now, and I am very sympathetic to how hard that can be. However, this is also a terrible time to be hiring: we posted these jobs and immediately, AI-generated applications started flooding in. We are wasting a tremendous amount of time we don't have in wading through applications trying to decide if there is a human involved.
One of the reviewers commented that the hiring process may come down to who can correctly identify the traffic lights.
we don't have plans to *actually* implement visual captchas for job applicants, but thank you for reminding us of the need for accessibility. We do our best but appreciate helpful feedback!
Privacy vs Security: Yandex is spying on their users in an insecure way, Meta (Facebook, Insta) in a more secure way. Both of them are a threat against user privacy
This is yet another example showing that there are reasons to be more suspicious against proprietary apps. We should avoid installing GAFAM apps, and reducing as much as possible our dependency on their services is healthy
wallabag is a self hostable application for saving web pages: Save and classify articles. Read them later. Freely. - Comparing 2.6.12...2.6.13 · wallabag/wallabag
Only 1,280 Survived: The Near-Extinction Event That Nearly Wiped Out Humanity 1 Million Years Ago "...This dramatic event, known as a “genetic bottleneck,” lasted for over 100,000 years, and could have played a major role in shaping the path of evolution. ..." dailygalaxy.com/2025/06/only-1…
AI systems could become conscious. What if they hate their lives? "...Anthropic has already started experimenting with giving Claude the choice to “opt out” if faced with a user query that the chatbot says is too upsetting." vox.com/future-perfect/414324/…
So many UK people say they oppose the genocide in Gaza, but those are just words. This petition ends at midnight TODAY, and we need another 39 000 signatures!
Do not be a bystander to genocide and war crimes! Sign this petition now, then share it far and wide (not just on here). Also, get EVERYONE you know to sign it. #FreePalestinepetition.parliament.uk/petitio…
We ask you to:
•Immediately suspend all arms licences and exports to Israel.
•Do everything in your power to seek an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Just 30 out of around 350 licenses to Israel have been suspended.
Last week for my birthday, I was sent a cheap 19-string Vixxnox Lyre Harp. My current living situation doesn't allow me to make much noise in the house, so I took it out to the back yard, as today is a nice day, so I could record the sound of it, and also demonstrate my complete ineptitude at playing it.
This was recorded using a Zoom H6 Essential, using a lav microphone to pick up my voice, and the X/Y capsule to pick up everything else. I used two instances of Supertone Clear to isolate my voice on the lav, and mute my voice on the X/Y microphones, so I am always in the absolute center.
Sorry Patrick, but you have to open a dictionary and search for the word "suck", you probably don't know its definition 😊. Anyway, I could never ever do something like this on a stringed instrument. To me this sounds more like a hammered dulcimer for some reason, I mean, timbre-wise.
@KaraLG84 I also want one but I absolutely can't play a harp, just really don't know how to do anything except for that strumming through all the strings.
@KaraLG84 No, you aren't, believe me. For me the most mysterious thing is how to play a separate note, and even a greater mystery is how to play a chord, or at least two notes at the same time, without making a mishmash of all strings sounding. I'm not kidding, I can't understand how people do it.
@FreakyFwoof Even though I am a bell ringer and handle rope several times a week, and usually have at least one blister on my hand, I only have to touch a stringed instrument and I end up with sore fingers.
@andrew @FreakyFwoof I am horrifically bad at guitar in particular. I kinda understand it in theory, but my fingers just nope. My kids occasionally beg me to play guitar so they can laugh at how bad I am. :)
For day 5 of #AudioMo, you're welcome to a minor slice of history. During the Covid lockdown, we ran after school clubs online. One of them was App Club, where we talked tech. Here's one of the reminder audios, with no student info or anything present so it's all safe. Not exactly fun times, but an interesting thing nonetheless.
@andrew I would imagine so by now. It's weird, so many milestones. seeing the first student I ever met actually leave, then ending up teaching kids younger than my own (who was a baby when I started), etc.
@FreakyFwoof My job was to teach the students about the wonders of technology. Whatever else was going down in the world, you bring your game face to the classroom, I suppose.
@FreakyFwoof and I mean, what a statement of possibility the tech was? we carried on learning in lockdown largely because of it. I'd been banging on for years how it let us do stuff as blind people and then there was a real, live world example we were all in the middle of, you know?
For all the challenges with AI, it can truly do some awesome things. I'm printing the Discovery spaceship from the 2001 and 2010 scifi movies. I just uploaded the PDF assembly manual and Youtube video to Google AI Studio. Here is a link to the assembly instructions I got back. The pdf is all images, and the video has no dialog at all: dropbox.com/scl/fi/wy56smmz6ie…
I'd be curious to see how accurate they are. What I'm finding with AI vision is that when it comes down to it, little details like exactly WHERE, say, a button is on a device, or how many controls are on a thing, it fails miserably and sometimes makes up entire parts that aren't there. So for something like this, where the instructions need to be really precise I'd be very wary of that happening
@zersiax This is the third model I’ve done this way. What I found is that it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s very good and close enough that you can figure things out if it gets things slightly wrong.
Interesting :) maybe it's just been getting better. I for example tried that blindy Viewpoint screen reader thing that is supposed to use AI to work with inaccessible user interfaces, and I see the same thing happen there. It lists stuff, but the second I ask it to click things, which require it knowing where those things are ... it falls over
Our latest Thunderbird + Rust Office Hours video is up! In it, @brendan explores how Rust (along with a little C++) is powering our push to provide support for Microsoft Exchange. Learn more and find how to get involved!
Gastblogger Gert Knepper legde vanmorgen uit dat mensen in de Oudheid net zo lazen als wij. Wat is dan de strekking van Augustinus' opmerking dat Ambrosius las in stilte?
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
🔬 Are you researching Matrix or real-time decentralized comms? Share your findings with the community at #MatrixConf2025! We’re looking for academic perspectives too!
New Attempt to Rollback Accessibility Requirements – Comments Needed U.S. Department of Energy proposes drastic change to decades-old regulations lflegal.com/2025/06/energy-dep…
For over forty years the United States has had regulations that say new buildings must be accessible to people with disabilities if the building is built by an organization that receives federal funds.
My side quest at #FlockToFedora was meeting Petr Šimáček, a longtime #Fedora user and author of @mestskacyklistika. He gave me a tour of Radio Beat, where he works as a news guy, and took me on a one-hour #bike ride to show me all the gems of city #cycling in #Prague.
Heute habe ich es endlich umgesetzt und den Mail-Verkehr von meiner eigenen Domain in meinem @Tutanota Konto integriert. Endlich alles geballt in einem Postfach mit einer riesigen, selbst angelegten Ordnerstruktur. 😍
Vielen Dank an das Tuta-Team für die schöne und verständliche Anleitung dabei. Weiter so!
I've just gotten a hold of this console so I know nothing much yet, but I will learn more over the coming days and weeks. This is a quick demo with me only having had access to it for about 30 minutes if that. #Nintendo #Switch2 #ScreenReader #TTS #Accessibility
Reupload with fixed audio.Nintendo surprised me by releasing a console with any kind of screen-reader functionality, and I always said that if they released ...
I've not listened yet, at work - but are there any games playable yet? I know we have to start with TTS before games can use it but ... just curious. I'm not really a gamer!
@ysotomayor Do any of the built-in apps, like game chat, nintendo switch online or the echop speak? A lot of people on the audiogames.net forum are curious about the shop, which I suspect may not speak because on the Switch 1 it was just a web view. How about the keyboard if you have to type in something? Lastly, for game recommendations 2 I can think of off the top of my head are brok the Investigator and Mortal combat 1. They’re both switch 1 games but should work on the 2 and talk out of the box.
@ysotomayor Funny thing is console and game engine limitations are the result of how both of these sound. Brok was made in an engine that doesn't support any eay way to do TTS, but because the game doesn't really have any dynamically changing content the developer just sampled the Amazon Poly voices. So the game is literarly playing sound clips to speak. And I totally agree it's snappy and sounds nice. MK 1 couldn't really do that because it's getting rolling content updates, you're seeing player names everywhere that keep changing, etc. And the original Switch had no API's for them to hook into, unlike Playstation, PC or Xbox and Festival was the easiest thing to use both engine wise because there's literarly a drop-in plugin for it and licensing wise. Hopefully Nintendo has given developers access to their speech on the Switch 2 so any games that arget it specifically should have an easier time using something that doesn't suck.
@pitermach @ysotomayor When you played Brok, did you get to the part when you're in jail and there's a book with 999 pages? If so, did you turn all the pages? There's a good reason to do so, shall we say...
@ysotomayor @svenja Have to to get back to it also, but while we're talking easter eggs and the like were you ever curious enough by the crack in the wall in Sin's apartment to switch to action mode and try to make it wider if you know what I mean?
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
Hey @Tusky a little question, when following a hashtag the megaphone icon, what does it does? If slashed seems to *show* the post in the feed while when not slashed seen to hide them,shouldn't be the other way?
NV Access are pleased to advise that Beta (and alpha) versions of NVDA are once again available. To celebrate, we've released Beta 10 of NVDA 2025.1: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2025-1b…
Beta 10 includes: * Updates to translations * Correct context help navigation for Remote Access dialogs
Thank you everyone for your patience and support, and as always with pre-release builds, please do file any issues on GitHub: github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issue…
Thanks for getting this back online. Prior to the server outage, to get to snapshots and what not, I always went to download.nvaccess.org in my browser and then clicked on Snapshots, but going there now just takes me to NV Access's home page. Is this the intended behavior, or is there another place the snapshots are linked to? Typing in download.nvaccess.org/snapshots or download.nvaccess.org/releases does take me to the correct section. Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to any input you may have. Thanks!
@menelion @TheQuinbox That one works, but I used to be able to type just download.nvaccess.org and manually click on Snapshots or Releases, and that's what I'm not able to do anymore. The snapshots and releases pages themselves work fine.
@BTyson @menelion @TheQuinbox What error are you getting? I can go there - download.nvaccess.org/ - and I get a heading "NVDA Files" with links to Releases, snapshots, documentation and symbols.
@menelion @TheQuinbox I'm not getting an error, it seems to be taking me directly to the NV Access home page instead. The only difference is that I didn't put http or https when typing it in.
@BTyson @menelion @TheQuinbox Maybe you have a cached version or something? What if you load in a private window - control+shift+n in Chrome or control+shift+p in Firefox?
@menelion @TheQuinbox That worked. And I couldn't do a hard refresh either because by the time it loaded the page I had already been redirected to nvaccess.org.
@TheQuinbox @BTyson I love how one of the terrifying use cases for the .zip tld was that it would look like software to idiots, and you're using it as a direct link to download a file.
You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation
Last October, I received a message via Twitter from a hot dog. This hot dog, calling itself The Beefy Miracle, informed me that the latest version of the Fedora operating system, Fedora 17, was going to be named after it.
🎨 "Designing GNOME" with Allan Day & Cassidy James Blaede 📅 24 July 🕒 11:05 CEST 📍 Brescia 🖌️ A year of design updates: notifications, UX patterns, Adwaita fonts & more.
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
someone asked me earlier this week: when getting funded for maintaining an open source project, how do you measure that you're doing a good job? How does the funder know they're getting value from it?
Tricky question. It made me realize we don't really know if we're doing good job in general. So I wrote up this blog post.
When I speak of curl in this post, I lump curl the command line tool and libcurl the library into one, and I just call them curl. Related: my webinar titled "Why everyone is using curl and you should too".
You could add a comscore solicitation in the CLI to ask "How likely are you to recommend Curl to a friend? (0-10):"
</joke>
I do think there's demonstrable value if looking at changes over time. Not lines of code or anything, but _what_ the changes represent. Bug fixes, features added, features removed, external contributors (representing a sort-of community health / good stewardship).
I recognize the difficulty, though, since it all seems indirect. Trust is a big factor, I reckon
it is mentionned in the article that phone apps need to build their own libcurls because the OS does not expose it’s own. Why is this ? It would help reduce app sizes a lot !
great question. How DO you measure a project like (lib)curl? Your post does a great job outlining the ambiguity of that.
Perhaps one thing that is easier to measure is developer activity? You mention GitHub stars but there is also issues, forums, social media, probably many more developer facing things?
> they are making a practical argument that I cannot, despite my best efforts, find compelling evidence to refute categorically
If you believe that the ethical problems trump the purported practical benefits regardless of whether those benefits are real, then that is a kind of categorical refutation. Perhaps that's a way to have a definitive resolution rather than the inconclusive surrender at the end of the post.
> to wit, I want to have everything in the computer be orderly and make sense,
This! In the Lobsters discussion about Steve Klabnik's post, he said that a lot of non-programmers are already comfortable with treating computers as magic boxes. I tried to push back, but I don't think he got it, and I haven't yet tried again.
Don't hesitate to characterize these as principled, carefully considered ethical objections. Sure, that makes us feel like a tiny minority in the current, noisy tech discourse. Whether we are such a tiny minority is debatable. One anecdote: My sister is a graphic designer, and she objects to genAI because of the energy use, the stealing, and of course, the deliberate intent to take away work from artists.
If you want me to stop, because you don't want to discuss this anymore, I will. But I'm trying to help you (and yes, myself too) feel _more_ at peace about this.
> Sure, I even sincerely agree, intellectual property really has been a pretty bad idea from the beginning.
Perhaps, just as we've had to, possibly reluctantly, move beyond the simplicity of free-speech absolutism because of the weaponized hate and disinformation out there, we might also need to move beyond the simplicity of "information wants to be free" because of the massive power asymmetry, which precedes genAI (e.g. megacorps exploiting unpaid open-source maintainers).
@matt yep. “You should be able to use technology for good things and to help people and you should not be able to use technology for bad things and to harm people” is not a double standard, it’s just … a standard. There are obviously big complicated questions about who gets to choose and what criteria they can use, but “billionaires” and “because it seems cool to them” are not the correct answers to those questions
@matt The fact that laypeople have given up on treating consumer-grade computers as reliable technology is a fucking _tragedy_, not something to acknowledge and move on from. It's a big problem in the industry and it is the result of specific choices. It is not inevitable!
@matt the problem is that the proponents are doing a pascal’s mugging. The ones at the top aren’t promising a 15% marginal return on investment in developer productivity. They’re promising an end to cancer and a technological solution to climate change. Brain microchips and arcologies, full luxury automated space communism, an end to work and an end to lack. If it could actually do half the stuff they claim at the limits, the ethical tradeoffs might actually be worth it.
To which I would respond that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and those claims don't have any such evidence to back them up. So we need to weigh the ethical problems against the mediocre evidence we do have.
FWIW, this post is now at the top of Lobsters (I submitted it), with mostly positive comments so far (6 out of 7, and the 7th was just skeptical about the extent to which genAI is being forced on developers), though admittedly it's only just now morning here in the US.
ISC.org
in reply to ISC.org • • •Some of you are looking for new jobs now, and I am very sympathetic to how hard that can be. However, this is also a terrible time to be hiring: we posted these jobs and immediately, AI-generated applications started flooding in. We are wasting a tremendous amount of time we don't have in wading through applications trying to decide if there is a human involved.
One of the reviewers commented that the hiring process may come down to who can correctly identify the traffic lights.
David Goldfield
in reply to ISC.org • • •ISC.org
in reply to David Goldfield • • •