Well, I'm awake, for now, at 3:30 in the morning, so, being me, I'm going to ruminate on what it might mean about life and write a blog post. mikegorse.substack.com/p/well-…
Today, Wendy the DBJUNGLESKOG and I are heading off on an 11-hour 1,600km slog through France on a couple of TGV Duplexes, going, via Paris Gare de Lyon and Paris Gare de l’Est, to Karlsruhe Hbf.
On the way out towards Girona we pass through the new platforms at the as-yet-unopened Barcelona La Sagrera station. And there we saw some Renfe Series 103 trains parked up, as the station is currently being used as a depot for High-Speed trains. These 103s will become relevant next Thursday and Friday during the second and third day of the #ICEAgeChallenge…
Today’s trip is the first leg of what is planned to be over 9000km worth of trip to round off the year. It’s also likely to be the last trip of this sabbatical, so I’m trying to make it count.
This trip is going to have: Marchés de Noël, a Hot Tub Party, a ride on the last remaining Danglebahn to complete the set, Weinachtsmarkts, the #ICEAgeChallenge, a dangleway over the Rhine, Kriskindlmarkts, a new country - Sweden, a little mermaid, Junlemarkeder, Hotels that are “unfeasably close to the station”, a pod cabin on a Ferry, Julmarknader, two new Talgo 230 trains, and Saunas.
I obviously decided to celebrate it with some slightly battered artisanal croissants… that I picked up in Spain, because I know full well how terrible the SNCF ones are. The somewhat now expected police doing the annoyingly regular and thus likely illegal border check did not object to them, so that’s something.
My train tracker over at viaduct.world informs me that I have now crossed the Tunel de Perthús - the main high speed link between France and Catalunya - 22 times, with a 23rd happening before the end of the year.
As such, I know that this now becomes the start of when we have decent cellular coverage, at least until the start of the high speed section at Nîmes.
One of the absolute pleasures of travelling by train on this route is being able to do the section between Perpignan and Narbonne, especially on a Duplex train.
On this section, you have a whole load of marshes and salt flats as well as a couple of larger lakes that create some delightful scenery, and the train line goes right through the middle of some of these marshes. The main road is a little further to the east, and much further away from the edge of these lakes, so you get a unique view from the train.
If you catch the right time of year you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of flamingos on the lakes. This time there were only a few dozen.
Sadly, we must give up some of the nicer things in life in the name of progress, and the Ligne Nouvelle Montpellier-Perpignan is due to replace this as the main access to Spain from France, but not til the 2040s
Definitely worth going past during the daytime, or if you can swing it, during a sunset.
Another of the experiences that doesn’t get old, part of the ritual of this line that is the first I encounter on a trip, is when the train leaves Nîmes, and we hit the LGV Sud-Est, and the driver puts his hand forward and turns the speed up.
Today’s driver, Jean-Jacques, just got on the loudspeaker to wish us all a pleasant ride as we go at a leisurely 280km/h up the high speed line. Which I felt was a nice touch, as well as a bit of well-deserved bragging.
I am still amazed that I am on the top floor of a 200m long train the size of a small skyscraper on its side, that can travel at 300km/h as I listen to synthwave and tap away on a laptop. This never ceases to bring me a little joy, and it seems somewhat more real than the abstract feeling of flying point-to-point, where you can’t see anything but the land in th distance below you moving seemingly slowly.
In my last two posts, I outlined different stories about my experiences dealing with developers that had offloaded their work to low-quality LLMs, resulting in frustrating performance degradation.
Tohle chcete takhle po ránu po otevření AlzaBoxu vidět...
Volám na podporu, tam místo člověka umělá demence. Po pěti minutách se konečně dostaneme k popisu problému. Já: Otevřel jsem schránku v AlzaBoxu a je prázdná. Alzee: Rozuměla jsem správně, že máte problém s otevřením schránky? Já: Ne. Schránku jsem otevřel, ale je prázdná, chybí zboží. Alzee: Rozuměla jsem správně, že máte problém s otevřením schránky? Já: Do pr*ele už! Alzee: Upozorňuji vás, že hovor je nahráván a tato nahrávka kolegy nepotěší. Já: Tak mě na ně konečně spojte, ať mi můžou pomoci.
The logical endpoint of self-driving cars is you getting into your car to go to Burger King, and the car refusing to take you there because its manufacturer has an exclusivity agreement with McDonald’s
This is like Google refusing to take you to Chat GPT, or refusing to put the Chat GPT app in the Play Store, AKA something which did not, does not and never wil happen.
I really don't understand where all this malice comes from.
(Like I said, I do like it telling me about lint/typing/formatting errors about 10 minutes before CI will anyway. If I'm in the middle of some rebasing or whatever, there's --no-verify for that.)
Doing a Worcester shoot at the club this morning. It's only 20yd because it's indoors, but the target is 16in diameter and scores only 1-5, with the 5 being about the size of a golf ball. Consistent accuracy is the name of the game.
And I've not really had time to tune my new setup and (poss. related) have been shooting like poo, so this will be ... interesting.
People who've done it, tell me true. Is getting married or having a baby really the happiest day of anyone's life? I mean, hopefully the day was a good one and everything went smoothly. And I can understand before it happens being very happy that it's going to happen and excitedly planning and looking forward to it, and afterwards being happy, but the actual day itself I imagine involves sweat, anxiety, and in the case of childbirth, pain.
You sure'bout that? When I go to my usual, suno.com/me, I see the table just as before. Under library, it's been ugly for months. You told me 'Oh it's fine it's fine, you can just use each play button' but nope. The table still exists and you're good to go.
Baha, how very sneaky of them. So if you activate their page library link, it points to suno.com/me/v2, but if I take off the v2? Back to the original library with tables. I wonder how long they'll let us use the old version?
After all the reports and concerns about the weak offline AI model used in NVDA 64-bit, it now seems that NVAccess is preparing to label this feature as experimental for the 2026.1 release. The word “experimental” is not explicitly used in their comment, but the tone and the explanation strongly imply that this is where things are heading. At least the status is starting to line up with reality. What still feels strange is how firmly NVAccess is holding on to the offline model idea. Yes, offline models can perform well with a strong GPU or an NPU, and the technology is improving fast. But will the majority of NVDA’s target users, now or even in the future, actually have the hardware needed to run these models properly? That part is still very uncertain. Marking the feature as experimental is a good step forward, but the bigger question about practicality and user hardware remains unanswered. github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issue… @NVAccess
Steps to reproduce Open NVDA Turn on image description Navigate to e.G. Github NVDA repository Focus a link in browse mode Press nvda+g to call image description Change to focus mode Press shift+ta...
What would you like to see happen? If you want an online model, there are multiple add-ons which will give you that. The offline model will work on any PC we've heard of people testing it with - yes it has limitations, as you are a loud critic of - but not being able to run hasn't been one - and yes, when we find a better model which will work on reasonable hardware and produce better results, we will look at changing to it. And, as always, we're open to feedback :)
Maybe it is already too late to hope for what I would have preferred to see. But if it were up to me, I would rather not see so much time, energy, and development effort go into offline AI models that ultimately will not benefit much of NVDA’s target user base. With the same time and energy, other bugs and features could have been addressed instead. Given NVDA’s development constraints, it might have been better not to pursue offline AI features at all. Of course, this is just my opinion. The current offline model is extremely limited and not reliable in practice. And if I ever wanted to use a stronger offline model, I would prefer to run it outside of NVDA rather than inside it.
Given it is already there..... yes, it's a bit late to cancel development which has already occured. The development work for this feature was not done by us, but submitted as part of an external project with ideas & plan submitted by them. Regardless of whether you use THIS feature or not, surely having more developers able to write code for NVDA is a good thing? So you'll be pleased to know, OUR internal developers HAVE spent their time working on addressing other bugs :)
LOL, fair enough. And yes, I’m aware the original work came from an external project. Still, I couldn’t help noticing how much time NVAccess developers ended up spending reviewing and commenting on those offline AI pulls. It’s funny how these things sometimes take more internal attention than expected.
Well, we know it is one of those features which will generate a lot of attention - people who may not have any intention of using it regularly, will still test it out just to see what they think and give their feedback - where we likely might not get that for some new feature in say, Excel. And anything AI is something which generates a lot of passion, on all sides. We don't want to be seen to be slapping something in just to have AI features, but this is a genuinely promising use case
Totally understandable. But I still think the “genuinely promising use case” part needs a lot more reflection. I really hope it turns out to be true, especially considering NVDA’s target user base and the practical challenges of running more powerful and more complex offline AI models.
I wonder if other screen readers as well, are perhaps thinking to discontinue sapi5 support, making any TTS engine you wish to use, having to be proprietary
@mckensie That's right - we're not discontinuing SAPI 5. For SAPI 4, if someone would like to make an add-on for it, please go for it. And we have already started talking at synthesizer manufacturers about what might be required to update to 64-bit. Even if they aren't now, if they are still developing them, they will likely get to the same point we are at which prompted us to go 64-bit - dependencies, development environments, etc, are all dropping support for 32-bit
I was also thinking something. Someone might make a multi TTS addon. Like the android app that lets you install different TTS packages in one? Someone could do that.
@mckensie NVDA's add-on system is quite powerful, and we do love to see how innovative the community and add-on developers can be. I look forward to seeing what people make!
@Valley_prime @mckensie It's worth asking, though it's not on our roadmap currently. While it is possible to "port" programs from one OS to another, this works best for high-level programs (like word processors). A screen reader like NVDA uses a lot of OS-specific commands so to work on something else we'd need to rewrite the majority of the code. Additionally, if you're asking about iOS, no - it's too locked down for ANY third-party screen reader.
Oh, well. I like using certain TTS engines like Ivona, but won't be able to, since it doesn't support 64 bit. I don 't really use Eloquence, but might have to use it, as a replacement daily driver for the engines I can no longer use.
@mckensie Yeah you'll be out of luck. At least until NVAccess offers that promised 32-bit bridge. Even then, it remains to be seen how it might affect performance, or if 32-bit add-ons or engines should be modified to utilize that. @NVAccess
The best I can do is blastbay TTs, which I'm just going to end up having to use since I'm not particularly an Eloquence fan, so blastbay might be considered my new daily driver instead
Eloquence just, doesn't cut it. and I may not be able to use Vocalizer, as they might be discontinued for NVDA. I might just have to suck it up, and just use Eloquence as much as I really don't want to. But, as the sapi adapter doesn't always work, and it may be broken with newer versions, I may not be able to use the natural voices. ESpeak, I can't stomach too much. So I might just have to consider Blastbay my new daily driver. I can actually stomach Libby, but when he makes a voice out of himself I'll find myself switching to that one. I wish I wasn't torn in between switching to a speech synth I don't use or just, perhaps even foregoing all 3rd parties and using one core instead, which, I kinda doubt that one core is going to stay along for any longer, because of, these voices
@mckensie We don't even have a beta out yet, and as always, we won't rush on getting the final release out, so no need to panic just yet. Do feel free to reach out to manufacturers of your favourite syntehsizers / add-ons etc to ensure they are working on updates if you like, but you don't need to make any long term decisions just yet :)
@carrottop1023 I haven't used Jarte in a little while, but I just tried it here and it seems to work fine. It might be worth restarting the PC and see if it works then?
@carrottop1023 Not sure, I'm using the latest alpha here as well and it definitely worked for me - I can read what I'm typing, read text already in the document, get around the Jarte menu and options etc...
So ekelhaft. Aus nichtigen Gründen den FIFA-Friedenspreis kreieren und dann ohne Auswahlverfahren gleich dem elenden Kriegstreiber Trump um den faltigen Hals legen. Also wenn dieser Schleimer Gianni Infantino keine Schultern hätte, würde er beim Arschlecken gleich ganz reinrutschen.
Der Hashtag 'DeGeneration' ist nicht so kreativ-lustig, wie hier vielleicht einige denken. Entweder wird damit ein Zusammenhang zum biologistisch-rassistischen Konzept 'Degeneration' (historisch eng verbunden mit 'Entartung') hergestellt. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entartun…
Rolling Stone: clearly documents a 30+ year long con job. A rural county's own leadership lined their pockets by helping ag interests destroy the water supply.
Everyone who read the article apparently??: Amazon data centers did this in 2011
Now looking for Calibre alternatives or forks. I haven't got around to *setting up* Calibre so this is an easy time for me to avoid locking in to AI-infected software.
I'll definitely have more to say about this one, but it's an immense tragedy to see a library management tool, of all fucking things, betray the whole concept of artistic expression like this.
https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1764956951.732666
Seriously, there ought to be a central place where every time an open source project either adds "AI" integration or code generated by "AI", the repo is forked from the last commit before infection so that someone can someday resume from that point.
(I'd have set this up already but I'm at an energy low and will be for a while yet.)
Pooyan's Proposal: Create a seed-bank code repo containing every important project forked on the day before ChatGPT launched. (Although actually you might need to go with 28 June 2021, which would be the day before the first Github Copilot technical preview.)
Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell
As there is a way to selectively not allow yourself to be quoted on Mastodon, I likewise wish there was a way to specifically not show any quote posts. I would miss stuff, but, ya know what? OH well.
in the upper right above the timeline on the default web interface, there is a menu that you can expand and toggle a switch to stop showing quotes. My server is on vanilla Mastodon 4.5.2 and it looks like yours is newer, so I would imagine it would probably be there.
#MUTUALAID - urgent housing need for blind wheelchair user
Aurora has been going thru a LOT and she didn't want to bother me to ask me to post here. She was kicked out of assisted living and needs $2,413 by Jan 16 to get safe housing again.
0/2413
PayPal.me/melissarainbow AuroraEloise on Venmo $AuroraEloise on CashApp
#MUTUALAID update - urgent housing need for blind wheelchair user
I told Aurora that we've got plenty of time to raise the money, but she's feeling discouraged. Wanna flood her with donations today to show her that anything is possible? ✨
165/2413
PayPal.me/melissarainbow AuroraEloise on Venmo $AuroraEloise on CashApp
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Hey so the AppImage guy pushes anti-Wayland conspiracy theories and follows a known Nazi piece of shit. Just in case the technical arguments weren’t winning you over, it’s fash tech
https://xcancel.
I'm pretty sure only like two or three people even see the music I post on here but it's fine lol. Beth Keeping - New York: youtu.be/qJ0d4hxMjtw?si=EPL5EK…
new york is out now! Stream it here: https://ffm.to/likelovingnewyorkSong composed by: Beth Keeping, Kaity Rae, Lauren McLambProduced by: Kaity RaeMixed by: ...
It's genuinely hilarious that Matrix caught up to Discord in accessibility... by doing nothing, because Discord indiscriminately degrades the experience through enshittification
Hey! But most of these people are kids and teenagers. Not cool. Let's laugh on Discord for making this disaster possible instead? I think it's misplaced
No it isn't. Don't be ignorant. I don't like Discord, but I know the Discord client has accessibility features built into the client that let you toggle all these behaviors.
We’re updating our support policy to better focus on current versions of JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion — helping us provide faster support and keep accessibility moving forward.
You’ll still have access to your software and resources, no matter your version.
We are updating our support policy to improve response times and service quality. Learn what is changing, why, and how to stay supported moving forward.
I've been shielded from Christmas music until today. The stuff was playing on the car radio on the way to and from the doctor's office. Oh well, can't win 'em all.
Ha. I was with some co-workers at an event this past week, and the game was, how long could we be out in the world without hearing "Last Christmas". Lasted all of 5 songs and then we lost.
Balls. Christmas music is the most commercialized, bland, milktoast version of music there is. It's specifically designed to be as palatable as possible for kids and old people.
@HunterXWorld I'm sure the people who work at those iHeart Radio 24 hour Christmas stations that start in early November might have something to say about the palatable part.
Moof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge
in reply to Moof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge • • •Today’s trip is the first leg of what is planned to be over 9000km worth of trip to round off the year. It’s also likely to be the last trip of this sabbatical, so I’m trying to make it count.
This trip is going to have: Marchés de Noël, a Hot Tub Party, a ride on the last remaining Danglebahn to complete the set, Weinachtsmarkts, the #ICEAgeChallenge, a dangleway over the Rhine, Kriskindlmarkts, a new country - Sweden, a little mermaid, Junlemarkeder, Hotels that are “unfeasably close to the station”, a pod cabin on a Ferry, Julmarknader, two new Talgo 230 trains, and Saunas.
Oh, and did I mention Christmas Markets?
The full itinerary can be previewed here: trainlog.me/public/tag/5491013…
Stay tuned in to see what I get up to this next couple of weeks…
Swan Song Trip - December 2025
trainlog.meMoof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge
in reply to Moof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge • • •Sensitive content
La France… Je suis à vous!
I obviously decided to celebrate it with some slightly battered artisanal croissants… that I picked up in Spain, because I know full well how terrible the SNCF ones are. The somewhat now expected police doing the annoyingly regular and thus likely illegal border check did not object to them, so that’s something.
My train tracker over at viaduct.world informs me that I have now crossed the Tunel de Perthús - the main high speed link between France and Catalunya - 22 times, with a 23rd happening before the end of the year.
As such, I know that this now becomes the start of when we have decent cellular coverage, at least until the start of the high speed section at Nîmes.
(CW: some battered but delicious croissants)
viaduct. The platform for train enthusiasts.
viaduct.worldMoof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge
in reply to Moof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge • • •One of the absolute pleasures of travelling by train on this route is being able to do the section between Perpignan and Narbonne, especially on a Duplex train.
On this section, you have a whole load of marshes and salt flats as well as a couple of larger lakes that create some delightful scenery, and the train line goes right through the middle of some of these marshes. The main road is a little further to the east, and much further away from the edge of these lakes, so you get a unique view from the train.
If you catch the right time of year you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of flamingos on the lakes. This time there were only a few dozen.
Sadly, we must give up some of the nicer things in life in the name of progress, and the Ligne Nouvelle Montpellier-Perpignan is due to replace this as the main access to Spain from France, but not til the 2040s
Definitely worth going past during the daytime, or if you can swing it, during a sunset.
Moof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge
in reply to Moof! 🔜 #ICEAgeChallenge • • •Another of the experiences that doesn’t get old, part of the ritual of this line that is the first I encounter on a trip, is when the train leaves Nîmes, and we hit the LGV Sud-Est, and the driver puts his hand forward and turns the speed up.
Today’s driver, Jean-Jacques, just got on the loudspeaker to wish us all a pleasant ride as we go at a leisurely 280km/h up the high speed line. Which I felt was a nice touch, as well as a bit of well-deserved bragging.
I am still amazed that I am on the top floor of a 200m long train the size of a small skyscraper on its side, that can travel at 300km/h as I listen to synthwave and tap away on a laptop. This never ceases to bring me a little joy, and it seems somewhat more real than the abstract feeling of flying point-to-point, where you can’t see anything but the land in th distance below you moving seemingly slowly.