This is a survey all #Discord users need to fill out {edit - seems they closed it within a day?}. Discord wants to know if we want AI to run the app. It'd be using data from pictures, conversations, voice notes, live streams, art, 'learning' from us in the app if they don't get strong enough pushback.
Let them know how you feel before they ruin that app for everyone as well.
I've been using Eloquence 5 for several weeks now and find I can listen to it much easier than I can Eloquence 6.1. I like how it reads things better mainly.
Are you adding to a pile-on of criticisms? If so, is the target of those criticisms someone who might be exposed to undue amounts of judgment already because of who they are (whether through race, gender, queerness, etc)?
Might you be magnifying the underlying bias against the person with your actions? Are there more compassionate approaches to take? Do your actions help or hinder in the grand scheme?
This is a masterpiece. "When you play billy Joel like it's 1700" youtube.com/watch?v=BRRLAQjKPx… #Music #Baroque #YouTube alt: Some clever guys and girls from Germany took four songs by Billy Joel and made it into a genuine Baroque concerto for two recorders and basso continuo. In spite of what we're living through as humanity, we are blessed to live in such times. Imagine this before YouTube!
1. Uptown Girl (Adagio) 0:002. For The Longest Time (Allegro) 2:553. And So It Goes (Grave) 5:594. She's Always A Woman To Me (Allegro) 7:39Words and melodie...
I love improvisations and interesting stuff like that. And every time I see someone, like playing on the street and having fun, I am genuinely happy. Because it's not the internet, it's them wanting to do it, that feels a bit like it. :D I should subscribe to the channel. Also, it's real cool to make stuff be played by a huge number of people, the more orchestral you make a track, the more people you bring together, not because of the instruments only, but also because it goes wide and far in the air, carried by the wind, etc. I digressed. ;)
@Tamasg There is a dll in the pwWebspeak version of SoftVoice that, unlike the NVDA version (which uses the one within Note Talker/Talk It! from Microsoft Plus! for Kids), it doesn't have the character limit, and produces true 16-bit audio output, not 8-bit.
@TomGrant91 ah darn nope. I grabbed it. Looks like they use a completely different DLL structure, and it's an SSIL-type COM server, interesting. Speech Synthesis Interface Library, an early standard for connecting speech synthesizers (like external hardware or software engines) to screen readers and other assistive technology.
"Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight": Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder techdirt.com/2026/01/08/abolis…
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her i…
Ah, I see, this is awesome. Sadly, nne of the foss android is accessible out of the box. Lots of sighted assitance in the form of humans is required to make it work.
Another fdroid question though, is it translated into bg? Cause, if I ever want to try it out, I will need that sighted assistance to be able to read. The assistance can't read English even if their life depended on it. :D
I just started encountering quite contradictory opinions. Also people who value confidentiality. Another thing is that Matrix still doesn't have an official code release. Another thing is that quite a few institutions such as NATO have started using Matrix, which is a little worrying.
I guess this warrants a screenshot, as I keep seeing #GNOME + #Linux threads where folks freak out about the "middle click paste" gsetting being set to False by default in gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gsettin…. Some ask "How dare they hide this into a gsetting to be toggled", or "they should add it to GNOME Tweaks" etc.…
Instead of relying on xsettings overrides, let's make use of a proper gsetting newly added for this purpose that can also be used by gtk+ on the wayland backend. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775847
Wow, so yeah, SoftVoice itself can't handle text longer than around 500 characters, it kind of poofs itself and fucks off if you feed it more than 200-300 chars. Wow, what a limitation that is. Thank you late-90s computing
usually after 19:00 and the address is Impasse de la Fidelite 4A, Brussels 1000 Belgium. I hopefully will be there as well if you want a company for a beer
Hey @FreakyFwoof have you taken a look at this? I just got to the crossover reveal chapter, probably gonna be done in the next 30 minutes LOL, shortish chapters but I'm loving it.
Title: The Owl, the Witch, and a Man Named Anthony Author: White_Squirrel Author Summary: Holly Potter learnt at Gringotts that her father wasn’t James Potter, but some guy named Anthony Stark. Tony Stark was very confused when a paternity claim was delivered directly to his bedroom by a snowy owl. They begin a correspondence of letters, not knowing what bizarre revelations will come of it, all mediated by our favourite Arctic avian and told in real time as the letters are delivered. Covers Hogwarts first year. Holly was born in 2000. Formerly “Flight of the Post Owl.”
If a kid starts kicking up a fuss on a plane, other people should be allowed to tell them to shut up and tell the parents to do better without it being frowned upon.
I'm watching people in my feed screaming at each other over Firefox's "AI kill switch" this morning with some trepidation.
As far as I'm concerned, Firefox already has an AI kill switch. It's called browser.ml.chat.enabled, I set it to false more or less the day it appeared, it hasn't mysteriously popped back on since, despite angry posts to the contrary, and that's been that for me. It's disabled every "AI" feature I find objectionable. I'd prefer if Mozilla leadership would sync up with reality on occasion and stop deciding to put this paid placement trash into Firefox in the first place, but at least there's a reliable way to get rid of it.
Everything else people have been screaming at Mozilla about? I'm not sure I see the problem. The little model you can download to summarise web pages for you? I wouldn't trust it, and so I don't think it's necessarily a productive use of Firefox devs' time, but at least it's opt-in. The other little model you can download to help organise your tab groups? I don't use it much, but this one seems more practical, and it's also opt-in, despite the occasional angry report of it slowing down people's browsers even without having been downloaded. Liek, bro, maybe try closing a Slack tab or two.
I don't want ChatGPT in my browser, or Claude, or any kind of world burning data centre LLM pretending to be our new AI god. browser.ml.chat.enabled = false does that for me. It would be even better if it wasn't there in the first place. But tiny, focused ML models doing nominally useful things? I not only do not see the problem there, I'd like some of them to be part of the Web platform rather than just the browser. I've been wishing since they launched them that Mozilla would make an API available to web sites out of those translation models of theirs, for instance.
I'm monitoring the situation, as European heads of state like to say, but so far, despite the posturings of their C-suite types, it doesn't seem like any critical Mozilla resources are being diverted away from maintaining the Web platform into AI boosterism. Every new Firefox changelog is delivering on what it should be delivering on, and it's only occasionally that I see a new "AI" feature advertised. Compare that to a product like VSCode, which has been completely consumed by the cancer of slop production with only one in a hundred changelog entries being about building an actual damned code editor, and I'm not feeling all that alarmed about Firefox just yet.
I know this is Mastodon, but sometimes I just wish people would entertain having opinions that can have some nuance in between "burn the world down so the AGI can live" and "Butlerian Jihad now," you know?
Now it really is sleep time. Yes, at 8 in the morning. I'm going to sleep with the Europeans. Having that bug in the speak program was bugging me horribly, so I couldn't get rest until it got squashed.
Stranger Things complete. Hard to believe a show that I've watched since middle or high school ends when I'm an undergraduate. That was sort of the only thing I watched on Netflix. But the service is disappointing now. There are barely any good shows or movies to watch. And if they are, they're are average at best, or they got canceled for reasons which usually involve money and whatnot.
@TomGrant91 oh, if you place the .exe where your soft voice add-on lives or the DLL files do, it'll auto-detect it. But because we can't technically bundle it all together in the repository, it's possible that someone builds the speak program on its own and would need to then manually give it where that file lives. I doubt the folks behind SoftVoice are around anymore, but I had to stay cautious. Even though the Eurpod page is public, it's not tied to the wrapper project so if anyone reaches out and says, "take this down, you're redistributing our speech engine!" I can just yank the file off Eurpod and not touch my repo.
is not a recommendation for any of those products, "Untersuchte" means "investigated". It's just a simple report. I shouldn't need to tell you this as you're a German company.
A study this week found that approximately six thousand child sex abuse and sexual harassment images are now being generated (and published online) every hour by the X Internet Unlimited Company. thegist.ie/the-gist-the-abuse-…
With regards to Grok generating CSAM, I'd like to point out that all the image generation models are probably trained with CSAM in the first place. The kind of scraping that was done to train them is indiscriminate and the companies that make them don't care, so god knows what's inside the training data. My recommendation still stands: stay tf away from them
Remember there are massive protest against the governemnt in Iran, with hundred kill by live ammunition. They are all fighting for their lives and freedom.
The Iran regime was installed by the CIA decades ago.
Just to remind you what happen when the 3 letter alphabet soup agencies on the US touch things. It never turns into gold.
So. Because GPT uses Jupyter internally, when it reviews files, they get truncated for it. Poor thing. It spends half its time trying to figure out why the code is truncated when in reality it's Jupyter and the output truncating it. Ha. Can't believe that. Gemini is good, but it can only do code changes inline. GPT will actually patch your file for you if you are specific enough and upload it. But then of course it spends half its time trying to figure out whether a piece of code exists or not because it got truncated. Unreal.
I guess that's why people use Codex or Claude Code, that way its not limited to the specific amount of information the app or website can hold before it starts trunkating it.
PSA We are happy about the wealth of privacy focused classic email providers (proton, tutanota, posteo, mailbox.org etc) but they are not geared for instant secure messaging. Do yourself, family and friends a favor and use delta with any of the many chatmail.at/relays
Or setup a relay of your own if you feel like it.
Or use a a dedicated chat email address on your own or any classic email server that has reliable service and no obnoxious rate limits or annoying spam handling.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
proton via a proxy some people managed to get working. But we don't recommend it. And with tuta you are probably right. We just got a question from someone about using tuta with delta which is why this slipped in 😅 in any case we do value their privacy focus as well.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
well, chatmail has higher rate limits, but then several hard restrictions: only end-to-end encryption allowed, only strict TLS allowed, only strictly validating DKIM allowed. Not sure this counts as "less restrictions" overall :)
there is e.g. a "copy" button that will copy a link. You can also go to settings/chats and media/export backup and then on the other device import that file via "i already have a profile" from the startup screen.
I really liked the fist version, that I used quite often with friends but it was completely different. You could use regular mail. There's certainly been a lot of work on the new version, but right now I can't join anyone, it's a bit annoying for a tchat.
exporting a backup file didn't work? Or importing it? This would be a severe bug. Please elaborate. ah, and make sure you are using consistent recent versions, to be sure -- versions around 2.35+.
for setting up contact with a friend, see delta.chat/en/help#howtoe2ee -- there also is a mode that doesn't require a camera/scan-qr code but sharing an invite link.
What is Delta Chat? Delta Chat is a reliable, decentralized and secure instant messaging app, available for mobile and desktop platforms. Instant creation of private chat profiles with secure and i...
@Delta Chat Have you tried calling the person and attempting to onboard them using only voice?
The only thing that came to mind was something like: "Take a sheet of graph paper and start shading in squares. Shade the first square. Now the second. Now the third..." Of course, dictating a link out loud is not much easier.
I hope that onboarding two or three friends a day for about a week will make it clear that all the options you suggested are not great. :)
We could for example attach an Eloquence audio sample, then ask for a synth that sounds similar. In case the AI couldn't make it from scratch, we could ask whether another synth could be the basis, for example ESpeak's klatt variants. @fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate @Tamasg
Sort of my thought sadly. It's gotten better, no doubt, you can now get AI to spit out 60 KB of slop in one go, wow progress. xD So context improved, maybe a slightly better skillset, but the amount of time you'd spend debugging and seeing which step it went wrong on, especially for all the low-level plumbing an engine needs is brutal. @clv1 @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate
If you knew the technical requirements well enough to do it yourself, AI could do it for you slightly faster. But if you couldn’t have done it on your own, AI won’t help.
so it's a lot. 1) Signal generation (the “voice box”) This is the DSP engine: glottal source → filter(s) → radiation → output audio. 2) Control model (turning phonemes into trajectories) You need to decide how parameters move over time: • How /a/ differs from /i/ in F1/F2 • How consonants inject noise and shape transitions • Coarticulation: the “smearing” of neighboring sounds into each other • Rules for duration and transitions (and exceptions) This is where “it works” becomes “it sounds like a person instead of a kazoo.” AI helps, but you still need a design. AI can implement whichever model you pick (Klatt-style rules, gestural targets, diphones-with-formants, etc.). 3) Text to phonemes (G2P) For English you can ship a dictionary + rules. • normalization (numbers, dates, abbreviations) • tokenization • stress rules • phoneme mapping5) Voice design + tuning Even with a perfect engine, it’s easy to end up with “robotic but intelligible” rather than “pleasant.” This is typically the biggest time because it’s: • parameter tables • hundreds of little exceptions • endless listening tests • DSP engine: days to a couple weeks • G2P + normalization: weeks • coarticulation + durations: weeks to months • prosody: weeks to months • tuning to ‘nice’: open-ended @fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate
thanks for this overview. Indeed, we would need skilled developers, engineers and maybe linguists working full time on a project like this for a few months at least.
yeah, I think if a team came together for it, splitting that work perhaps by person or 1 to 2 people per section, could really work. I know I could be useful here at the later shaping stages, so do count me in, it's that architecture creation and initial rules I'm a bit out on. But yeah, not against on being included. @fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate
I can do nothing here other than testing, so feel free to bring me back in at the latter stages. Until then, have 0 things to contribute. Very much outside of my understanding.
And also UX researchers, probably. I can't articulate why eloquence is better than dectalk, for me. Neither, I bet, could Andre articulate what makes Orpheus better than Eloquence, for him. So to get something that makes the largest number of people as happy as possible is a classic UX research problem, probably involving massive surveys, rating and ranking of samples, and so on. I work with the kind of people qualified to do this, and it's a unique skill-set in and of itself.
Regarding that idea of a new formant-based synth, has anyone tried to see if any AI, maybe a Pro AI, is already capable of coding its basics, given a well elaborated prompt? @fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate @Tamasg
Winter blue tardis
in reply to J🎶 • • •