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I wonder how common the Eloquence phenomenon is in blind communities around the world.
That is, an old speech synthesizer made years ago and long since abandoned by its maker, which blind people tightly hold on to for one reason or another.
Two examples I'm familiar with are Neurosoft's SynTalk 1.6 in Poland, and IBM's ProTalker in Japan, and I'm curious if this happens in other places as well.
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in reply to Mohamed Al-Hajamy 💾

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Timothy Wynn

I mean this hasn't been abandoned and isn't comparatively as old, but I know of many folks who still use this Vietnamese SAPI5 speech engine which essentially plays audio files in sequence. It was initially released in 2004 with a southern voice reading three different encodings and updated in 2009 with a northern voice according to the timestamps within the installer:
saomaicenter.org/en/smsoft/vnv…

Sao Mai VNVoice | Sao Mai Center for the Blind (SMCB)

Sao Mai VNVoice is the first usable text-to-speech engine with screen reading software on Windows for Vietnamese language.
Sao Mai Center for the Blind (SMCB)

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Please CW child abuse!

Sensitive content

#childabuse #EpsteinFiles #epstein #socialskills
in reply to Petra van Cronenburg

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Petra van Cronenburg

Please CW child abuse!

Sensitive content

in reply to Petra van Cronenburg

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Petra van Cronenburg

Please CW child abuse!

Sensitive content

mastodon - Link to source
No sleep. I'm busy implementing proper chunking into the SoftVoice-Say program, of course. What else? Codex sucked at it, it did a half-assed job. So now I'm manually writing up patching section prompts to GPT-5.2 Pro instead, because it'll actually build it, unlike Codex which prefers to make minor changes in the file and do one single task from many. That's the downside of Codex. Think of it more like a code review friend who can do quick repo scanning and read context if you tell it what files and where. However, Codex won't write you a new feature in your program from scratch, regular GPT is still way better for that.

mastodon - Link to source

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.

It's an [assumed - see replies] official survey and it doesn't even take 5 mins. Please boost and share in your servers too.
discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe…
#genAI #AIslop #AI #gaming #streaming #streamer #noToAI #gamer #gamers #womenWhoGame #resist

#gaming #discord #AI #streaming #Gamer #streamer #genai #notoai #aislop #resist #gamers #womenwhogame
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I'd like to ask folks to reflect for a moment.

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?

mastodon - Link to source
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!

When You Play BILLY JOEL like it's 1700

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...
YouTube
#youtube #music #baroque

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"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…

Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder

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…
Techdirt

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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.…

Thing is, it's *already* in GNOME Tweaks, since 2016: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-t…

We were told multiple times the gsetting is not getting removed. I'll keep using it & move on. :blobcatcoffee:

Screenshot of the "GNOME Tweaks" GUI application, that provides a "Middle Click Paste" setting toggle in the "Mouse & Touchpad" section.

Make Gtk/EnablePrimaryPaste configurable through gsettings (2f9b1b3b) · Commits · GNOME / GNOME Tweaks · GitLab

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
GitLab
#linux #gnome

gotosocial - Link to source

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.”

archiveofourown.org/works/7440…

@Andre Louis

mastodon - Link to source

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?

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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.

mastodon - Link to source
Isfugl - Alcedo atthis - Eurasian kingfisher
#fugle #fotografi #birds #birding #birdingphotography #herlevfotoklub #nature #wildlife #2730foto #photography #dof #dof #dofbirdlife
#Isfugl #Alcedo_atthis #Eurasian_kingfisher
#photography #wildlife #nature #birds #birding #fugle #fotografi #birdingphotography #herlevfotoklub #2730foto #dof #dofbirdlife #isfugl #alcedo_atthis #eurasian_kingfisher
in reply to Tom Grant

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@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.
@Tom Grant

mastodon - Link to source

RE: mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/1149428…

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

Gabriele Svelto (@gabrielesvelto@mas.to)

Also, torrenting porn at that scale means that Meta's models are pretty much likely to contain NCII and even CSAM. Keep the fuck away from them.
Gabriele Svelto (mas.to)
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