Big NV SpeechPlayer Update: I ended up fixing a bunch of long-standing low-level bugs that were responsible for pops, clicks, and general weirdness. The noise generator had DC bias, filters were carrying energy across utterances, frame data wasn’t fully initialized, and there was even a one-sample “zombie frame” when going from silence to speech. All of that is gone now. Even with fast speech, letter echo, or lots of interruptions, it stays clean. The other big thing is trills. Rolled R’s are now handled in the engine instead of through pack hacks like doubling letters. There are two pack-level settings now: one that controls how long the trill lasts, and one that smooths it. The actual flutter speed is fixed to something that matches how real trills behave, so pack authors don’t have to fight the engine anymore. Short values behave like taps, longer values give you a proper roll, and it’s consistent across languages. I tried pushing the engine toward a more “rounded” glottal pulse as well, but that changed the character too much for now, so I backed it out. The goal here was stability and correctness first, not a surprise timbre shift. Now that the engine isn’t fighting itself anymore, future tuning should be much easier and safer. Language updates: Polish, US English says words like "start", "neat" and "need" more correctly. Download: eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
@Tamasg Thanks; the issue of r+schwa is close to perfect. The only thing now is, it doesn't insert the schwa before ã. Any other vowel is OK, including õ. Please compare for example the sound of: bra, brã; tras, trans.
Interesting. Still sometimes gettings clicks over here. Mostly when just arrowing around the desktop. Still, I'm loving what you're doing with this. This synth is very nistalgic for me, and while I don't know if I could ever make it my primary, it's fun to use it every now and again.
Xbox showcase: We're carrying our accessibility features over from previous games. Not including blind drive assists. But rather, an enhancement to right-trigger driving called auto-drive. Disappointing. :(
@lerven I don't know. I hope, for the purposes of the campaign. But that means the map also has to be accessible, which it wasn't in FH5. Annah will only get you so far.
Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health" The onslaught includes LLMs finding bogus vulnerabilities and code that won't compile. arstechnica.com/security/2026/…
I'd love to just pretend I'm sick and stay home tomorrow, because at this point I'm internally broken again and just have to function cuz the system says so. But it wouldn't help and people wouldn't understand, so good night, fixing the 2,5 hours of sleep I got from yesterday.
I don't like talking about politics like this, but I am serious.
I am strongly considering shutting down Pomf because the US Department of Justice continues to manufacture outright lies against people who are innocent until proven guilty.
Running the service (despite my best efforts to mitigate risks well beyond what the law would require me to do up to and including full fledged cybersecurity research) exposes me to some level of legal or criminal threat to my livelihood. I knew this going in five and a half years ago, and the calculation at the time was acceptable because even if the feds came knocking at my door, I was confident the evidence would be in my favor and that a reasonable and functional court system would make the right decision. I was also confident that what happened to Les De Ridder almost eight years ago (archive.is/PJTzS) wouldn't happen here in the USA, because Europe was a communist shithole and we had rights over here.
Well, as the US continues to backslide into a fascist regime with a completely captured judicial branch that is utterly subservient to the executive branch, my evaluation of that risk level compared to my maximum tolerance of risk continues to inch closer and closer to parity, and when that risk exceeds it, I am out. If I am not convinced that I can adequately defend myself against potentially spurious claims and threats due to a corrupt and unequal justice system, then my next defense mechanism is to remove any and all ammunition from those who would try to harm me, and the largest weapons cache someone can bring to bear against me at this time is undoubtedly Pomf. I have never considered the government to be part of my overall threat model, but now I do, and I do not have the energy or resources to fight an entire government at this time despite it being morally the right thing to do.
If this does happen, there will be a reasonable and well defined sunset period, with a final archiving of all Pomf content to cold storage in hopes that in the distant future the risk comes down to a level in which I am comfortable bringing it all back online. I would never wipe Pomf - only make it unavailable at worst.
One last thing - if you think I am some big baby or think I have nothing to fear, consider this simple statement:
Qwen released a new Apache 2.0 licensed text-to-speech model, with full voice cloning abilities, and it's really effective - my notes from trying it out here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/…
I haven't been paying much attention to the state-of-the-art in speech generation models other than noting that they've got really good, so I can't speak for how notable this new …
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.
would probably been worth a try. As a researcher it's embarrassing if *any* report gets a signal below 1 (ok mistakes happen but in general...). But the average should definitely be above 1
better solution: just add humans. Require a sender channel/org/blob/whatever, block that source if it insists on sending slop. This machine vs machine bullshit is getting old.
@me that's not good enough. The human made reports have gone downhill significantly as well through 2025. I suspect that this is because in reality they too get lots of their "info" from AIs, but shield that from us.
I'm on very thin ice here Dev skill wise, but if the issue is obvious slop, easily detected by a human, then just add accountability. Just like AP instances: if it keeps sending slop, just block it. Then it becomes useless to send reports from that source. You don't have to earn trust, but you can lose trust.
Has anyone ever first try correctly entered the amount to send with Paypal, or similar such currency amount input fields? Wanted to send 2,50€ and suddenly had 2 thousand€ in that field. Da fuck?
Ever since authorship was formalized to make it possible to sell books for profit, the idea that ideas can be property and that art springs from individual genius has been challenged by avant-garde and folk traditions. 2/8
That essay discusses cases like the journal Situationist International, which published with the notice: “All texts may be freely reproduced, translated, and edited, even without crediting the original source.” 4/8
The same text also cites Woody Guthrie, who included this note in a 1930s songbook distributed to listeners who wanted the lyrics to his recordings: “This song is copyrighted… and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ours.” 5/8
Anti-copyright has been fully recuperated, and it feels like only a matter of time before a tech billionaire claims that ingesting copyrighted material into AI is détournement.
However, only when it is an input to production. 7/8
Feeling empty, and it bothers me. I'll try to keep ranting low this time, sorry if it upsets anyone I know you haven't followed me for this shit. Probably I'm feeling that annoyed because of the lack of sleep I have. But I just want more time for myself. Anyway work was shit today. Tried to tell my instructor about the way I feel, e.g. no time motivation limited big change blah, and he was basically like, yeah that's just a part of it. Right right. This is very stupid, but once again I'm considering just breaking up and going to some kind of school for the blind. I dislike everything about schools for the blind in this country, but at least it would probably work, somehow.
I need a real social life. With people being near me who can just be, there. But it's not like I'd find that in the situation I am right now. I can't do this for another 3 years. Talked to a Goalball team member and she said the same (regarding the school 4 the blind). At this point I don't know anymore. None of the options will improve my life, they'll just lead to other problems. Whatever should probably start introducing CWs for that crap so people can skip it.
You can, of course, ignore any responses here, especially mine. I'm just a guy speaking from his own experience which, needless to say, is far different from yours and comes from English-speaking cultures. Having said that, we have a serious problem in schools for the blind, in North America at least, and I don't see that this is a particularly cultural thing, I suspect it's human. The people who work in that sort of school are of two types in my experience and in a good deal of discussion with others. The first has a deep desire to help people and, unfortunately, that often comes with a lack of humility. That is, many think they know best about everything. The second are people who can't get anything else which will pay them nearly as well. The last type are usually like that for a reason, and you probably don't want to interact with them in general. The first type may sound good, but they may make your life difficult. There is often, and this is not always, of course, a deep inability to accept the desires of others for their own lives as definitive. That is, if you want something, time in your case to do your own hobbies, and person X thinks you would be better off doing something else, you can expect serious arguments at best and attempts at compulsion at worst. I'm not saying such attempts will be successful, but I'm the type who wants a quiet life if I can get it. I have no interest in explaining the alphabet to someone so I can explain what I'm saying so that the person can find a way to disagree to keep up his idea of himself as all-knowing. Again, this may be different where you are but it's at least worth asking others about the environment before you do anything specific.
A woman who I follow on the fediverse just had to delete a post due to sexual harassment.
Men if you want more diversity on the Fediverse you need to speak up and call in your peers. You need to educate them and if they persist ban them. Make it clear they aren't welcome.
Otherwise you're making it clear we aren't welcome.
In the early days of personal computing CPU bugs were so rare as to be newsworthy. The infamous Pentium FDIV bug is remembered by many, and even earlier CPUs had their own issues (the 6502 comes to mind). Nowadays they've become so common that I encounter them routinely while triaging crash reports sent from Firefox users. Given the nature of CPUs you might wonder how these bugs arise, how they manifest and what can and can't be done about them. 🧵 1/31
This release includes a new musl version for the *-linux-musl targets, adds support for #[cfg] inside asm!(), and adds [T]::as_array, VecDeque::{pop_front_if, pop_back_if}, Vec/String::into_raw_parts, fmt::form_fn, and more! ✨
U.S. firm involved in Quebec's digital health records is sued by Texas
> A U.S. software engineering firm that’s responsible for Santé Québec’s two pilot projects involving digital health records is being sued by the state of Texas [...] and is maintaining a monopoly that has proved costly to taxpayers.
> Santé Québec, however, is standing by Wisconsin-based Epic Systems despite cost overruns for its projects of nearly $135 million to date.
Ja, "klicken Sie nicht auf unbekannte Links" – auch nicht auf solche, die mit "Scanne jetzt" beschriftet sind.
Das Zeug kommt hier täglich vorbei. Der Link führt zu einer Domain, der man also getrost unterstellen kann, mit Malware infiziert zu sein. Möchte jemand raten, welche das ist? Eine vage Idee haben einige jetzt bestimmt schon, also kann ich auch "Butter bei die Fische" geben:
storage.googleapis.com
Jupp. Deren Betreiber ständig meint, wir wären befallen 🤦♂️ Keywords: Fegen, Tür, eigene
I can find an action to open a conversation, but not to dismiss it. I tried CTRL+G out of habit and it opened, but CTRL+apostrophe doesn't dismiss, nor does just pressing delete... Still looking though.
Improvements and Fixed Issues An error which prevents adding new contacts has been fixed Issues with creating new accounts have been fixed Feedback box on error reports is shown again Have a look at the changelog for a complete list.
@FastSM Wondering if there is already, or could be, a way for Mona and Fast SM to stay in sync? It does appear that Fast SM knows the last toot I read in Mona, but after doing some reading on Fast SM, it seems like Mona isn't aware of my new place.
Replying here. Mona uses it's own API for syncing. If it were to add support for Mastodon's home timeline sync API, which I did request a few times, then it'd work with no issues. I already see this working in Tusker, which does support this.
* at around 10:10 a full minute on IzzyOnDroid (though more the client written by Sunil) * short mentions at around 08:54 (our "Get it on" badge) and 14:03 (in context of Obtainium).
I was just a bit confused of what the narrator meant when saying "app store" (hint: not the store, but always the client app) 🙈
Seems this video was made just before #Droidify launched 0.6.8 with download counts, so it calls download stats as #NeoStore-exclusive, but oh well, still cool :)
12 of the Best Alternative App Stores to the Play Store! Enjoy!______________________________________ PATREON▣ HowToPersonalize - https://www.patreon.com/ho...
I like it being called "App store", even if it is wrong, but it help for people to understand what it is used for. The app store in which each app is free.
And still I hate using the word "app". It's an application, or a device driver, or a kernel, or a whatever........
@kobold I'm with you there concerning the terminology – but what twists the hay between my ears is: calling the client "app store", to me sounds like calling the shopping cart "supermarket" 🙈
Sorry, no offense meant at all, that well might just be me…
@kobold "app store client"? 🤷♂️ As I said, it was a bit confusing for me. As long as everyone knows what is meant, well… Not complaining there.
And thanks for your thanks, putting in some motivation 🤗 Seeing one makes people happy, and seeing the people showing that happiness, can't be bought with any money!
FOSDEM 2026 (Brussels): Sun Feb 1, 09:35 CET, UB5.230 (my last talk)
Accessible Sovereignty: Why the Four Freedoms Depend on Inclusion (Community devroom)
Thesis: the Four Freedoms are not real if people with disabilities cannot use the tools, study them, share them, and improve them in practice. Accessibility is the operational layer that makes software freedom exercisable.
This bizarre, hurried cut-and-paste Bluesky clone called "W" (wsocial.eu) says it will fill this huge gap in Europe where no social media platforms exist.
A curated selection of well-moderated Open Social providers that are are open for registration and serving specific countries, regions or cities.
[[https://jaz.co.uk/projects/mastodon-near-me/|Project Home/Message me]]
[[https://jaz.co.
“Procurement Is the Biggest Form of Fundraising for FLOSS” Track: Funding the FOSS Ecosystem 
Thesis: donations are optional and fragile. Procurement is structural. If public buyers require open deliverables and upstream work, they create durable funding for maintenance and security.
is it technically possible to throw a whatsapp web automation session like mcp on a server and spin up my own custom client? I'm done with this. why can't people collectively stop using this peace of crap.
WhatsApp Web becomes far more usable with Jamie Teh's script. I've stopped loathing it and now only mildly hate it. The actual desktop app though, no good.
WhatsApp If you use WhatsApp on Windows, you are likely aware by now that WhatsApp have discontinued the UWP app and replaced it with an app that effectively...
Don't really need one. Just install the equivalent called 'Tamper Monkey' and make sure it allows user-scripts. I'm using it in Chrome with this extension without any trouble.
@FreakyFwoof weird. successfully installed. it doesn't seem to behave as described. pressing alt + 1 doesn't do anything for me. neither other functions work. not sure if it's a brave problem.
I spent several minutes trying to figure out why the second port of my Roland SC-88ST Pro wasn't responding. I checked Device Manager, turned it off and on several times, checked every setting in my MIDI player....... only to realize the problem was that I'd connected the MIDI cables backwards, plugging the output cable into the input port.
Primarni klic se jmenuje id a pak je v te tabulce jeste invoice_id a to je id te invoice. Samozrejme. Kdo to ma obe v jednom, tak drive nebo pozdeji zaplace.
What do multiplayer text games actually look like in 2026? 🤔
This updated guide highlights 10 long-running Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) you can still play today, along with 3 additional games that opened more recently.
It also covers #accessibility features, web clients, and a beginner-friendly walkthrough for anyone curious about getting started.
Quite a milestone for Czech #Meshcore: Bohemia and Moravia functioned as two islands, because crossing the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands is not exactly easy. But today, the connection has been established. The two islands are beginning to function as a single network.
@jan_petrus someone has to start it in the area. 😉 A well-located repeater (on a hill, high building) can cover a large area and connect it with other regions.
@jan_petrus I'm in Zdarské vrchy. Unfortunately, it's in the hills. I tried it last year at home, but without success. Maybe now is the right time? I see someone in Zdar nS.
@zoufalec @jan_petrus if there is no repeater in your area, it won't work. Companions (the clients) have a reach up to 3km (5 in ideal conditions). It isn't enough to reach a remote repeater, especially in hills. You would need a repeater on a hill/high building/chimney with a good antenna and clear view to connect your area to the network. In the Meshcore app there is a useful feature: you can pick a spot on map, set how high the repeater would be and it would calculate the reach.
@jan_petrus then you should also see the repeater in Orlické hory and a repeater with a solid antenna should reach it. The Meshcore mobile app has a useful feature: you can pick a spot on map, set how high the repeater would be and it will calculate signal coverage.
Arfy
in reply to Rosalyn Anne • • •