I do not understand why the Melania movie gets no views… I mean, this Bruce Springsteen song called "Streets of Minneapolis" has gotten 3 million views in under 24 hours.

So strange.

youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si=oybETc…

1. Record yourself (or someone) saying a small set of diphones or even just sustained vowels/consonants
2. Extract the residual (what's left after you inverse-filter out the formants)
3. Use THAT as the excitation source instead of the mathematical LF pulse
4. The formant filters would shape it, but the "texture" would be real voice
It's basically what CELP/LPC vocoders do, but in reverse - instead of coding speech, you're generating it with a hybrid source.
Tools like Praat, STRAIGHT, or various MATLAB/Python libraries can do this. The result sounds like a weird buzzy/creaky "brrrrr" - not like speech at all, because all the "vowel-ness" has been taken out.
This entry was edited (3 hours ago)

Mastodon server admins, important news!

The Mastodon developers are going to stop suggesting mastodon.social as a "default server".

Instead, the "default" server suggestions are going to be ones for a user's language and/or geographical location.

If your server matches these:

- General public server
- Running vanilla Mastodon
- Mastodon Covenant compliant
- Have existed for 1+ year
- Have shut-down & disaster plans

...then see this post for details: mastodon.social/@Mastodon/1159…

#MastoAdmin

This entry was edited (4 hours ago)

I just published a new post on my Substack. If you’re a blind and disabled student, this one may hit close to home. I wrote about the quiet panic that comes with syllabi and textbooks and the very real difference between “accessible eventually” and “accessible now." This isn’t a jab at professors or disability services. It’s about how systems are set up, why timing matters, and why tools like OpenStax can completely change a semester by removing the wait. If you teach, design curricula, or care about access in higher ed, I hope this offers some perspective. Boosts would be appreciated so this can reach educators and more students. #Accessibility #DisabilityInSTEM #HigherEd #OpenStax
open.substack.com/pub/accessin…

#XMPP @ #FOSDEM 2026

Talk:
@Movim: Building a Decentralized Social Network on XMPP - Timothée Jaussoin
Sun, 13:45, AW1.126

Visit the XMPP #Realtime Lounge in #ULB, AW Building, Level 1!

#jabber #chat #opensource #messaging #federation #Brussels, #Belgium #opensource #rtc #e2ee #europe

Gerade #recable entdeckt. Finde das nachhaltige Konzept schon cool 👍

recable.eu/

#XMPP @ #FOSDEM 2026

Talk:
#UnifiedPush - #Push notifications. Decentralized and Open Source - Daniel Gultsch, s1m
Sat, 16:00, UB4.132

Visit the XMPP Realtime Lounge in #ULB, AW Building, Level 1!

#jabber #chat #opensource #messaging #federation #Brussels, #Belgium #opensource #rtc #e2ee

Daniel Gultsch reshared this.

I am still amazed that these super polished "simple" apps exist in the oss world. The likes of Fragments, Decibels and other apps with a completely different approach to the "mission control" UX, here's Ear Tag. A super simple music metadata editor that is a godsend for occasional music producers like myself. Thank you, @knuxify:postmarketos.org. It is a joy to use.

flathub.org/en/apps/app.drey.E…

Now in the #FOSDEM live stream: Holger Krekel introducing #autocrypt2, a mechanism to protect against store-now-decrypt-later attacks, to be introduced in Delta!

live.fosdem.org/watch/k4201

More details about the talk:
fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event…
#DeltaChat #forwardsecrey #reliabledeletion

I can’t remember where I saw it, but I feel like today is a good time to revisit the concept of “Vegan + bacon”.

People often avoid making small positive changes because they get caught up in trying to go all the way. For example, “I could never go vegan. I love bacon too much”.

So then go vegan plus bacon. Or vegetarian plus bacon. Or just switch to oat milk and eat more vegetables. Whatever small change you can make is good

#XMPP @ #FOSDEM

Our booth is so well-crowed we cannot find it anymore 😬

Be brave and keep trying to find us at #ULB, AW, Building, Level 1!

#jabber #chat #opensource #messaging #federation #Brussels, #Belgium #opensource #rtc #e2ee #decentralisation

"In late 2025, Alex started going massively viral on Bilibili, a Chinese video platform, for videos where he described poverty in America. He coined the term “kill line” (“斩杀线”) - an expression borrowed from gaming describing when a game character's health is so low one hit will finish them. In Alex’s framing, the concept describes how a single shock (illness, job loss, accident) can push middle-class Americans into irreversible poverty.

It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact he’s had in China. In barely a few weeks, “kill line” became part of everyday lexicon. So much so that even Qiushi - the core theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China - published a (...) analysis using "kill line" as its central framework (qstheory.cn/20260104/0a0919465…).

This never happens. Gaming slang coined by a 22-year-old streamer based in the U.S. does not become the analytical framework for Qiushi, the CPC’s core theoretical journal, in just a handful of weeks. That’s normally not how Communist Party theory gets crafted, to put it mildly 😂. And yet here we are - which goes to show just how powerfully Alex resonated.

It didn’t take long for America to notice - and for Alex’s problems to start.

Due to the staggering resonance his content was having in China, Alex became the target of an extremely vicious doxxing campaign by Chinese dissidents.

He also got targeted by Western media with the New York Times, among others, publishing a piece (nytimes.com/2026/01/13/busines…) identifying him as the origin of the phenomenon which they described - unsurprisingly - as Communist propaganda meant to “deflect criticism of [Chinese] leaders.”

I just wrote an article telling the full story. It ends with Alex escaping to China in an extraction worthy of a Cold War spy novel. Think about how extraordinary this is: a Chinese student fleeing to China for safety, because he feared for his life after being harassed for describing poverty in America."

x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/201…

This entry was edited (19 hours ago)