"But Wikipedia cannot survive by refusing to change. Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning research reminds us that the communities that govern shared resources often grow conservative over time.
"For anyone who cares about the future of reliable information online, Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary is not just a celebration. It is an urgent warning about what happens when the institutions we depend on cannot adapt to the people they are meant to serve."
This week I learned, from a blind acquaintance here, that when we write in ALL CAPS in alt text, their screenreader reads it all out, *one letter at a time*.
Totally defeating the point of alt text making things accessible, right? Needless to say, I've stopped.
@menelion huh. What screen reader does that? Is this an iOS/Android thing? I'm a screen reader user myself and I don't think I've seen this happen all that often
@zersiax I'm quiet here, because I use JAWS and I've seen it before maybe, but my hunch is that it depends on the TTS. I boosted though because I feel all caps is like yelling, also it adds burden for Braille display users.
@menelion I do use all caps to emphasize words in a sentence, as in "Why DO chickens cross the road?" but that's about it. All-capsing a whole entire post ... ehh ... I feel it looks like someone feels the need to scream but then, I don't mean to tone police either, just not my thing
It depends on used Text to speech engine, for example Google TTS in Slovak language reads words with capitals letter by letter. Probably thei interpret it by this way because mostly contractions are writed with capital letters (ETC...)
Some really great reads for January. I had no idea Dennis E. Taylor's standalones were so good! Not to mention a new Peter Cawdron and a couple of interesting fanfics.
@BorrisInABox Yeah I really enjoyed these too. His stuff is just good fun. Bobiverse starting to go a little stale maybe, so glad he’s exploring other ideas. Pity that, unless I’m mistaken, he seems to be exclusive to Audible though.
if (frameExSharpness > 0.0) { baseSharpness *= frameExSharpness; baseSharpness = clampDouble(baseSharpness, 1.0, 15.0); That way you can't break the sharpness slider. I think this can work well. AI was wanting to make negative sharpness. Oh fuck no.
You can tell if someone is a computering supergenius if their solution to a difficult problem looks like nothing.
Lisp is six functions. Forth is 200 bytes. Unix is just tiny programs and text files. The original web is just a hacked SMTP server sending SGML files. And yet, it does *that*.
The huge, complex stuff--Windows, Java, the modern web--is all the work of mediocre thinkers with big budgets and too little time.
I tried to build this small python tool on FreeBSD that uses the new uv thing but I couldn't figure out how to work uv
They really need to work on their UX
All I know is that it kept complaining that there wasn't any Python 3.13 but I couldn't get it to download or install one (into a virtual env I assume). Now I am aware that they probably don't have precompiled versions for FreeBSD, but it doesn't even seem to have an option to download the source and compile it by itself. So if that's the case, this tool is pretty worthless if you want to use it with a custom python version or on an unsupported platform?
Is that really how this thing works? Bizarro
It was easier to just hack it to work with my own venv and regular pip, build my own requirements.txt etc
Provided to YouTube by Universal Music GroupSweetness · Jimmy Eat WorldBleed American℗ 2001 Geffen RecordsReleased on: 2001-07-17Producer: Mark TrombinoProdu...
@Scott I do still hear it (or spin it) from time to time, but I can't really account for it today. I did watch "Spider-Man: No Way Home' last night; maybe seeing Toby Maguire's Spidey again evoked the era?
I think we're going to add voice sharpness as a frame parameter for the new frame. this would allow a lot more things to happen. Emotional emphasis, Creaky → sharp transition (stød), Consonants sharper than vowels. If we make it a frame param, it can really be adjusted per utterance.
The mathematical relationship IS the sound. When we made a "clean" table with quadratic closure, we literally encoded sharpness ≈ 2 into it. The synth doesn't care if that curve comes from: • pow(1-t, 2.0) computed live • A lookup table with those same values Same curve = same harmonics = same sound. The sample rate scaling insight: At higher sample rates, you need MORE harmonics to fill the spectrum. Lower sharpness = fewer harmonics = sounds "breathy" because there's less energy up high. That's why LF master scales sharpness UP with sample rate - to maintain consistent harmonic richness. The downside to a fixed glottal table is that you would need a different glottal table for each sample rate, if you wanted to keep the smoothness alive. By making one single Glottal table, we are effectively baking in a sharpness 2.0 into all sample rates.
I do wonder if folks liked it when the voice was smoother at 16000/22050 or 44100, or when it now has more sharpness. The sharpness is actually what Eloquence also has, when you think about it. It's voice isn't smoother. So now, with the recent SpeechPlayer, it's a bit like how the original sharpness was with it, when before we changed to the new Cosign waveform. It made 11025 sound very similar to 16000 and 22050 which is why I changed it. I didn't get any revolts, or like, "eww, where's the smoothness?" if anything one person told me that the voice sounds more "whole" at 44100. So I'm very conflicted on this, and I suspect people have their own preference. But now I am closer to understanding what gives Eloquence that classic Eloquence sharpness, they too probably also use an LF-type waveform. many blind users who grew up on DECtalk/Eloquence found the softer voices harder to understand at speed, not easier. The softer voice can make consonants stick out more and not sound like it's part of the voice's bandwidth itself.
So the sunday times hsa announced who's paying the most tax. BBC have reported on it. Concentrating on someone I'm presuming is a celebrity. A google suggests Harry Styles has a networth something like £225m. A lot, but not enough to be a billionaire. In comparison there are 156 billionaires in the UK. How then, is someone with a worth of under a quarter of a bn in the top 100, when the list should basically be 100 billionaires.
I think I'm going to add a new "patrick" voice to Speech Player though, modeled after the other parameters, like F3 multipliers, extracted from the voice. It's not all lost. It's just that Glottal shape mostly impacts smoothness, hollowness, and ringyness of the voice or whether it's metallic or not. Badly tuned glottal tables get you a mess, well tuned ones should sound closer to what the synth used to sound like in the first place.
Is your Mastodon timeline too empty or too full? Are you seeing too much of one thing while missing important posts? Is your timeline overwhelmed by someone who shares too many posts?
These and lots more timeline problems are solved in the "How to customise your Mastodon timeline" guide:
So, huge thanks to @BorrisInABox for sitting down and making silly sounds for like 25 minutes for me. This is a recording of SpeechPlayer using his Glottl tables. Notice how much better it came out compared to my own, no sharpness, no boxy sound. It's a perfect glottal source. But also, this tells me that the math-derived LF glottal source with tunable sharpness could get us almost this same voice, although there's a richness in the bass harmonics I can't quite explain, so the real-source Glottal tables still do a better job at making it sound a bit more natural.
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My father was hospitalized due to a severe drop in blood sugar, and my heart aches for him.
We are going through a difficult time and need your support to secure his treatment and medications.
It snew. It has snown. The ground is snawn upon. ❄️❄️ This ties a record for the fourth heaviest snowfall we've gotten here. The tie for this happened in 1880. I think a couple people in the neighborhood are trying to repurpose leafblowers as snowblowers. I have no idea if that'll work or not but even if it does and they can get their cars out, the roads are not magically clear of snow.
I heard people talking about using leaf blowers to clear snow on a local ham radio repeater here yesterday. Problem was, they were trying that while it was still snowing. So, it worked, but not.
Watch the official lyric video for “Now That We Don't Talk (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault)” by Taylor Swift, from ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’.Buy/download/...
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This page contains an overview of the status of various IzzyOnDroid services and the official mirrors.
If
I guess, his image generator chatbot is to compensate for the fact that even the creepiest billionaires hate his ass and wouldn't let him in most of the time.
Le PIB par habitant est un indicateur totalement dépassé
Si par malheur demain au volant de ma voiture j'écrasais accidentellement 2 enfants, alors j'améliorerais le PIB par habitant de la France : - les réparations de ma voiture iraient accroître le numérateur - les 2 décès diminueraient le dénominateur
Il est grand temps de passer à des indicateurs plus pertinents pour mesurer la "richesse" d'un pays.
je sais, je l'ai déjà booster, mais avez vu passer cette offre d'emploi ? entrouvert.com/actualites/2026… c'est pas un dev ou un adminsys, pas sur que j'ai la perle rare dans mes contacts, mais une personne qui connaît l'administration française (et/ou les universités), qui connaît les bases du code (et pas qui sait coder), qui sait gérer un projet... bref on cherche un mouton à 5 pattes mais si tu aimes les #logicielsLbres, travailler dans une #scop et avec les #administrations, et que tu as aux moins 3 des 5 pattes qu'on cherche peut-être que ce job est pour toi !
sinon tu peut toujours le repartager ... #jerecrute
Dragon Ball Z music reimagined in the style of Michael Jackson.This is a full rework of the Dragon Ball Z soundtrack. The goal was to keep the original feeli...
#fosdem was cool! I attended a single day, spent it all chatting with cool folks who wanted to know more about #XMPP and its gateways such as slidge.im As the "bridges guy", it was my duty to socialize with our neighbours @matrix and @delta - we have different opinions on which tech is better, but our goals are aligned: long live federated self-hostable chat protocols! No need to FUD each other. Matridge is already a thing, deltachidge when? Thanks @ge0rg for the cool LED display.
thanks for telling! I wanted to attend #FOSDEM but I was on duty (colleagues fell sick). But, I installed dino, and I do like it. A few seconds ago I used deltachat. This software is awesome. Hope to meet you at #FOSDEM2027
Yes, let's do Deltachidge! That might provide some opportunity to try true end-to-end encryption with client side support for the DeltaChat content format in #Conversations_im.
@social Bridged E2EE sounds fun and exciting, for sure. @daniel IIUC, your idea is something @delta -specific in #conversations_im?@larma informally entertained the idea of doing something @signalapp -specific in @dino It would be nice to have some common ground, could it be xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/gate… ? A (the?) registrar could be used to define "well-known" formatters and encrypters, maybe? Just wild ideas at this point. But we are wild, aren't we?
@social @larma @signalapp @dino I don't see myself integrating any wasm plugins. But using the format from that XEP to communicate that we are using the well known OpenPGP and the well known MIME is something we could do.
No promises on whether this is something I want to ship to end users. But I'm going to tinker around with OpenPGP (And OX) anyway. And I also have some experience with MIME.
OK. Lets kick off #Movuary for this year. #ableton Move is a groovebox which can do a lot. @BorrisInABox came up with an idea to post a track made with Ableton Move every day in february and call it #Movuary. So, me @FreakyFwoof and others joined in and here we are, second year round. January is a cold dark and in general bad month so I kick it off with a darker tune.a
Time for #Movuary day 2, The Niffnaffs. I mean, well, sending whatsapp messages to me is dangerous, because you may end up in a beat. Thats what happened with @FreakyFwoof a few days ago.
Movim will be at the @fosdem 2026 in Brussels ✨ This year we will also have a conference! 😽
📢 Movim: Building a Decentralized Social Network on XMPP 📍 Room: AW1.126 📅 Day: Sunday 1st of February 🕛 Start: 13:45
In this conference we'll discuss the technical challenges of building a rich web frontend on top of XMPP, showcase the exciting features recently added to the project, and introduce the upcoming planned ones.
Today, on Digital Independence Day, the new monocles chat update has finally been released on F-Droid ( f-droid.org/ ) 🎉 . Try it out for free and use the sovereign and independent XMPP between different messengers. The Playstore update will follow as soon as possible!
F-Droid is the FOSS app distribution ecosystem for Android where your user freedom comes first. Discover our app store to explore the world of free and open source (FOSS) apps and [learn](https://f-droid.
Nicoco
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