Under normal circumstances, I would be at work this evening broadcasting an interview. But the guests canceled the show, so here I am playing around with NVDA Composer.
First, I created a basic melody in NVDA Composer – it’s a Slovak folk song. Then I imported it into Reaper, added some modern samples from Nexus, and this is the result.
You might ask why I didn’t do it directly in Reaper’s step sequencer. Because that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. Hmm, seems that for some reason I can not upload mp3 dyrectly to this post, so here it is.
s.ondrosik.sk/f/b0cd4167954446…
#NVDAComposer #Composituary

On my way back from my parents' to Vienna and I was driving through the Czech Republic. In tribute to that fact, have my first NVDA Composer thing - Jozin z Bazin by Ivan Mladek, because we all need some more songs about swamp monsters called Joseph, or something... Could be better but given that it took most of the 4-hour ride to put it together, I don't think it's bad. Haven't found the special Nokia mode with the wav exports yet which could have saved it. Shall we call this #Composituary #NVDAComposer?

ondrosik reshared this.

Fucking Microsoft/Outlook sacks of goddamned SHIT!

My stuff (mail server), *again* cannot connect to their crap fucking mail hosts because ... why this time?

I have reverse DNS (IPv4 and IPv6) *Pristine* ... Google takes my mail, no sweat no strain.

Microsoft is a fucking hazard in EMail Space. They should not be Allowed (on the Internet, really ... ever) to run Internet EMail services and call it that.

connect to
outlook-com.olc.protection.out…[52.101.40.28]:25: Connection timed out

Es ist fast eine Woche her, dass hier mehrfach von sehr prominenten Menschen gegen Inklusion auf Mastodon geschossen wurde. Bei einer der Personen ging es um Bildbeschreibungen. Hier haben die Argumente verfangen und das finde ich sehr gut!

Bei der anderen Person ging es um die Verwendung von Hashtags im Fließtext. Hier wurde erst versucht, sich mit einer vermeintlich veralteten Technik herauszureden und dann eine ausgewiesene Expertin auf dem Gebiet aufs übelste beleidigt. Statt einer Entschuldigung folgte, auch über die Grenzen von Mastodon hinaus das Begeben in eine Opferrolle. Jedes noch so ruhig und neutral formulierte Gesprächsangebot wurde ignoriert.

Ich glaube, dass die meisten Leute hier vollkommen fremd ist, wie es sich anfühlt, hunderte Beiträge darüber zu lesen, wie schön es sei, dass die Person sich nicht unterkriegen lässt, weil es sind ja alles nur Störenfriede, die sich nicht zu benehmen wissen. Hier spielt zum einen ein krasses Machtgefälle eine Rolle, denn diese Menschen stehen in der Öffentlichkeit und in Rollen, die mit einer gewissen Moralität aufgeladen sind.

Als Mensch mit Behinderung kann ich sagen, dass aber noch etwas Anderes eine Rolle spielt. Hier, dass keiner betroffenen Person auch nur eine Antwort gegeben wurde. Nichtbehinderte hingegen bekamen sofort eine Antwort. Was soll man daraus schließen? Zählt die Lebensrealität behinderter Menschen so wenig, dass sie nicht mal eine Reaktion würdig sind?

Um es drastisch zu sagen: Das ist das Aussortieren aus der öffentlichen Diskussion. Man hat ja genug Verbündete, die die anderen nur als störendes Beiwerk betrachten, das man wegblocken kann. Dabei bin ich mir sicher, dass ein Großteil dieser Unterstützenden ganz nette Menschen sind, würde man ihnen in anderem Kontext begegnen.

Aber kommt es nicht gerade hier, wo im relativ Kleinen Menschen nicht zugehört wird schon darauf an, sich ein differenziertes Bild zu machen? Muss man das nicht gerade von Menschen erwarten dürfen, die wissen, wie sich Angriffe anfühlen? (1/2)

This entry was edited (1 hour ago)
in reply to Dennis

Ich habe es nur teilweise mitbekommen, aber das geht natürlich gar nicht. Der Herr ist mir aus anderen Zusammenhängen - persönlich - bekannt und bei mir meist geblockt (weshalb ich die Sache nur teilweise mitbekam). Großer Account oder nicht, ich bin für blocken.
Insgesamt - ich verstehe es nicht, warum es so viel verlangt sein soll, mal auf die Betroffenen zu hören und ein paar Kleinigkeiten zu beachten. Es tut mir leid, dass sowas noch vorkommt, auch wegen kc.

Path A: Direct DSP Only (speechPlayer.dll)
You handle everything yourself:
Your App → [Your IPA parser] → [Your frame builder] → speechPlayer_queueFrame/Ex() → DSP → Audio
What you do:
• Parse IPA text into phonemes
• Look up formant values from your own phoneme table
• Build speechPlayer_frame_t structs (47 parameters)
• Build speechPlayer_frameEx_t structs (5 parameters) if you want voice quality
• Calculate timing/duration yourself
• Call speechPlayer_queueFrame() or speechPlayer_queueFrameEx() directly
• Mix per-phoneme FrameEx with user settings yourself (if desired)
Pros: Full control, no frontend dependency, smaller footprint Cons: You reimplement all the phoneme logic, coarticulation, prosody, etc.
Path B: Frontend + DSP (nvspFrontend.dll → speechPlayer.dll)
Frontend does the heavy lifting:
Your App → nvspFrontend_queueIPA[_Ex]() → [Frontend magic] → Your Callback → speechPlayer_queueFrame/Ex() → DSP → Audio
You might be thinking, but that's more layers!
The alternative would be pushing mixing into the DSP, but then:
• DSP needs phoneme awareness (wrong layer!)
• Or every driver reimplements mixing (inconsistency, bugs)
The "extra layer" is actually the frontend doing its job - keeping linguistic smarts out of the DSP and out of every driver.

Next NV Speech Player update: Sharable user profiles in the phoneme packs. I got it coded during lunch, not a bad AI sesh. It's coming. While NVDA driver settings need to be stored as .conf values, we will let you click a "save voice profile to phonemes" button in the NVSpeech panel, so you can upload your defined sliders and phoneme class overrides to ship a complete voice. Same will go for the phoneme editor: If you want deeper voice tuning, you can tune there and save it to file, no more storing voice information in just the .ini file. So yep, solid updates for next build already. The frontend now can do frame mixing, significantly reducing burden on drivers to communicate with the DSP layer directly, they just talk to the Frontend's two callback's and frame emission mixing happens there rather than needing to be done by the drivers or callers. This makes life a lot simpler and moves more things to slowly centralize in the frontend component.

Here's a tale of how nature triumphs in the end.

Steel mills dumped molten slag in parts of Chicago and nearby areas. The slag hardened in layers up to 15 feet deep. These places became barren wastelands. Other industries dumped hot ash and cinders there.

But eventually the steel mills closed.

The deep layers of hard, toxic material were not friendly to plants. Cottonwoods are usually 30 meters tall or more. In the slag fields, stunted cottonwoods grow to just 2 meters.

But rare species that could handle these conditions began to thrive. The lakeside daisy, a federally threatened species lost to Illinois for decades, turns out to grow taller on slag than on topsoil! The capitate spike-rush, last recorded in Illinois in 1894 and considered locally extinct, was rediscovered growing on slag.

And more! Native prairie grasses like little bluestem. Native milkweeds. Even tiny white orchids called sphinx ladies' tresses.

A team of women ecologists began studying these unusual landscapes. They call themselves the Slag Queens.

(1/n)

This entry was edited (13 hours ago)

Möchte etwas loswerden:

Wenn ich mir anschaue, was @rpolenz und @BlumeEvolution so abbekommen, würde ich mich wirklich freuen, wenn hier einige verbal abrüsten würden.

Bitte beurteilt Menschen nach ihrem konkreten Handeln und nicht nach Etiketten, die ihnen angeheftet werden.

Allen, die das tun, möchte ich hiermit herzlich danken und ihnen meine Hochachtung aussprechen.

Und ebenso allen, die die Kraft finden, ihren Umgang mit Menschen in den sozialen Medien kritisch zu reflektieren.

in reply to Awet Tesfaiesus, MdB

Ja, ich find's nämlich sehr schön, wieviel Zuneigung den beiden hier überwiegend entgegenschlägt. Der Käse ist der Prominenz geschuldet. Geht aber auch uns allen so. Sobald ausnahmsweise mal ein Trööt steil geht, fängt man sich die ersten idiotischen Kommentare ein. Oder meint ihr nicht? Ich hoffe die beiden stehen darüber.
in reply to Awet Tesfaiesus, MdB

@achimreinke Den Wunsch nach mehr Abrüstung verstehe ich. Gerade bei den beiden Beispielen muss ich aber sagen, dass sie sich wirklich nicht respektvoll verhalten haben, als sie um Inklusion gebeten wurden. Stattdessen Wurde zumindest von Herrn Blume eine ausgewiesene Expertin auf dem Gebiet übel beleidigt. Und bei allem Verständnis für überzogene Kritik, die zum Tagesgeschäft gehören mag: Da erwarte ich, den Unterschied zu erkennen und die Größe zu haben, sich auch einmal einen Fehler einzugestehen und vielleicht zumindest eine Woche danach mal eine Entschuldigung hören zu lassen.

Respekt und Umgangsformen sind nämlich wahrlich keine Einbahnstraße.

Relationship polls -- are you legally bound roomates or are you actually sharing your life with them?

If you gambled on a fart and lost, would you tell your wife/partner or try to deal with it discretely?

  • Try to be discreet about it (0 votes)
  • Let them know without delay (0 votes)
  • Tell them about it eventually (0 votes)
Poll end: 8 hours ago

I talked AI slop with @codepo8 a few days ago and it's here:

youtu.be/Vp8K12oLs6A?si=st3Oxq…

daniel:// stenberg:// reshared this.

the place I work is after a senior software engineer - good people, full remote, 4-day weeks at full pay
assemblyfour.com/careers/senio…
This entry was edited (23 hours ago)
in reply to feld

Jesus Christ. What happens when they fuck something up and they can't revert the codebase to a specific version? Thats like one of the biggest perks of having a version control system.

The weird thing we do is that we include the ID of the relevant Azure DevOps ticket in the name of the branch, like "2727603-fix-some-bug", and it becomes really annoying really quick, especially because I prefer using git via a command line rather than a GUI

@nixCraft otoh, isn't this what people wanted though?

Everyone proclaims they want to take down big tech and how evil it is. But now we want the government to ... make it illegal for them to shoot their own dicks off with bad decisions?

You can kill big tech but not without killing big tech jobs, that's just the way it works
RT: mastodon.social/users/nixCraft…

in reply to feld

All of this is a logical conclusion of how the industry was going for at least the last decade. Rapid growth, everybody wanted to work in IT, everybody wanted to study IT. Eventual correction when businesses found out everyone isn't as necessary as they believed was inevitable.

Also from quoted post:
> you are just another commodity.
Yes, that's how this works. You sell yourself and your time to do work for someone else. That's it. As if the "resources" in HR wasn't clear enough about that.

in reply to mangeurdenuage :gondola_head: 🌿

damn i lost my draft i guess

alright well anyway i was writing that this is kind of an unrelated tangent, but it has some key points nobody talks about (except me and my degenerate friends):

Your corporate job was "cradle to the grave". They trained you. You were loyal. If you were good at your job, raises and promotions were guaranteed. Your understanding of the company was key to its long term success. These are important values. And as a result, you had job security. This means you can do things like... afford a 30 year mortgage.

Now we have banks handing out 30 year mortgages when people can't keep their jobs longer than 3 years. The banks are making a huge mistake. You can't do that; the risk is too high and it massively screws up the housing market long term.

This entry was edited (12 hours ago)

RE: tldr.nettime.org/@dk/115962588…

It has been written before, but the main goal of AI is not to improve efficiency but to lower the bargaining position of labour (unions).

They don't sell managers efficiency (for the people they currently employ), they sell them a tool to negotiate down on your contract terms during review.


I love conversational interfaces, and I am a big proponent of automation. The trouble is when these tools are not sold as productivity software to empower people who are doing work, with skill and effort, but as ways to create value without skill and effort.
8/11

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)

Videos prove, the Russian army stays online in Ukraine using network equipment from American company Ubiquiti.

Worried customers have been discussing this in Ubiquiti’s online forums, but threads have been shut down for “violating community guidelines”.

Many companies see their products sold to Russia, but Ubiquiti products are actually online, which means Ubiquiti could trace the illegal use and intervene — so why don’t they?

hntrbrk.com/ubiquiti/

reshared this

Holy shit. TIL that Janet Jackson is the only Grammy-winning artist with a CVE.

CVE-2022-38392 indicates that playing Rhythm Nation near certain hard drives will cause a crash, because the song contains a resonate frequency with a 5400RPM spinning disk of a certain diameter and construction.

Neat.

#music #infosec

reshared this

Are you interested in testing your USB cables? Then I have a blog post for you:

blog.literarily-starved.com/20…

Be aware: You might discover that your cable is fooling your PC

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

As it came up in a few conversations during "FOSDEM week", here's a link to the OpenSSF blog post about why the idea of "attestation for open source projects" is, in my opinion, and others, a bad idea:

openssf.org/blog/2026/01/21/pr…

Yes, FOSS foundations and projects need ways of getting funding, that is very important, but thinking that "attestation is how we will get that money!" might not be such a good idea given the risks involved, and the past experience for those that have attempted it.

@privacybrowser on privacy browser 3.19.3 fdroid android. when i use share url from another browser or from other app, it overrides my existing tab. ex. pbrower open tab is ddg.com. i am reading stoutner.com/ on fennec. when i click share button on fennec and choose pbrowser. ddg.com url is replaced with stouter.com is there anyway to change this behaviour

Iron Blue Intention, Castlevania Bloodlines

Sensitive content

Onj 🎶 reshared this.

I read a great anti-AI screed today (not linking to avoid a pile-on on the author). I found it to be an almost perfect distillation of the typical anti-GenAI arguments I read. The basic form is:

1. *Lists various ethical problems with LLMs*
2. Therefore a consumer boycott is the only solution
3. Fuck you, you're a monster, etc if you don't agree with me

Do #2 and #3 follow, though? Let's think about it.

#3 #2
in reply to Nolan Lawson

So overall: I love seeing passionate people defending what they believe in. But all the scolding and moralizing in the world is, frankly, unlikely to achieve their aims other than getting high-fives from the already-converted and maybe making the rest of us feel a bit guilty. Or honestly just chasing us off of public platforms like Mastodon and onto less vicious private alternatives like Discord.
in reply to Nolan Lawson

If you want advocacy (any kind of advocacy) to work, you have to go where the non-believers are.

This is why the movement to leave X is so self-destructive in that respect. If you want your voice to be heard, don't post to an audience of people who think the same way you do, they're already convinced. Missionaries don't preach on Saint Peter's square because there's no point, they go where they aren't wanted or liked, where nobody thinks like they do.

in reply to Nolan Lawson

And to end on a hopeful note, what does work? Regulation! Class-action lawsuits! Antitrust! All that stuff is great, and I support it. For example this lawsuit would give some recompense for OSS authors like me whose work was stolen without attribution and without honoring copyleft licenses: githubcopilotlitigation.com/
in reply to Nolan Lawson

The thing that I don't see regulation and all that other great stuff solving is the cognitive effects of AI, which, so short a time after it taking off, have already been demonstrated by studies. People use Chat GPT and that has a negative effect on their problem-solving skills. Also the environmental impact.

But anyway, I think consumer boycots are a way forward but I'm totally against the scolding. Encouraging a boycot is fine,

in reply to Nolan Lawson

saying you're evil and part of the problem if you don't abandon all evil big tech is just self-righteous, holier than thou barrier-building. And we need to work together. Look hard enough at anyone and you will see their double standards, inconsistencies and downright compromise of principles for the sake of avoiding risk or retaining comfort in a difficult life. Is that ideal? No. Is it to be accepted placidly and with resignation? No. But condemnation isn't the answer.

Part of me wants to make the native VLAN, that is, the VLAN that provides access to devices who don't talk 802.1Q VLAN-speak, one that has Internet-only access, and if any devices want access to the local network, they have to speak to a certain VLAN. Of course, that means that anything requiring local access would need to be 802.1Q compatible to speak VLAN, and be properly configured. The other part of me says that my local network is simply not that big of a security target, and I'd just be creating extra headaches for myself. But the geek in me still insists, LOL. So the decision is not yet decided.
This entry was edited (15 hours ago)

GrapheneOS version 2026012800 released:

grapheneos.org/releases#202601…

See the linked release notes for a summary of the improvements over the previous release.

Forum discussion thread:

discuss.grapheneos.org/d/31269…

#GrapheneOS #privacy #security

RE: tldr.nettime.org/@dk/115962588…

when I wrote my critiques of the centralization of the internet, it wasn't because I hated that internet, I love the internet! Same now, I don't hate AI, there is actually a lot I love about it.

What I don't love is centralization, proprietary software, bad dev practices and exploitation.


I love conversational interfaces, and I am a big proponent of automation. The trouble is when these tools are not sold as productivity software to empower people who are doing work, with skill and effort, but as ways to create value without skill and effort.
8/11

in reply to SuspiciousDuck

To by si měli nějak sjednotit, aby bylo jasné, co se tím myslí. Já bych od obědového menu čekal salát, jídlo, aspoň vodu a kávu. Ale přijde mi k ničemu, když recenzent A pod tím vidí, přeženu, samotné hranolky, zatímco recenzent B pětichodové menu se spárovaným vínem.

(To je samozřejmě kritika těch recenzí, zejména teda asi Googlu, ne tebe ani restaurace.)