#Joke #Humour

While walking down the street one day a politician is tragically hit by a truck and dies.

Her soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance. . “Welcome to Heaven,” says St. Peter. “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you.”

“No problem, just let me in,” says the lady.

“Well, I’d like to but I have orders from higher up. What we’ll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity.”

“Really, I’ve made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven,” says the head of state.

“I’m sorry but we have our rules.” And with that, St. Peter escorts her to the elevator and she goes down, down, down to Hell. The doors open and she finds herself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a club and standing in front of it are all her friends and other politicians who had worked with her, everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet her, hug her, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar.

Also present is the Devil, who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that, before she realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives her a big hug and waves while the elevator rises.

The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for her. “Now it’s time to visit Heaven.” So 24 hours pass with the head of state joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing.

They have a good time and, before she realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns. “Well then, you’ve spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity.”

She reflects for a minute, then the head of state answers: “Well, I would never have said it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in Hell.”

So Saint Peter escorts her to the elevator and she goes down, down, down to Hell. Now the doors of the elevator open and she is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. She sees all her friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags.

The Devil comes over to her and lays his arm on her neck. “I don’t understand,” stammers the head of state. “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and club and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now all there is a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.

The Devil looks at her, smiles and says, “Yesterday we were campaigning. Today you voted for us!”

> Oh, we're out here. Proudly being the one person in the room saying, "Look, it's not just that these things are garbage generators but they are literally the _least_ ethical way possible to generate garbage and burn the planet at the same time."

Offices. We're talking about the waste of everyone's time, energy, commutes, and the abuse of precious real estate on offices, right?

RE: fosstodon.org/@arcanechat/1159…

thanks a lot to the people that gave a review! you rock! 💜


if you happen to have #GooglePlay on some device, please give #ArcaneChat a review so it gets more visibility in the main stream, your sacrifice getting your hands dirty with Google will not be in vain 🎖️

play.google.com/store/apps/det…

#boostswelcome #pleaseBoost #boost
#foss #openSource #privacy #encryption #messenger


I'm noticing how much what I want to be doing with my life can evolve over time based on my perception of the situation around me.
At one point in time, I didn't feel particularly attached to doing any kind of accessibility-related work. I ended up sliding into it because it was available to me, not that there was anything wrong with that, and, to be clear, I feel grateful towards people who gave me opportunities, but, if I had other options available to me, then I may well have done something different. But then I ended up getting involved with Linux, and now I see a lot of accessibility-related gaps, things that no one is working on right now, so ...

I could say something similar about wanting to work in order to have financial stability, manifest one's skills and talents in the world, and generally have options in life vs. wanting to retire or temporarily leave the work force in order to have more time to volunteer or handle family things, manifest one's skills and talents in the world, and generally have options in life.

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 sich 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)

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 (5 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: 1 hour ago

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 (16 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 (5 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 (10 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/

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