I have a few projects for this holiday break, most of my time will be spent hanging out with my wife, friends, playing Pokemon, and sleeping a lot, but around that I'll also record a lot of music and try to convert Akira to Gtk4
The US TikTok sale has been signed. The company will be controlled by a joint venture including Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Adding a UAE company really makes it clear that this was never about national security concerns.
The designers of the MicroSD card format should be required to reimburse me 2x for every card I have lost, plus compensation for the time I've spent looking for them and the aggravation, with treble damages for intent.
You thought you could go through all of #Thursday without a headache, didn't you? Oh hahaha, my sweet summer child. Now that it's 10:32 PM, let us show you what you've been missing all day.
It was about this time on this day in 1997 when a defective candle set our living room on fire. We had to replace all the furniture, the carpets, and repaint the walls and ceiling. Good times, good times.
Found out today that my son and pretty much all there family is sick, again, so who gets screwed, again? Yep, me. Christmas will suck, again this year. That is all.
A quick reminder of a few things Mozilla/Firefox have done in the last *checks notes* ~year that I hope highlights that this is not a case of bad messaging but a consistent pattern of hostility:
- "Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising."
- "privacy preserving" Advertising telemetry enabled by default
- New T&C demanding a worldwide license (rolled back) & weakened privacy policy to support the above expansion (active)
- ""[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser"
The leaders of an organization keep making announcements like "we are building the torment nexus", "we are a torment nexus company"
How much do you really weight a follow up PR statement on a smaller dev channel along the lines of: "we promise to give you a kill switch for the torment nexus that will probably be opt-in for some definition of opt-in....we can reasonably agree that opt-in is a vague term right?"
Opt-in means that the person needs to perform an explicit action in order to do something. Ideally it means that they do that action of their own accord, without being harassed. They do that because the software/features/whatever is exciting and/or solves a real problem they have.
Something so good you don't have to trick them into turning it on.
You know, like that time 20+ years ago when people actively sought out and downloaded Firefox because it was simply the better option.
The guy managing the account that posted about the kill switch and is confused about what opt-in is used to work at Google on Chrome. That explains why he's not really up to date about the meaning of opt-in...
🤔 TinyCorp, a small AI startup, succeeded in getting #Nvidia GPUs to operate for AI workloads on a #MacBook with #Apple Silicon through USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 conections. techradar.com/pro/security/app…
To spell this out clearly, the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn't been produced yet has been bought with money that doesn't exist to populate GPUs that also haven't been produced to go in datacenters that haven't been built powered by infrastructure that may never exist to meet a demand that doesn't exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can't exist while economists talk about this thing they call the "rational markets hypothesis".
Found what looks like an #NVDA bug, or possibly #notepad++ bug. An & followed by a space will read a fake command key suggestion when changing focus to the notepad++ window.
NVDA: 2025.3.2. Notepad++: 8.8.8.
Minimum reproduction:
Open notepad++, if a file is open use ctrl-n for new. Type the following string in the file: "& ". Alt-tab in and out. On the focus, NVDA will announce "alt+space".
Are there any book clubs on Mastodon? The in-person ones around me keep petering out or are hard to get to, and the ones I’ve seen online are toooo big for my tastes. I have a slight preference for fantasy/sci-fi, but any genre is good. I just want to talk about books! #bookstodon #books #reading
What’s been on my mind is how we respond when someone we care deeply about chooses to sit at tables, or stay in rooms, where we are not welcome.
I don’t think there’s one universally right answer. Context matters. Capacity matters. History matters.
That said, Tito and I were talking about this last week, and I asked him a simple question: “If you were invited to a party but told I wasn’t welcome, what would you do?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I wouldn’t go.”
I asked why. “Because we’re a team.”
That answer made me love him more.
I’ve come to understand loyalty less as a grand gesture and more as a pattern of choices. Loyalty is what happens when someone realizes you’re not welcome somewhere—and they feel that exclusion as misaligned with their values. Not because they’re told to, not out of obligation, but because proximity to you matters more than access to the room. That doesn’t make anyone else wrong. But it does tell me who I can build closely with.
Earlier this year, I found myself in several situations where people didn’t mind if close friends of mine were around—but there were others in the room who were uncomfortable with me, didn’t trust me, or simply didn’t like me. I watched who stayed anyway.
And I realized something uncomfortable: I couldn’t think of those friendships in the same way afterward. (1/3)
That doesn’t mean I stopped caring. It doesn’t mean they didn’t care about me. But it did clarify something important. There are people in my life who wouldn’t stay in a room where I wasn’t welcome. And that represents a level of loyalty I’ve learned I need—and deserve—in my closest relationships.
If someone doesn’t know or love me enough to feel moved to leave a space when they realize I’m excluded, that’s okay. Truly. But it tells me where we stand.
Because when people spend time around others who don’t like us, they begin—often without realizing it—to see us through those lenses. Resentment, distrust, and unspoken narratives bleed into perception. That’s why I choose, deliberately, to stay out of rooms where people are constantly speaking negatively about others. I’ve learned that it costs too much. That’s a personal boundary, not a moral judgment.
Earlier this year, I fell into a bout of depression when I realized I was prioritizing certain friendships more than I was being prioritized in return. But rather than let those thoughts fester, I shifted my focus.
I thought about who spoke up for me when I wasn’t there. Who warned me when they could have stayed silent. Who opened their homes. Who gave their time—hours, days—without keeping score.
And I remembered: I am deeply cared for.
Care just doesn’t always come from the places we expect. (2/3)
Not everyone has the emotional bandwidth to show care in the same way. Some people are overwhelmed. Some are stretched thin. And still—people make time for what matters most to them.
At the end of the day, I trust my gut. If something feels right, I go with it. If it doesn’t, I don’t. (3/3)
My heart goes out to all my compadres with anxiety. I don’t regularly have it, but am *very* anxious when it comes to the dentist. I finished my cleaning and was absolutely exhausted. Got me to thinking how much y’all have to do despite that anxiety every damned day, and you’re just frickin’ superheroes.
Wow, Chatterbox-Turbo is pretty good! As a quick test, I let two local LLMs ramble about random topics of their choice and generated audio using zero-shot voice cloning with Chatterbox-Turbo. resemble.ai/chatterbox-turbo/ #TTS #LLM #AI #ML @ZBennoui
@vick21 haha The text is from Gemini-3-27b. Yes, Chatterbox is open weight. It does not work on Mac out of the box, but I asked Gemini3 to modify it to use MPS and it worked. lol In the past, LLMs would not have been able to handle this kind of task, but they now seem to have enough knowledge of ML libraries. So far, I have also managed to get a few other CUDA-only models running on MPS with just vibe coding.
@vick21 In deed! I had a another TTS model which was not only developed for Cuda, but also used a dependency for speech codec that only worked for Cuda. Gemini cli not only modified the inference code for the model itself but also looked up the dependency library inside virtual environment and provided monkey patch so it can work with MPS. These frontier models are truely getting better! :)
@vick21 Yeah, definitely try gemini-cli or codex-cli if you have sub to one of those plans. I know Northeastern students have access to Claude, but it seems like they did not enable claude code. Maybe for obvious reason? lol Agentic coding is pretty wild, especially in --yolo for Gemini-cli (or --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox for codex). lol
@vick21 Lol yeah I'm not sure if we have access to Claude code, I'll have to check. I can get Gemini CLI though, I'll take a look at that this weekend. Would be amazing if it could be used to just setup all these models without me having to jump through tons of hoops to make them work properly. Right now I'm scared to install anything so I just play with most of these through the hugging face demos lol.
There is a particular CUDA model I hear about that allows you to use your voice to sing anything. Do you know what I may be talking about? Would be awesome to have that running on Mac OS!
@vick21 I'm not sure, but are you talking about RVC? If so, you can already run that on Mac, but it's just extremely slow to train. You can just use Colab for it.
@vick21 I haven't followed with them for a while. Last time I tried like 2 years ago, they had v2. Also if you search, they have bunch of finetuned models for famous musicians. lol
@vick21 Zach, do you know any newer better singing voice models? It seems like the latest commit for RVC is from last November, and the v2 model is still the latest. Their main readme is in Chinese, but here's Readme in English. github.com/RVC-Project/Retriev…
@vick21 I'm honestly not sure about open source options, I know theres like Synthesizer V which is really good, but I don't think we can use it. Damn I wish I wasn't blind sometimes lol.
@vick21 If I produce a simple melody with piano accompanyment and provide the track with lyrics to Suno, I wonder if it can generate vocal part correctly. You won't have fine control like synth-v, but it might do the job. It might even sound more natural.
Blind Mac users, I need your opinion. Is it worth getting a MacBook Air as primary laptop in addition to a Windows desktop, for consuming media, music production and, well, general laptop? I'm kind of fed up with Windows laptops to be honest, the Mac seems awesome regarding quality, but I'm completely lost when it comes to VoiceOver, and I hear very, very different opinions on Mac accessibility these days. I'd kind of love to try it, the other hand, the price speaks for itself, and I'm not an Apple fanboy anymore, nor locked in the ecosystem, and would sort of like to keep beeing flexible. Another point of interest would be, how is Windows emulation these days, do VMs work reliably and lag-free? Thanks so much for any information or opinions you can give, boosts are really appreciated. #Blind #Accessibility #VoiceOver #MacBook @mastoblind
If I were you, I wouldn't invest in a Mac. VoiceOver is still far, far inferior to Windows screen readers, and the price is enormous. don't know about Windows emulation these days, though.
I know that Windows emulation works quite well with Parelels (forgive the spelling). Also obviously just making assumtions here, but imho the price and the ecosystem make this seem like a bad choize for me too. Like you'd get 24 gb of RAM and 512 gb of SSD for about $1.600. These are many resources yeah, but already plugins and samples take up space, plus the OS plus Ableton, and if you'd want to put a virtual machine there too? Well you definitely won't be getting the usage under 200-300 gb. Actually, I'm gonna be honest, I'd love to try it out and might even use it, but again I'm not in the Apple ecosystem and I'm not sure how much of a kill this is. Also, I'm not paying as much as I spent for my GAMING PC just to be able to produce music on the go. Again, I can relate and I'd love to have a Mac too because I feel like they feel really cool to use and it'd be really cool making music on the go and setting it up and that stuff, but even $1.099 are kinda much. And 256 gb are kinda less for that price, I have like 50 gb of samples, plus Ableton packs and installation.
OSX itself is excellent, and I would argue that Windows VMs aren't bad, though I do still dislike the lack of responsiveness of sound, even through USB. Having said that, VO is an unmitigated disaster. If you can use it with magnification, it may be worth considering it. I can't comment since I'm totally blind. As a blind person, though, it just stinks. I'm sorry.
@techsinger Thanks for sharing your opinion. I have tried Zoom on the MacBook Pro M1 of my mother and honestly it sucks as well. I'd prefer to use voiceover which is kind of sad but yeah it's Apple Zoom overall it's not better on the iPhone.
@techsinger I dare to say that VO on iOS is miles better than VO on the Mac. VO on the mac: * Doesn't support complex JavaScript on webpages; * Doesn't support the terminal well at all; * Randomly will tell you apps are not responding when you can tell they aren't by performing actions in the apps that make sounds; * etc.
So I wouldn't necessarily say VO is a disaster, however, it is in serious need of a major overhall. Unfortunately the macOS accessibility APIs are very old at this point, and while I think Apple is doing work to try and modernize them, it's taking a lot of time. For music production and audio stuff it's fine, but for daily use especially anything to do with word processing, spreadsheets, etc, I would keep using Windows.
@menelion If you are asking blind Mac users, you know what the answer will be. Windows users will tell you otherwise. I am a Mac user BTW! :) If you possibly can, get a mac, play with it for 13 days and then return on the 14th. You get the point. There is really no right or wrong. I like Mac mostly because of audio stack -- an important one for me. Rest is less important or workable. HTH!
Well, i have an m2 Macbook pro, and if your using the mac for browsing the web and the like, I'd say its perfect for that for sure. I've personally haven't seen much in the way of issues with VO and have found the Mac experience to be pretty great actually for that sort of thing, is it different than windows? Yes, its definitely different, but different isn't bad though. As for Windows emulation, I'm not exactly sure on that front.
Well, it depends: My Windows Laptop with NVDA is quicker in everydayscenaios. But I bought a Macbook Air to learn how to work with Logic and I have to say that the audio stack is so much better than on Windows. Maybe you could rent a Macbook for a couple of months to form your own opinion. That way you do not need to pay up front to experiment with it.
Today was a much better day, all the pull requests I opened yesterday are passing tests, so the sadness in my soul was finally avenged. Good way to end the work week before I take off for the holidays.
Thanks for the feedback, and we definitely want to make encryption easier to set up in all of our apps, and eventually between apps. Here is a SUMO article on exporting PGP keys, which we hope helps - and SUMO is definitely the best place to ask for help! support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/o…
This article answers common questions about OpenPGP support in Thunderbird, as implemented in End-To-End Encryption (e2ee), and how it differs from Enigmail.
I know how to do that. But currently it is a handjob and needs to be done on every mobile device.
I have my Desktop proflie since centuries, copying and duplicating from Windows to Linux and vice versa with just copy & paste the profile folder was easy going. (And it was very handy to have these as a backup).
If you've been wanting to speak securely to your garage door or whatever MQTTS capable devices you want to control with your #curl command lines, look no further:
(this is planned to merge in time for the March 2026 release)
I daily drive GNOME and donate monthly as it is simply beautiful. I want GNOME to stay independent and further improve the parts I miss: proper support for background apps, good runtime permission handling, more flatpak integrations and a good native mailing application.
because it works very well, I especially appreciate the design choices that the GNOME team makes, I particularly love the Libadwaita apps, they are so relaxing. In any case, I can't wait to see the progress that will come in the near future, in the flatpak/flathub world and especially in Foot os ❤️🙏🏻
I’m to broke but would love to be able to support the project financially. Sadly there is no way to make a anonymous pau payment method available like with cash send or Monero or something.
I'm donating to @gnome for a number of reasons. I do it because I love the user experience. Because I've been using it pretty much daily for almost two decades now. Because the team seems inclusive and promotes values I believe strongly in, beyond FOSS. Because I use GTK apps all the time and I want them to get even better - and more numerous. Because I want my phone to be running GNOME within a few years. Because you come across as run by humans, not a bunch of faceless suits.
I've been using GNOME since pre-1.0 days (with a brief swap to KDE when 3 was initially released), but once extensions fixed the biggest gaps (and KDE 4 dropped...) I've been back and been happy. I do wish that there was a bit more care given to the extension environment as they are *needed* to make GNOME truely functional, IMHO. But with them, it's the best environment available <full stop/>.
GNOME was my introduction to the linux desktop world. Since my introduction in 2021, I have since used many desktops but always found my home back at GNOME. It's reliable and I can't see myself using anything else as a daily driver. So of course I need to give back.
Debian stable currently uses ESR, which right now is 140.6.0. Next summer, around the time of the next ESR release, we will also make release channel default on Flathub. We hope this helps!
@thunderbird should at least open a path to allow us to replace their OpenPGP implementation, RNP, with other implementations, like @sequoiapgp's Octopus.
They may have their rationale on which they made these decisions, but the negative effect on the usability of Thunderbird+PGP for those who have them for many years is real.
Thanks for the feedback on this, and if you haven't already suggested this on connect.mozilla.org (or supported/commented an existing suggestion), that would be another good place to bring this discussion. Thanks!
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