This is horrible. Do not buy AI translated books. Please.

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The French literary translators association (ATLF) and the collective En Chair et en Os (In the Flesh) have just published a press release (in French) relating how translators working for Harlequin were recently told that the publisher would now be turning to AI: ‘An external contractor, the communications agency Fluent Planet, will put the texts through “automatic translation” software and then recruit freelancers directly to post-edit the machine output in French. The stated aim is to increase profitability by reducing working time.’

A number of French translators have been working for Harlequin for years, often exclusively. This decision places them in an extremely precarious position, without proper notice or compensation.

Supposedly, Sonia Bélanger is a trained professional nurse...

We'll see if she puts her professional training/nursing experience before CAQ ideology, eh. cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/qu… #CAQASTROPHE #polQC #QCpoli #assnat #santeQC #QChealth

protip: If you're going to rip off someone's Harry Potter #fanfic, and have a bad AI voice read it, maybe check to make sure it's not an explicit drary slashfic before uploading it to your Harry Potter Playtime Fun channel, and marking the video "for children".

Maybe while you're at it, consider picking a British voice? And proofreading the titles so they have the correct chapter numbers? And not skipping chapter seven completely? It must take extra work to do crime this badly!

Just a few tips for the scammers out there. I know crediting the original author and doing an actual human reading just isn't possible; you've gotta upload a couple hundred videos a week, after all!

The idea of Matrix as a chat service is nice. But the fact that it keeps going out of sync, and I keep losing messages from other people is just plain annoying. This is worse than IRC net split (at least there was a message when it happened).

#Matrix #MatrixChat #ElementX #IRC

If you met one autistic person, then you met one autistic person.

#ActuallyAutistic

Why is everyone mad at #mozilla I don't understand.

#firefox is about to release one of the best #ai features and I couldn't be more excited: a kill switch.

This is a big deal and marks a change of sentiment. After years of tech scrambling to reinvent itself with user hostile #ai features, Mozilla is offering something different - turn it off.

There's nothing quite like reading a newspaper article from 1986, which happens to load very slowly (kind of funny to me) and then has a damn "sign in with Google" popup.

Yep, we sure do that in 1986.

I'm recruiting a PhD student for autumn 2026 on a project on accessibility in musical instrument design, in partnership with disability arts charities OHMI and Drake Music.

Application deadline 15 February 2026. More info and contact details: liss-dtp.ac.uk/project/instrum…

So what I'm hearing now is that the redditor that tipped off the cops to the Brown university shooter is homeless and sleeps on campus

I bet they stiff him on the 50k reward

and also the news will probably never widely report that he is a homeless hero because Trump wants everyone to hate the homeless

Startversuch aktueller Version von DeltaChat

[11469:1214/134139.208764:FATAL:sandbox/linux/suid/client/setuid_sandbox_host.cc:169] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /opt/deltachat-desktop-2.33.0/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755.
Trace/Breakpoint ausgelöst (Speicherabzug geschrieben)

Ich lasse KEINE Executables mit SUID root auf meinem System zu

#deltachat

"i'm mad at firefox, so instead i'm going to give google incrementally more power over the web"

ok. consider: not doing that

My iOS apps are on the App Store again; if you ever wanted to have sonogrid or the others, now might be a good time to get a copy.

rosano.ca/blog/audioscrub-and-…

Don't threaten me with a good time! 😍

#AIShit

Are you coming to #39C3 this year? We'd love to see you there!

events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hu…

Edit: Find us on day 2 at 15:45 in the lovely @HouseOfTea.

#briar #mesh #p2p #meshtastic #qaul #bridgefy #tor #decentralization

ok, forreal this time, I can set my account to public once again.

And on another note (which may actually be sad, and also speaking of suno,) apparently suno is now going to restrict downloads and stuff do to this hole suno-wmg (warner music group) thing that's happening, and we can't use udio because uploading audio files (including ringtones like I always do) require premium unfortunately... And now suno also won't let you download stuff because now it has a limit and I'll probably be forced to screen record everything (unless wmg finds out or something...) I don't know... And just for proof of this suno.com/blog/wmg-partnership

A new chapter in music creation

Suno partners with Warner Music Group to build the future of interactive music

^Suno

RE: mastodon.social/@Gargron/11573…

I'll elaborate. I believe we're in an AI bubble. AI companies are pushing the overton window on AI discourse. They want the most extreme anti-AI sentiment to be "Sure, it's an overhyped technology right now but there will be reasonable applications down the road". I want to see pushback on this. It doesn't matter if I can disable some AI feature in the settings. The fact that Mozilla is jumping on this bandwagon is deeply disappointing to me.

Eugen Rochko

2025-12-17 23:24:01

I've finally switched to the @Vivaldi browser. I've been using Firefox for as long as I've been on the internet, but the focus on AI means it's no longer the browser for me. Thankfully unlike Chrome, Vivaldi supports the uBlock Origin extension which is the most important extension for being able to browse the web nowadays.

RE: mastodon.social/@Gargron/11573…

Always good when Firefox makes people to use Chromium/Blink browsers. 🤷‍♂️

Eugen Rochko

2025-12-17 23:24:01

I've finally switched to the @Vivaldi browser. I've been using Firefox for as long as I've been on the internet, but the focus on AI means it's no longer the browser for me. Thankfully unlike Chrome, Vivaldi supports the uBlock Origin extension which is the most important extension for being able to browse the web nowadays.

The European Commission lost the Chat Control 2.0 battle over access to end-to-end encrypted data. By the summer 2026, they will be back with their next attempt: Going Dark. This time some EU member states want to include VPN services.

The Going Dark initiative, or ProtectEU as the Commission now calls it, wants to “enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner”. This is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt.

#Mozilla choosing to kill embeddable Gecko (make it a #Firefox only engine, essentially) over a decade ago was such a tragic mistake.

Alternative browsers & desktop apps had no choice but to go with WebKit or Blink/Electron.

As a result, Mozilla have nobody to blame but themselves for their minuscule marketshare and nil developer mindshare today.

Further readings:
* lwn.net/Articles/436412/ (circa 2011)
* chrislord.net/2016/02/24/the-c… from @Cwiiis
* dutherenverseauborddelatable.w… from @Yoric

#OpenWeb

The Gecko monoculture

I remember a time, not so very long ago, when Gecko powered 4 or 5 non-Mozilla browsers, some of them on exotic platforms, as well as GPS devices, wysiwyg editors, geographic platforms, email clien…

^{Il y a du thé renversé au bord de la table}

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

We'll be at FOSDEM, and we have updates for you!

1. Excellent mentors signed up to our hackathon to help newcomers get started on Matrix
2. We have a booth with a solid team to staff it, but you can join the fun and help us
3. The Decentralised Communications Devroom we coordinate now has a schedule

Find all the details on our blog!

matrix.org/blog/2025/12/fosdem…

FOSDEM Update

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

^{Thib (matrix.org)}