it is with an extremely heavy heart that i inform you all that Ralph Giles aka @rillian at many places died suddenly of a heart attack over the weekend. i will miss him so much.
Small hypothesis: I bet people like AI chat interfaces in some part because they are “clean” – simple text, easy to process, consistent visuals, no ads, no pop-ups, etc.
To use a cliche example: Even if it wasn’t in any way “smarter,” it’d still be nicer to ask ChatGPT for a recipe than go to a webpage to read that recipe. Its interface is a natural “reader mode.”
I think it very well might, because of the difference in their nature.
Recipe webpages are strictly transactional. Their main purpose is to squeeze as much juice out of you *on this visit* as they can, and they compete in an extremely brutal, low-margin economy against other pages which have the same content and are attempting the same thing. There's 0 brand loyalty, there are no switching costs, if the page falls down in SEO rankings, they'll have 0 revenue after a week. This means that if they already have a customer "hooked", they need to shove as many ads in their face as they can. Next week, that customer won't remember whether the awful domain was online-recipes[.]com or recipesonline[.]us anyway.
Chatbots are different, as most people only use one. That means there's value in keeping the customer hooked, and giving them access to useful info when nobody else will is a great way to do this.
In an AI chatbot, the goals of squeezing as much money out of that customer and keeping that customer for themselves are at odds with eachother, and both of these goals are important.
I don't think they'll stay as pleasant to use as they are, but I also don't think they'll ever get anywhere near as bad as recipe websites.
Apple and Google have left X in their app stores, despite its AI-generated images that violate their own rules. There are no principles left in Silicon Valley.
I hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase. 1/7
Ich habe heute ein TikTok von Connor Scott Gardener gesehen. Er spricht darin über seine Erfahrungen mit Augenärzt*innen – und selten habe ich mich so unmittelbar, so schmerzhaft präzise wiedererkannt. Es war dieses „Ja, genau so fühlt sich das an“, das Erinnerungen an alte Müdigkeit und Verletzungen wachruft. (1/9)
Ich bin blind seit Geburt. Leber’sche Congenitale Amaurose. Eine Erkrankung, bei der die Stelle des schärfsten Sehens nie ausgebildet wurde, bei der die Fotorezeptoren rundherum im Laufe des Erwachsenwerdens nach und nach abgestorben sind. Als Kind hatte ich dennoch Sehrest: grobe Umrisse, große Objekte, Lichtquellen. Ich bin im Dorf Fahrrad gefahren, bis ich zehn war. Heute, Ende dreißig, benutze ich einen Lichtsensor, wenn ich sicher sein will, dass das Deckenlicht wirklich an ist. Mein Leben ist nicht weniger geworden – aber mein Sehen ist längst kein Feld mehr für medizinische Überraschungen. (2/9)
Und doch betrete ich Augenarztpraxen, in denen man genau so tut, als wäre ich ein ungelöstes Rätsel. Ich komme meist nur, um ein Rezept für ein blindentechnisches Hilfsmittel abzuholen. Keine Hoffnung, keine Erwartung auf Verbesserung. Nur Bürokratie. Und trotzdem beginnt fast immer dasselbe Ritual: Tropfen zur Pupillenerweiterung. Grelles Licht, das schmerzt. Untersuchungen, deren Sinn niemand erklärt. Ärger, weil ich nicht „richtig mitmache“. (3/9)
Ich habe das Glück, arbeiten gehen zu können. Seit Jahren bezahle ich meine Blindenhilfsmittel selbst. Sogar das Jaws-Update werde ich selbst bezahlen, genau um dieser Erniedrigung zu entgehen. Ich empfinde das als entwürdigend. Auch ich bin von Geburt an blind. Bei mir sind die Augen normal, der Sehnerv ist verkümmert. Daran ändert sich nichts. Ich will mich nicht jedes mal neu rechtfertigen und meine Blindheit beweisen. Und es ist mir unverständlich, warum es für Menschen mit einer auf dem Ausweis festgestellten unbefristeten Behinderung keine Regelung gibt, dass der Ausweis als Nachweis der Notwendigkeit gilt... #Blindleben #Disabled-Alltag
Interesting chat with my wife's uncle this weekend who is a Vietnam vet.
I asked him if he felt like the south Vietnamese were supportive of their efforts to keep the north in check and he yes but they had a lot of issues with people sneaking across the lines and switching sides all the time to whoever they thought was going to win.
> Mounted on each side of the Seawolf Hueys were 2.75-inch rocket launchers, and two M-60 flex-mounted machine guns per side. Unique to the Seawolf gunships were its two gunners, one seated on each side of the helicopter with a freehand, shoulder-fired M-60 machine gun. These very special young gunners hung out of the helicopter with one foot on the rocket pod and fired to the side, under, and to the rear, as the gunship rolled in and out of an attack run.
I thought when he was talking to me about this that they were mounted. He was hanging out the chopper shooting an M60 FREEHAND?! That's wild
He told me originally they didn't have the 50 cal and when they added that to the Hueys to penetrate the bunkers they had issues with the machine gun literally moving the helicopter and taking them off target
At one point they needed to recover the tail section of another chopper and the south Vietnamese wanted to barter for it I guess, so they took a trip to one base to go pick up some cases of beer, then flew over to another base in Cambodia to trade it for a cooler full of steaks, then took the steaks with them to trade the Vietnamese for the tail section. They jammed it sideways through the doors of the helicopter and flew it out that way.
He said they'd sleep with their clothes on and when they got the announcement SEAWOLVES SCRAMBLE they had 10 minutes to put on their shoes and run to load up and take off to go assist/defend another unit from the air
They'd take off so aggressively that they'd drop down off the side of the ship and you could stick your foot out the door and touch the water before they'd catch the airfoil and lift off
Also they were trained to release the rocket pods and kick out the ammo box sitting in the middle if they were ever going to go down, but it never happened.
Considering how small the unit was and that they are officially recorded as getting 8200 kills he probably has a lot of fucked up shit in his head. God damn.
Thank you for sharing all this. Fascinating. Stories that are passed down like this are sometimes never heard. The hardships, challenges, even enjoyable moments (where can be found in war).
@polishdub what's interesting to me is that my mother in law and nearly all her siblings were in the Navy, but nobody seems to recognize the very special and dangerous unit he was in during Vietnam. Most of the others I think are a bit younger so they never really saw active duty like that, but still... they should know
my wife has never known what he went through. She just always thought of him as Santa Claus because of his white beard
I hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase. 1/7
Like the ancient Ptolemaic model of the solar system, which tried to overcome its fundamentally incorrect understanding of the solar system by adding complex "epicycles" to force its Earth-centred model to match observed reality, 2/7
It attempts to fit solutions from potentially very different domains together with corrective code "epicycles" until it satisfies its context, the user, and tests. 4/7
This is a trap: while the code works within its parameters, its internal model is incoherent. When it inevitably fails, the incoherent basis for debugging or correction will lead to additional 'epicycles' being added. This process increases system complexity and brittleness. 5/7
The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, though completely incorrect, allowed sailors to navigate the globe for centuries, its failure was not practical but explanatory, similar to how Ptolemaic Code works until deeper issues arise. 6/7
but more epicycles means more lines of code which means more productivity which means better "programmers" which means "better" software, more money, etc, etc...
This is exactly how I have described the limitations of black box models to others.
A good scientific model should do two things:
1) Provide accurate predictions of outcomes given certain inputs, and 2) Enable greater understanding of how a system works.
Simpler machine learning models, like logistic regression or decision trees, can sometimes do both, at least for simpler phenomenon. The models are explainable and their decisions are interpretable. For those reasons among others, applied machine learning researchers still use these simpler approaches wherever they can be made to work.
But in our haste to increase accuracy for more complex phenomenon, we've created models that merely provide semi-accurate predictions at the expense of explainability and interpretability. Like the ptolemaic model of the solar system, these models mostly work well in predicting outcomes within the narrow areas in which they've been trained. But they do absolutely nothing to enable understanding of the underlying phenomenon. Or worse, they mislead us into fundamentally wrong understandings. And because their training is overfit onto the limits of their training data, their accuracy falls apart unpredictably when used for tasks outside the distribution of their training. Computational linguists and other experts that might celebrate these models instead lament the benighted ignorance left in their wake.
Or how it was more eloquently stated in the great philosophical film Billy Madison:
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
@DaveMWilburn #pluralistic describes the technical debt of these AI coding models as asbestos in the walls.
A hazard we'll be digging out of the walls for decades to come.
It remains a fact that when petrostate despots are this desperate to impose user adoption, alarm bells should be ringing. Fossil fuel funded cyberwarfare.
“While we were taking the picture, I said, ’Could you make it $1.5 trillion?’” Trump said about Saudi investment. “So he’s got something to think about.”
The tell-tales are lots of special casing in the code (the epicycles there) and the response "it works and that is all that counts" when you try to discuss what you see in the code.
This way of doing things not only happens in coding (as this example above) but un many disciplines including science itself (when theoretical knowledge is incorrect or not fully understood, so little empirical models are established until a bigger paradigm explains everything naturally) but also in industry, for example, in the US cows feed in industrial corn feeders instead of natural grasslands. This cause an increase of Escherichia Coli bacteria that naturally exists in the cow's rumen that ends up in the burger grinded meat. Industry invested in chemists and biochemists to develop a chemical process that uses ammonia and other substances that kill the EColi bacteria, but also leaves the meat without color (grey). So another process is developed to artificially color back the meat... Off course everything is fixed allowing cows to eat in grasslands, because the cellulose of the grass naturally controls the level of EColi bacteria. Artificial epicycles for fixing something fundamentally wrong that hould be fixed easily.
It's like overfitting a high degree polynomial to some data - each new data point requires a significant change to the overfitted formula (for software, substitute "use case" for "data point").
In order to make technological progress, we needed to abandon the incorrect model of our solar system. We would probably not have made it to the moon if we'd stuck to the ptolemaic model of our solar system.
Similarly, in order to meaningfully advance our software ecosystem, we need to abandon code produced using poor software engineering practices – such as LLM codegen.
Problem of Ptolemaic model wasn’t correctness—it is equivalent to heliocentric model—but the fact that its builders resisted attempts to falsify core assumptions.
That is the problem with AI coding. When it works, it skips model verification entirely. When it doesn’t, it doesn’t offer actionable insights.
@dk@nettime.org Jumping back a level of analysis or two (and therefore maybe no longer being valid): I'm thinking of the tweaks LLM masters demand their engineers make to LLM output, usually (from what I've seen) for two reasons:
To reduce antisocial behavior (e.g., LLMs producing fascist, misogynist, racist, anti-queer, etc. content, or stop them from encouraging people to commit #suicide) To increase the happiness of rich-people-who-own-the-LLMs (e.g., increase profit, decrease Grok saying Elon is an asshole, etc.)
The fact that both of these need to (apparently) be done regularly suggests a mismatch with "reality." Arguably, that is not objective external reality but the internal reality of the LLM vis-a-vis its constantly-updating training corpus. The combination of the LLM code and its training corpus seems to make LLMs regularly say awful things and also fail to generate maximum profit for the owners/shareholders.
I won't be the first (or 10,000th) to say there is a significant mismatch between what LLMs (currently) are and what their masters want them to do.
I think this prediction is on target. It is a more general syndrome that results from multiple failures to practice good software engineering. Reuse of code can be really great or a nightmare. I’d put AI-code reuse together with other common software failures in the category of faulty design. That affects everything downstream if you don’t catch it. Your formulation also highlights the failure to create complete requirements as well as the limitations of testing. It’s why we have brittle systems. I’ll wager most human-generated code of any significant complexity is “Ptolemaic” by your definition. No one has proved to my satisfaction that the current crop of AI-developed code is any better quality than what people produce, and that’s generous. But it is fast and probably costs less (initially) even if it doesn’t work right!
I love the idea! That said, how is traditional software development not prone to this either? Factoring out the deconomic (as in: the problem scaling out quickly) aspect, what do we do to prevent fundamentally incorrect models other than verifying the resulting artifacts against more or less distant interpretations of the user intentions that an AI could not?
Nice. It is a little unfair to Ptolemy. Epicycles are in implementation of the Fourier transform.
It is very good example of the distinction between a predictive model and a casual one. The Copernican model would still have to inject corrections.
“ For his contemporaries, the ideas presented by Copernicus were not markedly easier to use than the geocentric theory and did not produce more accurate predictions of planetary positions.”
Hi @dk, makes me think of this interview with Oswald Wiener, which is luckily still on archive.org: web.archive.org/web/2016031518… Quote: " Zwei Gedankenstränge waren die Vorläufer zum Bioadapter. Zum einen die Vorstellung der Gesellschaft als Homöostat. Ich bemerkte, dass die Kybernetik diesen Zug an sich hat, als Neuheitenverhinderungsmechanismus zu funktionieren. Ich habe auch alle möglichen Gleichnisse gebraucht, etwa dass Kopernikus über moderne Computer verfügte. Dann hätte man das ptolemäische Weltbild endlos weiterführen können, das ja in erster Linie deswegen aufgegeben wurde, weil die Epizykel immer mehr und die Berechnungen immer komplizierter wurden. Aber durch Erhöhung der Rechenleistung hätte man das kopernikanische Weltbild verhindert. Vielleicht nicht für immer, aber für 100 Jahre. Wenn der Sprung zu einer neuen Qualität, einer anderen Auffassung geschieht, weil die Widersprüche nicht mehr administrierbar sind, wäre der Computer ein Mittel zur Verlängerung des alten Zustands. Der andere Strang waren erkenntnistheoretische Schwierigkeiten. Man kann schwer übersehen, dass wir nur Repräsentationen der Wirklichkeit in unserem Kopf haben, die verbessert, verschlechtert, angepasst werden. ..."
Beim Einsteigen in den Mietwagen wird mir klar, sie haben mir das richtige Fahrzeug für die Mission gegeben. Ein kleiner Bildschirm zeigt, wogegen ich rückwärts fahren könnte. Nach kurzem Zögern widerstehe der Versuchung.
Like - face generation. People either wear glasses or they don't, it's a binary operation. But generation via diffusion starts with a continuous feature space, and is acted upon by a continuous function. This code will function in most cases but it is fundamentally incorrect.
If you take two faces, one with glasses and one without, interpolating between them will get you weird glasses melded with the face, and this is an artefact of that.
Eben in einer Unterhaltung mit Produktionsmitarbeiter:innen das Wort „Motek“ für Hammer gehört. Gemutmaßt, dass es polnisch ist. Recherchiert und zwei Dinge herausgefunden: 1. gebräuchlich im Ruhrgebiet und tatsächlich polnischer Herkunft. 2. im hebräischen bedeutet Motek „Schatz, Liebste:r“ und daraus ist im jiddischen das Kosewort „Motte“ entstanden. Meine Oma hat mich quasi immer „(Mini)Motte“ genannt 😍
When I started experimenting with #Linux again in 2024, I was very impressed at how mature everything had become since I last tried it in the mid-00s. The biggest surprise, though, was #GNOME. It had a level of intentionality and clarity of vision that far exceeded my expectations of a FLOSS project. It made me feel welcome and comfortable.
To the developers of @gnome : Thank you for having the audacity to strive for simplicity in the face of continued criticism from the community. It matters.
See? All 3 of my wrappers got a little bit of TLC. (tender love and care) Brailab-Wrapper got the nicer say-all, Softvoice-wrapper did too, and Flexvoice-wrapper got major updates to how it handles both say all and consonant generation. Whew whew. Gotta give them love all equally, they're my babies now. Weee weeee they go, crying through the night, asking me to fix this callback or that function, weeee weee. Hush little code babies, hush. You're all patched up now. Next time you'll all grow will be when NVDA 2026.1 will require I wrap the wrapper in another wrapper to sandbox the wrapper from wrapping NVDA too rapidly. Wait what?
I have since at least 2009 posted occasional emails I received on this blog. Often they are emails from people who found my email address somewhere, thinking I am involved in the product or service where they found me.
two concepts that many developers don't think much about are connectedness (how many things talk/connect that you aren't even aware of) and unintended use/consequences.
i think it's great you keep this collection to remind you and others of how much we all don't know about how our work is used or how the things we do use don't work the way we think they do. :)
Liebe Community, nach reiflicher Überlegung haben wir entschieden, diesen Kanal der Verbraucherzentrale Schleswig-Holstein nicht aktiv weiterzuführen. Aktuell fehlen uns die personellen Ressourcen für ein aktives Community-Management und eine plattformgerechte Aufbereitung unserer Inhalte.
Bei Fragen oder Beschwerden erreichst Du uns per Mail unter: info@vzsh.de
Aktuelle Infos findest Du auf www.vzsh.de
Vielen Dank fürs Mitlesen, Teilen und für eure Unterstützung! 🫶
Hello Wonderful people. I wanted you to all know, I updated eurpod.com/flexvoice.nvda-addo…. For those who are caching an older copy, use this link instead OK? eurpod.com/flexvoice130.nvda-a… It’s now way more resilient with URLs and weird symbol-heavy text (Mastodon stress tests 😅). Big win: no more silent dropouts when it hits consonant-only strings like MSGS, HTTPS, ETC. I really really put effort into making the normalizer more robust.
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It’s not easy being a male Anna’s hummingbird: hovering with your wings moving 50 beats per second, flashing your gorget to defend the aloe, feeding every 10 minutes in order to have enough nutrition to survive, and positioning you…
So it started three days ago with one very neat little recommendation from @FreakyFwoof. An organ plugin that was on sale at a bargain price, and sounded much better than some of our previous organ. But now, thanks to this recommendation, and a little help from @daygar, not only have we got an amazing organ, but a free synth plugin worth $300 on top! I mean seriously...it's amazing how one recommendation can lead to other great stuff! Thanks Andre and Day for your help on this!
De maatschappij is aan het veranderen en daar komt heel wat stress bij kijken. Weet je niet wat je met jezelf aan moet? Je komt jezelf echt tegen als je je inzet voor anderen, beloofd!!! Vind community, vriendschap, en samenhorigheid bij een collectief! Interesse in het ACA? Stuur ons een berichtje!
New podcast episode! #LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages – but we want to do more! Jonathan Clark recently joined the TDF team to improve LibreOffice’s support for RTL (right-to-left) and CTL (complex text layout) scripts: peertube.opencloud.lu/w/c31Cgi… #foss #openSource #freesoftware
I was trying to listen to the episode on @podverse but there seems to be something wrong. The video plays, and it stops halfway. Any chance you could check what kind of podcast RSS goes to Podverse (looks like there's at least two: podverse.fm/podcast/l9ldjLosC_ and podverse.fm/podcast/8krTUBa_Zs), if the metadata is correct, and maybe only send audio to it?
LibreOffice is a free, fully-featured and open source office suite used by millions of people around the world. Download it from https://www.libreoffice.org Support LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
This will only make sense if you're a Linux geek, but I just saw a post where someone was wondering why government departments are still using X. At first, I interpreted the question as wondering why they're using X11 and haven't switched to Wayland, but, of course, in this context, X was referring to my ex-social network.
Congratulations on this milestone. I'm proud that AccessKit (accesskit.dev/) played a role in making this possible. I know that we, both AccessKit and Servo, have a long road ahead to implement full web content accessibility across platforms. But this is a good first step.
Shok'z ist DER Anbieter für Knochenleit- und Open-earHeadsets, Produkte, die für #Blinde wie mich nun durchaus interessant sein können. Als ich mir die neuen open fit 2 pro besorgt habe, hab ich mir auch die App runter geladen. Was soll ich sagen: Buttons nicht sinnvoll beschriftet, equilizer nicht nutzbar und nicht wirklich gut bedienbar, aber noch erträglich. Ausser, dass man sich ums Verrecken nicht ohne sehende Hilfe einloggen konnte. Denn der Schalter zur Akzeptanz von Datenschutzrichtlinien und AGB war nicht Umzuschalten. Hab das damals sofort gemeldet und eine Laberantwort bekommen a la das tut uns sehr leid, Barrierefreiheit liegt uns sehr am Herzen, wir sind bemüht, unsere Produkte für alle zugänglich und nutzbar zu machen ... Bla bla! Also kurz: Wir nehmen das mal mit... Das ist jetzt einige Monate her. Diese Woche wollte ich schauen, ob es ein Update für die Firmware meines Headsets gibt. dafür sollte ich mich neu einloggen... Das Problem besteht immer noch. Keine einzige Verbesserung in der App und kein barrierefreier Zugang. Ich habe gestern wieder eine Mail hingeschrieben, dieses mal mit der konkreten Frage, wie ich mich mit Voiceover ohne sehende Unterstützung in die App einloggen kann... Bisher keine Antwort. Und das von einer europäischen Firma, die Produkte herstellt und vertreibt, für welche Blinde keine ganz unrelevante Nutzergruppe sind. Ich weiss, Luxusproblem angesichts Stadtbild und Grundsicherungsdiskussion, und fraglich, warum man sich überhaupt in eine App einloggen muss, um Firmware-Updates zu kriegen, aber musste trotzdem mal irgendwie raus. #Blindleben #Disabled-Alltag #Blind #shokz "#BFSG
Inzwischen sind wieder 2 Monate vergangen. Ich hatte zwischenzeitlich wieder eine Laberantwort bekommen, ohne konkrete Beantwortung meiner Frage. Nun hat Shok'z ein neues Flackschiff auf den Markt gebracht, mit Head-Tracking und anderen Features. Aber die App... Wieder hingeschrieben, nach konkretem Zeitplan für die angekündigte Barrierefreiheit der App gefragt. Wieder Laberantwort, ist sehr komplex, ein Zeitplan kann nicht genannt werden, aber an mangelnder Priorisierung läge es auf keinen Fall. Habe erneut geantwortet vor ca 1 Woche und das in Frage gestellt, geschrieben, dass #Barrierefreiheit einfacher erreicht wird, wenn sie von Anfang an mitgedacht, statt später aufwendig nachgerüstet wird. Habe gefragt, warum das nicht geschehen ist, wenn Screenreadernutzer eine relevante Zielgruppe sind... Erneut keine Antwort. #Blindleben #DisabledAlltag #BFSG
If you insist on not having speech in your videos and only having music or complete silence, you are an asshouse who clearly doesn't care about blind people.
I don't think its that they don't care about blind people. Its more of an aspect of they never even considered the possibility that a blind person would watch their video and have this limitation. In the same way it is the same as if a person produces a podcast and doesn't supply transcripts for deaf people they are hating onthe the deaf community.
@khronos Doesn't matter. If people provide feedback on your content like suggestions to make it more accessible to those with disabilities and you flat out ignore it, it looks bad on you.
Another option that may or may not be the answer is that what if the person creating the content isn't a native English speaker and is ashamed of how they mightcome across in an audible way so they use writing to say what they want to say because their grasp of the second language is not all that good.
Well, here's a new accursed UI pattern. When you try to book a flight on Chase rewards and key in the exact code for the airport you want to go to, it suggests a bunch of non-matching airports, and puts the exact match like 10 options down.
Safari 17.4 shipped a new HTML switch element that upgrades a checkbox to a switch by adding a `switch` attribute: `<input type="checkbox" switch>`.
This blog post introduces a polyfill for the element, covering accessibility, internationalization and styling, and looking at the element's status in the HTML spec.
"Have you considered going commercial yet!?!?!?" Yes and it is a bad idea. Here is why it is actually really hard to give money and support most FOSS projects. In a blogpost rant.
This is probably my second to last blog in that improptu serie about Hobbyists Maintainers, slowly reaching its conclusion of a model of Hobbyists Maintainers situation and how we can actually help them.
Because believe it or not, I know how to say something else than "no" or "it will not work".
In the OpenSource Supply Chain discourse in the past few years, we got many versions of the same article. The title is usually something like “unpaid maintainer of library X demand Big Company to shut up or pay them money”.
also, since lots of developers make a lot more than 5k/month in their dayjob, even just offering 5k/month for Open Source work is a challenge since that would mean a significant step down in pay which is hard for most people to deal with
I had a very strange and scary dream involving my Mini PC. It was apparently opted into running Windows preview builds, although nothing looked any different. Whenever I would switch to a certain synth, the fan would run really high, the audio would sometimes crackle, and it would either reboot or just freeze, but not like a blue screen. I then somehow was able to open some sort of log thing that showed way down at the bottom of this Windows Update page in settings that as part of being in the Windows preview, it was sending 29 gb to Microsoft over the wi-fi by default! I switched the synthesizer again, and immediately it crashed again and did the same thing, even after turning that setting off. I'm guessing I dreamed this because one of my machines had the audio stutter a bit yesterday after the wi-fi temporarily disconnected.
Lol why does this sound like something that could happen with Microslop and Windows these days though? Like idk if I'd be surprised. Audiocrackling is something I experience each day, drivers... Nothing more needs to be said. My best friend on Windows for sure.
@jonathan859 Yeah, and it was also Windows 11 in the dream, I'm not sure what was up with my Windows 10 machines in the dream. Which is interesting because the stuttering yesterday actually happened here on my Windows 10 machine.
Just finished my 1st audio drama, in 2026, and generally since a long time. Was just around 9h, as it's split in 2 parts and the 2nd part is sadly going to release on april 30th. So what do I do? Get the full audiobook, which will miss the effects and different voices, which I found quite good, though I admit the audiobook narator sounds nice as well, or do I wait, which would kinda disturb the feeling I have for the story now? Or both lol. In case anyone wonders, it's Fourth Wing 1, but I'm listening in german.
Regardless I need good audio drama/audiobook suggestions, I'm getting into it again and it's great distraction/generally worlds better than scrolling TikTok and similar stuff I used to fill the time with which I now spend listening. And audiobookshelf also makes it fun, the seemless syncing of positions across all devices and some nice additional features like rewind on pause of the clients make it even more enjoyable.
We're Alive The Dungeon Crawler Carl audio drama version, whatever its called. The Harry Potter full cast versions are the ones that come to my head rn for audio drama type things.
If you are gonna do the audio books though, I recommend the English version. I know it probably has been translated because of how popular it got, but the narator for the original audio books is just something else altogether.
Have you found an accessible ABS client for Windows? There are some pretty accessible ones for iOS, but the official web interface... well... I couldn't get anything to play there.
@Piciok No, but I have not really looked since the web client works good enough for me. The most I had to do to resolve playback issues, which was one time is relogging in, but usually it works all right. I do not have a lot in my lib though so far. Maybe they will improve stuff with the new web client which is apparently in the works.
@irisʼ metabolism, but 
@lumiʼs appetite 🙃
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Graydon Hoare • • •Ted Mielczarek
in reply to Graydon Hoare • • •Hubert Figuière
in reply to Ted Mielczarek • • •