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Today was quite productive.
Got my 1st seedbox and some torrents and resilio running.
Setup linkding and migrated my Firefox bookmarks, really nice tool.
Some game dev here and there.
The weekend was too short but wellp, off to a new week...
Got my 1st seedbox and some torrents and resilio running.
Setup linkding and migrated my Firefox bookmarks, really nice tool.
Some game dev here and there.
The weekend was too short but wellp, off to a new week...
This entry was edited (4 seconds ago)
RE: mastodon.social/@NouranKhaledGā¦
If you are still thinking of us, please donate and share to help my family overcome this tough time
chuffed.org/project/121561-urgā¦
I'm a human being. I have dreams. But the genocide changed my dreams. In the past I had big dreams. But now all my dreams are to live a normal life.What normal life means for me?
A normal life is to sleep peacefully in the night. To have a home where my family gathers. To eat healthy food and drink clean water. To meet friends in the university. That's it! Unfortunately these basics became big dreams
Please donate to help my family overcome this tough time
chuffed.org/project/121561-urgā¦
Urgent help for Ahmed's family
"Iām tired, Mama. Iām thinking of the hours that I'll spend tomorrow in the water line." ā says 9 year old Ahmed to his mother before going to sleep.Chuffed
I'm a human being. I have dreams. But the genocide changed my dreams. In the past I had big dreams. But now all my dreams are to live a normal life.
What normal life means for me?
A normal life is to sleep peacefully in the night. To have a home where my family gathers. To eat healthy food and drink clean water. To meet friends in the university. That's it! Unfortunately these basics became big dreams
Please donate to help my family overcome this tough time
chuffed.org/project/121561-urgā¦
Urgent help for Ahmed's family
"Iām tired, Mama. Iām thinking of the hours that I'll spend tomorrow in the water line." ā says 9 year old Ahmed to his mother before going to sleep.Chuffed
Muslim mindset: āIām fasting, donāt eat in front of me or I might be tempted.ā
Christian: practices self-control and doesnāt make a public show of fasting.
Muslim man: sees a woman who isnāt fully covered and says, āCover yourself or Iāll be tempted.ā
Christian man: sees the same thing and says, āI need to guard my heart and discipline my eyes so I donāt sin.ā
Christianity deals with the heart. We emphasise self-discipline and self-control. Islam, on the other hand, tries to control the environment instead, asking others to change because the individual hasnāt learned to master himself.
When the heart is truly transformed, temptation loses its power. Self-control means taking responsibility for your own desires, not placing the burden on others. A disciplined heart governs the flesh, not the other way around.
What are your pain points, folks? Stuff that you hate doing or dealing with, or problems you can't find a good solution to? Stuff that other people might be frustrated with, too.
I'm looking for a way to make myself valuable to other people, as a way to both help people and also earn an income to feed my family in the process.
One thing I can do *really well* is create reliable software to automate rote tasks, generate financial/statistical/other reports, or calculate difficult solutions. Think it can't be done without LLMs? I might surprise you!
Throw me a bone!
Please boost for reach!
#PainPoints
#WishList
#Automation
#Reporting
#ProblemSolving
#FediHire
#GetFediBHired
#FediJob
A good friend of mine needs a lot of help. Facing health challenges as well as eviction, she needs enough covered to keep her, her partner and their cats from becoming homeless. Payment is going to be due by February or they get evicted, and they need as much covered as possible. They've personally helped me out before in my time of need nearly 2 years ago; please help me boost and cover their costs, I'll be forever grateful!
Python in 2026:
- New code doesn't work, misses dependency
- Dependency can't be installed with old PIP
- PIP can't update itself, since it is too old
- Delete PIP, download PIP installer
- PIP installer is too new for old Python
- download old-style new PIP installer
- install new PIP
- install dependency
Now I'm sitting there wondering what the new code was supposed to solve. Forgot why I ever tried to change that thing.
"Wenn man die Lage Polens auf dem Globus anschaut, sind die vom Deutschen Reich gestellten Fragen Ć¼brigens nachvollziehbar."
Was fĆ¼r ein wahnsinnig gefƤhrlicher Trottel!
"Trottel" soll nicht implizieren, dass dieser skrupellose Anti-EuropƤer im Rang eines Fraktionsvorsitzenden, der ganz sicher Merz' rostiger Sargnagel sein wird, so einen imperialistischen Dreck nicht mit vollkommener, berechnender Absicht ƶffentlich raushaut.
Trottel ist ableistisch und darf von dir zukĆ¼nftig gern vermieden werden.
Behindertenfeindliche Wƶrter sind Nazisprech ā¤
Und leider auch verharmlosend, denn, wie du selbst schreibst, machen Menners wie Spahn das nicht aus "geringer Intelligenz", sondern aus Berechnung und einer faschistoiden SchlƤue heraus.
brrr.
Behindertenfeindliche Wƶrter sind Nazisprech ā¤
Und leider auch verharmlosend, denn, wie du selbst schreibst, machen Menners wie Spahn das nicht aus "geringer Intelligenz", sondern aus Berechnung und einer faschistoiden SchlƤue heraus.
brrr.
Ha. Wanted to read my home timeline without seeing replies. Control shift F, unchecked replies, and boom! The only thing it didn't do that it was supposed to was retain my buffer position, but hell yeah. Love filtering in realtime.
Zach Bennoui reshared this.
We're having a bit of a rough weekend. Had some things yesterday that locked the system out. Nobody could switch and the fronter had no connection to our headspace. We don't assume today will be that much better, but we're hoping tomorrow and the rest of the week will be less of a mess. How's everyone else's time? As always we hope everyone is well and taking care of themselves. - Samara
@Bri Yeah, hopefully it will. Yesterday was just rough because people were being jerks. Today seems to be a liiiittle easier though, but that's also not a very high bar. - Samara
I'm sorry guys, #FastSM's Bluesky support is kinda lackluster at the moment. My main focus has been Mastodon, but working on some Bluesky fixes now.
Good point lol, I guess if some crazy fediverse like thing happens where someone creates an ATProto service that becomes a viable alternative to vanilla Bluesky it'll be useful then.
OK, so all I can trace from my minidumps is, my crashes are happening with how I'm calling LibEspeak.dll. hmm. This engine may not be ready for awhile. I'm going to have to break down both X86 and x64 calling conventions for Espeak. At least it's open-source so this isn't hard just more work.
OK, looks like The issue is with eSpeak initialization: calling FreeLibrary in the destructor may unload the module while leaving the static variable espeak_initialized true. Huh. Reference counters, here we come.
OK, looks like The issue is with eSpeak initialization: calling FreeLibrary in the destructor may unload the module while leaving the static variable espeak_initialized true. Huh. Reference counters, here we come.
This entry was edited (1 hour ago)
Just realized: Whenever I read outrageous news about politics, my outrage comes second. First, my brain makes an attempt to find a perspective in which it might make sense to act like these morons do.
Thatās not healthy for my brain. But Iāve trained myself so well that I canāt seem to unlearn the reflex.
And this is the main reason why I have to avoid news these days. Of course itās also because of the helplessness and all the bad emotions. But mainly because āunderstandingā causes damage to my brain and soul.
Ok, @x0 will also be happy to know: I added two new language settings:
1) autoTieDiphthongs
When enabled, the frontend scans token sequences and if it sees: previous token is vowel/semivowel, current token is vowel/semivowel, current is NOT wordStart and NOT syllableStart (so we donāt smash hiatus) and not already tied, not lengthened, and the second vowel looks like a typical offglide candidate (high vowels like i, ÉŖ, u, Ź, ā¦)
ā¦it marks them as tied internally (prev.tiedTo=true, cur.tiedFrom=true), so timing treats the second part as a short offglide.
The second setting is autoDiphthongOffglideToSemivowel. Optional, off by default. If enabled and autoTieDiphthongs is enabled, then when we auto-tie we also try to swap the offglide vowel to a semivowel: i/ÉŖ/ÉØ -> j u/Ź -> w - This is the āmake the glide more obviousā switch. I hope these will help people.
1) autoTieDiphthongs
When enabled, the frontend scans token sequences and if it sees: previous token is vowel/semivowel, current token is vowel/semivowel, current is NOT wordStart and NOT syllableStart (so we donāt smash hiatus) and not already tied, not lengthened, and the second vowel looks like a typical offglide candidate (high vowels like i, ÉŖ, u, Ź, ā¦)
ā¦it marks them as tied internally (prev.tiedTo=true, cur.tiedFrom=true), so timing treats the second part as a short offglide.
The second setting is autoDiphthongOffglideToSemivowel. Optional, off by default. If enabled and autoTieDiphthongs is enabled, then when we auto-tie we also try to swap the offglide vowel to a semivowel: i/ÉŖ/ÉØ -> j u/Ź -> w - This is the āmake the glide more obviousā switch. I hope these will help people.
šØš¦Samuel ProulxšØš¦
in reply to Aaron • • •I can go into more detail about why all the options are bad if you want. But this is the sort of problem that eats years of your life, requires advanced mathematics (digital signal processing at a minimum), and advanced linguistics, on top of being a good systems-level programmer.
Sam's Stuff - The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users
stuff.interfree.caAaron
in reply to šØš¦Samuel ProulxšØš¦ • • •@fastfinge I just so happen to be an (unemployed) machine learning researcher by trade, with advanced mathematics, linguistics, and programming skills. Maybe not systems-level programming, but I could probably find someone who does that and work with them.
Given that the first two responses I've gotten were both about accessibility, there might be more of a market for this than you think, and also, it might make a good way to demo my skills even if it isn't paid work.
šØš¦Samuel ProulxšØš¦
in reply to Aaron • • •The reason I say systems-level programming is mostly because for a text to speech system used by a blind power user, you need to keep an eye on performance. If the system crashes and the computer stops talking, the only choice the user has is to hard reset. It would be running and speaking the entire time the computer is in use, so memory leaks and other inefficiencies are going to add up extremely quickly.
From what I can tell, the ideal is some sort of formant-based vocal tract model. Espeak sort of does this, but only for the voiced sounds. Plosives are generated from modeling recorded speech, so sound weird and overly harsh to most users, and I suspect this is where most of the complaints about espeak come from. A neural network or other sort of machine learning model could be useful to discover the best parameters and run the model, but not for generating audio itself, I don't think. This is because most modern LLM-based neural network models can't allow changing of pitch, speed, etc, as all of that comes from the training data.
Secondly, the phonemizer needs to be reproducible. What if, say, it mispronounces "Hermione". With most modern text to speech systems, this is hard to fix; the output is not always the same for any given input. So a correction like "her my oh nee" might work in some circumstances, but not others, because how the model decides to pronounce words and where it puts the emphasis are just a black box. The state of the art, here, remains Eloquence. But it uses no machine learning at all, just hundreds of thousands of hand-coded rules and formants. But, of course, it's closed source (and as far as anyone can tell the source has actually been lost since the early 2000's), so goodness knows what all those rules are.
šØš¦Samuel ProulxšØš¦
in reply to Aaron • • •Nicks World
in reply to Aaron • • •Aaron
in reply to Nicks World • • •@NicksWorld
Have your tried LibreOffice? I have read that it is accessible, but I trust real users better.
What specific features do you wish for most?
I have a feeling it's probably a big ask for a single developer, but I could at least take a look at the source for LibreOffice (unlike MS products) and see if I can add the features without retooling the whole codebase.
Nicks World
in reply to Aaron • • •Aaron
in reply to Nicks World • • •@NicksWorld I would probably need to sit with you to understand the dynamics of the flow and where it gives you trouble. There are a few things to unpack here, on first reading:
* Not sure what misformatting you're finding.
* By getting to the categories, do you mean navigating columns by their headers?
* Do you have specific spreadsheets you are working with regularly? If so, I might be able to come up with a different way to collect and/or present the information that is more naturally suited to blind users, like a Q&A format with predetermined flow.
Spreadsheets are designed specifically with sighted users in mind, so there's an element of inaccessibility baked into them. By organizing the information into a more linear, language-based flow instead of a spreadsheet, that could potentially make the process much more natural for a screen reader, and the data could then be automatically formatted as, or loaded into, a spreadsheet. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this.
Nicks World
in reply to Aaron • • •Aaron
in reply to Nicks World • • •@NicksWorld
Sure, I bet it's a bit of a pain for you with text-based discussions! I'm awkward on phones but willing to give it a shot, if you think it's worthwhile and can put up with my spoken awkwardness and fumbling with words. (I communicate so much better when I can write! lol)
Can I suggest, though, that first it might make sense to get familiar with LibreOffice and see if it does a better job with the interface than Excel or other such software? It would be a shame to waste our time and effort on a problem that's already solved. It might also turn out that you have different pain points with the open source software that I can actually modify.
Nicks World
in reply to Aaron • • •Aaron
in reply to Nicks World • • •@NicksWorld
Here's the main page:
libreoffice.org/
And here's the download page:
libreoffice.org/download/downlā¦
You will need to select your OS for the download.
Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft
www.libreoffice.orgNicks World
in reply to Aaron • • •Aaron
in reply to Nicks World • • •Zach Bennoui
in reply to Aaron • • •