Das "Heizungsgesetz" habe eine "enorme Unsicherheit in den Markt gebracht", sagte Katherina Reiche heute beim Handelsblatt-Energiegipfel.

Zumindest für den Wärmepumpen-Markt scheint diese aber überwunden zu sein: Dort wurde mit 299.000 verkauften Geräten 2025 das bisher zweitbeste Ergebnis erzielt, wie der Branchenverband heute mitteilte. (1/4)

in reply to Malte Kreutzfeldt

Ich darf korrigieren: Die orchestrierte Kampagne und Verunglimpfung der Wärmepumpentechnologie, die Verzerrung der Historie und Inhalts des Gesetzentwurfs, persönliche Angriffe auf #habeck durch die #niemehrcducsu und #springer sowie das Durchstechen einer Vorabversion des Gesetzes durch die #fdp haben enorme Unsicherheit in den Markt gebracht.

Und ich darf ergänzen: Und die Inkompetenz und Fossil-Industrienähe von #gaskathie, die offensichtlich die Erneuerbaren ausbremsen will, bringt nun auch weiterhin Unsicherheit in den Markt.

Augenscheinlich ist sie jedoch glücklicherweise auch darin wenig erfolgreich. Es lebe die Inkompetenz!

This entry was edited (6 hours ago)

No TVL, to je fakt bizár.
Tahle Babišova čtyřletá schovávačka před spravedlností bude stát celou zemi ostudu, která ČR posune mezi země třetího světa

seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/domaci-…

Equipment failure slows REM service between Bois-Franc and Côte-de-Liesse

montreal.citynews.ca/2026/01/2…

The heavy rail that was on that line, that was barely 25 year old when it was taken down, didn't have these issues

We'd like to invite you to our #BoF session at #FOSDEM It's on Saturday at 13.00 in room K4.401. This is a meet-and-greet for everyone who is part of, or interested in, the #NGIZero ecosystem. We'll bring drinks and snacks :).
Preceding us at 12.00 in the same room is the BoF about the Open Internet Stack calls from @EUCommission the follow-up programme to #NGI.
For these and many more NGI Zero related talks and events at FOSDEM see: nlnet.nl/events/20260131/FOSDE…

hmm. I wonder if releasing on GitHub might be easier for folks, rather than Eurpod. I am considering doing this and keeping one file there. This might break my old posts, but GitHub releases are more trackable, the repo is frozen at that tag, ETC. There's just clear benefits to release them always as a pair (editor + Add-on) whenever I make a change. From here on out, I think that's going to happen.
This entry was edited (6 hours ago)

Saw a reference to Paulo Coelho’s ‘The Alchemist’ this morning, which was funny because just yesterday I was explaining to someone it’s where one of my key prioritizing heuristics comes from.

There’s a proverb in the book that goes something like “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

Of course, logically this makes no sense—everything that happened twice is a thing that also happened once.

But I take it to mean “Once something goes wrong twice, it’s time to pay attention.” Once could be a fluke. Twice means there’s something going on. The second time it happens is where the phase change from noise to signal begins.

This entry was edited (4 hours ago)

I submitted a proposal for a lightning talk for #FOSDEM . It's about .... from street-level hack to open cultural production.

pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026…

#openart #foss #creativecommons

Do you like nonsense?
Today, for the second time in my life, I have been asked to convert a "pirate" copy of an old (50y+) movie into the DCP format, for a cinephile club. Not because they do not want to pay the copyright holders, they actually did. But that did not give them access to any copy of the movie, they are on their own.
The previous time, the distributor would only send them a French-dubbed version, which was a no-no for them.
They are not even obscure unknown movies, but classics. 🤦‍♀️

Native Instruments GmbH is in preliminary insolvency.

Not remotely what you want to see. Will keep tabs on this one in a tough time. Details:

cdm.link/ni-insolvency/

reshared this

in reply to Andre Louis

@FreakyFwoof @shye I didn't see that coming, but it is no surprise either. The lock-in approach doesn't seem to work forever. There were numerous threads on the NI forums over the years to support linux but they always just gave us the middle finger. I own a NI machine mikro, but it doesn't do a thing under linux, though MIDI has been around for a while.
If NI really bites the dust this time they should open source KONTAKT so all the 3rd party sample companies can still offer their products.
I have used their stuff over 20 years ago and have never needed it since so, won't be missed on my end.
If they disappear or not: They should release their stuff as open source just as Steinberg released their VSTSDK under MIT just recently. At least the KONTAKT format, please.

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website.

accessibilityforeveryone.site

The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

Alright, work meetings. No SpeechPlayer updates for a bit. Someone's asking for Russian, really can't promise that'd be ready by next driver with how complex it is of a language. If I add Russian I'd also be tempted with Ukranian, Belarusian, and Serbian. so it would come in with similar languages, just as we have all the Germanic ones, and then each would get their own tuning treatments. But large work. The initial scaffolding I can make, native speakers I can't just birth out of my stomach.
This entry was edited (7 hours ago)

RE: mastodon.social/@laura_carlson…

great work by @mgifford highlighted in this issue.

I don't know. My partner (Jess) asked if I'm building this for other people or myself. I feel like I'm building it for other people but I really should be happy with it for myself at least. My only goal was to get this thing working in modern NVDA. Then US English lead us to other languages, people asked if they can have theirs, and then it turned into this big sad project. But maybe I shouldn't feel so sad over it. For myself, it sounds nearly there. Yes some words are off, and some things still stick out a bit sharp, like the word words, ironically. But I can understand and use it, probably 80% of the time I am instead of Eloquence. In that way, mission accomplished, and we have a big robust frontend to tune, so I probably should feel less sad about it.
in reply to Tamas G

The key is to realize this can't be only your project. Think of it like you're founding an organization that needs to persist over the years. You're already doing that work, by documenting everything really well, and giving lots of people other features they can use. As well as creating tools. But your goal should be getting it into a state you, personally, like, and then in moving towards having other people in charge of different things. So all you do is final tests and sign off on releases.
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

@fastfinge I just made a massive tools update, formant_trajectory.py and the frame inspector use lang_pack.py and a simple_yaml.py to parse it in a less strict way. So now it's really solid on tooling. People can do tests against them, and build languages easier. I think you're right, hopefully it can get to a point where I'm sitting back and accepting PRs from people tuning phonemes, and carefully weighing bigger changes to anything with the community, liaison for improving it. But this is so so far away from that, although interest is definitely picking up and the more I can simplify tools and add them in many ways I'm hoping the flexibility will make it shine for it. Whether you use the phoneme editor, the frame inspector / trajectory tool, now you really have a way to dig into the rules.
in reply to Tamas G

What I've been playing with, and why you haven't heard much from me, is trying to create some good way to extract formants from existing sounds, in an accessible way. Thus far, though, nothing has worked, or been as accessible as I want it to be. It involves matlab and other terrible things. But what I really really want is something where I can put in a second of sound and get an estimate of all the formants and transitions, and then use the tools you created to compare them. But I haven't gotten close enough to have anything to share.
in reply to Tamas G

So one thing to think about: If people change settings in the NVDA addon, then you release an update, it looks like there settings aren't always updated. And it's really, really easy to break subtle things. If I were you I might consider adding a reset to defaults button in the addon. Because otherwise you're going to get feedback from people who toggled a checkbox like co-articulation without thinking about any of the associated settings and now wonder why everything sounds bad.
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

@fastfinge I think we can. If we shipped a .defaults folder with the untouched language files, then the person just hits "reset to defaults" in the NV Speech Player panel, and boom. We just copy over the files from .defaults and they have unchanged settings. But sadly it can't live in the voice panel, because you cannot put buttons there. So it has to live in the NV Speech Player settings area near the top.

This blogpost makes an astoundingly good case about LLMs I hadn't considered before. The collapse of public forums (like Stack Overflow) for programming answers coincides directly with the rise of programmers asking for answers from chatbots *directly*. Those debugging sessions become part of a training set that now *only private LLM corporations have access to*. This is something that "open models" seemingly can't easily fight. michiel.buddingh.eu/enclosure-…
in reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber

This goes much, much wider than programming and LLMs.

In general, the open source world looks with disdain at all kinds of automated feedback collection mechanisms, which the Silicon Valley Venture Capital tech ecosystem has wholeheartedly embraced. OSS is still stuck in the 1990s mindset of "if there's a problem, somebody will report this to us", and That... just isn't true.

What we're stuck with is OSS solutions with inferrior user experiences which nobody wants to use, instead of a compromise where OSS software collects more data than some people would have liked, but that software actually has some users and makes a difference in the world.

To be fair, there are some good arguments against this (it's much easier to protect user privacy if the only contributors to your code are employees with background checks), but that doesn't make this less of a problem.

Yeah, not a bad idea to release the add-on and editor together on GitHub. Link updated. If people want they can use the packs folder from the add-on included to tweak phonemes now too, so that really solves that problem. Appreciate that suggestion. Technically it's still not bundling libespeak or linking directly to it so I'm able to do that fairly.
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
Remember, the driver file is like 70 KB because it has so much code for settings, compatibility with older NVDA back to 2023.2, voice keys, all of it adds lines. I think we're good on frontend passes for now, too many settings and people can now build proper languages with this set of them.
This entry was edited (8 hours ago)

I didn't put in the new phonemes into the editor yet. Going to give it a bit of time to be in the driver first, then yeah if people aren't overly upset, we'll move them into Master. For now it's a bit experimental. Maybe this afternoon. I'll move them into the master branch now, so people can see and mess with them, compare the diffs if they want, and then we'll roll it into the editor version later.

New NVSpeech Player build for NVDA:
Mostly language tuning. Words like "square", "fair", "bear" get proper US and UK pronunciations. Protein, Fourteen get a slight tweak, though not perfect. Some of this is just on Espeak being used for IPA and phonemizing. We also fixed it so that the "google / able" rule doesn't bleed into words like real. Overall, no phoneme changes from last night. People were not super overly mad at them getting a slight softening. At 16000, it sounds really good to me, and less sharp. At 22050, that's your own damn problem. Formant synthesizers lose their bandwidths at higher sample rates because they simply cannot fill it all in and compress their voice in an equally filling way across all frequencies. It's a thing with all of them. Eloquence at 22K? I'm realizing, not the greatest. So if you're using it at that and think, "oh now it's too soft", at least it also doesn't sound like it does at 44100 when it's at 22050, so you should really be thankful instead. Just saying. Besides, we only really changed like 17 phonemes to get this effect, it's not like all of them got a rewrite.
eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
in reply to Charlie Stross

Not the specific claim, but there is news coverage claiming that opposition to U.S.A. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is being suppressed on #TikTok.

Standard caution about question headlines applies, of course.

forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2…

cosmopolitan.com/politics/a701…

But let's put it this way: the notion has reached Forbes and Cosmo, and isn't just some anonymous poster on Twitter stirring the pot.

#USPolitics #fascism

This entry was edited (23 hours ago)

2021: OpenAI is the most expensive loss-making startup in human history, and their only product is a chatbot.

2022: OpenAI is the most expensive loss-making startup in human history, and their only product is a chatbot.

2023: OpenAI is the most expensive loss-making startup in human history, and their only product is a chatbot.

2024: OpenAI is the most expensive loss-making startup in human history, and their only product is a chatbot.

2025: OpenAI is the most expensive loss-making startup in human history, and their only product is a chatbot.

2026: OpenAI is the most expensive loss-making startup in human history, and their only product is a chatbot.

Much innovation. Very business.

Data control = identity control. 😨

Nubus by Nextcloud partner Univention is an identity management system that puts IT departments back in charge of storage locations, access rights, security policies, and integrations.

Discover more👇 biometricupdate.com/202601/uni…

NVSpeech Player with phoneme editor version 1.7
• Adds proper focus management for the editor, so alt tabbing away and back, or opening the window, will land you on the first field in the window.
• adds keyboard shortcuts for commands available in the main area, so you're not left tabbing through.
• Adds new settings available in the frontend for the passes.
• YAML now gets ordered correctly as the NVDA driver writes it, so the phoneme editor will create a structurally sound form that's consistent.
Still using ESpeak as a non-linked, separate phonemizer, or you can specify your own if it runs through STDIN / CLI, as always. Enjoy!
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
This entry was edited (8 hours ago)
in reply to Alex Chapman

@alexchapman there it is, I updated the release. github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…

So HackerOne published a blog about how organizations should deal with AI slop reports. TL;DR: Use AI to evaluate them. Now we've gone full circle.
I bet @bagder has opinion on this. Also the timing seems weird, with cURL very publicly scrapping their bug bounty program.
hackerone.com/blog/ai-slop-exp…
This entry was edited (9 hours ago)

RE: mastodon.au/@TheVoiceGuy/11596…

I have figured this out.
I had to save the HTML code in plain text instead of rich text and add the HTML extension.


Question for anyone on here using Google Gemini.
I want to extract some text from some war diaries and preferably save it as an HTML file.
I realise Gemini probably will not create an HTML file for download but it did offer to create me HTML code.
I put it into a text editor, saved it as an HTML file but there must be something I'm missing because when I opened the new document in a browser, it just showed me a whole bunch of HTML code instead of my nicely formatted text.
Is there something I'm doing wrong? I'm on the mac.

Question for anyone on here using Google Gemini.
I want to extract some text from some war diaries and preferably save it as an HTML file.
I realise Gemini probably will not create an HTML file for download but it did offer to create me HTML code.
I put it into a text editor, saved it as an HTML file but there must be something I'm missing because when I opened the new document in a browser, it just showed me a whole bunch of HTML code instead of my nicely formatted text.
Is there something I'm doing wrong? I'm on the mac.

RE: hessen.social/@C_Ottenburg/115…

#Disabled-Alltag