Eloquence uses a modified Klatt synthesizer with:
• KLGLOTT88-style source (at² - bt³ polynomial)
• Spectral tilt (TL): ~8-12 dB for normal voice, ~20-24 dB for breathy
• Flutter (FL): ~25% for naturalness (sums of three sine waves at 12.7, 7.1, 4.7 Hz)
• Open quotient (OQ): ~50% default, varies for voice quality
Eloquence has very specific formant transition patterns:
• Non-steady-state targets (0ms duration) as inflection points
• F2 "locus" frequencies for consonants that drive coarticulation
• 5ms frame rate for smooth interpolation

Just a friendly reminder that it's the #FOSDEM week :)

7 rooms will be streamed over #PeerTube from VHSky.cz and MakerTube.net instances. Playlists here.

=====
Přátelská připomínka, že nás tento týden čeká #FOSDEM :)

7 místností bude streamováno i na #PeerTube z instancí VHSky.cz a MakerTube.net. Playlisty zde.

#VHSky

This entry was edited (4 days ago)

I don’t really get the benefit of doing a national shutdown like this. Reaper took their website offline until tomorrow to protest ICE, and while the issue clearly matters to them, shutting down access to the software just ends up affecting normal people who have nothing to do with anything.
It doesn’t really persuade anyone who’s just trying to download or check out the program. Instead, it mostly creates frustration and shifts attention away from the actual issue.
I was planning to download and try Reaper today, but now I can’t. That alone makes me less likely to come back later, especially since the protest doesn’t have anything to do with the software or audio work itself.

Remember: It's okay for your F/OSS project to be finished. You don't have shareholders who need you to grow every year. You don't have customers who need to be persuaded to buy a subscription or a new version every year by marketing-driven features. If it solves the problem that you created it to solve, you have won. You now have some software that solves the problem that you had. You are allowed to stop now.

Erotic Parody ' #Melania: Devourer of Men' Sales Surge on Amazon Amid Documentary Flop

404media.co/erotic-parody-mela…

@marcozehe kann ich dich für eine neue Behandlungsleitlinie bei Narkolepsie interessieren? Da ist heute ein Podcast von Apotheken-Umschau erschienen nedosiswissen.podigee.io/995-a… vielleicht kann das ja jemand in deiner Umgebung brauchen 😉

#XMPP Summit

After two great days focusing on the XMPP ecosystem and its future we are closing the 28th XMPP Summit. Many thanks to all 35+ participants!
xmpp.org/2025/11/xmpp-summit-2…

Meet us tomorrow at #FOSDEM 2026! #ULB, AW Building, Level 1

#jabber #chat #opensource #messaging #federation #Brussels

Hey, you guys. I'm testing out a keyboard for iOS, PC, and Mac called Wispr Flow. You get 1,000 free words a week on mobile and 2,000 free words a week on PC and Mac.

I like it because I don't have to dictate punctuation. It auto-formats and inserts punctuation for me, which means that I'm typing faster or rather more productively on iOS with less of a need for editing. It also lets you specify punctuation style. In messaging apps, I have casual punctuation, but in email and other apps I have it set to formal punctuation.

You get a two-week free trial. After that, the app is $15 a month or $143 a year. Either way, I think I'm going to subscribe to this. ChatGPT estimates that I generate about 12,000 words of content a week right now, so I think this is a really good fit for me personally.

RE: mastodon.world/@somecanuckchic…

It's treason, plain and simple. This kinda shite needs to be nipped in the bud... #cdnpoli #polcan


The US administration have held meetings with members of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist group that is pushing for the western province to become independent.

The group is openly seeking a $500B US line of credit from the US Treasury to help bankroll the new country, if they come out victorious in a referendum.

DO WE NOT HAVE LAWS PREVENTING THIS AND/OR PUNISH THIS?!?!? cbc.ca/news/politics/eby-alber… #cdnpoli #polcan #treason


Final User Testing in France
The Ability project has recently conducted its final user testing workshops with future users with visual impairments. Following earlier trials in Lithuania and Germany, these sessions held in France made it possible to evaluate various usage scenarios, including understanding geographical maps, following routes, online shopping, and exploring images.

The consortium will now finalize its conclusions for deliverable.
#ABILITYProject

I think I have to say that the Asus Zephyrus G14 (2024) has been the absolute best notebook I've owned. The audio quality from the internal speakers continues to blow my mind, every single time I hear it. I'm like, wow! Speech is boomy, and I can even actually gleem some enjoyment of music through it. Quite impressive. It is majorly speedy with its AMD Ryzen 8945HS CPU, 32 GB of lPDDR5 6400 MHZ RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, and its 6E WiFi. Battery life is mediocre at 8hours on the balanced performance profile, two hours with everything clocked up to performance mode. But eight hours is enough time to get me through a pretty decent haul away from power, which is rare. It is also rare for me to be as highly impressed with as many features in a single product. Awesome stuff!

Time is up for our hackathon! Our mighty teams have successfully hacked their way towards the Matrix Caps! We'll start live streaming the results in a few minutes!

youtube.com/live/U_YdrcrWw8M

#XMPP groups are centralized depending on a single server, if server dies the group is gone, server stores group metadata

#Matrix servers store a lot of group metadata across servers

with #DeltaChat the server stores ZERO group metadata/state you don't depend on any server and can easily migrate your profile keeping group state and history in your devices

if Delta Chat had "super groups" with admin/moderation for public rooms, would you switch?

support.delta.chat/t/spec-prop…

#PleaseBoost #boost

  • yes, please! (85%, 24 votes)
  • no (14%, 4 votes)
28 voters. Poll end: in 6 days

This entry was edited (7 hours ago)

My partner's been looking into changing home health agencies for a while now for reasons that are a whole other thread. Her caseworker sent along a PDF of agencies supported by her program, but of course it was 62 pages of graphical PDF. Also, even though she can read the PDF just fine, all the agencies were listed by city and not county, and our county has probably something like 20+ cities/townships. None of the agencies had any context, either, just one giant pile of images with names/medicaid details.

Several hours and strategic prompts later, Claude Code OCR'd the PDF, extracted details for 38 agencies in the cities in our county, linked to and summarized reviews across Google/Indeed/Glassdoor about not only how the agency served its clients but also how it was to work there, cross-referenced sanction data from a Michigan government website and provided details on one agency's ongoing active litigation, and gave me a markdown report I piped through Pandoc and emailed her.

Could it have missed an agency or some details? Possibly, but it did at least catch the agencies I knew about and was specifically looking for in the output. Could it have gotten a link wrong? Yes, it was not absolutely right (in at least one case anyway,) I caught it and it fixed the error, though the link still showed what it claimed when I verified it. Could it have gotten a phone or CHAMPS number incorrect? Certainly, but it distinctly flagged the possibility that it might make OCR errors with numbers and that I should verify these details myself. Could I have made any of these errors myself, especially after a few hours of repetitive cut-and-paste? Yup, I have an do. And even if I'd managed to solve the original problem of making the PDF accessible, I'm still new enough to the area that I don't know all the little cities and towns in my county well. Feels like every other block in this county is another tiny township or other.

AI is heavy machinery. Use it incorrectly and it'll slice through your proverbial waterline like any other backhoe. It's unfortunate that it gives the impression of doing good and valid work even while slicing and dicing indiscriminately, but until we live in a world where our abilities to make choices about our care don't hinge on us having the ability and time to parse through a 62-page inaccessible PDF and review our options, I still maintain that one of its best uses is as access technology. Imperfect tool it may be, but without it, I'd have been dead in the water with no one else to help.

Rui Batista reshared this.

В Москве 16-летний подросток убил в здании РКН сотрудника Роскомнадзора, отвечавшего за блокировки и замедление трафика
agents.media/vchk-ogpu-soobshh…

@rf@mastodon.ml

I'm not sure why Alberta Wexiteers wanting to join the US is suddenly a big story about treason 11 months after Jeffrey Rath went on Fox&Friends to announce it and DeSmog wrote about it.
Except that Premier Eby only just read about the separatists ask for $500bn US credit in the Financial Times yesterday. #abpoli #media

CBC radio was all omigod about it this morning, although they don't like the word treason any more than they like the word genocide.
They also gave AB Premier Smith a big pass, saying its not her fault, even though it was Smith who actually altered Alberta election law to help the future separatist referendum succeed.

desmog.com/2025/05/20/meet-the…

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

Ahahahaha. You all are going to laugh when I tell you why UK English sounds messed up in SpeechPlayer. I fixed it. It was a bug in the driver, well two: (A) always pass En-GB (not EN) to Espeak, and (B) make sure the YAML rules apply in the NVDA driver. As a result, UK rules were simplified, and it's back to sounding like UK sounded in the initial SpeechPlayer. I should probably release this for UK folks.
This entry was edited (8 hours ago)

I haven't seen an llm that does things flawlessly, in that when you tell it to do a task that it theoretically has done before, it's always going to do it the exact same way every time. That's why I don't use Alexa Plus for example. Many times it will, sure, but sometimes it's gonna hickup and not do the thing you asked, saying it can't help with that, or try to do something else entirely. That's why I went back to the normal one. I like using them in environments where I can say no, that's not right, fix that, or I can fix it myself. That's why I use them for coding, and only in languages where I can read and correct the generated code.
in reply to Stevo

@TheQuinbox yep. Think I feel the same way about this. As much as I'd love to pick up Rust learning, not knowing at least how classes, functions, objects, mutexes (for C stuff) work, threadding, locking, ETC... Shifting your mental model to Rust's... The LLM could probably write me something but then I lose all ability to debug it myself and point to lines and exactly say where to refactor and what. So probably to pick up a new language I'd use a combo of LLM and classical learning (IE read a damn tutorial) LOL.
@Quin

#XMPP Summit

The next topic is #Onion #Routing 🧅

The XMPP Summit:
xmpp.org/2025/11/xmpp-summit-2…

Meet us at #FOSDEM 2026, too!

#jabber #chat #opensource #messaging #federation #Brussels, #Belgium #opensource #rtc #e2ee

Me and a friend were talking last night, and she had some good ideas for AccessiWeather, including ISS tracking and the like. I thought, that's a bit out of scope for a weather app, so...

Hey everyone,

Just published AccessiSky, a companion app to AccessiWeather on GitHub.

"Stay connected to what's above."

While AccessiWeather handles weather forecasts and alerts, AccessiSky tracks what's happening in the sky:

- ISS (international space station) pass predictions for your location
- Moon phases and rise/set times
- Sunrise, sunset, and twilight times
- Meteor shower calendar
- Planet visibility — which planets are up tonight
- Eclipse calendar through 2030
- Aurora forecasts and space weather
- Tonight's Summary — a quick overview of everything happening tonight

Same accessibility focus as AccessiWeather, full screen reader support. Uses free APIs, no accounts needed.

github.com/Orinks/AccessiSky

reshared this

Born this day in 1919, Fred Korematsu, one of the bravest and most honorable of American patriots.

In 1942 president Roosevelt ordered that persons he deemed threats to national security be relocated from the west coast to detention camps inland. 125,000 people, two-third of them American citizens, had to give up their homes, their jobs, and their businesses.

Korematsu resisted every step of the way. When he was rejected from military service (probably on account of his ancestry) he took work as a Navy shipyard welder.

Later that year Roosevelt's order came down. Korematsu went into hiding, but was found, arrested, and convicted. He was sentenced to five years' probation and he and his family were relocated to a prison camp in Utah.

Korematsu appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the Supreme Court's decision was to uphold the president's judgments about national security matters, however panicked or racist they might be. In the U.S., the case law was (and is) that if the president wants to strip 80,000 citizens of their rights, the courts can do nothing to stop it if the claimed purpose is national security.

Some say the decision was overturned in 2018. It was not. And, although current Chief Justice John Roberts has written "The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority", the Supreme Court seems determined to repeat the errors of the Korematsu case, to accept at face value and take as unreviewable, the president's representations, no matter how obviously bad faith, and no matter the cost.

This entry was edited (9 hours ago)

Winter hits the hardest in crisis zones.

This week, another EU Humanitarian Air Bridge flight to Gaza delivered 48 tonnes of supplies.

Since October 2023, over €550 million in aid, including health supplies, shelter, and educational items, has been delivered to Palestinians on behalf of EU and humanitarian partners.

The EU remains the largest international donor of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

Learn how ➡️ link.europa.eu/bKMF48

Sensitive content

This entry was edited (8 hours ago)