Here's everything coming to Perspective Intelligence in version 1.4
- Standard On-device AI - IOS Now, everyone can experience Perspective Intelligence even if you do not have an Apple Intelligence capable device.
- Web search for All Access subscribers - Perspective Intelligence can now search the web to get more up-to-date information
- RSS Feeds - You can now add RSS feeds to Perspective Intelligence to get the latest news. (1/2)
Looking for a record of #accessibility issues left on @fosdem website issue queue I wasn't too surprised to see @Edent had beat me to it github.com/FOSDEM/website/issu…
We can do better.
Can I update the HTML & CSS on the website?
I've notice that the HTML & CSS for https://fosdem.org/2025/ is a little out of date. Wrong doctype Use of obsolete elements like Metadata not compliant with modern standards Repeated use ...edent (GitHub)
GitHub - trypsynth/fedra: An open-source, accessible, blazing fast Mastodon client
An open-source, accessible, blazing fast Mastodon client - trypsynth/fedraGitHub
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Democrat Taylor Rehmet wins solidly red Texas Senate seat in stunning special election upset
With ballots tallied from all but a handful of voting centers, Rehmet had 57% of the vote, besting the 43% for his GOP opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, who had a massive spending advantage.Alejandro Serrano (The Texas Tribune)
This release focuses on stability, correctness, and cross-language improvements. The primary goal was to address accumulated issues in the synthesis pipeline and bring several under-maintained language packs up to a proper standard.
Synthesis Engine Fixes
Phoneme Tuning:
M (Bilabial Nasal):
Adjusted formant values based on acoustic phonetics research. The antiformant (cfN0) is now set to 950 Hz to properly cancel F2 energy, eliminating the overly "stuffy" quality in words like "same" and "memory".
P (Voiceless Bilabial Stop):
Reduced frication amplitude and adjusted formant values for a flatter, more diffuse spectrum. The F2 locus is now at 850 Hz, appropriate for bilabial consonants. This addresses the excessive "puffiness" reported in words like "quote" and "paper".
K (Voiceless Velar Stop):
Reduced frication amplitude and parallel formant values to soften the release burst.
Language Pack Improvements:
Danish:
Resolved a significant intelligibility issue. eSpeak-ng outputs glottal stops for Danish stod, which were causing vowels to be interrupted and producing speech that was difficult to understand. Danish stod is currently stripped entirely rather than rendered as creaky voice. A proper implementation would require synthesizer-level support for laryngealization. We are exploring this for the future.
Spanish is improved!
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
On Dec. 27, 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft witnessed the most intense eruption ever recorded on Io, Jupiter’s most volcanically active moon. The eruption spanned 65,000 sq km (larger than Earth’s Lake Superior) near the south pole and released 140-260 TW of energy, > 6x the total energy of all power plants on Earth.
3 other hotspots also lit up. Scientists interpret this as a single event affecting an underground network of massive, interconnected magma chambers.
jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-juno-mi…
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NASA Juno Mission Spots Most Powerful Volcanic Activity on Io to Date
Even by the standards of Io, the most volcanic celestial body in the solar system, recent events observed on the Jovian moon are extreme.NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
My wife and I are looking to add some exercise equipment at home and want to make sure what we get is actually accessible and easy to use.
We’re especially interested in things like a stationary bike, treadmill, or elliptical, but we’re open to other ideas too. If you have personal experience with equipment that works well for blind or sight-impaired users, or that has simple controls, good audio feedback, or an easy layout, we would really appreciate your recommendations.
Specific models are super helpful. Thanks in advance for sharing what’s worked for you!
Sensitive content
People keep citing water/energy use to me and I remain unconvinced. The single best thing you can do for the planet is to have one less kid. A distant #2 and #3 are avoiding cars and flights: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.…
A recent estimate says using Claude Code is similar to running a dishwasher: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/20/…
If you are a vegan monk who never drives and also hates LLMs, good for you: you have my respect and admiration. But I don't think this is what's motivating most people's arguments.
Electricity use of AI coding agents
Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT. Simon P. Couch notes that …Simon Willison’s Weblog
BTW I am a childless vegetarian who drives a hybrid but mostly bikes and buses (ask my coworkers – they think I'm very eccentric), but that doesn't matter because that's not what this is about. People just want a rhetorical slam-dunk and they think they've found it.
@simon had a great comment on Lobsters where he pointed out that nobody seemed to care much about these things until LLMs came along, and they still only seem interested insofar as it applies to LLMs: lobste.rs/s/cw6f2s/ai_tribalis…
There was actually a really interesting TPAC session a few years ago that explored how the W3C could help sustainability efforts. There's a lot to consider here: hardware production (e.g. e-waste), server vs client energy usage, network costs, etc. youtube.com/watch?v=o8avSFOuT8…
There's now also a Sustainable Web Design Community Group that's put out a set of guidelines, which mostly read to me as sensible best practices around UX design, performance, and accessibility: w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-g…
WebPerfWG TPAC meetings 2022 09 16 - Sustainability and WebPerf
Užívejte si videa a hudbu, kterou máte rádi, nahrávejte originální obsah a sdílejte vše s přáteli, rodinou i celým světem na YouTube.YouTube
At heart I'm basically a degrowther who thinks the only reasonable solution to the climate crisis, species collapse, pollution, and all the rest is to dramatically reduce our consumption of the Earth's resources. But I'm also enough of a realist that I don't think we'll go there willingly – I think degrowth will be forced on us.
This is a very emotional topic for a lot of people, so I don't really want to get into it. And I'm hardly an expert; these are just my opinions based on what I've read.
The only reasonable solution is to do whatever we can to invent better tech to solve these problems. Society will not accept degrowth (not until it's far, far too late), and a solution a society won't accept may as well be worthless from a Realpolitik perspective, even if it would solve the problem in theory.
I think we're doing extremely good work on that front. Solar is on an exponential growth curve right now (and we need more people talking about it), so are batteries, and batteries+solar will, sans environmental regulation, solve the energy problem in most places. In places where there's lots of sunlight and no demand for it, think deserts, solar can be used to capture carbon dioxide. That's extremely inefficient energy-wise, but it's not like people will use that sunlight for anything else, so it doesn't even matter. You can even capture it into biofuels afaik, which is another way to produce free energy that can easily be transported to places where solar won't work. There's also some very interesting work being done in making geothermal more economical and available in many, many more places, and that's basically infinite free energy again. Worst case scenario, we'll just let the Chinese build us nuclear reactors, they're doing a lot of that and know how to do it safely, quickly and cheaply, which the western world definitely does not.
The real problems we need to solve are a lot more prosaic. Making sure misguided environmental regulation doesn't slow down the switch from coal to solar (and accelerate the collapse of human civilization) just to save a rare species of frogs is one of them. Incidentally, this is the reason why Texas is building out far more solar than California for example, but this is far from just a US problem. We need to make sure there are no tariffs on Chinese solar, Chinese rare metals, Chinese batteries and Chinese EVs. In parallel, we need to make sure we're building all of those ourselves in the western world, and that there are no misguided regulations solving a small problem but causing a bigger one that prohibit us from doing this. We need to start building out nuclear now, because nuclear takes a long time to build. We might regret this in the future, but better to waste money building something we don't need than to not build it and have to use non-renewables. We have to figure out what to do with existing coal mines (in places where they still exist) and how to close them down as quickly as we can, despite the miners and their labor unions. We need to make sure that the government-associated, monopolist power companies aren't doing anything stupid to slow down the deployment of consumer solar. And when we've done all of that, we should do a carbon tax, to make it more economical for companies to invest in renewables than to stay where they are.
At the same time, I worry that code that I write with the help of LLMs may be tainted because of the uncertain legal status of the training data. I especially don't want AccessKit's adoption, and hence its effectiveness in making more user interfaces accessible, to be hampered in any way by such concerns. So I may just not use LLMs at all when working on AccessKit.
So I guess my copyright concern ends up being more practical than ethical.
A very nice first day at FOSDEM. I spent time at the @matrix booth and met overwhelmingly enthusiastic people, then left it to our fabulous team of volunteers.
I’ve met Allan and @jsparber at the @gnome booth, got one of those fabulous systemd T-shirts, said hi to the @postmarketOS gang, got a T-shirt and brainstormed with @pabloyoyoista, got to thank Proxmox and OpenTofu for the great tools they provide.
#FOSDEM is where internet friends materialize.
Was listening to Apple Music yesterday and this song came on, incredible stuff. youtu.be/XrdHjd9QhYc
Alexa's response: "Kentucky is leading Arkansas 85 to 77 with zero milliseconds remaining in the second half at the end of the second half."
Uh, somehow I seriously doubt anyone's gonna get anything done with what, by her definition, must be at most 0.00099999999999999999999999999999… seconds left on the clock.
i'm looking for good *modern* anti-authoritarian, pro labor music.
(in other words, while the Wobblies are commendable, their hymns are not what I'm seeking right now.)
any recs?
(looking at you, the part of the fediverse with vinyl collections you haven't talked about in a while. now is your time to shine.)
open.substack.com/pub/roberthu…
Zach Bennoui reshared this.
On my way to Brussels!
GNOME designers inspired by the best font when choosing a bar at FOSDEM…
RE: mastodon.social/@blogdiva/1110…
now that we know #JeffreyEpstein was paying m00t to keep #4Chan open and available for pedos like him and that he specifically requested to keep /pol/ going no matter what, let me bring this oldie but goodie:
❝ QAnon was created by Trump’s fascists to take attention away from the Anons working on Opeation Death Eaters and the Jeffrey Epstetn case.
QAnon is a new form of COINTELPRO" ❞
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 (@blogdiva@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image QAnon #Xitterdivingyour auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 (Mastodon)
A Message to DHS Tribal Affairs Director
Minnesota has 11 federally recognized Tribes and due to ICE and CPB’s racial profiling, Tribal citizens are increasingly reporting being stopped, questioned, assaulted, and detained by federal agents.click.actionnetwork.org
Zach Bennoui reshared this.
#FreeBSD folks:
Which sound system do you use?
- OSS (Native) (40%, 2 votes)
- PulseAudio (40%, 2 votes)
- sndio (0%, 0 votes)
- Something else (please comment!) (20%, 1 vote)
UFCU (my bank) automatically places my withdrawals into categories that it displays when I look at my recent transactions, but it sometimes gets things wrong (it thinks that Austin Current is travel, for instance, rather than a local news publication.) Regardless, I want my own categories, and I also need to look at Paypal and FNBO (for my credit card), neither of which define the same categories as UFCU, so UFCU's categories are useless to me.
So now I have a tab-delimited file listing my expenses for the month, along with their dates and amounts, and I have a script that puts them into the categories that I want and tallies them, optionally for a specific date range, or, optionally, it can tally what I've spent at a specific place, rather than the category that I've placed it into.
Most of my transactions are through FNBO, and I can download them to a .csv, and I also have a function that takes the csv and converts it to the format that I want, so now I have a semi-automated process for keeping the file up to date in the future.
Anyway, I know that ynab exists for instance, and I have no idea how it compares to what I have, but I like my script.
Bri🥰
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in reply to Bri🥰 • • •Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 2m 13s
Aryan
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in reply to Bri🥰 • • •cd fedra
git pull
cargo build --release
Bri🥰
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Unknown parent • • •Aryan
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in reply to Bri🥰 • • •lets wait for quin.
Bri🥰
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