From Brian Vogel: For those using Outlook Classic (the installed one) with Gmail, if you want Contacts & Calendar to Sync, too . . . groups.io/g/tech-vi/message/74…
For Windows 11 Users: Informative Post From Joseph Lee: Notice: when you come across a feature that shows as available but isn't groups.io/g/tech-vi/message/74…
New scraper just dropped (well, an old scraper was renamed):
Facebook/Meta updated its robots.txt entry for opting out of GenAI data scraping. If you blocked FacebookBot before, you should block meta-externalagent now:
Obligatory “the W3C/EU effort for a standard TDM Reservation Protocol would solve this by letting sites globally opt out of datamining for purposes like this, without having to play robots.txt whack-a-mole”.
People really ought to support the NoAI and NoImageAI X-Robots tags in the meantime. They probably won’t, though. Unlike the TDM Reservation Protocol, there’s no legal incentive to do so; unlike noindex, there’s no self-interested reason to do so (noindex is often used on pages that don’t belong in search results, like duplicates and non-public pages).
🇨🇭 Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source - @ZDNet
｢ This new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it. This "public money, public code" approach aims to enhance government operations' transparency, security, and efficiency ｣
Let me preface this by saying that I do absolutely believe the world would be better if Windows were Free Software, but fsf.org/news/lets-not-celebrat… is a very odd post. The failure was due to a bug in Crowdstrike's code when fed invalid data, resulting in uninitialised memory being interpreted as a valid pointer value, which exploded when dereferenced. Having more access to the Windows source code wouldn't have helped here. If the argument is that *Crowdstrike* should be Free Software, sure!
dunno about where you live, but here those backpacks are highly prized by delivery people. Apparently delivery companies sell them to them for way too much, so used ones are gold.
Hey @chikim no pressure, but I do think this deserves your attention, especially in the context of VOLlama: ollama.com/blog/tool-support Really cool development, I must say!
Ollama now supports tool calling with popular models such as Llama 3.1. This enables a model to answer a given prompt using tool(s) it knows about, making it possible for models to perform more complex tasks or interact with the outside world.
Sorry, I was looking for your earlier post, but could not find it. Is what you said here the same what you said in the original post? Just wanted to make sure I did not miss the context.
@FreakyFwoof Also this is a good time to remind folks that bunch of republicans mocked #Kamala providing a brief visual self description at the roundtable discussion with #disability rights activists. Regardless whether self description is useful for visually impaired people or not, at least she acknowledged and tried to be inclusive. msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinio…
The Vice President began a recent meeting with “I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit."
Just curious, do you use Moma? Did you quote the post or just link to it? When I quote posts they show up in the feed, I’m trying to see how universal this is.
I'm browsing an appliance site that has the following ADA statement as a terrible excuse to not make their site accessible. "Welcome to our website! As we have the ability to list over one million items on our website (our selection changes all of the time), it is not feasible for a company our size to record and playback the descriptions on every item on our website. However, if you have a disability we are here to help you." Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen. mannystv.com
In a recent (personal) audit of accessibility and continued struggle to get my head around Voice Over (for macos), I remembered that the spoken sound of "…
As a screen reader user, this seems mad. You shouldn't have the right to determine how I hear something anymore than you could stop someone reading it visually and deciding how to say it.
@cachondo perhaps a strong opinion, but when I'm on stage introducing the event, and when I talk about the event, I say it as "F F Conf" (and we correct people who call it "Full Frontal")
It's definitely mad that I've tried to jump through hoops when in reality a screen reader is going to sound it out differently depending on the software you use.
As for the right - I've always argued for small and personal sites, you should have the right to experiment, so long as this doesn't hurt anyone.
mine was perhaps a bit reactive, too. My apologies. I think the lengths you've gone to for inclusion are remarkable and I admire the technical aspects greatly. As you say, though, a person's choice of screen reader, speech synthesizer, voice characteristics ... it all impacts. Blind users will spell what they need to, if they don't already use Braille. It's the difference between calling me Shaun or Shawn or (If you're very british and blind, shorn), when the spelling is sean. It's part of our lives already.
@cachondo on your closing point, I do agree. That's where I nearly (or should have) ended with "am I doing it wrong" in the blog post.
I did also consider changing all instances (across 14 years of micro-sites) from (lowercase) ffconf to (mixed case) FFConf. I didn't mostly because, well, I think screen reader users don't really think (or care) that the event is actually called ffconf (where the F letters aren't pronounced).
@cachondo tangentially related question: are you, the user of the screen reader, able to fix pronunciations? For instance, I'm called Remy (pronounced "rem-me"), but I've had machines call me "ree-me". I'd want, as a user, to correct local pronunciations that the developers possibly had wrong. (Just curious)
Oh absolutely yes, there are dictionaries. Some screen readers just let you do it globally, others on a per text-to-speech engine or even per-voice basis.
there's also a huge disparity between speech engines. Some people want a Human-sounding version of the onscreen text, others see a screen reader as more of a way of accessing data. The predictability of a more monotone voice can allow for faster speeds, for example. The models used to generate speech have varied wildly over the years as technology has changed.
And then there's the matter of how much the engine should do for you. Is "Dr." drive or doctor. Is MB always Megabyte? Sometimes it's millibars. One of the best examples of this is the Windows properties dialog box, the title of which reads "OS (C:) Properties". One engine interprets the colon and closing parenthesis as a smily face emoteicon. as a kid I thought it did that when you had loads of space, and it'd change to c:( when space was low.
The post, and eventual "solution" (in quotes because there was no problem) were interesting, and I think the attention to detail is excellent. I always enjoy seeing people learning more about what makes screen readers tick.
Unfortunately, the end result is that screen reader users everywhere will be copying the incorrect event name to the clipboard, creating an impression that they can't write a conference name correctly when they paste it on social media. It also uses more braille cells than needed (10/11 vs six, depending on translation table, repeated across the website).
Given that they end up hearing the "wrong" (in quotes because it isn't) version in the page title before they read any of the "fixed" (likewise) versions, I think the effort was disproportionate to the return on investment. @eric
@jscholes @eric so much more eloquent than my pissed-off hey, who gets to decide how my screen reader works if not me? Great points, as ever, and I also applaud the spirit to learn of course.
@jscholes @eric there's a lot to parse (and it's late for me, which is why I'm getting muddled), but! I'd say that *if* someone copies the text on the FFConf.org site, they're going to get the *correct* way to their clipboard (FFConf is correct, ffconf, looks "better" but not the letters I want copied).
Absolutely 100% that the effort was disproportionate to the actual problem - the small upshot is that I learnt more about navigating screen readers and a tiny bit about ligatures
@Blort Hopefully yes! But we're not sure yet, we're still ironing out all of the details. We'll raise it with the team! It would certainly be fitting for us to publish on PeerTube.
KDE signed an open letter for funding for Open Source. I'm not opposed, but I do want to say - given the billions that go in 'funding' to proprietary software - that changing the purchasing rules in the public sector is, in my opinion, far more important.
This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
As California gets ready to do more "homeless sweeps," I feel the need to remind y'all that NYC has more homeless people, and more homeless people per capita, than San Francisco.🙂🙃
But NYC is a much less cruel and much less dysfunctional city than San Francisco, so their homeless people are much more likely to have shelter.
Periodic reminder that NYC has more homeless people, and more homeless people per capita, than SF. 🙂🙃
But NYC has more shelter spots that are suitable for human habitation, and a more efficient intake process, so has far fewer street homeless (tents…
New York weather makes it prohibitive to be outdoors for six months per year. San Francisco has a much milder climate and much smaller geographic area than New York City. Then there is the issue of homeless who reject housing offers because of restrictions on prostitution drug use etc. in the available housing. Many of our long term homeless have been offered SRO or shelter beds and refused it.
If a shelter is so bad someone would rather sleep on a piece of cardboard in the cold and wet San Francisco weather than sleep in a cot or bed inside ... What does that say about the shelters?
Many of my friends who are homeless have to literally PAY RENT to be able to stay in the shelter. Yes. Homeless people. Get kicked out of their homeless shelter. Because they can't afford rent.
Thanks for doing this. Our local feeds are unsurprisingly not doing AD, at least through the app so I really appreciate being able to switch to a described feed because noone else in the house is interested in watching.
@pitermach our terrestrial TV only works if next door aren't running a washing machine, dryer or dishwasher. Any vibration along the wall and the signal goes. We don't care 99 times out of a hundred because we stream nearly everything.
@cachondo @pitermach When @MoonCat and I used to watch #EastEnders, just near the end of the episode almost without fail, a motorbike would go passed our house and it was at the Duffduffs, so you'd miss the most important bit. happened too often to be coincidence. We had a Netgem freeview box at the time. I remember it very clearly.
@johann @cachondo I'm sure you can find it on your country's tv channel(s) of choice. It's only an opening ceremony anyway, not the world's most exciting event. I shouldn't bother about it honestly.
GOod lord the difference between the brawdcasts of the US and the UK is insulting. We're breaking for ads every couple minutes, missing huge chunks in the process. Intolerable. Thank you for this service. I feel like I should chip in something for your trouble!
@stirlock whenever the rugby is on ITV, we get a break after the anthums and before kickoff. Really spoils the atmosphere. But I guess we've been lucky to get the beeb for all these years. Their comparatively poor olympic coverage this year compared to the paid channels is sad.
@cachondo @stirlock I know what annoyed me during Euro 2024 on ITV, when the national anthems were played, then the commentator would say "the match of team A versus team B, next". Come on! Just start the bloody thing!
From the very first day I purchased my Samsung S9 FE tablet and Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard, I planned to write this article. I finally decided to take
If you still maintain a Twitter account, probably opt out of it using your content to train its racist LLM / genAI chatbot: x.com/settings/grok_settings
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
Who needs Project 2025 when The Donald could be so easily swayed to return us to 1925, halfway through the forced sterilization of 30,000 Americans in the eugenics program that influenced the Nazis.
Sad that the #Olympics have already been marred by attacks. I'm only a passing sports fan, but I enjoy the variety every 4 years. Last time, I really enjoyed the choice of music during the parade in Tokyo at their opening ceremony. Looking forward to this evening's opener!
@bermudianbrit I also enjoy teasing the AI about where the pictures are. Gave it a photo of some mounted police and it was confident somewhere in europe but we had to look at the shopfronts and text visible in other places to pin down France.
Totally gripping day of medals yesterday. The tennis match on Sunday was captivating, and Ive slo really enjoyed the archery. For all that there are always problems this is absolutely an #olympics to be hooked on.
A gold in the swimming for Team GB this evening and a fantastic finish to the doubles in Tennis. BBC Radio commentary handled the events expertly, it was like a relay of its own. And Murray, just shining his way through his last tournament.
Great fun watching the Archery at the #olympics yesterday, and more qualifying for GB this morning. The skill and focus needed is impressive, I've only personally done rifle shooting and that was taxing too. The noise of archery is very distinctive, though, and easy to follow by ear. Tennis again this evening. If Dan and Andy - Dandy? Can pull off another win, well. Hard to imagine how that'll feel. GB are also in the rowing for a title today, among plenty of other things.
Shame about the tennis on Thursday. Looking forward to the Archery qualifying again this morning. GB have been bouncing around the top 6-7 of the medal table the last couple days, been a great #olympic performance for them. I think as an opening week goes, one of their strongest certainly since I can remember!
@DavidGoldfield No I don't think it says that. Sometimes even some Americans mispronounce that word to my ears anyway. Where I had an issue was when we got to the bridge onward. Despite my original document having no spelling errors, the AI tool insisted on singing, Tors for Windows. That tune was too good to lose, so I simply edited it and substituted the T sound for a J. Strange it did that, but AI can do interesting things.
Inside JD Vance's VC career: five years, two firms before co-founding Narya, investing in AppHarvest, which faced lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy, and more (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
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![[screenshot of someone's schedule for a day]
9am - 1pm: Prepping for A CALL
1pm - 2pm: A CALL
2pm - [cut off at 3pm]: recovering from A CALL](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/575322 "[screenshot of someone's schedule for a day]
9am - 1pm: Prepping for A CALL
1pm - 2pm: A CALL
2pm - [cut off at 3pm]: recovering from A CALL")
Seirdy
in reply to Seirdy • • •Obligatory “the W3C/EU effort for a standard TDM Reservation Protocol would solve this by letting sites globally opt out of datamining for purposes like this, without having to play robots.txt whack-a-mole”.
People really ought to support the
NoAIandNoImageAIX-Robots tags in the meantime. They probably won’t, though. Unlike the TDM Reservation Protocol, there’s no legal incentive to do so; unlikenoindex, there’s no self-interested reason to do so (noindexis often used on pages that don’t belong in search results, like duplicates and non-public pages).Seirdy reshared this.