@davetaylor2112 I'm not sure what you mean, Dave. Personally, I think I've only seen this announcement from one other individual on Mastodon. Even if several people posted it, I'm still unclear as to the reason for this objection.
Sorry, I felt like I had seen it from you a few times on here. I'm just finding the majority of platforms becomming less and less useful because everyone seem to post everything a million times. To be honest, I've actually disengaged with a lot, and more will probably follow. Heck, I might even close this account lol
@vol4life8657 @robini71 I was tempted to purchase them last Christmas when they were on sale but I decided to wait until the feature set matured and expanded.
As I don't like it when articles force you to open them in order to get to the critical information because they won't put that information in the title, I'll copy the main points below.
United Natural Trading LLC issued a recall on its Fresh Direct dark chocolate-covered pretzels on January 30, 2025 due to an undeclared allergen: milk. In other words, the packaging does not disclose that the pretzels contain milk or milk protein derivatives, which could lead to serious reactions for those with milk allergies. The good news is that the damage may be limited — the chocolate-covered pretzels were shipped out to Connecticut, New Jersey and New York in limited quantities. What's more, according to the FDA, they were sold through an online third-party retailer and not directly on supermarket shelves. An internal review showed of the company's label management system is what rang the alarm that these pretzels were not labeled properly.
From knowing what kind of noodles work best to the ideal melting cheeses and add-ins, here's all the tricks chefs use to elevate their bowl of mac and cheese.
Some thoughts about DeepSeek r1 and its purported biases, including a transcript I ran on my own server to show how it answers politically sensitive topics to the PRC: modulus.isonomia.net/tech/r1-b…
Is that chat interface something you wrote, or part of Llama or something? I haven't seen it before, but that's not saying much because I haven't selfhosted anything. My resources are pretty low.
oh neat. Yeah I'm living under a rock with this stuff. I technically have an M2 Mac which could run some of these models but the rest of my hardware is pitiful. This is pretty interesting though.
I'm honestly a bit ashamed at how long it took me to start looking seriously into this stuff, considering I studied AI for my CS degree in the early 2000s. I'm still getting familiar with all the terminology (distillation, quantisation, ablation...). This is a point at which having local models starts making sense for doing some trivial and not-so-trivial tasks though. Very tempted to take this into consideration when I buy my next computer, and go for a powerful graphics card and lots and lots of RAM.
I wonder what that was like in the early 2000s. It's also taken me a long time to start looking into it. I knew about things like GPT for a long time, but didn't start using them until around the time GPT 4 was in beta. I'm with you on the want for better hardware; I probably need to buy a very nice desktop sometime soon.
It's interesting. In the 2000s AI was just beginning to emerge again after the 1980s crisis (the so-called AI winter). There were several things going on: OCR improvements, voice recognition and synthesis, some symbolic AI which is now seen as very old school, and the start of big data trends. Natural language processing was beginning a statistical turn, so giving up on systems using manual expert rules, and going more towards data mining and using statistical techniques to get information from the text. Algorithms like Google rank and early recommender systems were the sort of important thing.
Neural networks were seen as an impractical curiosity. They were developed early on, I think in the 70s/80s, but until maybe the 2010s there wasn't enough hardware to do anything too interesting with them. I tended to disregard progress in this area because I knew NNs were useless and inefficient (turns out they're not when they get big enough).
My final year project was on textual entailment. Get two strings of text and try to determine if one logically implies the other. For example:
Statement 1: Paris is a French city. Statement 2: Paris is in France.
At the time we were using what's called shallow-semantic approaches, so doing things like measuring string distance (Levenshtein distance), seeing if there were tokens that were related by WordNet, which is a sort of definition graph, etc. It was fun, but the approach was clearly weak and only got you maybe 60-70% of the way there.
That's really interesting. I had no idea these concepts went so far back, and I could see how hardware was a huge limitation then. So I wonder if we always knew how to develop modern language models, but didn't have the hardware for it until recently. I wasn't in this space enough to know whether that's the case, or whether there was a technical breakthrough that made it possible.
Sort of yes and no. There were neural networks very early on, but there were also a couple of important breakthroughs that took place in the 2010s. Basically one problem with neural networks was that they took an input and had trouble dealing with sequential information and relations, which is quite important in language (which word comes after another and so on). There were a few interesting approaches to this (convolutional and recurring neural networks) but what seems to have won are transformer models, based on techniques called attention and self-attention.
I can honestly say I barely understand the topic, because I'm no longer anywhere close to the research, but the idea is that these models can encode temporal information better (what comes after what) and focus on what's salient about it. It seems to have had a huge effect on the ability to handle language. But none of this could have happened without both much more powerful hardware (storage, memory, processing) and much, much larger datasets than people had access to before.
Also, have you seen my post where I tried to use the API? My answers were quite different and I wonder if the hosted version is specifically censored in a way the public model is not.
We just had a GTK hackfest at FOSDEM. A good time for an update on whats new and exciting in GTK, with an eye towards 4.18.
Requirements
You can no longer call gdk_display_get_default() or gdk_display_open() before gtk_init(). This was causing problems due to incomplete initialization, so we made it fail with a (hopefully clear) error message. If you are affected by this, the usual fix is to just call gtk_init() as early as possible.
On Windows, we have a hard requirement on Windows 10 now. All older versions are long unsupported, and having to deal with a maze of ifdefs and unavailable APIs makes development harder than it should be. Dropping support for very old versions also simplifies the code down the stack, in Pango and GLib.
The same idea applies to macOS, where we now require macOS 10.15.
Spring cleaning
The old GL renderer has been removed. This may be unwelcome news for people stuck on very old drivers and hardware. But we will continue to make the new renderers work as well as possible on the hardware that they can support.
The X11 and Broadway backends have been deprecated, as a clear signal that we intend to remove them in the GTK 5. In the meantime, they continue to be available. We have also deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow, since it needs a new design. The replacement will appear in libadwaita, hopefully next cycle.
It is worth reminding everybody that there is no need to act on deprecations until you are actively porting your app to the next major version of GTK, which is not on the horizon yet.
Incremental improvements
Widget layout and size allocation has received quite a bit of attention this cycle, with the goal of improving performance (by avoiding binary search as much as possible) and correctness. Nevertheless, these changes have some potential for breakage, so if you see wrong or suboptimal layouts in applications, please let us know.
GTK has had difficulties for a while getting its pointer sizes right with fractional scaling on Wayland, but this should all be solved in GTK 4.18. No more huge pointers. Fixing this also required changes on the mutter side.
New beginnings
Accessibility in GTK 4.18 is taking a major step forward, with the new AccessKit backend, which gives us accessibility on Windows and macOS, for the very first time. The at-spi backend is still the default on Linux, and has seen a number of improvements as well.
And, maybe the biggest news: We have an Android backend now. It is still experimental, so you should expect some rough edges and loose ends. For example, there is no GL renderer support yet. But it is exciting that you can just try gtk4-demo on your phone now, and have it mostly work.
Oh hi. I wrote most of the code in the new GTK AccessKit backend. Still a work in progress, and it currently relies on an unreleased version of the accesskit-c package. I need to make some time to put in a bit more work on that before 4.18 comes out.
@RaccoonForFriendica I'm seeing a lot of new users from Google Play's statistics, even if the app is not yet in the production channel. Welcome everyone, I hope you'll enjoy #friendica and #raccoonforfriendica!
Thanks to all the translators who continued to work on the app UI and store description, your dedication is really appreciated. @Fitik @Cătă@TamilNeram@Ricky-Tigg
To old users, I've added two new big features: swipe navigation which allows you to navigate between posts from the conversation detail and the "shortcuts" section, where you can explore other instances and see their local timeline "as if" your were registered there. Plus, as usual, small fixes and enhancements listening to your continuous feedback.
@Cătă I celebrated with some pizza tonight, easier to find in Italy than mici... 🍕 Celebrating everywhere with our traditional food is a great idea and we all deserve it! 🎉
@Cătă aș putea să încerc să-i gătesc și eu, carnea tocată se găsește oriunde, în sfârșit.
Am o altă întrebare pentru tine: dacă traduc descripția aplicației pentru Play Store, poți să-mi dai o mână de ajutor cu proof-reading ca data trecută?
@Cătă da, pe Weblate. Proiectul pe Weblate are două componente: "app" care conține toate mesajele interfeței și "metadata" care conține titlul și descripțiile pentru stores. Nu e prea mult text, dar sunt mai sigur dacă îi arunci și tu o privire pentru că trebuie să "atragă" utilizatori potențiali.
@𝔻𝕚𝕖𝕘𝕠 🦝🧑🏻💻🍕 I think I just searched for Friendica and Raccoon came up as the first suggestion. I'm motivated to trust anything named after those little bandits, so it was an easy download. Looks good so far.
I like that it's multi-purpose, but switching between the accounts wasn't straight forward to me. Maybe just a UI hiccup, or maybe user error on my part.
I think it's a "feel" issue more than a "functional" issue. I went to double check but the app is just stopping on me. Might be my phone''s being difficult.
I think the account switch is maybe a bit too far out of the way to be readily available. The menu opens up to access the account dropdown, and then you switch to the other account and the menu stays there.
My first thought is that switching to the account should acknowledge the change and then retract the menu. It took me a while to guess my way into swiping the menu to the side to dismiss it.
I was able to switch between Friendica and Mastodon well enough, but maybe there's a way to float that switch up to the top a bit more.
"Možná jste si všimli, že velké technologické společnosti (a státní organizace) zaměstnávají speciální týmy lidí, kteří přijdou každé ráno do práce, sednou si ke svému stolu a řeknou si: „Hmm, co bychom tak dnes mohli totálně dojebat?“"
Don't miss UI/UX Design Studio Manager Laurel Terlesky's #FOSDEM talk, "Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System" at 13:30 (CET) today. Watch in person (K.3.201) or online (live.fosdem.org/watch/k3201)! #Thunderbird #OpenSource #Design
@jonhicks Last year the recordings were available after FOSDEM, and we will happily point people to it if that's the case. We'll reach out to the FOSDEM crew, after giving them a well deserved breather.
We have also nicely asked Laurel to come on our office hours this month to give the talk again, and so we'll have that up by the end of February/beginning of March!
We just had a GTK hackfest at FOSDEM. A good time for an update on whats new and exciting in GTK, with an eye towards 4.18.
Requirements
You can no longer call gdk_display_get_default() or gdk_display_open() before gtk_init(). This was causing problems due to incomplete initialization, so we made it fail with a (hopefully clear) error message. If you are affected by this, the usual fix is to just call gtk_init() as early as possible.
On Windows, we have a hard requirement on Windows 10 now. All older versions are long unsupported, and having to deal with a maze of ifdefs and unavailable APIs makes development harder than it should be. Dropping support for very old versions also simplifies the code down the stack, in Pango and GLib.
The same idea applies to macOS, where we now require macOS 10.15.
Spring cleaning
The old GL renderer has been removed. This may be unwelcome news for people stuck on very old drivers and hardware. But we will continue to make the new renderers work as well as possible on the hardware that they can support.
The X11 and Broadway backends have been deprecated, as a clear signal that we intend to remove them in the GTK 5. In the meantime, they continue to be available. We have also deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow, since it needs a new design. The replacement will appear in libadwaita, hopefully next cycle.
It is worth reminding everybody that there is no need to act on deprecations until you are actively porting your app to the next major version of GTK, which is not on the horizon yet.
Incremental improvements
Widget layout and size allocation has received quite a bit of attention this cycle, with the goal of improving performance (by avoiding binary search as much as possible) and correctness. Nevertheless, these changes have some potential for breakage, so if you see wrong or suboptimal layouts in applications, please let us know.
GTK has had difficulties for a while getting its pointer sizes right with fractional scaling on Wayland, but this should all be solved in GTK 4.18. No more huge pointers. Fixing this also required changes on the mutter side.
New beginnings
Accessibility in GTK 4.18 is taking a major step forward, with the new AccessKit backend, which gives us accessibility on Windows and macOS, for the very first time. The at-spi backend is still the default on Linux, and has seen a number of improvements as well.
And, maybe the biggest news: We have an Android backend now. It is still experimental, so you should expect some rough edges and loose ends. For example, there is no GL renderer support yet. But it is exciting that you can just try gtk4-demo on your phone now, and have it mostly work.
Son muchos quienes hablan del "sesgo ideológico" de la AI china #DeepSeek No les muestren este prompt y respuesta, que explican como funciona Bing Image Creator que utiliza #DALL-E, desarrollada por #OpenAi desde la "cuna de la libertad occidental".
@KaterinaGloserova Dobré ránko, já úplně nejsem fanoušek moto sportu, ale každý rok se těším na fotografie z Dakaru. To je vždy pecka. Hezky zbytek víkendu ☺️👋
A growing number of US government websites have gone offline as of Saturday, including several related to USAID and others focused on youth programs, Africa, and more.
This time it’s not mere partisan hyperbole. Fascism really has come to America, to an extent we’ve never seen before. (If you still have any doubt, look at the role of Steve Bannon.) An…
I'm an unpaid volunteer who runs five websites and six accounts helping people use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. I pay all their bills every month.
If you want to help these sites & accounts keep going, you can buy me a coffee:
Canadians are anxious, yes. But we are also angry - angry that the U.S. sees us as disposable, despite the deep economic ties that we have upheld in good faith.
We should NOT take this lying down. We stand together. We buy Canadian. We diversify our trade. And we refuse to support a country that threatens us for no reason other than a madman's political theatre. #Canada stands strong. #ChooseCanada
On Thursday, multiple school systems around the United States released advisories stating that Trump's EO mandating discrimination in schools will not be followed.
Try RIM (Remote Incident Manager) for remote access—lightweight, accessible, and cross-platform! Great for troubleshooting and training. Learn more: getrim.app #RemoteAccess #TechHelp
Brian Driscoll, the acting FBI director and head of the bureau's Newark field office, pushed back so aggressively that some feared he would be dismissed.
"A kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century."
"In recent months the Harvard Law School [@harvard_law] Library Innovation Lab [@harvardlil] has created a data vault to download, sign as authentic, and make available copies of public government data that is most valuable to researchers, scholars, civil society and the public at large across every field. To begin, we have collected major portions of the datasets tracked by data.gov, federal #Github repositories, and #PubMed...."
Právě dorazilo. V reprobedně s chybějící mřížkou něco těžkého chrastí, bohužel dovnitř se teď nedostanu, šrouby jsou zapuštěny příliš hluboko. Nicméně - hrají. Volant je skoro 20 let starý, ale s trochou přemlouvání by snad i pod Win10 mohl fungovat :)
Web accessibility-related jobs are always going to flourish. Why? Because each browser, each screen reader, each operating system, each device, each input control, each custom control needs separate treatment.
Don't believe me? Try to implement a Vue3 combobox where you can filter items on Windows (Jaws, NVDA), Mac, iOS, iPad OS, Linux via a keyboard, touch, respecting screen sizes. Then, when all that is done, wait a few months until browsers receive some minor webkit update and things slowly start breaking.
If you’ve got lawyers and a copyright, the law gives you tremendous power to silence speech you don’t like. Copyright’s statutory damages can be as high as $150,000 per work infringed, even if no actual harm is done.
Plus de 1.000 pages web ont été supprimées des sites officiels du Ministère de la Santé états-unien. Des pages sur la vaccination, sur l'avortement, sur les personnes trans...
Les quatre prochaines années vont être absolument dévastatrices aux États-Unis. L'information disparaît, l'éducation s'étiole, la haine va croissant.
Nous n'avons pas une seconde à perdre en Europe pour inverser la vapeur chez nous. Nous organiser, créer des espaces numériques qui soient des refuges. Contribuer à Wikipédia. Marginaliser à nouveau la haine, refermer la fenêtre d'Overton.
Qu'on arrête de nous comporter comme si nous n'étions pas les prochains, parce qu'on l'est.
After realizing that my servers were offline since the 25th of January 2025, I've been in contact with Oracle support in a multitude of ways trying to figure out why this happened and how we can recover both the account and data.
I wasn't told that my account was disabled. I didn't receive an E-Mail or anything. When logging in, I was simply told that my username or password was incorrect. After (successfully) resetting my password twice, I realized it wasn't about the password. Oracle had just deleted my account without any notice.
Both through calls and text, always with the same service request (SR) number, I contacted support. Initially, support told me that my account was flagged “Inactive” and hence disabled. They also verified that they saw me login almost daily and that I never missed a payment or anything. Even if an account was inactive, that's never a reason to disable it, especially without any warning E-Mail or an E-Mail letting me know that my account was disabled in the first place.
This chat was the result of all of that, where the highest team I've yet been elevated to told me that there's nothing they can do about it, there's no reason they can tell me for why this happened, and there's no one else I could ask.
I also love how I ask “Is there anything I can do to avoid this happening in the future?” and they respond with “Oh, don't worry. You don't have a future at Oracle. This will not happen to you again, as we don't allow for you to make another account.”
Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle's CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.
Day three of Trump's term and the largest push for surveillance capitalism yet has been made: Project Stargate will be a $500.000.000.000 (500 billion USD) data center used for running a multitude of AIs with the purpose of spying on you.
Larry Ellison, the world's second richest man and CEO of Oracle, one of the main partners of Stargate, said:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on [...]. We're using A.I. to monitor the video.”
— Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle on how the company's A.I. systems will be used for in the future [Source: Business Insider]
This is who is in power now. This is the vision they have.
If you remember back to Lizzie Bennet Diaries diaries on youtube then you will remember it's star Ashley Clements.
Sadly her house has burned down in LA. If she ever brought you some joy but never figured out a way to pay her back (that youtube production didn't pay much) now is the perfect time to give.
When I received an alert about a “fast moving fire in your ar… Ashley Clements needs your support for Help Ashley Clements and Brendan Bradley Rebuild After Fire
I’m researching the life of my 5 x great grandfather Samuel Cottrell. This will be an interesting challenge because Samuel, a non-conformist, managed to avoid all the censuses taken in the 1800s
Samuel was born on 11 July 1796 to John Cottrell and Mary Teek. He was baptised on 2 October 1796 at Saint Luke’s Old Street, Finsbury, London.
During this research, I hope to learn more about London as well.
Joint Statement from 12 State Attorneys General: President Trump is Misleading the American People on Purpose of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Acc... oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases…
OAKLAND – California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, with the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, t…
Starting off #Movuary with a thing I posted several months ago now, because it's the first thing I did with all 8 scenes in a single project. No external samples were used, and it was made entirely on Move, with no midi keyboard tracked in from elsewhere.
This was started on the day that my portion of London hit 31°C, which is nothing for my US followers with your fancy AC units, but for me without any of that...
Requirements
Dave Taylor
in reply to David Goldfield • • •David Goldfield
in reply to Dave Taylor • • •Dave Taylor
in reply to David Goldfield • • •