You don't get to own Xorg. It belongs to the X.org foundation and community.
X.org literary hosts and runs Wayland and Weston
Xorg is dead and we killed it. And nobody regrets it.
So I found myself doing some actual calculations in a spreadsheet today. On if you could store meaningful amounts of energy by sinking & raising massive pieces of concrete into the ocean (yes). Doing such calculations *correctly* benefits tremendously from dimensional analysis, but a spreadsheet can't do it. In fact we barely do this. But it is so luxurious to have the computer check your work:
Discovery of the day: Turns out you can make Steam accessible on the Mac, and in general there is work on making it more accessible. I wrote about it here forum.audiogames.net/post/9119…
Seriously, make your life easier and don't go overboard for no reason.Links 'n' stuff:OPEN SAUCE:https://opensauce.com/Technology Connextras (the second chan...
For NVDA users: the Tiflotecnia voices (Cerence, formerly Vocalizer) have been updated to be compatible with NVDA 2025.1 RC 1. This ppackage is not free for new purchasers. tiflotecnia.com/
Ty jo hustý, pramen zdraví z Posázaví koupit v Anglii. V Německu má Norma docela dost český produktů. Jsem taky koukal u pokladny v Mnichově, že tam mají Tatranky. 😀 Ale to je německý obchod.
Surprise! Just because we released C23, doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working on C as a whole! There is a TON of things to do, and we have absolutely been busy working on things!
The US Department of Energy has decided that section 504 just isn’t a thing anymore, so it’s fine actually for recipients of their financial aid to build handycap-inaccessible buildings with our tax dollars.
If you disagree, leave a comment! There is one day left.
Zero percent chance this stops with the Department of Energy. I will say it louder, for the folks in the back: if you have a disability, the Trump administration wants you dead, and is taking direct action to ensure your death.
Researchers find Llama 3.1 recalls large parts of popular copyrighted books, possibly weakening AI industry claims that such memorization is fringe behavior (Timothy B. Lee/Understanding AI)
In which I take you through my favourite sounds found within Rhodes Anthology from Rhodes Music. We also skim through the NKS parameters so that if you wish to use it this way, you know what you can expect from the mapping.
I'm also treating this as my #AudioMo Day 15 post as well.
In this video I take you through my favourite sounds found in the Rhodes Anthology Plugin from Rhodes Music.We also take a look at the NKS mapping created by...
I'm probably just easily impressed but it comes to something when I didn't have to replace a *single* instance of 'Roads' with 'Rhodes' in the subtitles I uploaded, as created by MacWhisper. I opened up the file ahead of uploading to skim it as I usually do, thinking that I'd have to swap out 100% of the word 'Rhodes' and absolutely none were wrong. I think that is fantastic.
This is one thing LLMs are pretty good at. Give them a transcript, explain what it is and ask to fix. Much faster than a human. Still requires manual review afterwards, but LLMs can usually do 80% of the work.
For harder cases, Google's Gemini models (both flash and pro) support audio input natively, and they're better at transcription than Whisper in my experience. More prone to hallucination when the quality is so bad that even a human has trouble understanding, but overall better nonetheless.
This is just sumthing that i have seen happen to me on multiple occasions. If i forget to type i in trying to write a word with ing, i might accidentally type this, ng! The sound is unexplainable, and weird. This is today's Audio Shit Fest, Part 9!
TTS noises were something I made a lot of back in the day. Different engines, different sounds. AT&T Mike is where I got my name from>. Freaky Fwoof. It said Fwoof in a weird way, and it then became who I am today. It also said the word 'Nananaf' in a particularly bizarre way. VW Paul would hum like a generator if you typed 'BWBW' followed by a vowel. Many, many things like that I can think of.
You need a VM then. Oh, and can't forget about Infovox 3, which would go absolutely crazy when given the phrase 'RSS readers for phones' without any punctuation over and over again. I have a recording of that one.
@alexchapman @cachondo I didn't grow up with Eloquence as so many do, my version of favourite TTS is Dolphin Orpheus which I use in NVDA. Using it right now in fact.
@FreakyFwoof @alexchapman there was a recent Keynote revival, which is great, but I never had a Braillenote. I'm hoping for an analogue one next, which is as close as I think I'm going to get to doubletalk.
@FreakyFwoof @alexchapman why would you limit yourself to SAPI when the addons are portable? Need to move machine and you've lost one of the most defining characteristics of how you use a computer. Obviously back in the day you had no choice, but ...
@cachondo @FreakyFwoof @alexchapman I am just not a fan of the idea that at any moment, the add on can be unsupported. I just don't even bother. I used to use different speech add ons, be for i started using Sapi5 Mike full time, and none worked out for what i needed. I was also looking for a universal engine for both Jaws and NVDA, making it seemless whenever i move between the two screenreaders.
@cachondo @alexchapman Well you have a damn long time to see if it will be or not, and since the store now allows you to enable unsupported addons, I see no problem.
@cachondo @alexchapman I am very, very certain that at some point, your particular SAPI engine will be deprecated with some windows version, or SAPI itself will be killed off. Then what?
@FreakyFwoof @alexchapman well Eloquence is already dead on some 64 bit android, I think. It felt like pure luck it came to iOS, I'd missed it for a decade. Nothing lasts for ever, I guess.
@cachondo @FreakyFwoof @alexchapman Yes, Eloquence is dead on X64 Android now, for the most part. Thank god i have an E-speak APK that is X64, and that was not a concern to me. When Eloquence died, people collectively lost it, and all you heard about was the angry people complaining about it. There are alternitives, but i understand thats just not possible for sum.
@FreakyFwoof @alexchapman well obviously it's possible. I moved from Nokia to Apple in 2010 and had no eloquence on mobile for a decade. I didn't like it, but I put up with it because of all the other benefits of having an iPhone. The saddest thing is that there are lots of enthusiasts and hobbyists who'd put code out there, but someone's paid to keep it behind closed doors, even though it's not bringing them in any money or being of any use to them.
@cachondo @FreakyFwoof @alexchapman code Factory had it on the Google Play store, but claim the reason they are not making a 64-bit version is because people are apparently cracking it too much. Okay cracks are a thing, and I do have slight objections to them, but everybody hates code factory. Nearly every person I know says nothing good about them. They start off with a product, they publish it and release it, and then all of a sudden they seemingly abandon it. I have just steered clear of anything that requires updates. In vda and Jaws obviously not, is I know those two get consistently updated but all of these add-ons, and these paid synthesizers that may I remind you I'm paying for, don't get updated. I don't know Harpo soft track record, but I know code Factory has a pretty shoddy one.
@cachondo Yep, it gets slower and seems to me that had it still been recording all these years later, it would have never stopped slowing. Alternate version of the word 'Phones' is different from the last.
@FreakyFwoof @fireborn @alexchapman @cachondo If i'm ever gonna use Orpheus, i would go for En-us, Lucy. Maybe not the hotest chick out there, but hay, it's a start.
@fireborn @alexchapman @cachondo To me they vie for first-place hated American voices with ESpeak. Nothing about US ESpeak is anything other than rancid, incomprehensible elephant shite. An utter travesty of an accent in both cases.
@fireborn @FreakyFwoof @alexchapman @cachondo Oh, dam. I have never heard sum one be like, these voices are so unbearable, you will just stop using them after five minutes.
@mhussain @FreakyFwoof @fireborn @alexchapman They stopped producing speech synthesizers shortly after that latest Orpheus build as I recall. They also discontinued their OCR software and Braille translator, focusing on Supernova as a mainly magnifier-based product, Dolphin Guide, and latterly their easy reader app for iOS.
@FreakyFwoof @fireborn @alexchapman @cachondo query, did dolphin ever release better voices from that line? like a better carrel voice or a better alan voice?
@cachondo @FreakyFwoof @fireborn @alexchapman huh, well, dolphin must not have many supernova customers now then a? I mean they have nvda and jaws to contend with?
@mhussain @fireborn @alexchapman they didn't even make it onto the Web AIM Screen reader surveys for a while, there were so few users. They compete with Zoomtext more than JAWS and NVDA directly, people like @FreakyFwoof who used it up until comparitively recently without any eyesight aren't the demographic they've been targeting for the last decade. The magnification side of Supernova is respected and deployed widely in UK schools, libraries etc.
@mhussain @fireborn @alexchapman @FreakyFwoof They did have a very powerful scripting system based on LUA. I got a free day's training out of them at work back in ... 2013? and it was a nicely done tool. Ironically many of the people writing the modules were doing so with NVDA.
@fireborn @cachondo @alexchapman @FreakyFwoof last time I used supernova was 2008 or something? as soon as nvda came on the seen I was using that, nvda 0.5
@fireborn @mhussain @cachondo @alexchapman I was newly using Chrome at the time and it would crash the screen-reader without warning several times a day. One day I said to myself that one more crash would make me try NVDA for a day... Then it turned into a week... Then it turned into forever.
@FreakyFwoof @fireborn @alexchapman @cachondo I guess i just live with it. Google TTS makes using my phone a nightmare, because it lags constantly. I like voice 1, but even she's a lager herself.
@fireborn @BTyson @FreakyFwoof @alexchapman @cachondo I wonder if DECtalk will unseat it once it becomes stable. IMHO nothing beats a nice klatt synth, and DECtalk is the daddy of klatt synths, being the work of Klatt himself.
Heute sprechen wir über Faschismus und das hoffentlich zum letzten Mal. Wir wollen wissen, was wir tun können, wenn der Worst Case eintritt, so wie wir es in den USA live miterleben. Was ist das für ein Leben im Faschismus? Wie wird man ihn wieder los?
Wieder hinterlässt der Podcast von @afelia ein Gefühl der Hoffnung in mir. Es ist mir ein dringendes Anliegen, euch alle zu ermutigen, diesen Podcast zu unterstützen. Mir hilft es ungemein, meine durch die Nachrichten der Welt immer in grausamen Dystopien laufenden Gedanken neu zu sortieren und in eine bessere, hoffnungsvollere Richtung zu lenken. Danke dafür.
Heute sprechen wir über Faschismus und das hoffentlich zum letzten Mal. Wir wollen wissen, was wir tun können, wenn der Worst Case eintritt, so wie wir es in den USA live miterleben.
After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control th…
I'm glad Europe is doing well on this. But 2 out of the 7 alt texts have typos. Come on, BBC. [How UK paternity leave compares to the rest of Europe - BBC News](bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8d3l…)
Trying to login using the #raccoonforfriendica app, but when I try to add my instance it gets returned as "invalid". What am I doing wrong? @RaccoonForFriendica
We've done part 1, part 2 and now it's time for part 3 a look at BRLTTY, the Linux TTY and how it all integrates or better yet, doesn't with the screenreader...
This felt too valuable not to share. Braille-labeled maps of washrooms to help people find and use facilities in the washroom. Everyone deserves to get in, do their business, wash their hands, and get out in peace and safety.
🗓️ Planify mi bylo doporučeno v komunitní místnosti o #triliumnext – a musím říct, fakt super! Konečně krásná co padne do #Gnome, jednoduchá a funkční aplikace pro správu úkolů, která se napojí na #Nextcloud #oscloud přes CalDAV.
Nextcloud (backend) + DAVx⁵ + Tasks.org (Android) + Planify (desktop) Funguje to skvěle dohromady.
umí opakované úkoly? Gnome úkolníků s caldav synchronizací jsem pár zkoušel, ale ještě jsem nenašel žádný s opakovanými úkoly. Ani frontend nextcloud tasks je nepodporují, jsem tedy odkázán jen na používání androidí Tasks.org
@stepan Planify opakované úkoly umí a přes CalDAV se mi normálně zobrazují i ve webovém Nextcloudu. Umí i podúkoly, ale ty už Nextcloud webové rozhraní nepodporuje. Mně to stačí – to důležité řeším na PC a přes Nextcloud mám jen osobní věci, které potřebuju v mobilu. Hrozně se mi líbí to rozhraní – je čisté, rychlé. Navíc Quick Add umožní vytvořit nový úkol odkudkoliv pomocí klávesové zkratky, aniž bys musel mít otevřené hlavní okno.
Jj, zrovna jsem se díval jestli to není v Gnome Circle. A není. Že by to nendodželo nějaké guidelines? Přijde mi že tam je plno blbin, ale užitečných aplikací jako tato po málu... circle.gnome.org/
Follow live updates as the military parade in Washington, D.C., kicks off on Trump's birthday. 'No Kings' protests by opponents are planned across the country today.
My notes on Anthropic's substantial essay about how they built their multi-agent research system, which has finally talked me around to taking multi-agent LLM prompt engineering seriously simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/14/…
OK, I'm sold on multi-agent LLM systems now. I've been pretty skeptical of these until recently: why make your life more complicated by running multiple different prompts in parallel when …
Not for the usual reasons, but because it encourages thinking of agents like we think of employees. Something you have a limited number of, difficult to hire/fire, can only do one task at a time etc.
A better way to think about them would be as (graphs of) ephemeral tasks / jobs, like in Celery, Sidekik and such. In this model, LLMs are essentially an autoscaling pool of compute that those tasks can always tap into.
This way of thinking gives you features like parallel sub-agents, checkpointing, crash recovery or surviving system migrations / power outages for almost free.
@miki I think the term "agent" is mostly unusable, because if you ask five people you'll get five different (potentially *wildly* different) interpretations, and often people will have a weird confidence that THEIR definition is the right one which everyone else shares when it isn't
In this case Anthropic opened their paper by clarifying the definition they were using ("LLMs autonomously using tools in a loop"), and I'm fine with that
Aujourd'hui, c'était retrouvailles entre vieux collègues, cassoulet et profiteroles. Et au retour, une visite improvisée à la halle de la machine (halledelamachine.fr/), un chouette endroit inspirant à base de machines mécaniques, pneumatiques et avec du bois. Jolie découverte.
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