My father loves the "bird program", as he calls @thunderbird (he doesn't speak English). He doesn't like webmail or other email clients, just Thunderbird.
Byli jste dnes behat? Nebo na vylete? Ja se taky dnes nabehal...nechapu, proc mi to meri v kilometrech. Metry by bohate stacily! (Na spanek nekoukejte, hodinky na noc sundavam.)
Is there something you always wanted to ask an astrophysicist? Here is your chance.
I will try to answer as many questions as I can today. And if I enjoy it, we may repeat this later.
Some background: I'm a high energy astrophysicist working on black holes, neutron stars, accretion and massive stars with a pretty broad knowledge of the whole astro field (I did teach it at uni level), but little to no experience with hobby observing or astrophotography.
Reading For Fun Is Plummeting In the US, and Experts Are Concerned - alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you sett... - news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/… #books
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S.
Western scholarship has had “a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry.
Last year, Vision Australia attempted to recruit a CEO without an open process, thus locking out capable blind leaders from Australia and around the world who didn’t work for the organization. They would have gotten away with it if a group of brave, principled blind leaders weren’t having it, and stood up to make change, despite the personal difficulties this caused. They banded together, formed an organization called United Blind Leaders, and were relentless until Vision Australia did the right thing and embarked upon an open and inclusive process in which appointing a blind person was something they are actively seeking to do. They’ve been effective, and now they’re taking their message global and continuing to advocate for change. It is essential that we as blind people lead the organizations that provide us with service. If these organizations don’t believe in blind people, why should the rest of the world? I encourage you to follow United Blind Leaders on Mastodon for updates on this great movement for change. @Unitedblindleaders. That’s UnitedBlindLeaders at Mastodon.social.
It is essential in 2025 that blind people lead the organisations that are representing us. However this has to extend across the organisation, throughout senior and middle management as well as staff overall. I have personally seen major organisations be led in the completely wrong way due to a tiny number of blind people within the organisation. And that’s up to the blind leaders to implement. I’ve equally seen a blind person get into high office in an organisation only to pull the drawbridge up behind them to ensure their own viewpoint is heard and to allow them to dismiss all others. One blind person’s opinion is just that - one opinion. As they say, it takes a village. And that village needs to be full of blind, low vision and sighted people, with a blind leadership team. caneandable.social/@JonathanMo…
Last year, Vision Australia attempted to recruit a CEO without an open process, thus locking out capable blind leaders from Australia and around the world who didn’t work for the organization.
I still use a Kobo Touch, an ereader that came out in 2011, and this morning I got an update that replaced the now-dead Pocket integration with an Instapaper one. A decade and a half old product still getting new features shouldn’t feel extraordinary but it really really does.
Today I learned that fuzzy logic came to be thanks to an Iranian scientist, Lotfi A. Zadeh. Fuzzy mathematics play an important role in so many appliances and new tech, including your rice cooker and the AI you use daily. Fuzzy logic allows computers to work with a degrees of truth rather than 1/0 or true/false. Fuzzy mathematics added a little humanity to our machines. Think about it! We say the weather is warm, really hot, kind of cool, extremely cold, ETC. There's no just hot/cold. Machines can understand this using the fuzzy logic. In simpler words, fuzzy logic is designed to mimic human reasoning by handling imprecise information. I am proud of my country and my people, but I should emphasize that my current government is definitely not my people. #Iran #FuzzyLogic #LotfiZadeh #Mathematics #AI #Tech #Computing
Сегодня у кошки Сони день рождения. 28 сентября 2013 года она появилась у нас в доме. Была слабенькая, голодная, только ела и спала, за что и была названа Соней. Потом-то мы, конечно, поняли свою ошибку. Но первые дни она была Соня Соней. Вот как первом своём фото, которое тут оказалось третьим - где она совсем мелкая на оранжеваом пледике лежит.
А у моей дочки тоже кошка Соня. Она (кошка) — дочка нашей первой кошки, поэтому я её новорождённым котёнышем помню. А уже 15 лет почти и здоровье, прямо скажем, не очень…
INFO: Wenn Ihr die 112 anruft, benutzt bitte KEINEN Lautsprecher sondern das Telefon als Telefon, es sei denn wir fordern Euch dazu auf!!! Durch den Lautsprecher verstehen wir nur die Hälfte. Und ja, das ist so. Danke
Thunderbird 142.0 has a host of exciting features and bug fixes. From improving the PDF experience to better support for quiet time, learn what's just landed in our recap of the newest monthly release.
@nw Thanks for the feedback! Improving search is going to be much easier once we have our underlying database work completed, as well as other developments, but it's definitely something we want to improve!
@sus Improving search is going to be much easier once we have our underlying database work completed, as well as other developments, but it's definitely something we want to improve! And for now, using the Send Later Add-on is the best way to snooze emails! addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/t…
@sus Yeah I have also stopped using Thunderbird and I'm just using the Gmail interface because search is totally useless now and every time I open Thunderbird I get a whole bunch of Gmail calendar alerts that I've already responded to on my phone and just will not go away even if I click dismiss all. so they just keep coming back
It's a shame that it's so terrible to use now since I've been using it since version 1.0
@Canageek We're so sorry you had any frustration with search and the calendar! Like we replied to others above, we're looking at ways to improve search, especially once we've completed some of our backend database work. And improving our calendar is one of our major focuses for this coming year!
Could you offer a native arm64 build for Windows please ? We are more and more arm windows laptop users and it would improve our experience. Thanks for your hard work!
@maedhros001 Thanks for the suggestion, and we'll make sure it gets to the team! Another good place for suggestions like this is our official feedback site, Mozilla Connect! connect.mozilla.org
We're in the development process right now for an iOS app! And in our upcoming monthly Mobile Progress Report, we'll have some exciting updates on how things are going! 🎉
I meant that it can be quite frustrating when you've written a program in a particular programming language, but that language has changed since, and now your program is no longer a valid program in that language.
Of course clang-tidy is a silly example since it's not required to compile a program.
It's causing all kinds of false-positives with clang-tidy v21, in some
cases in system headers. In a few cases in tests/server, there was no
distinct source line that was triggering it.
Appear...
@liaizon The Tuta server is very complex. We plan to build a small, open-source server that enables you to self-host, but this is further down the line.
Does everything support linux now? I guess that must have changed recently. And do I need to study linux for years so that I can understand how it works? Or does it do things automatically now?
I'm all for Linux, if only it was convenient and people could understand how to use it easily.
I don't work there, I don't get paid for it, and I don't even use it anymore, but for the sake of completeness, I wanted to mention that there is a second, albeit commercial, alternative to Microsoft Office: SoftMaker Office from Germany: softmaker.com/en/products/soft…
I used it a lot and enjoyed it during my studies many years ago. I no longer need any office software, as I have created my own template in LaTeX for letters and am happy with it.
One small thing that's stopping me from going all-out for Tuta is the lack of a "not spam" button (or am I missing something?). I get lots of false positives in my spam folder and making rules for all of them is a huge pain. I see people have been asking for this for years, but it's still not there.
@stereo you denounce that Microsoft stops free office for NPOs and recoment Tuta Mail that is also not free? If you would write that it has othwr advantages ok... but THAT is no argument....
I see there's now a petition asking Google not to block sideloading apps on Android. I'm not optimistic that's going to work, especially since Google is so close to its apparent end goal of preventing people from circumventing its Play store. (I wonder if the timing has something to do with the rumors I'm seeing that Amazon is going to go stock Android.)
We need a mobile OS that is not controlled by a single entity. Not an Android fork, something 100% not controlled by big tech.
I don't know if that's possible, it's certainly a hard problem to solve. But reliance on big tech to remain non-hostile to the needs of the FOSS community -- or even just the needs of people who want control of their devices -- is foolish.
What that really means is that we need to solve the business problems ourselves, which is something that the FOSS community has generally avoided. By that I mean, we need to dig into our pockets and pay for goods and services. 2/?
We need financial entities that hire people to do the things volunteers don't want to do, to maintain software, to support hardware, to write documentation, etc.
We need to source hardware and sell hardware, and people need to deal with the fact that it won't be as convenient or full-featured as what big tech can provide -- at least not right away. And it will be more expensive because it's not subsidized by preying on the users.
Lobbying big tech to pretty please play nice doesn't work.
It is, of course, easy for me to say all this because saying it is the easy part. Doing it is another. But I've seen example after example after example of the problems with hoping that big companies will "do the right thing" or lobbying them to do the right thing, or just hoping that things will stay status quo.
For example, Sun carried a lot of the a11y work for the Linux desktop, until it was devoured by Oracle. That was nice, but it was a failure waiting to happen.
A bunch of hardware is now losing maintainers because Intel is laying people off because of its financial woes. Fewer people are being paid to package software as priorities change with other vendors. Half of Red Hat's QA team moved to other things, and there's at least a temporary gap in Fedora testing due to it. Etc.
The corollary to the random person in Nebraska is the person employed by $bigco that eventually retires, quits, or is laid off and another hole needs to be filled.
Go ahead and petition Google, I guess. It might, temporarily, work. Or read the writing on the wall--the uneasy relationship between Google/Android and people who want general computing capabilities on their phone is not sustainable. If people want computing devices and operating systems they control, and that they can trust, and that are sustainable, it will have to be done by a non-profit entity that only exists to serve users and is funded by users.
I once (around 2011) evaluated it would cost around $100M / year to develop and maintain a mobile OS, open source based on Linux, including some cloud services. There was no revenue model for this either.
I'm not even sure that figure is valid now. You need developers. You need sysadmins. You need business development / sales to create revenue. You need admin and marketing.
Today the landscape has an even higher cost of entry.
Blind Android users, are you able to type into the calculator app with Braille? Like, can you type numbers and operators and press enter to have them calculated? #braille #android #blind
LWN publishes an article on my "GNOME governance" proposal, and of course the comments are from whiny people complaining about GNOME's UX, because LWN commenters are nothing if not entirely predictable
The graphical interface, themes, styles, widgets, and visual artifices are the concerns of the Linux kindergarten. There, toddlers play at changing Tux's diapers, choosing his eye and beak colors, and choosing the outfit for each distro.
One of our newest contributors, Jan, discovered how to interpret the timecode signal on the Traktor MK2 Control Vinyl and has created the first implementation we're aware of to decode it. Soon, DJs will be able to use their Traktor vinyl on another system for the first time!
Download the most advanced FREE DJ software available, featuring iTunes integration, MIDI controller support, internet broadcasting, and integrated music library.
🇦🇿 Aliyev calls Azerbaijan’s entry into the #USSR “Russian Invasion and Occupation”
In 1920, the #Russian army invaded and occupied #Azerbaijan, the country's president Ilham Aliyev said. According to him, the Azerbaijan #Democratic Republic existed only briefly before Moscow took the state away from its people. The country, he noted, was torn into two parts in the process of “Sovietization.”
Heute war es endlich soweit: Die Bachelorarbeit wollte verteidigt werden. Furchtbar nervös auf dem Weg und die Tage davor. Und nun alles bestanden. Die Bachelorarbeit mit einer 1,0 und das Studium insgesamt mit einer 1,72. Jetzt bin ich noch gespannt, wann ich das wirklich realisiere.
I bought an #Android 4.3 tablet (#Alcatel onetouch, 18 £). Sure it is outdated but is sufficient. I found several great apps via #fdroid and transferred them via Bluetooth (saved as txt) from my current phone to the old tablet (tablet certificate expired, need to update this). Is there any resource to find more apps in the meantime? I looked at #izzyondroid a bit.
@IzzyOnDroid do you have be chance a filter for the minimum Android version I missed in the web interface?
Unfortunately not. That is still on our list (gitlab.com/IzzyOnDroid/repo/-/…), but there was always something "more important" to do. As we mostly do this in our free time (our funding doesn't allow a full time job unfortunately, though I'd love to take it – opencollective.com/izzyondroid), we have more tasks than time to perform them. We're currently reworking our framework, so hopefully this will be addressed in that context (also see: codeberg.org/IzzyOnDroid/-/pro…).
Oh, it is fun! Especially with such a lovely team we have – and the great feedback we receive, thanks! We all enjoy it. I really wish I could make THAT my "full time job"…
Esperem que para os malucos que diziam que tinham sido os Muçulmanos a atearam os fogos e que a fotografia dos imigranres a apagar fogos era IA, agora os moços não são heróis, porque... trabalhavam para a Caule. Estavam só a fazer o trabalho para que foram pagos Então... os bombeiros, já não são heróis, é isso?
E quê? Deixaram de ser imigrantes, por serem funcionários?
After 22 years, Typepad is shutting down with one month's notice. Go back up your old blogs, old-school blogger friends. everything.typepad.com/blog/20…
Re: last boost (sauropods.win/@futurebird/1151…), this whole thread is worth a read. I have used an LLM as a validation machine before, and it has led me to do a few things that I mildly regret, even within the past month. Yes, despite my earlier critical posts on LLMs, I have broken down and used one for personal purposes quite recently. Maybe now I will actually stop.
You may have seen this tragic story about a teenager who committed suicide and used chat GPT to plan and work up the nerve to go through with it. If you are skeptical that an LLM could really be responsible the details of this case will challenge you.
With LLMs "the user is always right" they are validation machines and will reinforce and validate any idea presented in a prompt.
Any idea, no matter how bad, can be refined, amplified.
Adam's parents claim ChatGPT went from helping Adam with homework to becoming a companion, then to eventually becoming his suicide coach, according to the lawsuit.
I have shared ideas and feelings with an LLM in order to have a semblance of conversation, without the vulnerability of sharing things publicly or the feeling of imposition that comes with dumping those thoughts on an actual individual human. But of course, the responses I got aren't from someone with their own thoughts, and LLMs are optimized to reinforce whatever the user says, perhaps with a few specific guardrails.
Yeah, that's sadly something all those management people seem to ignore when pushing AI down hard on everyone.
They aren't gonna take responsibility if one of their employees will run into such issues.
The "it's just a tool" excuse doesn't work, some people are just more likely to accept that fact that than others.
It doesn't help that LLM players already manipulate their models to push their own narratives/agendas and who knows with what goal you'd get manipulated while "chatting".
Abhiraj Bibhar
in reply to It's FOSS • • •Linux G. Fossman
in reply to Abhiraj Bibhar • • •@abhirajbibhar Yes they can and are. We need to support them by contributing, and also buying from #mobilelinux vendors.
#Flx1 #LibertyPhone #jolla2c #Vollaphone #Librem5
Abhiraj Bibhar
in reply to Linux G. Fossman • • •Linux G. Fossman
in reply to Abhiraj Bibhar • • •Purism
in reply to Linux G. Fossman • • •Liberty Phone – Purism
shop.puri.sm