given what our leaders are doing to protect the planet, why would one procreate to leave that shit to heir children? You gotta have to be a special kind of bad person to destroy the planet your children will be living on.
I had the absolute WORST coffee this morning: Summer Moon cafe, a chain that looks inviting and kinda third-wave
Brewed coffee: terrible. Their shtick is oak-roaated coffee. Tastes like campfire ashes mixed with Folger's
Lattes: their thing is "moon milk" in all their lattes which is this blend of sweet cream, whole milk, sugar syrup, and whatever else (maybe cereal milk like flavor?). I had the weakest option which was only 1/4 moon milk, 3/4 skim for the latte. It was so sweet I wanted to puke. And some people actually order a "full moon"???
Disgusting trash that should come with health warnings.
I should probably post this on their Yelp to warn others.
This week I learned that September 26th is the most popular of all birthdays during the year, probably because it's about 40 weeks from roughly the week between xmas and new years, which explains why half of everyone I know seemed to be born this week.
All the dark patterns when you don't have Amazon Prime and order something. No wonder they have to settle 1.5B$. If only other countries followed suit.
@NVAccess hello. Yesterday I tried to join the developers mailing list. Unfortunately none of my message seemed to make it through. Is there an additionally approval process in place before new members can post to the list? Thank you.
Hi Richard, I don't believe so. You should be able to join from groups.io/g/nvda-devel or by emailing nvda-devel+subscribe@groups.io I'm actually not an admin of that group, so I'll check on it for you :)
@ZBennoui Hello, don't ignoring me‼️ The lack of medications in Gaza my Mom who is a type1 Diabetis patiant and was scheduled for an urgent eye surgery have had no access to insulin or any medical care for the past 3 months. Am on my knees requesting for your donations. Please go and check out my pinned post contained donation link and donate whatever you can. Every bit helps, thank you from the bottom of my heart ❤️🙏❤️
Hi All, Just a quick note to let you know that episode 18 of Access Ableton will be delayed by a few days. I've been absolutely swamped with work this last week and need a little more time to get everything ready. Should be out on either Tuesday or Wednesday. Thanks for your patience.
I really like Gordon Ramsay but it's super disappointing to see him shilling those Hexclad pans. They're garbage and he knows it. They're also not non-toxic; they lost a lawsuit about it too
I think if all those companies producing and designing phones spent as much time worrying about audio as they do about cameras and video, we would have a 32-bit float recording by now, and perhaps a few more cool audio bits! :)
The way at least iPhones work now, there isn't really an advantage to 32-bit FP. The microphone volume is fixed at 30% with idiot-proof multi-band processing to make up the difference, which can be bypassed, but only in mono.
A US citizen & human rights defender identified as Rachel S. was abducted & beaten by ICE Trump regime forces in LA, then transported to the hospital and then a detention center, local rights defenders demand an investigation. She is heard screaming: "Let me go! I am an American! I was born here!"
Project I'm vaguely thinking of building: getthing. A GUI where you paste a URL, and it sends the link to yt-dlp, or fanficfare, or ARIA2c, or spotdl, or streamlink, based on the website and what supports it, and then just saves the thing. Because I often have things I want, and I don't like thinking about what app to use. Also, I have a nest of scripts to keep it all working: the update thing that updates yt-dlp and ffmpeg and deno, the other different update thing that updates fanficfare, the thing that uses rookie to get the auth cookies from my browser, the thing that bypasses cloudflare, the other thing that bypasses cloudflare when the first thing doesn't, the thing that keeps the user-agent up to date for all the different other things so they are impersonating the latest version of a browser, etc. Someone should really just put this all into a package that will just save stuff to your hard drive in the "correct format"(tm) that you probably wanted based on what it is.
I would use this immediately mate, immediacy abounds for a product like that. Not get it done immediately but as in, with out hesitation I would use the mess out of it.
@dodecahedron Hmmm. The main thing is getting the list of supported domains for each tool. I don't wanna update the GUI every time a tool updates, and I want the GUI to keep the tools it uses up to date, so I'm gonna have to parse the command output where it lists supported websites. That's really the big job that I don't already have code for.
@jackwilliambell I'm not sure there are many RSS feeds of fanfics, spotify songs, large files, etc. And as for YouTube, yt-dlp has better ways of doing that using the propper API's. There are also already several bridges that can turn any YouTube channel into a podcast.
Was in Dubuque again and reminded that the only notable thing about that depressing city is that Al Capone had a special suite at the Hotel Julien with a giant safe which he would lock himself in when the cops were looking for him. I haven't seen it myself, but the rumor was that it was still there and you could rent that room.
I liked the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium rivermuseum.org
I met Steve Langasek (vorlon) there (RIP). This was when he was going to join a secret new company based on his Debian release manager work. (He didn’t tell me details, but it was Cannonical to work on Ubuntu.)
It was nice to pickup a copy of The Quad-City Times. Local news seems rare now.
It was a bit of a rush driving back to Winnipeg, but I fondly remember my short time in the Quad Cities.
Part museum, part aquarium, part science center—it’s the total package for family fun! We create educational experiences where history and rivers come alive.
@drewdaniels I have been to that museum!! I think they did a great job based on my own experience growing up right near the Mississippi River in southwest Wisconsin. I believe schools in the area take field trips to it as well
It's crazy to see all those historic buildings downtown by the riverfront that used to be a massive manufacturing district but are now mostly derilict. The only thing keeping that area alive seems to be the casinos 😭
oh, and I had family in Little Chicago (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan). Some of the stories of Capone’s empire were horrid. “Don’t go near the rail yard, or the tunnel people will get you” wasn’t a fairy tail. If you’re into that history, they have a spa, and tours of the tunnels that had live action re-enactments.
I gather you're not having the same problems with the Intel Ethernet and sshd on Kubuntu. I wonder if you'd have those same problems on stock Arch, since KDE Linux says it's created using Arch packages.
@matt That is correct, it seems to work fine. TBH though my entire goal here was to have a "vanilla" KDE + Plasma install as a reference so that I could deduce when my FreeBSD + KDE Plasma desktop was malfunctioning. (treating the Linux version as 'known good') so don't expect to exercise the Linux version particularly heavily.
So am I the last person on earth to learn that windows+up arrow maximizes a window? Kind of means that I don't really need alt+space for anything anymore.
In Windows 11, this doesn't work unless you turn off... What's it called... Window snapping? I think? There's a feature that takes over win-up and win-down, and it annoys me. Turning the feature off restores the wonderful maximize and minimize shortcut keys.
Tonight, in things I will not be reading despite what the AI recommendation systems think of me, we have the following example. Who is this even for? Lonely moms? Teenaged boys? The harder I think about it the more upset and baffled I become.
Oops! I Banged My Bully’s Mom "A boy’s reputation is thrown into the trash because others are intimidated by his large dick. His bully’s may resent and despise him, but their lonely moms see him in a different light."
@thelonelyghost Huh. Apparently I don't hang out on the right sections of Kindle. I mostly get anime enspired harem stuff and litrpg. But...the word "boy" was really throwing me. My first thought was: is Kindle just publishing child porn now? I wouldn't exactly put it past them.
Another thing especially I see in the FOSS community:
You don't need some fair trial, face your accusers, innocent until proven guilty, beyond a shadow of a doubt to decide you don't want someone to be around anymore. On a personal, or community, or organization level, you can just kick toxic people out for any reason whatsoever.
They're dropping fash dog whistles. They make women uncomfortable to be around and show misogyny. They make racist jokes, or are unusually critical of minorities. They act as narcissistic shitheads. They create unnecessary amounts of drama and try and split the community if they don't get their way. They suggest doing unethical things.
It doesn't matter. You can at MINIMUM kick them out of leadership positions and speaking spots at conferences. And if it still continues, ban them from the community entirely. There's no court of law requirements to ban people who make your space worse.
Not currently, though you can find our issue requesting that here: github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issue… which also links to several other related issues. Do please feel free to add any extra info to any of those issues and / or subscribe to them for updates.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Many websites have Unlabeled buttons with a image init like share , download and clip Unlabeled edit boxes combo boxes Describe the so...
God’s love is greater than his justice — or rather, his justice flows out of his love. St. John says in both his gospel and his epistles that God is love; he never says God is justice.
That’s why I can never buy “The Father punished Jesus in our place.” The Father is not punitive. He is the “philanthropos,” the lover of humankind.
Jesus willingly endured death, because his plan from before creation was to defeat death through death. He endured suffering not to end suffering, nor even to give meaning to suffering. He came to join us in suffering; that is where he meets us.
That’s my answer to Shusaku Endo’s question in the book/movie Silence: “Why is God silent in the face of suffering?” It is because in suffering he is waiting for us to encounter him. This is why he did not take away St. Paul’s “thorn in the flesh.”
As Christians we can thus never embrace the Buddhist ideal of eliminating [our own] suffering. Nor can we accept the God of Islam, whose primary attribute is justice over love.
Warning: The above post contains both em-dashes and semicolons; it’s therefore up to you to determine if it was written by a yet-to-be-determined Large Language Model.
We learned on actual typewriters (the electric kind, thankfully, not the always-jamming old-school mechanical ones).
Because the deck of the typewriters were very high off the desk, my physical therapist very kindly made me a wrist rest out of wood so that I could rest my wrists on it while typing in class. It was very very first device of its kind I had seen, now they're everywhere ;)
I kinda wish I had an electric typewriter now, honestly. Something beautifully minimalistic about those.
One thing I did when the writing minimalism bug bit me was create a simple shell script that let you create a text file one line at a time, but whenever you hit return, that line was written out to the file (appended), and couldn't e edited again. So you just kind of kept writing and didn't worry about editing too much. :D
Welcome to #StroongeCast, a husband and wife team consisting of Andre and Kirsten Louis who live in London. On this podcast, we explore anything that makes us question the world—from relationships and parenting to school memories and beyond. Join our family chats for lively discussions, fun stories, and plenty of curious moments.
Going forward we will post all new episode links to this account before any others.
Many things end long before the one year mark. Easy to start a show, think 'yeah that'll work' but life gets in the way, you can't commit etc etc, but we've stuck with it and I'm proud we have. Really enjoyed doing this and we have no plans to stop. Here's to another year of #StroongeCast.
@falcennial No, that's by design. It's so you can follow the podcast on your platform of choice. It can't load a particular episode because there are already 54 of them which we've already copy/pasted from the original episode posts. If you check our timeline, you'll see all of them. Edit: Just updated our bio to reflect links to our youtube playlist, Apple Podcasts and also Spotify. A
Did you know: There are many completely *free* sample libraries these days, some could help you end up in writing for your next film, documentary, podcast or TV show?
Andre wrote this piece of intro music for the podcast using purely *free* libraries and nothing else.
This piece of music is for the podcast 'StroongeCast' I co-created with my wife Kirsten. Every podcast needs a musical intro (or at least I believe so) and t...
We record #StroongeCast episodes on Thursdays consistently now, meaning that youtube members can listen early if they so wish. If we can find a way to do that for everyone else, we will. Until then however, if you want your fix a day early, please become a youtube member at any level. youtube.com/@TheOnjLouis/join
Hi, how are you doing? Thanks for visiting my channel, firstly.
A bit about me then.
I'm Andre Louis (AKA Onj), a visually impaired musician from London.
What will you find here?
Videos on this channel fall into a few categories.
Wow, Keith Jarrett, Encore from Tokyo: open.spotify.com/track/7dRiJ2j… I know, I know, it's only five chords, but how well does he develops the theme. Very soul-grabbing! #music #piano
Who says you can't learn something from ads? Here's Alexa and the usual gang of idiots to tell you how to get The Global Voice on your Amazon smart speaker via Live365.
Hey #playdate devs - what's the most current/active lib/framework for 2d side-scrollers/platform games, scene control etc? Roomy, Cotton, Noble? Something else?
(Extremely Montréal post) Currently having an out of body experience listening to the music on CHOM97,7 because stuff I grew up is apparently classic rock now.
They were saying that the album "What's the story morning glory" from Oasis is 30 years old and my GF had a conniption in the car. Why not call Grunge "retro".
"Europe can afford to build a browser." Interesting analysis on the why, the how and the how much of building a Web browser to avoid the dependency on US software.
Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check
Reading in Servo’s latest weekly report that it’s now passing 1.7 million Web Platform Subtests, I started wondering: How much investment would it build it into a competitive, independent browser, in the context of all this talk on digital sovereignty?
The current browser landscape reveals how concentrated digital control has become. Roughly 75% of global web traffic flows through browsers based on Google’s Chromium engine; not just Chrome, but Microsoft Edge, Samsung, and dozens of others. Apple’s Safari dominates iOS but remains locked to their ecosystem. Firefox, once a genuine alternative, has declined to under 5% market share globally. This means American companies control how billions of users worldwide access the web. Every search, transaction, and digital service flows through infrastructure ultimately controlled by Silicon Valley. For societies valuing their independence and sovereignty, this represents a fundamental vulnerability that recent geopolitical events have made impossible to ignore.
Digital infrastructure is as important as energy or transportation networks. Unlike physical infrastructure, however, digital systems can be controlled remotely, updated unilaterally, and modified to serve the interests of their controllers rather than their users. Browsers exemplify this challenge because they’re both critical and seemingly replaceable. In theory, anyone can build a browser. The web standards are open, and rendering engines like Servo prove it’s technically feasible.
In practice, building browsers requires sustained investment, institutional coordination, and overcoming network effects that entrench existing players. If democratic societies can successfully coordinate to build and maintain competitive browser alternatives, it demonstrates their capacity for more complex digital sovereignty goals. If they cannot, it reveals the institutional gaps that need addressing.
Firefox offers important lessons about the challenges facing independent browsers. Mozilla has indeed faced difficulties: declining market share, organizational challenges, and ongoing technical issues. The organization has also alienated its most dedicated supporters by pivoting toward advertising, AI initiatives and cutting their impactful public advocacy programs.
However, Firefox remains the only major browser engine not controlled by Apple or Google, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Its struggles reflect structural challenges that any alternative browser would face: the enormous engineering effort required to maintain web compatibility, the network effects favouring dominant platforms, and the difficulty of sustaining long-term technical projects through diverse funding sources.
Yet, building a competitive alternative browser infrastructure would require substantial but manageable investment. Here is a ballpark estimation I made based on existing browsers: Annual operating costs would include:
Engineering Team of ±50 developers, designers, managers etc.: €15 million.
Quality Assurance and Testing Infrastructure: €10 million
Security Auditing and Vulnerability Management: €10 million
Standards and Specification Development: €5 million.
It would probably take around 3-4 years to fully build an alternative browser from scratch, less so if it’s a fork of one of the existing ones. Forking Chromium/Gecko or building upon Servo’s foundation could reduce this timeline to 18-24 months for basic functionality, though achieving full web compatibility and market readiness would still require several additional years of refinement. The initial development sprint needs to be followed by a sustained engineering effort needed afterward, for maintaining compatibility with evolving web standards, fixing security vulnerabilities, and keeping pace with performance improvements.
The core challenge isn’t technical; it’s institutional. How do you sustain long-term technical projects through democratic processes that span multiple countries with different priorities, resources, and political systems? Successful models exist. The European Space Agency coordinates complex multi-national technical projects. CERN manages cutting-edge research infrastructure across dozens of countries. The Internet Engineering Task Force maintains critical internet standards through voluntary coordination among global stakeholders. The “Reclaiming Digital Sovereignity” proposal specifically addresses this challenge by advocating for “new public institutions with state and civil society representation” to govern universal digital platforms, alongside “multilateral agreements on principles and rules for the internet” as safeguards for autonomous, democratically governed solutions.
Browser development could follow similar patterns: international frameworks that respect national sovereignty while enabling coordinated action, governance structures that balance technical expertise with democratic accountability, and funding mechanisms that provide stability across political cycles. The Reclaiming Digital Sovereignity’s report’s emphasis on “democratic international consortia” and “public knowledge networks led by a new public international research agency” provides concrete institutional models that could be adapted for browser development. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency represents another model for public investment in digital infrastructure for the public interest.
With all that being said, browsers represent one of the more achievable digital sovereignty goals. They’re built on open standards, rely heavily on open source components, and face fewer network effects than platform-based services. Other areas of the technology stack would be far more challenging, and far less open.
Success here would demonstrate that democratic societies can coordinate effectively on complex technical infrastructure and pass the first hurdle. Failure would reveal institutional gaps that need addressing before attempting more ambitious digital sovereignty goals. Democratic digital sovereignty is challenging but feasible, if societies are willing to think institutionally, invest sustainably, and build incrementally rather than trying to recreate Silicon Valley with different ownership structures.
Ultimately, the real question isn’t whether democratic societies can build alternative technologies, but whether they can build the democratic institutions necessary to govern them effectively across the complex realities of international coordination, competing priorities, and long-term sustainability. I believe browsers offer an ideal place to start testing these institutional innovations. The technical challenges are surmountable. The institutional ones remain to be proven.
Views expressed are personal and do not represent any organization.
Corporate funding comes from Huawei, with their own staff and likely paying Igalia.
That article is not wrong for the big picture, but the details about timelines / manpower etc. are pretty much wrong. "It would probably take around 3-4 years to fully build an alternative browser from scratch" lol
Some Servo contributors are funded by EU based grants like NLNet. This is not bad, but lacks long term stability. I don't know how possible it is to create a EU-funded org that would ensure ideally at least 5 years of funding. Who leads? who gets on payroll? etc..
I am so incredibly annoyed by the stupid "Big Five" #banks in #Canada forcing broken phone or SMS-based #2FA upon everybody. It just plain doesn't work. Let alone the fact that it's insecure compared to standard #TOTP.
I've had at least two different financial institutions try to pull this crap on my parents, and each time, I have to call them to ask to turn off that shite because they're unable to send codes, or the codes they send are always invalid.
"we are looking at new technology and adopt it when relevant". The answer I got a decade ago when asking for TOTP instead of the moronic security questions.
Instead they force enrolled me into SMS without consent. And it doesn't work when I'm abroad which is the case that triggers it.
I’m sorry, but someone please enlighten me. If I don’t know you, then why is ‘hi’ your conversation starter. People on Meta Messenger have been starting conversations with me this way. And so then I respond with, what’s on your mind today? And they go, can I be your friend? Um, I don’t even know you from Adam! How am I supposed to answer that? At least on Mastodon, people say what they’re thinking.
Umm? The polite thing to do is to say. "Hi," when starting a conversation? Especially for the first time? Never would I jump in and just say what I want to say to someone. that's just rude. The "Can I be your friend." is weird. But I don't reply to people on messenger that I don't know. I'm not nearly that nice. LOL. If its a name I recognize I might. But if someone just says. "Hi." I'm not going to answer because it's probably some weirdo or spammer.
that is actually pretty true, especially because I feel like people should write a short intro, saying who they are maybe. I blocked people who just say hi. After I look at their profiles.
@tardis If someone messaged me and didn't say hi. If I were in the wrong mood I would flat out say. "Are you going to say. "Hi, or anything?" But I'm not always nice. Most times I am. But we've sure all got our moments. I'm not going to waste the energy chatting about small stuff with what could come across as rude people. Not anyone in this thread. But common sense.
Yeah, understandable. I'd usually ask how someone is doing, or say stuff like, I haven't talked to you in a while, etc. etc. If I know the person. But if you just say hi. Meh. I might or might not respond, and if I get nothing of value after the hi, then you better be sure I am not talking or replying to you. Rude much? I know. LOL.
@tardis If it's someone who I have no idea who they are and if they just say. "Hi." I won't respond. But if it's a friend I will. Even when my friends come up to me at karaoke I'm all. "Hi!" Then we get to talking about whatever it is.
Honestly, in person just saying "Hi!" and sparking a conversation somehow feels more natural than doing it on the internet. There's something compelling in face to face talks that's not on the net. If you get what I am saying. :D
@tardis I do. But I'm the exact same I am online as I am in person. So I'm going to talk the same way no matter what. I'm more chatty in person than I am online. But I'm still the same person.
In person I am a bit more talkative, but it really depends on the situation as I am generally a quiet person. I was the quiet kid, and that just carried over to grown up life.
@NightDrake @tardis Yeah. If it’s a friend, it’s one thing. But these are people who literally just met me on the platform. I don’t know them really. That’s why it felt weird.
Yep, like I scid, there's an option who to send you messages, even who to read your posts. With meta, probably doesn't mean much, since, meta but whatever. They broke accessibility really hard for fb and whatsapp for Widows, so. Meh whatever.
![Rule of three
edit
LLMs overuse the 'rule of three'—"the good, the bad, and the ugly". This can take different forms from "adjective, adjective, adjective" to "short phrase, short phrase, and short phrase".[1] LLMs often use this structure to make superficial analyses appear more comprehensive.
Examples
The Amaze Conference brings together global SEO professionals, marketing experts, and growth hackers to discuss the latest trends in digital marketing. The event features keynote sessions, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/708398 "Rule of three
edit
LLMs overuse the 'rule of three'—\"the good, the bad, and the ugly\". This can take different forms from \"adjective, adjective, adjective\" to \"short phrase, short phrase, and short phrase\".[1] LLMs often use this structure to make superficial analyses appear more comprehensive.
Examples
The Amaze Conference brings together global SEO professionals, marketing experts, and growth hackers to discuss the latest trends in digital marketing. The event features keynote sessions, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.")
.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to somecanuckchick • • •somecanuckchick
in reply to Hubert Figuière • • •