Sabem porque é que eu vos digo para usarem ferramentas AI em grande volume desde que não paguem nem um chavo às empresas de AI?

Porque a AI é uma bolha. Como qualquer bolha, quando rebentar vai ter efeitos na economia real. Mas quando mais depressa rebentar, menos efeitos terá. Se rebentar antes dos idiotas meterem AI em tudo será muito menos destrutiva do que rebentando depois.

Portanto, façamo-la rebentar depressa. Usem AI todos os dias. Não lhes deem um tostão furado.

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

was just chatting with a former student about how much interesting compiler work never gets written up, and of course other work is written up and then forgotten.

on that topic, was there ever a good overview or retrospective for Microsoft's Phoenix compiler? and does anyone have an educated guess as to how many engineer-years they put into it?

in reply to John Regehr

@brouhaha @monospace @goosey @alexr @foone

The R1000 is deeply interesting for more reasons than you can imagine, but what impresses most people is this:

Imagine you maintain a library in some corner of $ReallyBigAndImportantProject and one of your exported functions has a parameter which defaults to 3.

Now you want to change the default to 4.

Who do you call ?

On the R1000, you change the 3 to 4 and when you try to commit that change, it will tell you /precisely/ which other code modules would be /semantically/ affected by that change, and ask you what to do about that.

Only calls which do not explicitly specify that parameter will be on the list.

When we demo that for modern developers, some of them get upset that was possible in 1980 but they can't do it today.

Edit: This is now released. Say all works, though the audio becomes choppy sometimes. But it doesn't crash.
Right! I now have a copy of Eloquence that works on the 64-bit alphas of #NVDA, with the following issues: say all on the web doesn't work (it stops whenever the type of element changes for reasons I don't understand), and dialect switching doesn't work (but it doesn't crash everything anymore). If you want to play, you need to follow the build instructions; I only understand about a quarter of this code and have no intention of actually releasing things that are still broken: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/
#nvda
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes Hah no worries. Your question got me thinking about what that even means. Like if my collaborator doesn't speak my language, does that mean I should disclaimer the code as AI assisted? If the code started off as entirely human generated, and an AI rewrote it, is it now AI generated? If a human rewrote large parts of what the AI did, when does the code stop being AI? I really don't know.
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes So with more code updates this morning, the thing I'm noticing is that the more rewriting that is done, the less and less code there is from the initial AI rewrite. The AI solution mostly worked, but was over-complicated and multi-threaded where it didn't need to be. We're slowly arriving at code that is both simpler and works better.
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

I suppose I initially asked because of it defaulting to a Python helper process written in Python, using sockets as the IPC mechanism. Which is very AI, based on what will have been most common in the training data.

But for this sort of thing, I wonder about performance gains from shared memory, COM, or whatever with something other than Python on the other end.

in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes So the reason I wanted Python was because I naively thought a lot of the existing code could be reused, as well as some of the learnings from IBM TTS, eloquence threshold, and the sonata voices. That turned out to be entirely wrong. The "correct" way to do this would be to write a 64-bit API compatible wrapper for ECI.dll. But that's way beyond my abilities as a programmer, and AI can't help because we don't have the development headers for ECI.dll to feed it.
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes Those are for version 6.4 of the DLL, and we use 6.1 because 6.4 has a bunch of changes like requiring registry entries for languages and voices that make it not portable, and several annoying bugs. I believe 6.4 also made a bunch of changes around threading. I already ran into issues with this, because the tts.txt is the manual for 6.4, and we need to use 6.1, the last release before IBM took it over.
in reply to Day Garwood

@daygar@jscholes@matt If you look at this file, you should be able to understand what's expected from you by both ECI.dll and NVDA. github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/blob/master/host_eloquence32.py
in reply to Day Garwood

I suck ass at coding without help from either someone who knows way more, or in most cases, Gemini or ChatGPT. I've used Python as its super easy to get the program going and things like nuitka and pyinstaller let you compile stuff with a couple of commands. C++ I've heard is way more complex, and if you don't want to deal with the bloat that comes with Visual Pubio, sorry I mean Visual Studio, then you're other option is GCC with MinGW, and when I tried to get that working, the installation manager UI is borked with NVDA.
in reply to Alex Chapman

@alexchapman@daygar@jscholes@matt Meh. You can install the visual studio build tools from the command line, these days. Then just add the workload to vscode. Getting a development environment set up isn't the hard part. I actually already have one because of unspoken-ng and working with steamaudio. I just am not comfortable in C++ doing anything other than compiling other people's code and making the odd, extremely basic, change.

Salut Mastodon.
Ma mère, vivant à Paris, accueille un réfugié tibétain chez elle. Ça arrange bien tout le monde, mais ce qui l'arrangerait encore plus lui, c'est de trouver un boulot à Paris ou en banlieue, en journée. Il comprend bien le français mais le parle encore difficilement. En revanche anglais fluent. Il aimerait bien trouver dans la restauration mais pour l'instant tout travail serait le bienvenu. Si jamais tu as ça...et sinon repouet apprécié.

If you're curious whether an account is an impersonation or not, one way to check is viewing the profile. If any of the profile fields includes a website or similar, and it says something to the effect of: "Ownership of this link was checked on Sep 24, 2025, 04:24 PM", that means there's a link back from that website to that Mastodon account, meaning that in theory, that person has control of both the Mastodon account and the website being linked. If it does not say this, then there is no link between the website and the Mastodon account. You can see this on my profile as an example.
Of course you have to make sure that the website is also one that belongs to the person in question, and they have to have linked it. For example, if the URL says something like iamtalon.fakewebsite.com then that's probably not me.
It's not a bullet proof system, but it is definitely a tool available to check.
Some clients might also display this. Enafore displays it, it says "Verified" under the website link in the profile fields. I'm not sure about other clients, though the website of the instance will show it as well as quoted above.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

It's weird how critical personal data got stolen soon after age verification became a thing, and now neither company wants to accept responsibility for the hack. It's almost like, if the government is so desperate to force users to verify their ages, then the government should implement a way to do that. Want to verify someone can drive a car? Government system. Check that someone lives at their address? Government system. Taxes? Government. But verify someone's age? Nothing!
in reply to Alex Hall

@jscholes The UK and US are the only two countries with "ID allergy."

In the rest of Europe (and the rest of the world)., it is obvious that every citizen has an ID card, (which is distinct from any other document which could potentially be used for identification, like a passport or driver's license).

Even Germany, which is famously stubborn about things like these (they don't have a single citizen identification number for example) has ID cards.

New, by me: If you're not using ad blockers, you should be! I wrote 2,000+ words on why you should use them and how to get started.

In this deep-dive blog, I explain why ad blockers are critical for your online security and privacy, what threats ad blockers can help defend against, and we'll look at some of the best ad blockers out there.

More: this.weekinsecurity.com/why-ad…

You can also sign up for my weekly cybersecurity newsletter, out Sundays: this.weekinsecurity.com/

One advantage of using #AdGuardHome is that it provides statistics on the responsiveness of public DNS providers.
For me, #DNS4EU is by far the fastest (10 ms). Perhaps it's because of their geographical proximity, as they're also based in Czechia. The slowest has been #quad9 at 500 ms. I have no idea why.

I'm also glad to learn that DoH doesn't have a significant speed penalty. It's 12 ms versus 10 ms for DNS4EU. So you don't have to trade privacy for responsiveness.

What has been your experience with #DNS providers based in Europe? Do you have any recommendations? I'm interested in unfiltered DNS because I do the filtering in AdGuard Home.

in reply to Jiří Eischmann

The average response time is shown in AGH dashboard. With optimistic cache, AGH replies with stale date first (if it has the record in its cache), then it updates the record and keeps it in its cache. That’s why you get a very short response time from clients to AGH. In this case, the average time response between public resolver and AG) doesn’t really matter IMHO.
You can measure this average response time without this feature. AGH only uses the response time for the DNS records that are not in its cache or expired ones if optimistic cache isn’t enabled.

My company has recently stopped using GitLab and I think it's worth a quick discussion why, because I think these are largely addressible.

Firstly, their paid product for teams is very pricey. Where Github costs ~$4 per seat per month, GitLab charges $29 per month. Even if we assume some portion of that is due to Microsoft's economy of scale and exploitation of user code for things like AI training, that's 7.5x more expensive!

GitLab charges for things like API address, and even more (full price) if you want to do things like store secrets via API.

While the direct cost wasn't a lot, I didn't feel like being nickle and dimed, and the product was just not worth it.

I enjoyed the product, but the pricing wasn't 2x, or even 3x, but >7.x! I felt like I was being taken advantage of, so we left altogether!

#GitLab

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)

Glide is the world’s first autonomous and intelligent guide for people who are #blind or have low vision.

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OK Linux folks. With #KDE hitting 29 years old, I'm curious about switching my gaming PC from Windows 11 to KDE. The games I play are listed on ProtonDB as being gold or platinum, so I think I'm good as far as gaming goes, but I have some other software concerns.

What do y'all use for cloud file storage/syncing?

What do you use for image editing/creation?

Where can I find out if my Razer Leviathan and HyperX mic will work on KDE?

#KDE
in reply to Ben Overmyer

Nextcloud isn't just a storage any more. It's a platform for integrated apps. I cover a lot of things with it: files, calendars, contacts, tasks, document editing, photo albums, password manager, RSS reader, notes taking... If you don't prefer selfhosting, Hetzner provides it for ~€5/TB/month.

GIMP has improved, but its UI isn't radically different from what it was 20 years ago. There are other editors. Just "I need exactly Photoshop and Light room" doesn't work.

Looking at a thing that came across my feed, I don't understand why I would need or want a StellerTrek for anything. Apparently, it is an AI-driven GPS and OCR device. These kinds of things were useful before the days of smart phones, but, nowadays, my phone has both a gps (or "jeepies," as my phone's TTS was randomly pronouncing it for a few days while I was in Europe)and a camera, so I can't see the point of these specialty blindness devices anymore.
in reply to feld

@tk here have some cheese

foodandwine.com/microplastics-…

Linux oh Linux, you're making me Run windows 7 for a Mastodon client that plays sounds for events, oh why so must this be. Really want to warm up to this land of Linux but I'm thinking more and more, maybe I'll have to settle with Windows 10 forever. Some of you who know me a bit more personally from 2016 might recall when I used to say that. All the time, Windows 10 forever! Oh wow how I never thought the truth of that statement might one day shine through and not for the reasons that we were marketed at the time, mainly that it really would be the last version of Windows. No wit's because Windows 10, in its final form, still uses aprox 300-400 MB less RAM, and while RAM in of itself isn't the problem these days, it's that it spins up a bunch of broker and even more SVCHost (Service control host) processes, just to accomplish what Windows 10 did. And yes, the same could be said For windows 7 to 10: Windows 7 can fit into 500 or less MB of memory, with very few SVCHosts, because at the time, the entire Onecoreification (yes, that's pronounced one-core-eefication) of the OS had not yet happened. That my friends, was all after Windows 8, and I'd say by 8.1 we had doubled the Ram, from that of Windows 7. But you know what? Nobody cared, because not many ran Windows 8.X, so people just accepted Windows 10 with these higher process usages.
Linux? Well the number of services you run are on you, really. If you want 1 GB of Ram, install Mate and it's good. Monday rant over!
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

Say hello to @RocketChat a proud sponsor of Matrix Conference 2025 in Strasbourg!

🍴 Swing by their booth right by the food bar for a chat,
🥂 join them co-hosting the welcome party on Wednesday, or
🎤 catch CEO Gabriel Engel on stage sharing his insights.

Thanks Rocket.Chat for sponsoring The Matrix Conference!

rocket.chat

Languages are fun, have mysterious rules called grammar, but their native speakers certainly don't care about all that. In other words, do native speakers of a language speak the language correctly, as textbooks prescribe? (Hint: Definitely not.)

Here's a video to illustrate this. Thanks, Google recommendations. youtube.com/watch?v=nIl_rdTUU1…

Winter blue tardis reshared this.