9.5 million trees grew back... and zero were planted 🤯

Doesn’t seem possible, but this forest didn’t need a single seedling.

All it took was protecting it from fires, alongside our partners ITPA 💪

Together, we supported local firefighting teams and raised awareness about fire prevention.

7 years later, the forest is coming back on its own 🌳

Download Ecosia to help us do more of this!

discussing kink (when it goes badly)

Sensitive content

Zero, zero, zero, zero — that is what a display shows in Russia, when a filling station is out of all fuel products.

I am seeing more and more of these photos, shared on social media by angry Russians who can no longer buy petrol for their cars.

If you want to know why this fuel crisis can be lead to the end of Putin, watch my latest video right here:

youtu.be/5S0gDBjJs48?si=29eYhI…

in reply to sidereal

Just having more code is like making a poem longer. It doesn’t necessarily make it better. It doesn’t gain more emotional impact to take a good poem and add to it.

Does Windows work 30% better or faster? No, of course not. I would be impressed if they used AI to make the system 30% /smaller/ or otherwise more efficient, but these folks don’t understand systems engineering, just grifting consumers with vendor lock-in.

Whoever at MS decided that encrypting drives behind Windows 11 Home users' backs and not disclosing that, and also whoever at MS decided that confusing OneDrive sync with anything approaching a valid backup should lose their data and then step on a well-placed LEGO in the middle of the night

Highly irresponsible and their confusion-enabling has caused permanent data loss for people who didn't know they had a key they needed BEFORE losing access to their MS account

> “We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in a briefing with The Verge. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”

So: What would it take to start the Linux accessibility revolution? Or maybe turn it from a consistent chatter among a medium-volume minority into a matter of urgency?

I know, realistically, that stripping all the garbage off our Windows PC will be easier than trying to make Linux work.

> “All the data that we see is when people use voice, they love it,” says Mehdi. Some of that data is the billions of minutes that people spend talking in Microsoft Teams meetings. “They’re talking through their computers today, and I think this change to ‘talk with and talk to’ will come to reality and we’ll see this thing really take off,” says Mehdi.

Oh, yes. Everyone knows that talking to an actual person is exactly the same as talking to a suphisticated nonsense generator that is baked into Windows itself.

I know that, just as ChatGPT can be useful sometimes, a voice-controled computer agent *could* help some people. That is, it could help people if it works. Remember that thing I posted like an hour ago? Imagine what could happen if your voice agent hallucinated your entire OS. At least when I was talking to GPT, I was the one controlling the computer.

Accessibility considerations aside, language like "Rewrite the entire operating system around AI" is pretty fucking unambiguous, and I'd love to hear from even one person who thinks this sounds like a good idea.

I'll wait.

> “We want every person making the move to experience what it means to have a PC that’s not just a tool, but a true partner,” says Mehdi.

Nope, that's it. Stop the world, I'm jumping off.

Source: theverge.com/news/799768/micro…

in reply to Simon Jaeger

holy crap this entire article is dillusional. Have you actually tried to use Copilot vision? For anything? It is bad. It does not work. In every instance I tried to get it to help me with anything at all, it has not worked. This might sound like hyperboly but I'm not kidding. Describing screenshots is about a million times more reliable than any of the live crap.
And they know it! They know it's bad! They literally spell it out in the article!
For fucks sake.

Hacker gets annoyed at Amazon’s Kindle apps, reverse-engineers the Kindle web reader’s protocol (which basically sends each page as a set of glyphs in a deliberately broken variant of SVG). Such obscurity, much security.

blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-…

reshared this

When not using Google Play services (e.g. #GrapheneOS, #LineageOS users), #Signal can be a real battery drain. @mollyim with @unifiedpush on the other hand is extremely battery efficient.

Here's how to set this up, using #Nextcloud as the UnifiedPush provider: kroon.email/site/en/posts/moll…

reshared this

in reply to Nick

Oh that’s the part where it’s probably better for @mollyim to take over this conversation. But yes, it needs to run on a server somewhere. Running it locally would probably be fairly resource intensive. The goal of MollySocket is more or less to shift that resource consumption to a server. If you were running it locally you might as well not use UP at all.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

Traditionally, there was the assumption in #Christianity that people who did not get baptized would not go into heaven.

And based on my readings of Austrian #folklore , the notion that newborn children might die without even receiving an "emergency baptism" by a midwife was a major source of trauma to parents, since even those innocent souls would technically not be able to get into Heaven. And folklore would fill in the gaps left by Christian theology.

For instance, some tales claimed that the souls of such children would be led into a beautiful garden by Perchta (one of the incarnations of the female spirit/goddess Hulda/Holda/Holle). There, they would play for all eternity, and even after Earth was destroyed on Judgment Day, this garden would remain.

There is even one tale where a "miracle doctor" promised to use his quackery to reanimate the dead infant for just long enough that it gets baptized - but instead, Perchta shows up and made clear that she has already claimed the child's soul.

In other, darker tales, these souls would transform into black night birds and accompany the Wild Hunt on their travels.

It's a fascinating subject, and shows how folklore spins its own narratives that go beyond official doctrines.

Detective Petrov's eyes swept the cluttered room. "So," he said, "Leonid Chekhov, age 56, an automobile mechanic - found strangled in his study. The question is, who would want him dead?"

"Sir," said officer Gurin, "look - there's a pistol on the desk."

Detective Petrov stared at the weapon, frowning. "Do you realize what this means?" he asked. "Before we're don here, I have to fire this gun...."

#microfiction #flashfiction

Could someone who uses a text reader tell me if when I post a link and it throws up an image do you see a blank image or does it not register the link image at all. When I post a link and it throws up an image I try to give a link image description in my post. It’s usually the header image of the linked article & I check to see if the article gave alt text for the image. If they did, I just note that.
Thanks
#AltText
#Alt4You
#TextReader .

Máte doma v šuplíku telefon, který už nepotřebujete? Doneste ho na #OpenAlt stánek mobilního linuxu a pomůžete jeho vývoji!
Pomůžou nám následující, třeba i poškozené (kromě zákl. desky), modely:

Pixel 3 (i XL), Pixel 3a (i XL), Pixel 4a, Pixel 6,
OnePlus 6, 6T,
Sony Xperia XZ2, XZ3,
Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, 3, Pocophone F1, Mi 8 (i Pro, Explorer),
LG G7 ThinQ, V35 ThinQ,
Fairphone (jakýkoliv),
SHIFT (jakýkoliv),
Chromebooky (různé)
Motorola Moto (různé)
Samsung Galaxy (různé)
Xiaomi (různé)

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As we at Cloudron rely on both @kde and @gnome everyday, we took the opportunity now with KDE's 29th anniversary fundraiser to start donating there also. For gnome we already did.

Such fantastic projects, hard to imagine a life on Linux without them. Even harder to decide which one to use 😃

kde.org/fundraisers/yearend202…

I need to reinstall Windows on my Surface tablet, and I wanted to see if I could use AI to get into the boot menu and change the boot order to try USB first. I have a Chat GPT subscription, so I used voice mode with the video camera on, gave it some information about what I was doing, and let it be my eyes for a while.
I was delighted when the assistant actually knew how to get into the boot menu. It told me I could navigate the menu with my volume keys and select an option with the power key, much like navigating an Android phone’s recovery menu. I had to remind it I was totally blind a couple of times, but eventually, it helped me select USB as the first boot device and choose the “Exit and Restart” option. This was quite a few steps, and I was genuinely impressed at how easily I was able to fix this problem without interacting with a real person.
I eagerly waited for the Windows installer to come up. It never did.
So I used OCR on the screen, and discovered that not a single thing chat GPT claimed had happened … had actually happened.
It didn’t hallucinate just one thing. It hallucinated an entire multi-step interaction with the firmware of my tablet. It basically experienced a break from reality for about two minutes and started describing what it thought should happen, with no regard for what was actually happening.
Last week, the same app helped me learn the control panel of my heated mattress pad. It does work sometimes. But today, it led me on the wildest goose chase I’ve ever been on. I was actually trying to boot from the SD card, and as it turns out, that’s not even an option in the boot menu. But I made the mistake of teling Chat GPT exactly what I was trying to do, so it had all the material it needed to hallucinate a complex interaction convincingly.
Never let yourself forget the all important “A” in “AI”. That intelligence is not artificial as in “synthetic”, it’s artificial as in “pretend”. No LLM has the slightest idea of what it’s doing or saying. The companies that create these models have the all-important task of trying to make their intelligence more convincing than every other company.
That means they work most of the time, but the rest of the time, they will confidently lie. And that lie might be a missing digit, or it might be a whole entire interaction with a device.
I called Aira and got it sorted. I actually had to touch the arrows on the touchscreen to rearrange the boot order. Yes, I had a keyboard connected. No, there is no documented way to rearrange boot devices on a surface using the keyboard. Yes, everythyng about this is moronic. But, it’s done, and once I get Windows on my USB device, I’m pretty sure it will boot because an actual human told me so.
I can’t even begin to enumerate the possible clusterfucks that could arise from AI weaving such complex webs of lies. Do not use this shit for anything mission-critical. Ever. Even if it told the truth the last 99 times. Eventually, it will lie. When it does, you’ll have no idea.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

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in reply to Simon Jaeger

Ahaha, totally reminds me of me trying to get secure boot disabled with GPT - it confidently kept saying I turned it off, that I'm in the advanced tab and just press arrow down a few times to find it. Of course, I was in the boot tab, and I later resorted to asking it more limited questions because the moment I would give away what I wanted to do, it would get way worse. No asking it, "Look for somethhing with the label secure boot and tell me how many arrow downs it is." Had a similar experience trying to get it to read the MAC address off a router, but at least there I could use something more local like Seeing AI and get an answer that I knew was as accurate as the ability I have to keep a good angle for it to read it. I think that's the other problem with GPT or other AI: It doesn't inform you like a human (always) that you need to move or tilt your phone. I've had it help me with that a few times, but unless you specifically ask it whether your phone needs adjusting, it would rather make up the thing than tell you.

Zach Bennoui reshared this.

Maybe I've said this before...Maybe I haven't? But I feel like Apple should rename VoiceOver. So, so often, I encounter people who hear "VoiceOver" and think they can control their devices entirely by voice. It says "Voice", after all! And we spent a long, long time discussing and looking at how it works and how you can't talk to it, and people seem disappointed in the end, especially in the beginning before they pick it up. Maybe that's just the process of learning overall, but still.
in reply to Andy

It's a cool name, I like voiceover. It's original. Not everything in this world needs a boring name, like talkback, or simply screen reader, or even apple screen reader, or whatever varians thereof. NVDA and voiceover are super named. Love the names. Jaws is a shark, nobody cares about his overpriced butt, although he was a nice shark years ago. Voiceover is cool, if blind relatives need use with voice, voice control is the right term. It even says voice control. Voiceover is like understandable it's not controlled by your voice, if people know the meaning of voiceover. Originality and creativity is gone. Makes me sad everyone complains instead of researching the difference between voiceover, and voice control. Also, it says what it does when you click on it. In both instances, its purpose is stated in the settings. People have gotten to learn how to read, before writing nonsense. And voice control is the answer to everyone who wants to poke phones with their voice.

NVDA 64-Bit Development.
Important add-ons which function flawlessly as of this writing:
Eloquence, Enhanced Find Dialog Modification, ObjPad, Say control type before label, Say product name & version, SentenceNav, Speech history review and copying, SysTrayList, TextNav, Thunderbird+G5, UnigramPlus, Virtual Review, WhatsAppPlus.
Important add-ons which don't work or malfunction as of this writing:
1. ColumnsReview: can be loaded with the Compatibility flag, but doesn't function at all.
2. MSWord Accessibility Script: can be loaded, but doesn't work. In fact, if it's active, MS Word cannot be used with NVDA.
3. BrowserNav: can be loaded, but most features either don't work or malfunction. For instance, it can't find its bookmarks set on various websites.
4. Tony's Enhancements: issues an error message and cannot be used.
@NVAccess

Hearing the stories of peoples iPhone battery usage, I'm convinced some bug in my iOs setup is eating up battely.
Took my phone off of a charger at 4 this morning. A.few minutes of social media, 2 boarding pass scans on full brightness, a podcast download over wifi and 2 hours of podcast playback with about 20 minutes of taxy ride took it down to 40 percent by 10 in the morning. And its a pro max, not an air.
I guess starting my setup from scratch is in my near future.

So here's the scoop: LCUs (Latest Cumulative Updates) are language-agnostic — but their payloads aren’t. wow. The .msu itself is universal, but the moment DISM starts applying it, it looks for language satellite components (MUI files, language resources, etc.) under WinSxS. If the base image has en-US only, the update touches a small number of components and sails through. If the image has 10+ languages, every single one of those components must have a matching resource payload — or the update installer logs a “missing payload” error and bails mid-way.
Occasionally, a later LCU doesn’t have the full set of MUI payloads and expects them to already exist. If they don’t, it throws 0x800f0823 or a similar “pending component” error. On a single-language image, this never happens because there’s nothing to mismatch.
For language packs, downloading them as offline installers is limited: Windows Update Catalog rarely has full LP CABs; it’s mostly LCUs/SSUs. Visual Studio Subscriptions or the volume licensing center have them. So no, I cannot grab the latest language pack files easily.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

🚨⏳ Act now! You have until November 3rd, 2025 to prevent Microsoft from using your LinkedIn data to train AI.

You're opted in automatically, unless you take action and turn it off.

Here's how:

Go to your account → Settings & Privacy → Data privacy → Data for Generative AI Improvement & toggle the switch off to opt out.

Find out more: tuta.com/blog/linkedin-ai-user…

#LinkedInAI #MicrosoftAI #BigTech

darn yup. For custom installs, the new multilingual ISO is trash. For upgrades too maybe. all of it. I was able to get passed 88% on my original image. Things are installing like normal. Sadly you lose the in-place Win11 upgrade, but we might have to live with this until someone smarter than I comes out with a proper ISO. Sorry y'all, I tried. After a few tested it though and I tried to custom install, I'm even strongly considering removing the links to not mis-lead people with a broken ISO. At least the original one, while English only, can install just fine when you choose English US. This setup if booting from the media also gives you "upgrade" and unlocks it, so it may be that you can upgrade from Win11 that way, but I haven't tried without a proper Win11 VM (might do this on the weekend to do more testing though.) Either way, it's a bust. Will probably try to super-focus in on work and not think of this terrible disaster.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

I finally did it. I've practically maxxed out my computer over the years. I can't add anything there, all slots are taken, all drive positions are filled, I can't put a better CPU there, the only viable upgrade now is to go from 64 GB to 128 GB RAM and I don't need that.

I guess my next motherboard one day will have to be an E-ATX form factor to have more options and an over the top chipset to handle it all.