A general theory of slop: Given enough examples, humans will always learn to identify low-skill, low-effort work, simply because it becomes common. 1/5
Work produced with AI, without skill or effort, may seem good before there is a lot of it, but that impression will always wear off quickly. People who work with AI, but with skill and effort, will produce work that won't immediately read as slop. 2/5
Solopreneurial dreams of creating compelling digital products without skill or effort, just vibes, will fail because they will be overtaken by digital products made with skill and effort, with or without AI, though likely to some degree with AI. 4/5
Hello everyone, I just wanted to let you know that Starwar Part1, the binaural text to speech audio production I showed off on stream, is now available to download in flac! Especially for those who didn't see the stream, you might want to read the description before listening in order to acquire context which will certainly leave you a bit less confused. Those on mastodon and thus most likely to know of the streams get the Anyaudio link before the clip goes generally public, especially since there is no Anyaudio commenting at this time due to disabled registrations. Anyway, enjoy! anyaud.io/listen?audio=OeFViBO…
We are happy to announce that GUADEC 2026 will take place from July 16th to 21st, 2026, in A Coruña, Spain. As in recent years, GUADEC will be held as a hybrid event, allowing attendees to participate either virtually or in person at our venue.
Okay, 2026 is the year I am going to actually get back into writing.
I have three ideas for articles lined up.
1) Advanced, and often crazy, networking under FreeBSD. 2) MPLS on JunOS in my home, the how and why. 3) A brief history of IP Networking; Classful vs CIDR and FLSM vs VLSM.
I can say, however, that I've reunited with an "old friend" who is still in great shape. Before I get dozens of replies about it being insecure: in theory, it is, but it's not accessible from the outside. It's isolated within its own network and is only able to connect and fetch backups for 'extreme disaster recovery' (only at specific times, restricted by specific firewall rules). It served its purpose today, and tomorrow, it might be even more useful.
Collaborate for free with online versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Save documents, workbooks, and presentations online, in OneDrive. Share them with others and work together at the same time.
When we design for disabilities, we make things better for everyone. This is called the Curb-Cut Effect. The term was coined by disability students and activists in the 70s, who added curb cuts to the Berkeley sidewalks to make access easier for those in wheelchairs. They discovered those also helped people with strollers, using trolleys for deliveries, etc.
@FreakyFwoof I love that analogy, but I think it has its problems. Namely that people without disabilities have options even when the curb cut is non-existent. Humans tend to act and take things seriously when they are out of options. Of course, I realize this is quite a generalization, but I am not sure I can do better on social media! :)
I think that split is too blurry to be considered a problem in the analogy 🤷 On a wheelchair day, I usually have other options if there's no ramp--often I'm able to stand and take a couple steps, and often I have another person with me to help me get over a step with the wheels. A more skilled manual wheelchair user could pop a wheelie. An abled parent pushing a large stroller with heavy kids and stuff in it doesn't always have the option to pick it up.
Popular AI-powered integrated development environment solutions, such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae, recommend extensions that are non-existent in the OpenVSX registry, allowing threat actors to claim the namespace and upload malicious extensions.
Now I've heard there was a secret way To edit text on your display That's better than emacs (that's made by GNU), yeah. It goes like this, you type E D And nothing shows up visually You baffle newbs who haven't got a clue, yeah. Hallelujah, Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah You type an "a" to start append, Then period to mark the end. There is no AI bot that's gonna screw ya. It's there for you in rescue mode And when you need to edit code Or when you need to spoof some Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah
why would I stop calling slop slop? It's slop so I call it slop. If he stops making us consume slop maybe I'll consider not calling it slop. But I doubt it, because it will still be slop
Happy monday people, wishing you all a joyous productive one. I'm getting slowly hyped on my Monster Coffee energy drink, did not come back to a disaster of pull request reviews and Jira tickets and fires to put out, so I'm grateful for that despite the Monday sludge.
Thunderbird, el cliente de correo de software libre, este año 2025 ha realizado grandes cambios y mejoras, hagamos un repaso de lo conseguido y lo que está por llegar
Gracias por todo lo que haces por el proyecto Thunderbird y nuestra comunidad, desde donar para ayudarnos a conseguir todos esos objetivos y compartir las noticias en tu blog. No tenemos palabras para expresar lo agradecidos que estamos 😊🙌.
I’m _not_ saying to never put a live region in / on a button, but I _am_ saying it may not (will not) perform as you want. cdpn.io/aardrian/debug/WbxvPOd…
Table of Contents Example The HTML Live Region Button Decoration Accessible Name The Styles Hide the Live Region Color and Contrast Active Animations Text Resize and Reflow Windows High Contrast Mode The Script The Click Event Manipulate Outcomes Scr…
ooh this is a good experiment, noted for sure. The only time I could see someone even remotely thinking of this would be for a status-update button, but that's when we have other stuff like aria-busy anyway and direct label changes get announced when buttons have focus so a dev doing that would be very mislead. Nonetheless, that pen will be useful to show devs what not to do.
In this series, I’ve explored the principles and practices that teams seeing modest improvements in software development outcomes have been applying. After more than four years since the firs…
For World Braille Day, I compiled a list of free braille art and tactile image libraries that I used for a project in one of my graduate school classes. This is by no means a complete list of all available resources for tactile graphics, rather it is a list of sources that were explored for this project. veroniiiica.com/free-braille-a…
Free online resources for braille art and tactile graphics for blind and low vision students, with an emphasis on STEM content. Written for World Braille Day
The best thing about modern software is the error messages that show up even before the condition has completed.
Like... "NO INTERNET OMG MAKE SURE YOU ARE ONLINE" which sits there for the first few seconds after you launch the app, and goes away when the software itself finally gets around to even attempting the connection for the first time.
Microsoft Windows, an entire operating system, likes to do this.
A While ago someone posted a long List of blind accessible Games, native and through Mods, it was a Reply to a Thread, but I can't find it anymore. Can anyone point me to the right direction? #Blind #Gaming #Accessibility
That's wild. Each Cadance tablet has over 3500 parts that go into it when manufacturing, and they need to go down in precision as far as 1/32th of an inch for some parts when making them. There are wire coils thinner than a human hair inside it. Wow, just wow. And to think they got the manufacturing together and try to source local parts from Indiana where ever possible, mind-blowing. Watch this video on Vimeo to learn more. vimeo.com/1109418855?fl=pl&fe=…
Tactile Engineering Design Engineer Nick Will and CEO Dave Schleppenbach show various parts and machines at the Cadence tablet factory. Schleppenbach gives a tour…
I wonder if Guix should publish a statement on generative AI.
The statement would acknowledge what I and many view as a fundamental mismatch between genAI and an empowering and humanist project, and it could provide guidelines for the project’s attitude towards genAI.
The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users: The past year has seen an explosion in new text to speech engines based on neural networks, large language models, and machine learning. But has any of this advancement offered anything to those using screen readers? stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html#ai#tts#llm#accessibility#a11y#screenreaders
I've started using eSpeak-ng. It's grating, but I can crank the speed up way higher than any other TTS I've ever used, especially the fancy AI shit that simulates breath draws and lip movement
@PepperTheVixen The reason it's grating is because unlike Eloquence and dectalk, Espeak only uses formant synthesis for the vowel sounds. For consonants and plosives, it instead uses concatenative recordings based on human speech. That's why even when you switch to a voice that sounds less sharp, the "t", "b", "p", and other sounds are still too sharp. This seems to be the primary cause of the fatigue most people experience while using ESpeak.
There is a 32-bit compatibility layer in the works for NVDA itself (although it currently only references SAPI4). But with any luck the need for every add-on to implement its own will go away.
Link to issue number:
Summary of the issue:
64 bit NVDA can no longer support SAPI4.
Description of user facing changes:
SAPI4 is again availble on 64 bit NVDA.
Description of developer facing cha...
@jscholes@cachondo@FreakyFwoof@amir My understanding is that when this comes to addons, it's going to require some kind of secure addons API/layer. And it won't be ready for 2026.1, or maybe not even 2026.2.
I see the "Secure add-on runtime" on the roadmap, with the note that "The first version of the runtime will provide support for speech synthesis and braille devices."
I don't see any implication that any 32-bit compatibility layer will only work for secure add-ons, which is hopefully a bit of a leap.
Still, the fact that people don't know what will or won't be happening, or whether their preferred synthesiser(s) will work or not, continues to be a big part of the problem. @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir
@jscholes@cachondo@FreakyFwoof@amir That's my assumption because the only things that really need a 32-bit compatibility layer are speech synthesizers and braille devices.
Regarding ESpeak-ng, AFAIC, the main complaint from users is its base tone, which cannot be solved by simply making new variants. In this regard, how about improving its MBrola voices?
@clv1@jscholes@cachondo@FreakyFwoof@amir The issue is that both of these are effectively concatenative or parametric, rather than formant, systems. So they will never be as intelligible as eloquence.
@FreakyFwoof@cachondo@amir You should be able to get either Gemini or Codex to help you, depending on what AI you have access to. The workflow would be: 1. download gemini-cli or codex-cli, and get them installed and configured. 2. clone all of the sourcecode from github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/3. Delete the tts.txt and tts.pdf files, so you don't confuse it with incorrect documentation. 4. Find any API documentation for orphius that's available, and add it into the folder. 4. Run codex-cli or gemini-cli, and tell it something like: "Using the information about how to develop NVDA addons you can find in agents.md, and the information about the Orphius API I've provided in the file Orphius-documentation-filename.txt, I would like you to modify the code in this folder to work with Orpheus instead of eloquence."
It will go away for five or ten minutes, ask you for permission to read and write the files it's interested in, and then give you something that mostly works. Now, build the addon, run it, and tell it about the errors and problems you have and ask it to fix them. In the case of errors, include the error right from the NVDA log, and for bugs and problems, tell it exactly what it's doing wrong, and exactly what you want it to do instead. Keep doing this until you wind up with a working addon.
Think of AI as a particularly stupid programmer, and you're the manager in charge of the project. You should be able to get this done without paying anyone.
Well there's already a 32-bit addon for Orpheus floating about. I'd still rather pay someone competent to do it, even if they use AI. Proper programming terms would help narrow down the broken bits. I'm just an audio guy.
@FreakyFwoof@cachondo@amir Yeah, you can get AI to modify the 32-bit addon for you. That's how I got the first two eloquence prototypes; it helped me understand the problem and what approaches would work and what wouldn't. If you give it the 32-bit orphius addon, and the 64-bit eloquence addon, it should be able to understand the working approach to make an addon 64-bit, and make the modifications itself. The reason to give it the 64-bit eloquence addon as an example is so it doesn't decide to go down the GRPC route and include protobuf and a bunch of other nonsense.
Oh happy days 😊 that was the voice that used to come with the Hal ScreenReader isn't it? That was my first ScreenReader after my accident back in 1996 and I seem to remember the plug-in synth was called something like Apollo two or thereabouts such happy memories 🙂 but not really I used to sit up till about 4 am banging my head against the brick wall trying to figure it out but hey ho
@luiscarlosgonzalez@cachondo@FreakyFwoof@amir I didn't try Kokoro, because it cannot achieve a real time factor of 1 on CPU. By that I mean, to be fit for consideration with a screen reader, a text to speech voice must be able to generate one second of speech in one second or faster. In general, Kokoro takes two seconds to generate one second of speech. So it's not suitable.
Supertonic works way better on my 2012 machine than Kitn. That one just cuts off things all the time and just doesn't sound good at all. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to do that. Very weird.
Really interesting article. I'm particularly passionate about this subject, I've been fascinated with TTS for a number of years. I've trained many voices, both for Piper and some of the newer LLM based systems, and while I can't speak to the speed issue, training data is extremely important.
What you feed into these models has a big impact on the voice's performance overall. If you give it stuff scrape from the web, random audiobooks that weren't optimized for TTS, things like that, you're not going to get good results for the type of work screen reader users do every day. This applies to all of these systems, not even just neural networks. The latency / responsiveness issue is something we'll have to solve at some point, because I don't think using TTS systems last updated in 2003 is going to work out in the longterm, as much as I love Eloquence.
In my ideal world, we would have either a machine learning based or formant system that is easy to train / maintain. Big companies have lost interest in on device TTS, not even just for screen reader users. Many of the solutions being put out now are cloud based, and while developers are still creating on device models, as said in the article, they're not optimized for our needs and may never be. I think we have to take matters into our own hands and figure this out, but I believe with enough people we can make it happen.
@ZBennoui Agreed. I think blast bay is close to the right track. If only it was open and the issues pronouncing words were fixed. The speed and sound of the voices are top notch.
@ZBennoui We need a good formant system. Machine learning is useful for setting the model parameters. But I think the word to phoneme rules can’t be a neural network, because they have to be reproducible and modifiable. Even here though, machine learning could help though. I’d love a system where a user could submit a recording of a word, and the system could create the phonetic representation.
Yeah I completely agree, I happen to know Philip and have been talking with him extensively about his experiments with TTS. I can't go into a ton of detail, but I'll say what he said publicly. The system he's using is a hybrid approach of neural networks and formant synthesis, where he trains a model to output formant frequencies based on the audio data he feeds into it. I won't pretend to understand all the details, this is way above my pay grade, but as far as I understand this has never been done before by another developer.
@ZBennoui Yup. I just wish he wasn’t also trying to train his own phonemizer, because I really believe that has to be reproducible and modifiable for users. I’ve swapped multiple emails with him about an NVDA addon. But he’s pretty set on sapi for now until things stabilize both on the NVDA side and on his side.
@amir I too think we can make it happen by taking matters into our hands. I don't know how to code, but I'm at disposal to work on Portuguese language support, e.g. improving pronounciation rules, when time comes.
@FreakyFwoof The major problem with incorporating AI TTS into screen readers is latency. Maybe you can use it for say all, but it is not suitable for navigation. There are a couple of tiny TTS with low latency like Piper TTS, but the quality is not the best. Also multi lingual support and pronunciation for many uncommon words are issues for AI tts.
@jaybird110127 Yup. That and the fact that the sourcecode isn't getting updated; just getting it to keep compiling is a huge effort. There is a 64-bit build, but it doesn't actually work. I consider dectalk pretty much dead, even though the source is available.
isn't it possible to "pregenerate" the speech with all the necessary IDs so that you can navigate and interrupt at will? Just as one generates SSML from rich text (including maths formulas) before generating speech.
It would even be better to catch intonations, breaths and others, unchanged instead of letting the TTS generating a "pleasant full phrase" (a wrong expectation).
I find your post intriguingly close to the emerging reaction against the Ai-generated #mundaneslop.
@polx Maybe, but probably not. Doing that would result in a lot of wasted resources generating text I'm never going to listen to. Think about the average user interface: dozens of menus, and toolbars, and ads, and comments, and so on. Plus, the text changes constantly, on even simple websites. That's not even taking into account websites that just scroll constantly. It might be possible to create some kind of algorithm to predict the most likely text I'll want next, but now we've just added another AI on top of the first AI.
I think a better solution might be to make the text to speech system run on different hardware from the computer itself. This is, in fact, how text to speech was done in the past, before computers had multi-channel soundcards. This has a few advantages. First, even if the computer itself is busy, the speech never crashes or falls behind. Second, if the computer crashes, it could be possible to actually read out the last error encountered. Third, specialized devices could be perhaps more power and CPU efficient.
The reason text to speech systems became software, instead of hardware, is largely because of cost. It's much cheaper to just download and install a program than it is to purchase another device. Also, it means you don't have to carry around another dongle and plug it into the computer.
Hello fedicrowd! Does anyone have the #Fairphone 6 with murena e/os? If so, can you share compatibility issues you encountered? I'm eager to ditch Android and would like to anticipate which troubles may lie ahead. :)
Liebe Schwarmintelligenz, hat hier jemand das #Fairphone6 mit #murena #e/os und Erfahrungsberichte bzw Kompatibilitätsproblemen? Ich will wechseln und wissen welche Schwierigkeiten mich eventuell erwarten. :)
I used /e/OS before but don't currently, but here are my experiences, hope this helps:
1. Google Pay/Google Wallet is a lost cause, accept having to bring your bank card when leaving the house. 2. Anything you can find in IzzyOnDroid or F-Droid will work fine. I strongly recommend installing an F-Droid client: izzyondroid.org/quickstart/, you can already get used to some apps :) 3. Most apps will work fine but not all. Try Sapio and Plexus to see compat info. Mostly banking apps are a pain.
I think you do need to go in with a mindset and willingness to compromise sometimes. If you go in with the idea of "I can run anything I randomly download from Google Play" you will be disappointed. But if your general way of using your phone is "as little apps as possible" it may be fairly pain-free, especially if you prioritize apps from IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid.
May be worth making a list of apps you really aren't willing to lose and ask other /e/OS users specifically about those apps.
@SylvieLorxu Thanks a lot for your thoughts and the insights! I fully agree about the mindset. I also see it as an opportunity to declutter and/or widely review and replace what I've been using with FOSS apps. My only real need is the bare minimum for digital participation (public transport , banking seems to have mixed support for my banks 🫣, eID, etc), I'll celebrate everything beyond this as a nice add on
I sadly can't say much useful about public transport (I drive, sorry) although I do know a few people use my app Catima together with https://zügli.app/ for their Deutschlandticket (though it's broken in 2.41.0 - 2.41.3, version 2.41.4 with the fix isn't available everywhere yet).
Banking is very inconsistent yeah, depends on the bank. eID depends per country, though I think Germany is covered? f-droid.org/en/packages/com.go…
Hope some more Germans can fill in my missing knowledge :)
We must not stand in awe of the magnitude of our global contradictions. We need to identify the contradictions at hand and look for transiterative processes we can enact now to impact our trajectory, so that greater contradictions come to be at hand.
A friend of mine, Beqa Gozalishvili, a very talented developer from Georgia the country, announced an early stage of his #SAPI5 wrapper for the popular #ESpeakNG #TTS engine. bug reports and feature requests are welcome, he says in his Telegram channel. He does speak English. github.com/gozaltech/espeak-ng… #Accessibility #ScreenReader #Windows #JAWS #NVDA
@alexhall you can already download it. Pull the conversation if you can and check out the github page. I can get you a download link if you can't find it
@alexhall @Bri I installed it. Quite responsive. Problem though. And this isn't for my exact needs, but, there isn't an installable language selecter. Say someone speaks English and Spanish, they won't have Spanish installed unless there's a file I'm missing? I don't know
@alexhall @Bri Does it let you select voice/variant pairs to be exposed in SAPI like the old one did? Pretty sure he submitted this to ng issue number 7 but IDK if it's going to be pulled in.
@Bri @alexhall Oh. Meh. So I can't expose multiple variants, e.g. a Klatt one and a non-klatt one to use across given langs? Sad. Hopefully that can be added.
You may have heard that the maintainer of med-mastodon.com, a large, prominent Mastodon server, recently decided to shut down the server without warning, leaving his users with no access to their data. [EDIT: it's back up! Ref: mastodonapp.uk/@wild1145/11584…] This could happen to you at any time. If you care about this, you should be backing up your data regularly. Here's a post I just wrote about how to do that, and about what you can do with your backed-up data. #FediTips blog.kamens.us/2026/01/02/the-…
Your server or your Mastodon account could go away at any time. If you don’t want to lose your data, you should back it up. Here’s how to do that, and how to restore it later.
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Stack Overflow's monthly question volume has collapsed about 300 -- levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform's activity over its sixteen-year history.
Well, we've already taken to defending Wikipedia - it's gone from "it's just written by some random bod on the internet, it must be crap" to "it's written by actual human beings, it's great!"
Over the weekend I got Pi-hole up and running (first time user), and it sure is eye-opening seeing what your devices are up to.
The screenshot that's all red, for example, is my Samsung smart TV, which is constantly talking to Netflix (and other domains, even when using my PC and not interacting with the "smart hub".) I haven't opened the Netflix app in at least two weeks.
The other one all in green (allowed for now), is my Echo Dot with Alexa. That thing is talking to Amazon constantly...
Coincidentally I wrote a blog post about AdGuard Home (Pi-hole alternative) yesterday: blog.eischmann.cz/2026/01/04/a… (in Czech, but GT works well on it) I've also noticed how much the Netflix apps call home. Glad it's blocked now.
AdGuard Home: domácí ochrana nejen před reklamou Jak na blokování reklamy a rodičovskou kontrolu ve vlastní režii? AdGuard Home je na to výborné řešení. Používám ho už půl roku a v článku jsem se podělil o praktické zkušenosti z instalace a provozu, popsal jeho nejdůležitější vlastnosti a taky se trochu věnoval srovnání se známějším Pi-hole. #Adguard #AdguardHome #blokování #Pihole #reklama #soukromíblog.eischmann.cz/2026/01/04/a…(reakce na tento příspěvek se může zobrazit jako komentář pod článkem)
since Day 2 on CCCongress i am missing three of these definitively not an IED contraptions, designed to make music and deployed on the towel holders in three toilets, clearly marked with my DECT number and my nickname. If you took them and repurposed them for other shenanigans, i would love to have them back. As of now, i am out roughly 160 euros for replacements and that hurts.
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, banking seems to have mixed support for my banks 🫣, eID, etc), I'll celebrate everything beyond this as a nice add on
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