mastodon - Link to source

I'd like to ask folks to reflect for a moment.

Are you adding to a pile-on of criticisms? If so, is the target of those criticisms someone who might be exposed to undue amounts of judgment already because of who they are (whether through race, gender, queerness, etc)?

Might you be magnifying the underlying bias against the person with your actions? Are there more compassionate approaches to take? Do your actions help or hinder in the grand scheme?

mastodon - Link to source
This is a masterpiece.
"When you play billy Joel like it's 1700"
youtube.com/watch?v=BRRLAQjKPx…
#Music #Baroque #YouTube
alt: Some clever guys and girls from Germany took four songs by Billy Joel and made it into a genuine Baroque concerto for two recorders and basso continuo.
In spite of what we're living through as humanity, we are blessed to live in such times. Imagine this before YouTube!

When You Play BILLY JOEL like it's 1700

1. Uptown Girl (Adagio) 0:002. For The Longest Time (Allegro) 2:553. And So It Goes (Grave) 5:594. She's Always A Woman To Me (Allegro) 7:39Words and melodie...
YouTube
#youtube #music #baroque

Winter blue tardis reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source
"Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight": Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder techdirt.com/2026/01/08/abolis…

Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder

Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her i…
Techdirt

mastodon - Link to source

I guess this warrants a screenshot, as I keep seeing #GNOME + #Linux threads where folks freak out about the "middle click paste" gsetting being set to False by default in gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gsettin…. Some ask "How dare they hide this into a gsetting to be toggled", or "they should add it to GNOME Tweaks" etc.…

Thing is, it's *already* in GNOME Tweaks, since 2016: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-t…

We were told multiple times the gsetting is not getting removed. I'll keep using it & move on. :blobcatcoffee:

Screenshot of the "GNOME Tweaks" GUI application, that provides a "Middle Click Paste" setting toggle in the "Mouse & Touchpad" section.

Make Gtk/EnablePrimaryPaste configurable through gsettings (2f9b1b3b) · Commits · GNOME / GNOME Tweaks · GitLab

Instead of relying on xsettings overrides, let's make use of a proper gsetting newly added for this purpose that can also be used by gtk+ on the wayland backend. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775847
GitLab
#linux #gnome

gotosocial - Link to source

Hey @FreakyFwoof have you taken a look at this?
I just got to the crossover reveal chapter, probably gonna be done in the next 30 minutes LOL, shortish chapters but I'm loving it.

Title: The Owl, the Witch, and a Man Named Anthony
Author: White_Squirrel Author
Summary: Holly Potter learnt at Gringotts that her father wasn’t James Potter, but some guy named Anthony Stark.
Tony Stark was very confused when a paternity claim was delivered directly to his bedroom by a snowy owl.
They begin a correspondence of letters, not knowing what bizarre revelations will come of it, all mediated by our favourite Arctic avian and told in real time as the letters are delivered.
Covers Hogwarts first year. Holly was born in 2000. Formerly “Flight of the Post Owl.”

archiveofourown.org/works/7440…

@Andre Louis

mastodon - Link to source

I'm watching people in my feed screaming at each other over Firefox's "AI kill switch" this morning with some trepidation.

As far as I'm concerned, Firefox already has an AI kill switch. It's called browser.ml.chat.enabled, I set it to false more or less the day it appeared, it hasn't mysteriously popped back on since, despite angry posts to the contrary, and that's been that for me. It's disabled every "AI" feature I find objectionable. I'd prefer if Mozilla leadership would sync up with reality on occasion and stop deciding to put this paid placement trash into Firefox in the first place, but at least there's a reliable way to get rid of it.

Everything else people have been screaming at Mozilla about? I'm not sure I see the problem. The little model you can download to summarise web pages for you? I wouldn't trust it, and so I don't think it's necessarily a productive use of Firefox devs' time, but at least it's opt-in. The other little model you can download to help organise your tab groups? I don't use it much, but this one seems more practical, and it's also opt-in, despite the occasional angry report of it slowing down people's browsers even without having been downloaded. Liek, bro, maybe try closing a Slack tab or two.

I don't want ChatGPT in my browser, or Claude, or any kind of world burning data centre LLM pretending to be our new AI god. browser.ml.chat.enabled = false does that for me. It would be even better if it wasn't there in the first place. But tiny, focused ML models doing nominally useful things? I not only do not see the problem there, I'd like some of them to be part of the Web platform rather than just the browser. I've been wishing since they launched them that Mozilla would make an API available to web sites out of those translation models of theirs, for instance.

I'm monitoring the situation, as European heads of state like to say, but so far, despite the posturings of their C-suite types, it doesn't seem like any critical Mozilla resources are being diverted away from maintaining the Web platform into AI boosterism. Every new Firefox changelog is delivering on what it should be delivering on, and it's only occasionally that I see a new "AI" feature advertised. Compare that to a product like VSCode, which has been completely consumed by the cancer of slop production with only one in a hundred changelog entries being about building an actual damned code editor, and I'm not feeling all that alarmed about Firefox just yet.

I know this is Mastodon, but sometimes I just wish people would entertain having opinions that can have some nuance in between "burn the world down so the AGI can live" and "Butlerian Jihad now," you know?

mastodon - Link to source
Stranger Things complete. Hard to believe a show that I've watched since middle or high school ends when I'm an undergraduate. That was sort of the only thing I watched on Netflix. But the service is disappointing now. There are barely any good shows or movies to watch. And if they are, they're are average at best, or they got canceled for reasons which usually involve money and whatnot.

mastodon - Link to source
Isfugl - Alcedo atthis - Eurasian kingfisher
#fugle #fotografi #birds #birding #birdingphotography #herlevfotoklub #nature #wildlife #2730foto #photography #dof #dof #dofbirdlife
#Isfugl #Alcedo_atthis #Eurasian_kingfisher
#photography #wildlife #nature #birds #birding #fugle #fotografi #birdingphotography #herlevfotoklub #2730foto #dof #dofbirdlife #isfugl #alcedo_atthis #eurasian_kingfisher
in reply to Tom Grant

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@TomGrant91 oh, if you place the .exe where your soft voice add-on lives or the DLL files do, it'll auto-detect it. But because we can't technically bundle it all together in the repository, it's possible that someone builds the speak program on its own and would need to then manually give it where that file lives. I doubt the folks behind SoftVoice are around anymore, but I had to stay cautious. Even though the Eurpod page is public, it's not tied to the wrapper project so if anyone reaches out and says, "take this down, you're redistributing our speech engine!" I can just yank the file off Eurpod and not touch my repo.
@Tom Grant

mastodon - Link to source

RE: mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/1149428…

With regards to Grok generating CSAM, I'd like to point out that all the image generation models are probably trained with CSAM in the first place. The kind of scraping that was done to train them is indiscriminate and the companies that make them don't care, so god knows what's inside the training data. My recommendation still stands: stay tf away from them

Gabriele Svelto (@gabrielesvelto@mas.to)

Also, torrenting porn at that scale means that Meta's models are pretty much likely to contain NCII and even CSAM. Keep the fuck away from them.
Gabriele Svelto (mas.to)
This entry was edited (1 week ago)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source
So. Because GPT uses Jupyter internally, when it reviews files, they get truncated for it. Poor thing. It spends half its time trying to figure out why the code is truncated when in reality it's Jupyter and the output truncating it. Ha. Can't believe that.
Gemini is good, but it can only do code changes inline. GPT will actually patch your file for you if you are specific enough and upload it. But then of course it spends half its time trying to figure out whether a piece of code exists or not because it got truncated. Unreal.

mastodon - Link to source

PSA We are happy about the wealth of privacy focused classic email providers (proton, tutanota, posteo, mailbox.org etc) but they are not geared for instant secure messaging. Do yourself, family and friends a favor and use delta with any of the many chatmail.at/relays

Or setup a relay of your own if you feel like it.

Or use a a dedicated chat email address on your own or any classic email server that has reliable service and no obnoxious rate limits or annoying spam handling.

Cheers.


Chatmail: Relays

Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
chatmail.at

ArcaneChat reshared this.

in reply to Attilax

mastodon - Link to source

Delta Chat

for setting up contact with a friend, see delta.chat/en/help#howtoe2ee -- there also is a mode that doesn't require a camera/scan-qr code but sharing an invite link.

Delta Chat: FAQ

What is Delta Chat? Delta Chat is a reliable, decentralized and secure instant messaging app, available for mobile and desktop platforms. Instant creation of private chat profiles with secure and i...
delta.chat
in reply to Delta Chat

hubzilla - Link to source

Fedir Ustynov

@Delta Chat
Have you tried calling the person and attempting to onboard them using only voice?

The only thing that came to mind was something like: "Take a sheet of graph paper and start shading in squares. Shade the first square. Now the second. Now the third..." Of course, dictating a link out loud is not much easier.

I hope that onboarding two or three friends a day for about a week will make it clear that all the options you suggested are not great. :)

@Delta Chat

mastodon - Link to source
We could for example attach an Eloquence audio sample, then ask for a synth that sounds similar. In case the AI couldn't make it from scratch, we could ask whether another synth could be the basis, for example ESpeak's klatt variants. @fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate @Tamasg
@James Scholes @Tamas G @Sean Randall @Andre Louis @Zach Bennoui @Devin Prater :blind: @🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @Amir
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

Sort of my thought sadly. It's gotten better, no doubt, you can now get AI to spit out 60 KB of slop in one go, wow progress. xD So context improved, maybe a slightly better skillset, but the amount of time you'd spend debugging and seeing which step it went wrong on, especially for all the low-level plumbing an engine needs is brutal. @clv1 @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate
@James Scholes @Sean Randall @Andre Louis @Zach Bennoui @Devin Prater :blind: @Amir @Cleverson
in reply to Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

so it's a lot.
1) Signal generation (the “voice box”)
This is the DSP engine: glottal source → filter(s) → radiation → output audio.
2) Control model (turning phonemes into trajectories)
You need to decide how parameters move over time:
•
How /a/ differs from /i/ in F1/F2
•
How consonants inject noise and shape transitions
•
Coarticulation: the “smearing” of neighboring sounds into each other
•
Rules for duration and transitions (and exceptions)
This is where “it works” becomes “it sounds like a person instead of a kazoo.”
AI helps, but you still need a design. AI can implement whichever model you pick (Klatt-style rules, gestural targets, diphones-with-formants, etc.).
3) Text to phonemes (G2P)
For English you can ship a dictionary + rules.
•
normalization (numbers, dates, abbreviations)
•
tokenization
•
stress rules
•
phoneme mapping5) Voice design + tuning
Even with a perfect engine, it’s easy to end up with “robotic but intelligible” rather than “pleasant.”
This is typically the biggest time because it’s:
•
parameter tables
•
hundreds of little exceptions
•
endless listening tests
•
DSP engine: days to a couple weeks
•
G2P + normalization: weeks
•
coarticulation + durations: weeks to months
•
prosody: weeks to months
•
tuning to ‘nice’: open-ended
@fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate
@James Scholes @Sean Randall @Andre Louis @Zach Bennoui @Devin Prater :blind: @🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @Amir
in reply to Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

yeah, I think if a team came together for it, splitting that work perhaps by person or 1 to 2 people per section, could really work. I know I could be useful here at the later shaping stages, so do count me in, it's that architecture creation and initial rules I'm a bit out on. But yeah, not against on being included.
@fastfinge @jscholes @cachondo @FreakyFwoof @amir @ZBennoui @pixelate
@James Scholes @Sean Randall @Andre Louis @Zach Bennoui @Devin Prater :blind: @🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @Amir
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Cleverson

iceshrimp.net - Link to source

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

And also UX researchers, probably. I can't articulate why eloquence is better than dectalk, for me. Neither, I bet, could Andre articulate what makes Orpheus better than Eloquence, for him. So to get something that makes the largest number of people as happy as possible is a classic UX research problem, probably involving massive surveys, rating and ranking of samples, and so on. I work with the kind of people qualified to do this, and it's a unique skill-set in and of itself.
⇧