Driving my kid to school today, we passed a crowd on a street corner. She asked what they were doing. I said my guess was that it’s observers conferring about ICE.
That wasn’t really a guess What I knew that she didn’t know is that they were gathering because somebody was just abducted there.
Faltblatt zum Digital Independance Day (englischsprachige Ausgabe)
Hier: XMPP / Jabber
Dieses Faltblatt wurde von Freiwilligen ausgearbeitet, um auf das gute freie ...
#HardenedBSD applies the following compiler flags to #OpenSSL in the base operating system:
-ftrivial-var-auto-init=zero
-fsanitize=safe-stack
-fzero-call-used-regs=used
The OpenSSL port (in the HardenedBSD ports tree exclusively) only enables the first option.
I wonder if the combination of these features would mitigate the OpenSSL stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability announced today. I hope to answer that question this evening unless someone else beats me to it.
"about a week before his death, he suffered a broken rib when a group of federal officers tackled him while he was protesting their attempt to detain other individuals."
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that “DHS law enforcement has no record of this incident.”
It sure looks like they knew who he was, but don't want to reveal it was an #ICE #execution
** 2025 Wrapped - the traditional summary of my year. which also serves as an award eligibility post.
(Spoiler - I'm elibible for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award. I have been a finalist every year since 2023, and I hope you will consider nominating me this year too.)
** If you're not familiar with how the Hugo Award nomination and voting works, Reactor Magazine has a good write-up. reactormag.com/anyone-can-vote… **
It sounds like there was another ICE shooting today but there's almost nothing known about what happened.
"The individual, who has not been identified, was shot in southern Pima County near milepost 15 of West Arivaca Road at around 7:30 a.m., according to a news release from the Santa Rita Fire District. The fire department said it transported the person in critical condition."
One thing I love about being involved in my College is I get a direct line on what young people are thinking.
In my circle of 30-50-somethings, it's taken for granted that "AI" is changing everything. Some people express caution that we shouldn't even take any position on software engineering education because it will be out of date within a week.
Meanwhile, my students are telling me that in their cohort, everyone is tired of AI and wants to learn proper software engineering.
One lesson here is: do you remember how clueless your boss was about everything? Recognise when you are in the "boss" demographic, and that your breathless enthusiasm and concern may be equally misinformed.
yes to an add-on updater, yes to a "reset Language settings to defaults" button. But all after work. Yes to Russian support. If people wait about 4 or 5 hours I'll see what I can get started towards the end of the day when I'm done with reviewing things and working on things that have well, actual deadlines.
I manually added a few coarticulation settings to pt-br.yaml in a text editor, with values different from the defaults. It seemed to have no effect, so I went to the language settings in the phoneme editor. Instead of the values I added manually to the file, the values in the phoneme editor settings were the default ones, so I needed to change them inside the settings dialog. Why is this? Can't the phoneme editor detect when I change the values and save the file in a text editor?
@clv1 oh hmm, you have to manually hit "save language" from the file menu in the phoneme editor to get it to re-write it. Should probably do a confirmation dialog though if you try to exit it without first hitting the save options and changed something, that's good catch there.
OK, now to another issue: the synth is adding a schwa after an r when it comes before consonants like f, m, r, s. this caused words like "permite, personalizado, interface, irmão" to sound strange, so I stripped off the schwa for testing, but then the r became too weak. One solution I found is to change the schwa to the other schwa, that's ᵊ can it be done with a single rule, or I have to normalize for every consonant?
@clv1 hm, you shouldn't. you can try it this way: normalization: classes: R_SCHWA_FOLLOW_CONS: # consonants that were causing the full-schwa to sound too syllabic # (you can expand this later if needed) - "f" - "m" - "r" - "s"
replacements: # If we have r + schwa and the next phoneme is one of the consonants above, # swap schwa to the reduced schwa ᵊ so /r/ stays audible without adding a full syllable. - from: "rə" to: "rᵊ" when: beforeClass: R_SCHWA_FOLLOW_CONS
One more detail: I did the following steps: 1. Add a rule using a text editor and save the file; 2. Go to the phoneme editor and save the file; 3. Now when I command the editor to speak something, it successfully takes into account the rule I've just added. However, the normalization rules list view is not updated accordingly. This issue applies to other lists like language settings as well.
@clv1 oh yeah that's tricky since we'd have to check whether you made manual changes outside the editor for that one, like every minute, read the file or something. I'm not sure if we can do it without you needing to quit and reload the editor, though I can do a "reload language" option in the menu that can help this. Otherwise it becomes a mess with syncing whether the file was modified or not and more like the auto-save features in word haha. Not impossible, but right now yes, it only checks it once when you arrow to the language. So actually just up/down arrowing again will reload the new one.
I'm trying to add voicing to the phoneme whose key is x. Is it enough to change _isVoiced to true? I did it, but I cannot notice difference. Is the difference really subtle?
@clv1 Setting _isVoiced: true on a phoneme does not actually add voicing. It’s metadata. It just says “this sound may carry voicing”, but it doesn’t generate any buzz by itself. It also allows for timing rules on that phoneme (voiced things are allowed to be longer) If voiceAmplitude is still zero, the DSP has nothing periodic to work with, so your ears hear… nothing new. That’s why changing _isVoiced on x feels like it does nothing, it kind of does nothing. To hear a difference, you must give the phoneme a voiced source and mark it voiced. For example: "x": _isVoiced: true voiceAmplitude: 0.18 fricationAmplitude: 0.55 Now you’re actually mixing voicing + noise, which is how voiced fricatives work in Klatt. The effect will still be subtle (that’s normal), especially at fast speech rates, but it’s there.
@clv1 I hope you do find out something interesting! We can always tune the main phonemes based on it. I'll be updating the Phoneme editor as well; It now supports F5 command to refresh from the text file in the editor.
Philip Glass has withdrawn his symphony based on Abraham Lincoln from the Kennedy Center, with the award-winning composer writing to the board of the arts institution that its values conflict with the work.
What we pay for electricity should cover proper replacement and scheduled maintenance... so, why doesn't it?
Documents show the utility has long identified Hampstead substation as a weak link in the local grid... but f*ck the anglophones—let them freeze, let their pipes burst, let their food go bad—they have insurance, so STFU, eh
they're not going to crack Signal's encryption, they absolutely have infiltrated these group chats a long time ago posing as concerned citizens trying to collect data on ICE agents and ICE activities
but I guarantee the majority of Signal users in that chat aren't using usernames, but still their phone numbers. So now you have all these contacts on Signal who have exposed their phone numbers to you, and you can look up who owns the number and start terrorizing those citizens for conspiring against ICE
oooh I guess the usernames don't protect you at all anyway
> If Signal receives a subpoena demanding that they hand over all account data related to a user with a specific username that is currently active at the time that Signal looks it up, they would be able to link it to an account. That means Signal would turn over that user’s phone number, along with the account creation date and the last connection date. Whittaker stressed that this is “a pretty narrow pipeline that is guarded viciously by ACLU lawyers,” just to obtain a phone number based on a username.
so they'll just get your identity anyway, because we know they won't be able to guard this from the government no matter how "vicious" these ACLU lawyers think they are
If you write about the messy reality behind "free" internet services: we're seeing #OpenStreetMap hammered by scrapers hiding behind residential proxy/embedded-SDK networks. We're a volunteer-run service and the costs are real. We'd love to talk to a journalist about what we're seeing + how we're responding. #AI #Bots #Abuse
@pietervdvn Because that would involve a human using their brains or having a shred of conscience and those both go against the basic principles of the companies doing this.
I am halfway tempted to create a new mastodon account, and only follow people with a very common name, like James, John, or whatever. Not really sure why this popped into my head, or what I would actually do with it.
Fun fact: over here in Germany, at least a few years ago, there were more Michael's and Thomas' in leading positions of companies than actual women. So I guess, for german accounts those names would be Thomas and Michael. Then again, I just ran into some very bad conversations with a Michael about accessibility lately, and I don't think i'm not going to give them a second chance so soon.
This is a reminder that Apple’s entire executive team and Board of Directors actively support Tim Cook, friend to convicted sexual offenders, and destroyers of democracy.
Well done to the person in Philadelphia government who sent an emergency text to everybody in area with a link to chubbyparade.com, a porn site, instead of a weather site
When I did the promotion for the Firefly movie back in 2005, Universal gave the website and Browncoats stuff to me (unpaid) and instead spent the marketing money on merchandise to give out.
Unfortunately they got the website name wrong and printed a porn site name on everything, so it had to be destroyed.
Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable.
That is certainly up to you. But I don't see anything wrong with asking for donations. To me, it doesn't matter what kind of a job you have. If I like what you produce and can afford to do so, I certainly will donate.
For what it's worth: I'm not personally opposed to donating to projects operated by people with full time jobs. Not all work pays well or is secure, after all, and a lot of open source work goes on outside of office hours.
In your particular case, though, you have recently very publically talked about spending $22,000 on braille displays. Now I don't know if you split that with your partner, put it on credit cards, remortgaged your house, paid it outright, sent them a suspitious briefcase full of cash, or what. And I don't actually care; it's your money.
But, that sort of outlay does suggest you're not financially struggling, so I might be more likely to donate to a project maintained by someone for whom the funds might go further.
Just some thoughts. No judgment intended in any way.
@jscholes yeah, I think my feeling more is, it's not a full-time job, just something I (mostly) do after work or during my lunch when I can, else I'd risk jepordizing my job by shirking responsibilities and that isn't the way to live. So it really can't become my full-time gig unless I purposefully made it that and asked for donations, and people may carry that as an expectation on the project itself because they did so. That can get quite ugly too. Haha and thankfully we did split the displays, but I mean, both of us have full-time work so definitely not struggling with paying the house ETC. So, with that obligation burden, probably no donate button. xD
I wonder, if I'm nominated for something and two people need to second, then there's a second second required, so is a second second really a third? Anyway, I'll try to be patient and wait more than a second for people to second.
Re: last boost (mastodon.world/@anttipeltola/1…), I'm American, and I'd like more of that (open protocols, open source, no gods, no masters) over here as well.
Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
Whatever this European tech sovereignty formulates into DO NOT give us European Big Tech.
Open protocols, open standards, open source. Like the 1990s internet I enjoyed as a kid. The European governments finance the projects and largely leave us the fuck alone.
Interviewed on Al Jazeera today about ICE killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and made it a point to speak the names of all 9 people ICE has killed so far in 2026. Including Keith Porter, Parady La, Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos.
We need unity of humanity against fascism and autocracy.
Apple just rolled out an update for a few older iPhone and iPad models that ensures iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation continue working smoothly.
Carney's bill to counter the 27% increase in food prices over the last few years will mostly serve to subsidize the big 5 grocery stores - Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco & Walmart - which have already profited billions by that same 27% price increase:
Carney's bill includes: $11.7 billion boost of 25% to GST benefits over 6 years. Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit to 12 million low income Canadians. $500 million to help businesses address the costs of supply chain disruptions without passing costs on to consumers. $150-million Food Security Fund that will help small- and medium-sized businesses to expand greenhouses and abattoirs. $20 million to food banks.
Poilievre said in the House yesterday that he will support the bill.
Agriculture Canada did an inquiry into Canada’s grocery industry and found it extremely “vertically integrated”. The differenent suppliers all owned by the same corporations that “compete” (NOT) to supply groceries.
Ag Canada is being cut back, these analysis will be abandoned to fund the tax break that offers minor relief while falling to challenge the issue, subsidizing these corporations allowing the profits to further integrate the industry.
Grocery corporations invest their profitability in becoming more profitable through integration. Until politicians are willing to recognize and challenge this the problem will continue to become more extreme
It's worse than that. Mandatory, authoritatively checked age verification is a short, slippery slope directly to mandatory, authoritatively checked internet access. This isn't hyperbole. Gating VPN access is just a short stop in between.
UK PEOPLE: this is REALLY IMPORTANT. If the government bans under-16s from using VPNs, then logically they must intend to REQUIRE AGE VERIFICATION FOR ALL VPN USE. Which will affect adults too!
*Your* privacy and right to anonymous web browsing is at risk!
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social You might be interested in giving this petition opposing the motion a signal boost: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/754408
Small steps forward in the cross border railway ticketing. After many years, I finally succeeded in buying a single ticket covering an end-to-end journey between not just two but three countries.
Question for #blind and partially sighted folk on the fediverse:
If you go to a museum or gallery, do you prefer braille or do you instead use a text to speech app?
(Or both, or something else)
I've got a bit of money to refurbish a small UK museum space with better provisions for Deaf and Blind folk, so I'm keen to know what will be the most useful.
Please Note: This is a question specifically for blind and partially sighted Fedi users, rather than fully sighted folk.
For quickness I prefer to hear what's going on. Braille is nice to have for sure, but if there's a lot of info, would spend more time reading than enjoying. Definitely a personal opinion, and just like anything it's very subjective. I have done sound design and audio queues for museums in the passed so understand that more, as it were.
My phone. I already have it with me. Maybe scan a QR, it opens up to an accessible web page with info on, whether that be audio files the user presses play on, or written text which then is spoken via the screen-reader. If you go the latter route, then anyone who does use Braille and happens to have a display with them, such as deafblind can use that. @jakobrosin thoughts on this? I know you've done similar things.
the benefit of the user already using a device they have with them is less outlay on your side, just the web hosting or whatever. Also means they could in theory take the tour without being on-site at all, though that's bad for business, as there aren't paying customers there. You could charge for the virtual tour as well, but that's a different discussion. @jakobrosin
@Onj @jakobrosin QR codes fixed in location have a big flaw, they are usually URLs, which require someone to pay to host the domain and site, ive seen several cases where an organisation forgets to renew the domain and someone else takes it over.
That's really good to know, and it would link with another project I'm already doing.
There's the risk people will tour without coming in, but I'm happy to risk that. The building the museum is in is the big draw for what I do anyway, so our patrons still most likely want the experience of being here anyway.
It also comes down to budget. Creating a QR code and an accessible website behind it is quite low cost. However, not everyone is confortable in using their smartphone in such settings, especially for example elderly people or people with less digital skills. In that case, an audio guide, in a form of a separate device handed out from the ticket desk, could be an easier solution. Its also possible to set up more interactive experiences with tactile representations and mockups of some exhibits. Using a solution like NaviLens could combine both, the description and also guidance around the exhibit area. NaviLens uses their own QR codes, which their app can detect from quite far (tens of meters if necessary). The app is aware of users location so it can tell you things like "exhibit hall exit is 25 meters at 2 oclock" or "Mona lisa is 10 metres ahead" and upon reaching said exhibit, it can proceed with a description for example. But we've also had QR codes at exhibits, which point to youtube videos with descriptions. @DarkSheepArts @jakobrosin@hear-me.social
If you do end up going with Braille, keep in mind that English has two Braille grades. Most native speakers will use and prefer grade2, which introduces abbreviations for common English words, prefixes and suffixes, think "have", "would" or "ing". However, many foreign visitors, *even those who both know Braille and can speak English, may not actually know grade 2 English Braille*, and need grade 1, which has no such abbreviations.
In English-speaking countries, it's often assumed that what you want is grade2, but if the place has a lot of foreign visitors specifically, that may not always be the right choice.
First, as many explorable pieces as possible. You definitely want labels, but yes, for longer descriptions, you might want either some pre-recorded stuff, or some texts on say, a website, and have a giant QR code somewhere comfortable to find.
Linking to an accessible companion guide on a site might be a better shout than braille. That would be easier to produce, easier to update, definitely cheaper to maintain and most importantly, it places the choice of how to consume that with each person who wants to read it. EG, I'm totally blind here, learned braille so young that I can't even remember not knowing it, but there are boatloads of blind/VI folk who lose sight later in life and never get that opportunity. IMO audio is a really nice to have extra if you can get it done within budget, but deafblind folk get the soggy end of the stick so often, I reckon I'd try to offset that a bit by commissioning a good writer over a sound designer if I were in your shoes.
BTW I live in London and my partner bloody loves a museum/exhibit. Would be happy to come and poke around ideas in progress. Holler whenever you've got something if that might help.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Driving my kid to school today, we passed a crowd on a street corner. She asked what they were doing. I said my guess was that it’s observers conferring about ICE.
That wasn’t really a guess What I knew that she didn’t know is that they were gathering because somebody was just abducted there.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •With these recent days of news showing that the Trump regime is on their heels about ICE, my refrain has been: “It’s working. Punch harder.”
Last night I let myself savor the “It’s working” part for a few happy minutes, but this morning I’m squarely focused on “Punch harder.”