We're starting to see the first results of the hackathon! Florian here is building a Rust bot that talks to Christian's receipt printer, and makes it print what they send to a room.
Prototypes are taking form, keep up the good work everyone!
Hey, pals, this study is headed by J Michael Bailey, Kenneth Zucker, and Lisa Littman, noted transphobes and pseudoscientist. Littman in particular ison the advisory board for the genocidal anti-trans group GENSPECT.
Do not, under any circumstance, participate in this junk study.
Tengo una duda existencial del primer mundo friki. Quiero experimentar con inteligencias artificiales en local. Para empezar, además de informarme mucho, me hace falta un hardware dedicado. Además del precio está cual escoger. Las máquinas más preparadas del mercado funcionan bajo Windows o se puede usar equivalente en Linux. Y son dos mundos que no manejo con soltura. Así que me da miedo a quedarme con un caro pisapapeles. ¿Alguna opinión?
Fact of the day: the Ford Edsel ("a 1950s flop so notorious that it’s taught in business schools to this day") outsold the Cybertruck 2:1, "in a country with half the population."
In theory, it’s people who care a lot about audio quality. They often claim to have better than average frequency range in their ears (many do, but a lot claim to hear things only bats can actually hear).
For a long time, a lot of consumer audio equipment was pretty terrible, so there were real reasons for wanting something better, I remember listening to a CD that I’d heard many times on my CD player and ripped to my iPad and discovering that CD player from the ‘80s had completely lost a load of low-volume bits and there was material that would probably have been audible on an expensive player in the ‘80s and was easily audible on a cheap player in the early 2000s.
At the same time, the Loudness War happened. Music execs found that people were more likely to like music if it was loud the first time they heard it. So they started making CDs louder. But CDs have a fixed dynamic range, so making it loader lost detail. They couldn’t do this with records because the needle would jump out of the track, so we had a weird period where LPs had better audio fidelity than CDs. Unfortunately, LPs are really finicky and it’s very easy to scratch them if you don’t perfectly balance the stylus to avoid more than minuscule pressure on the surface.
So, to listen to the highest-quality music, you needed a moderately expensive record deck, a decent amplifier (and pre-amp: again, LPs are annoying to play), and speakers. And it was fairly noticeable if you got any of these wrong.
But then DACs got a lot better. Cheap USB audio adaptors for computers had much better precision than anything available in the ‘80s, and could be placed outside of the case and away from RF interference from the computer. AAC audio supports a variable dynamic range (so bumping the loudness is just a scaling factor, not a loss of precision). Baseline speaker and amplifier quality improved a lot. By the mid 2000s, fairly cheap equipment gave better sound quality than anything you could buy in the ‘90s.
By then, an entire industry had grown up to cater to people who wanted the best sound quality possible and an even larger group of people who wanted to be seen as having the best sound quality. It moved from music appreciation to conspicuous consumption as a primary market driver. And that made it a ripe target for scams.
For analogue things, there were obvious things you could sell, like cables with gold-plated connectors. Gold is a good conductor and, unlike copper, doesn’t corrode, so this would make a difference (whether the difference is audible is another matter). But the move to mostly digital paths made this harder. You got very silly things like ‘audiophile grade’ Ethernet cables and optical connectors, which ignored the fact that the digital protocols had built-in error correction and that audio is staggeringly low bandwidth in comparison to other things carried over these connections so there’s space for a lot of error correction. A load of these things can be run over a wire coathanger with no loss in quality.
The entire ecosystem became dominated by very silly things. But they’re all quite interesting because they have some plausible-looking science behind them, which then goes off in a nonsense direction. For example, Ethernet is an electrical protocol, so signal quality matters. Gold is a good conductor. Gold connectors on Ethernet cables will reduce signal degradation. Pay no attention to the fact that the Ethernet standard is specified based on specifically rated cables and won’t be any better on ones with marginally better connectors.
My guess from the picture is that someone has noticed that electrical noise from a power supply can be a problem and has built something that looks very plausibly like it would solve that.
Not far from Brussels now, excited to have a chill afternoon before what I think is going to be a busy #FOSDEM - Tomorrow looks like it's got a lot of talks and sessions that I'm hoping to attend with Sunday currently looking slightly more relaxed!
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
Software engineer here. It was pretty obvious the volume of spam calls was going to go through the roof with AI being ubiquitous. So I always try some prompt injection when they call me. Proudest achievement was a 3 minute recital of the digits of pi.
Several of our teams will be at #fosdem26 ... we'll introduce our PQC and Reliable Deletion ("forward secrecy") efforts, and give an overview over multi-relay #chatmail architectures. Or catch us on the booth or some sunny place outside :)
invite link for public fosdem26 group attention: consider joining with a dedicated conference chat profile because large public groups can attract trolls. Your private profiles are safe/unaffected then.
I just saw the most cringe game description ever. I am not naming the game or the developer, but I have never in my life been put off a game just by what's on the cover. Do better.
A password manager is an easy tool to increase the security of your digital identity. In this guide, we take a look at the best three password managers and why you should start using one.
what about @keepassxc ? Thats a good one that I felt should have been on the list, sure its a little more setup but once you have it up and running and combined with syncthing for syncing and its pretty good
I love how many times #Drupal has been called out at the EU Open Source Summit this year. We're half-way through this great @openforumeurope.org tradition, but in so many ways the Drupal community's governance model is an important one for #DigitalSovereignty & #OpenSource #EUpolicy #FOSDEM
moments of terror: I went to put the rog to charge, it was at 21%. NVDA says something like charging 21% and stops talking. Keyboard, unresponsive. Control buttons, nothing. Pressing the off button, nothing happened. I held it for a while, no response, no vibration, no sound, no nothing. Take off the headphone, nothing. I held the button to force the shutdown, I read the screen with seeng AI, just the rog text, standard from Asus. After a few tries, he woke up. Every blind man's nightmare.
I'm about to buy an used Pixel 6 Pro for 60€, new battery and only a few scratches, and throw GrapheneJOS on there. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
Už je s tím trapnej. Nezná nic jiného než cla. 🚘 Tys mě nepustil na přechodu, uvalím na tebe 100% cla. ♟️ Porazils mě v člověče nezlob se, cla! 🍽️ Cože? Dneska mám vyndat nádobí z myčky já? Cla! 💃Smím prosit? Ne? Cla! 🚋 Koukej mě pustit sednout. Jinak, cla! 🍞 Splesnivěl mi chleba, cla! 🎓 Dostal jsem kouli z matiky, cla! #Trump
Prezident USA Donald Trump oznámil, že hodlá uvalit cla ve výši 50 procent na veškeré letouny dovážené z Kanady, dokud Ottawa necertifikuje americká letadla Gulfstream.
TalkTalk salesman just knocked on my door. 8:30pm. I think he got the message that I didn't want to talk by the look on my face, so he just fist bumped me, laughed and walked away. I didn't say a single word.
The Prize for Excellence in Open Source … goes to…
Greg Kroah-Hartman, Fellow at the The #Linux Foundation!
We could think of no one more deserving of this Award than Greg - who has ensured through maintaining of different kernel subsystems and the Linux kernel stable releases that thousands of devices function seamlessly and securely.
The Prize for Excellence was presented by the European Open Source Academy, @bagder
Frank Feldman of @SUSE takes the stage as the first sponsor keynote. "It cannot take another 30 years to build the next SUSE!" Frank identifies the creation of a self-sustaining European software ecosystem as a key policy priority to enable Europe's digital future.
To support this, the European public sector needs to not only give priority to open source when procuring, but also be an active customer and partner to open source companies.
Fabrizia Benini (@EUCommission) starts off the new panel by explaining her work on the Open Digital Ecosystems Strategy. "The main objective is to foster the growth of open source communities in Europe, as they are fundamental in fostering tech sovereignty in Europe."
Responding to a rise in MadeInEurope narratives, Baddy Breidert points to the global cooperation that builds open source: “Open source shouldn’t have to choose its home, we are all involved in open source projects!” European open source companies, like Drupal, shine thanks to a vibrant international community.
Deborah Bryant of @opensource reflects on key lessons from the open source movement. She suggests avoiding the creation of new, less open licenses that may restrict the important qualities of openness.
Code and financial contributions of private companies are a critical backbone of the open source community, while companies benefit substantially from fostering a culture of participation among their employees.
In her final remarks, @suehle of @TheASF emphasises collaboration as a key driver of open source. It both builds and relies on collaboration across companies, communities and geopolitical borders.
"There is no borders in an open source project!" @bagder encourages focus on the sustainability of open source products, beyond technical specifications and borders.
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
The name of the main station in Brussels is already complicated enough, being called Zuid or Midi based on which language you speak. Yet #NS decided to complicate it even further and invented two more names: Brüssel-Süd and Brussels South, accompanied by Rotterdam Hauptbahnhof, while the station in Antwerp kept its Central name 🙄
This week we're discussing how we've changed both as a couple and individually. It's hard to see change when you've been together for a long time, but when we actually sat down and talked about it, we did notice some things that we were surprised to realise. Change is so gradual when you live with someone else, that it may not always be glaringly obvious that it's even occurring at all.
Welcome to episode 72.This week we're discussing how we've changed both as a couple and individually. It's hard to see change when you've been together for a...
Did you noticed that there is a new Social Media App called "upscrolled"?
It turns out that there are a lot of anti-Semitic and Islamist people hanging around there, and some hateful, anti-Semitic texts have already been deleted. Somehow, it was clear to me that various artists, for example from Bluesky, can now be found there.
I think it would be cool to have a server for Jewish artists. Everywhere you go as an artist, you encounter boycott, exclusion and hostility. You have to constantly justify yourself. People who give commissions tend towards zero because they don't want to be associated with you as an artist.
What's the preferred alt tag for a profile picture on a website? Just the name of the person? A description such as "picture of Mike Bowler"? #accessibility #WebAccessibility
Just "Mike bowler". Screen readers identify elements, so it would sound like "Mike bowler, image" or (JAWS, it's an old tradition) "Mike bowler, graphic". That's self-explanatory. Thanks for caring!
Hiisikoloart
in reply to 🆎 • • •David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to Hiisikoloart • • •In theory, it’s people who care a lot about audio quality. They often claim to have better than average frequency range in their ears (many do, but a lot claim to hear things only bats can actually hear).
For a long time, a lot of consumer audio equipment was pretty terrible, so there were real reasons for wanting something better, I remember listening to a CD that I’d heard many times on my CD player and ripped to my iPad and discovering that CD player from the ‘80s had completely lost a load of low-volume bits and there was material that would probably have been audible on an expensive player in the ‘80s and was easily audible on a cheap player in the early 2000s.
At the same time, the Loudness War happened. Music execs found that people were more likely to like music if it was loud the first time they heard it. So they started making CDs louder. But CDs have a fixed dynamic range, so making it loader lost detail. They couldn’t do this with records because the needle would jump out of the track, so we had a weird period where LPs had better audio fidelity than CDs. Unfortunately, LPs are really finicky and it’s very easy to scratch them if you don’t perfectly balance the stylus to avoid more than minuscule pressure on the surface.
So, to listen to the highest-quality music, you needed a moderately expensive record deck, a decent amplifier (and pre-amp: again, LPs are annoying to play), and speakers. And it was fairly noticeable if you got any of these wrong.
But then DACs got a lot better. Cheap USB audio adaptors for computers had much better precision than anything available in the ‘80s, and could be placed outside of the case and away from RF interference from the computer. AAC audio supports a variable dynamic range (so bumping the loudness is just a scaling factor, not a loss of precision). Baseline speaker and amplifier quality improved a lot. By the mid 2000s, fairly cheap equipment gave better sound quality than anything you could buy in the ‘90s.
By then, an entire industry had grown up to cater to people who wanted the best sound quality possible and an even larger group of people who wanted to be seen as having the best sound quality. It moved from music appreciation to conspicuous consumption as a primary market driver. And that made it a ripe target for scams.
For analogue things, there were obvious things you could sell, like cables with gold-plated connectors. Gold is a good conductor and, unlike copper, doesn’t corrode, so this would make a difference (whether the difference is audible is another matter). But the move to mostly digital paths made this harder. You got very silly things like ‘audiophile grade’ Ethernet cables and optical connectors, which ignored the fact that the digital protocols had built-in error correction and that audio is staggeringly low bandwidth in comparison to other things carried over these connections so there’s space for a lot of error correction. A load of these things can be run over a wire coathanger with no loss in quality.
The entire ecosystem became dominated by very silly things. But they’re all quite interesting because they have some plausible-looking science behind them, which then goes off in a nonsense direction. For example, Ethernet is an electrical protocol, so signal quality matters. Gold is a good conductor. Gold connectors on Ethernet cables will reduce signal degradation. Pay no attention to the fact that the Ethernet standard is specified based on specifically rated cables and won’t be any better on ones with marginally better connectors.
My guess from the picture is that someone has noticed that electrical noise from a power supply can be a problem and has built something that looks very plausibly like it would solve that.