mastodon - Link to source
'Not a buyout': Attorneys and unions urge federal workers not to resign - NPR apple.news/A7ZwXOtO7Qt-Lz9_UV6…

'Not a buyout': Attorneys and unions urge federal workers not to resign — NPR

Unions and attorneys who represent federal employees are telling workers not to take the offer from the Trump administration to resign from their jobs by Feb. 6 and still be paid through September.
apple.news

mastodon - Link to source
Why is everything panicking about DeepSeek? Shouldn't they instead look at the code, learn from it, and build something better? After all, it's a lot more open than what most of big tech has produced so far.
#AI
forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/202…

DeepSeek Panic Live Updates: Nvidia Stock Drops 4%—As Trump Reportedly Mulls China Chip Sale Restrictions

Nvidia shares' 9% recovery Tuesday was the second-best day in terms of market cap added for any company ever—but the company faced another selloff Wednesday.
Derek Saul (Forbes)
#AI

mastodon - Link to source
New Kokoro TTS model just released. This was trained on much more data than the previous version and really sounds good. If you want to try yourself, just do pip install kokoro. I haven't gotten a chance to test the model yet, but here is a demo from the guy who trained it. Here's a demo. A female voice reading the following text: "Kokoro is an open-weight TTS model with 82 million parameters. Despite its lightweight architecture, it delivers comparable quality to larger models while being significantly faster and more cost efficient. With Apache licensed weights, Kokoro can be deployed anywhere from production environments to personal projects."

mastodon - Link to source

You've probably heard that "we are stardust," but this graphic breaks it down further & tells you what kind of stars your dust came from--and which elements didn't come from stars at all.

svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13873/ #science #nature #space

This periodic table depicts the primary source on Earth for each element: from the Big Bang, massive stars, white-dwarf supernovae, merging neutron stars, low-mass stars, or other processes. In cases where two sources contribute fairly equally, both appear.

Periodic Table of the Elements: Origins of the Elements

This periodic table depicts the primary source on Earth for each element. In cases where two sources contribute fairly equally, both appear. || PeriodicTableOrigins2_print.jpg (1024x682) [251.7 KB] || PeriodicTableOrigins2_Large.
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio
#science #nature #space

mastodon - Link to source
Dear lovely #PHP community, what do you think about Mago? I've recently read about it in PHP Annotated by Roman from JetBrains. Seems a potentially good replacement for PHPCS and maybe PHP-CS-Fixer. Is it time or not yet? mago.carthage.software/

Mago by Carthage Software

Mago - A comprehensive suite of PHP tooling inspired by Rust’s approach, providing parsing, linting, formatting, and more through a unified CLI and library interface.
mago.carthage.software
#php
in reply to André Polykanine

akkoma - Link to source

Drew Mochak

@menelion Hey thanks for the feedback! BTW, my rant about accessibility testers acting like ADA inspectors was completely unrelated to this, totally different thing.

The phone numbers are necessary in order to verify the person you are talking to, since anyone can set whatever name they want in their profile. Bad actors could use this to impersonate people you know.

I agree that it’s annoying though from the screenreader perspective, and we’ve gotten a fair bit of feedback to filter them out. We’ve been able to balance the concerns on mobile by including the number in the custom action hint when you swipe down from the bubble (E.G. “view contact info for +1 (202) 555-1111”) It’s more complicated for desktop though.

As a best practice, you are supposed to convey any information that is relevant to the screenreader for it/the user to decide how to handle it. I think this is an area where it makes more sense for a screenreader add-on or script perform this function so it is under the user’s control.

All that to say, it’s tricky, but I think there is a path forward here that will give the users what they want without security compromises.

@André Polykanine

mastodon - Link to source
Guys check out this new project, it's a cross platform app that lets you experiment and train open source LLMs without any code. It's based on Electron and open source, but I haven't yet looked at accessibility. github.com/transformerlab/tran…

GitHub - transformerlab/transformerlab-app: Open Source Application for Advanced LLM Engineering: interact, train, fine-tune, and evaluate large language models on your own computer.

Open Source Application for Advanced LLM Engineering: interact, train, fine-tune, and evaluate large language models on your own computer. - transformerlab/transformerlab-app
GitHub

mastodon - Link to source
The irony: OpenAI—which faces multiple lawsuits for using content without permission—accuses China's DeepSeek of basically copying from ChatGPT to train its AI models. pcmag.com/news/openai-deepseek…

OpenAI: DeepSeek Used Our Models to Train Their Own

OpenAI—which faces multiple lawsuits for using content without permission—accuses DeepSeek of 'distillation,' a technique that use larger models' outputs to improve smaller ones.
Jibin Joseph (PCMag)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

“Nobody asked for NFTs or the fucking Metaverse. Nobody asked for lying chatbots instead of getting to reach an actual support person that could solve your problems.”

And:“…people are challenging the notion that we all have to do AI now. Because we don’t. It’s a choice. A choice that mostly benefits monopolists.”

— @tante in tante.cc/2025/01/28/quoted-in-…


Quoted in Ars Technica's article on tarpits for AI crawlers

I am quoted at length in a new article on Ars Technica (a website I have been reading for years and years) on an in-depth article on tarpits for AI crawlers.
tante (Smashing Frames)
@tante

mastodon - Link to source
Nvidia RTX 5080 Reviews Fail to Impress Gamers
"That’s due to the RTX 5080 failing to surpass the RTX 4090 and only offering slight improvements over the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super."
(Still no talk of whether it runs less hot than the prior generation, so far none of these gaming sites covered that one)
tipranks.com/news/nvidia-rtx-5…

Nvidia RTX 5080 Reviews Fail to Impress Gamers

Nvidia stock is down on Wednesday after reviews for the RTX 5080 graphics card failed to impress gamers.
William White (Tipranks)

mastodon - Link to source

#XSF Announcement

We hold the 27th XMPP Summit in #Brussels, #Belgium tomorrow! Everyone is welcome physically or remote: xmpp.org/2024/11/xmpp-summit-2…

#jabber #chat #interoperability #rtc
#opensource #decentralization

The XMPP Logo

XMPP

XMPP - The universal messaging standard
xmpp.org
#opensource #Jabber #chat #interoperability #decentralization #belgium #xsf #brussels #rtc
in reply to XSF: XMPP Standards Foundation

mastodon - Link to source

Gonzalo Nemmi

yay!. Super excited about the Summit!. I'll try to do my best to join you guys remotely tomorrow!

And I really hope to see other members of the community join as well. Even if it's just to get to know each other!.

@lorenzo @kris @roughnecks @millesimus @thecoffemaker and so many others !

@Millesimus @thecoffemaker @Kris @lorenzo

mastodon - Link to source
Ignore the title, but look inside. I think it's an interesting point of view. Trump inauguration: The real reason Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos support Trump | Vox vox.com/future-perfect/395646/…

The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think.

For billionaires inspired by science fiction, it’s about using crypto and network states to undermine democracy — not just lower taxes and friendly regulations.
Sigal Samuel (Vox)
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