For all the challenges with AI, it can truly do some awesome things. I'm printing the Discovery spaceship from the 2001 and 2010 scifi movies. I just uploaded the PDF assembly manual and Youtube video to Google AI Studio. Here is a link to the assembly instructions I got back. The pdf is all images, and the video has no dialog at all: dropbox.com/scl/fi/wy56smmz6ie…
I'd be curious to see how accurate they are. What I'm finding with AI vision is that when it comes down to it, little details like exactly WHERE, say, a button is on a device, or how many controls are on a thing, it fails miserably and sometimes makes up entire parts that aren't there. So for something like this, where the instructions need to be really precise I'd be very wary of that happening
@zersiax This is the third model I’ve done this way. What I found is that it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s very good and close enough that you can figure things out if it gets things slightly wrong.
Interesting :) maybe it's just been getting better. I for example tried that blindy Viewpoint screen reader thing that is supposed to use AI to work with inaccessible user interfaces, and I see the same thing happen there. It lists stuff, but the second I ask it to click things, which require it knowing where those things are ... it falls over
Our latest Thunderbird + Rust Office Hours video is up! In it, @brendan explores how Rust (along with a little C++) is powering our push to provide support for Microsoft Exchange. Learn more and find how to get involved!
Gastblogger Gert Knepper legde vanmorgen uit dat mensen in de Oudheid net zo lazen als wij. Wat is dan de strekking van Augustinus' opmerking dat Ambrosius las in stilte?
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
🔬 Are you researching Matrix or real-time decentralized comms? Share your findings with the community at #MatrixConf2025! We’re looking for academic perspectives too!
New Attempt to Rollback Accessibility Requirements – Comments Needed U.S. Department of Energy proposes drastic change to decades-old regulations lflegal.com/2025/06/energy-dep…
For over forty years the United States has had regulations that say new buildings must be accessible to people with disabilities if the building is built by an organization that receives federal funds.
My side quest at #FlockToFedora was meeting Petr Šimáček, a longtime #Fedora user and author of @mestskacyklistika. He gave me a tour of Radio Beat, where he works as a news guy, and took me on a one-hour #bike ride to show me all the gems of city #cycling in #Prague.
Heute habe ich es endlich umgesetzt und den Mail-Verkehr von meiner eigenen Domain in meinem @Tutanota Konto integriert. Endlich alles geballt in einem Postfach mit einer riesigen, selbst angelegten Ordnerstruktur. 😍
Vielen Dank an das Tuta-Team für die schöne und verständliche Anleitung dabei. Weiter so!
I've just gotten a hold of this console so I know nothing much yet, but I will learn more over the coming days and weeks. This is a quick demo with me only having had access to it for about 30 minutes if that. #Nintendo #Switch2 #ScreenReader #TTS #Accessibility
Reupload with fixed audio.Nintendo surprised me by releasing a console with any kind of screen-reader functionality, and I always said that if they released ...
I've not listened yet, at work - but are there any games playable yet? I know we have to start with TTS before games can use it but ... just curious. I'm not really a gamer!
@ysotomayor Do any of the built-in apps, like game chat, nintendo switch online or the echop speak? A lot of people on the audiogames.net forum are curious about the shop, which I suspect may not speak because on the Switch 1 it was just a web view. How about the keyboard if you have to type in something? Lastly, for game recommendations 2 I can think of off the top of my head are brok the Investigator and Mortal combat 1. They’re both switch 1 games but should work on the 2 and talk out of the box.
@ysotomayor Funny thing is console and game engine limitations are the result of how both of these sound. Brok was made in an engine that doesn't support any eay way to do TTS, but because the game doesn't really have any dynamically changing content the developer just sampled the Amazon Poly voices. So the game is literarly playing sound clips to speak. And I totally agree it's snappy and sounds nice. MK 1 couldn't really do that because it's getting rolling content updates, you're seeing player names everywhere that keep changing, etc. And the original Switch had no API's for them to hook into, unlike Playstation, PC or Xbox and Festival was the easiest thing to use both engine wise because there's literarly a drop-in plugin for it and licensing wise. Hopefully Nintendo has given developers access to their speech on the Switch 2 so any games that arget it specifically should have an easier time using something that doesn't suck.
@pitermach @ysotomayor When you played Brok, did you get to the part when you're in jail and there's a book with 999 pages? If so, did you turn all the pages? There's a good reason to do so, shall we say...
@ysotomayor @svenja Have to to get back to it also, but while we're talking easter eggs and the like were you ever curious enough by the crack in the wall in Sin's apartment to switch to action mode and try to make it wider if you know what I mean?
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
Hey @Tusky a little question, when following a hashtag the megaphone icon, what does it does? If slashed seems to *show* the post in the feed while when not slashed seen to hide them,shouldn't be the other way?
NV Access are pleased to advise that Beta (and alpha) versions of NVDA are once again available. To celebrate, we've released Beta 10 of NVDA 2025.1: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2025-1b…
Beta 10 includes: * Updates to translations * Correct context help navigation for Remote Access dialogs
Thank you everyone for your patience and support, and as always with pre-release builds, please do file any issues on GitHub: github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issue…
Thanks for getting this back online. Prior to the server outage, to get to snapshots and what not, I always went to download.nvaccess.org in my browser and then clicked on Snapshots, but going there now just takes me to NV Access's home page. Is this the intended behavior, or is there another place the snapshots are linked to? Typing in download.nvaccess.org/snapshots or download.nvaccess.org/releases does take me to the correct section. Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to any input you may have. Thanks!
@menelion @TheQuinbox That one works, but I used to be able to type just download.nvaccess.org and manually click on Snapshots or Releases, and that's what I'm not able to do anymore. The snapshots and releases pages themselves work fine.
@BTyson @menelion @TheQuinbox What error are you getting? I can go there - download.nvaccess.org/ - and I get a heading "NVDA Files" with links to Releases, snapshots, documentation and symbols.
@menelion @TheQuinbox I'm not getting an error, it seems to be taking me directly to the NV Access home page instead. The only difference is that I didn't put http or https when typing it in.
@BTyson @menelion @TheQuinbox Maybe you have a cached version or something? What if you load in a private window - control+shift+n in Chrome or control+shift+p in Firefox?
@menelion @TheQuinbox That worked. And I couldn't do a hard refresh either because by the time it loaded the page I had already been redirected to nvaccess.org.
@TheQuinbox @BTyson I love how one of the terrifying use cases for the .zip tld was that it would look like software to idiots, and you're using it as a direct link to download a file.
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Last October, I received a message via Twitter from a hot dog. This hot dog, calling itself The Beefy Miracle, informed me that the latest version of the Fedora operating system, Fedora 17, was going to be named after it.
🎨 "Designing GNOME" with Allan Day & Cassidy James Blaede 📅 24 July 🕒 11:05 CEST 📍 Brescia 🖌️ A year of design updates: notifications, UX patterns, Adwaita fonts & more.
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
someone asked me earlier this week: when getting funded for maintaining an open source project, how do you measure that you're doing a good job? How does the funder know they're getting value from it?
Tricky question. It made me realize we don't really know if we're doing good job in general. So I wrote up this blog post.
When I speak of curl in this post, I lump curl the command line tool and libcurl the library into one, and I just call them curl. Related: my webinar titled "Why everyone is using curl and you should too".
You could add a comscore solicitation in the CLI to ask "How likely are you to recommend Curl to a friend? (0-10):"
</joke>
I do think there's demonstrable value if looking at changes over time. Not lines of code or anything, but _what_ the changes represent. Bug fixes, features added, features removed, external contributors (representing a sort-of community health / good stewardship).
I recognize the difficulty, though, since it all seems indirect. Trust is a big factor, I reckon
it is mentionned in the article that phone apps need to build their own libcurls because the OS does not expose it’s own. Why is this ? It would help reduce app sizes a lot !
great question. How DO you measure a project like (lib)curl? Your post does a great job outlining the ambiguity of that.
Perhaps one thing that is easier to measure is developer activity? You mention GitHub stars but there is also issues, forums, social media, probably many more developer facing things?
> they are making a practical argument that I cannot, despite my best efforts, find compelling evidence to refute categorically
If you believe that the ethical problems trump the purported practical benefits regardless of whether those benefits are real, then that is a kind of categorical refutation. Perhaps that's a way to have a definitive resolution rather than the inconclusive surrender at the end of the post.
> to wit, I want to have everything in the computer be orderly and make sense,
This! In the Lobsters discussion about Steve Klabnik's post, he said that a lot of non-programmers are already comfortable with treating computers as magic boxes. I tried to push back, but I don't think he got it, and I haven't yet tried again.
Don't hesitate to characterize these as principled, carefully considered ethical objections. Sure, that makes us feel like a tiny minority in the current, noisy tech discourse. Whether we are such a tiny minority is debatable. One anecdote: My sister is a graphic designer, and she objects to genAI because of the energy use, the stealing, and of course, the deliberate intent to take away work from artists.
If you want me to stop, because you don't want to discuss this anymore, I will. But I'm trying to help you (and yes, myself too) feel _more_ at peace about this.
> Sure, I even sincerely agree, intellectual property really has been a pretty bad idea from the beginning.
Perhaps, just as we've had to, possibly reluctantly, move beyond the simplicity of free-speech absolutism because of the weaponized hate and disinformation out there, we might also need to move beyond the simplicity of "information wants to be free" because of the massive power asymmetry, which precedes genAI (e.g. megacorps exploiting unpaid open-source maintainers).
@matt yep. “You should be able to use technology for good things and to help people and you should not be able to use technology for bad things and to harm people” is not a double standard, it’s just … a standard. There are obviously big complicated questions about who gets to choose and what criteria they can use, but “billionaires” and “because it seems cool to them” are not the correct answers to those questions
@matt The fact that laypeople have given up on treating consumer-grade computers as reliable technology is a fucking _tragedy_, not something to acknowledge and move on from. It's a big problem in the industry and it is the result of specific choices. It is not inevitable!
@matt the problem is that the proponents are doing a pascal’s mugging. The ones at the top aren’t promising a 15% marginal return on investment in developer productivity. They’re promising an end to cancer and a technological solution to climate change. Brain microchips and arcologies, full luxury automated space communism, an end to work and an end to lack. If it could actually do half the stuff they claim at the limits, the ethical tradeoffs might actually be worth it.
To which I would respond that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and those claims don't have any such evidence to back them up. So we need to weigh the ethical problems against the mediocre evidence we do have.
FWIW, this post is now at the top of Lobsters (I submitted it), with mostly positive comments so far (6 out of 7, and the 7th was just skeptical about the extent to which genAI is being forced on developers), though admittedly it's only just now morning here in the US.
"No matter how much you try to cut, it’s primarily a drop in tax revenues that is causing the deficit to balloon." <-- Big Beautiful Bogus statuskuo.substack.com/p/musk-…
Come help us make UI code feel good, readable, and even… magical. <confetti toss> Also: come argue about names with very awesome people! jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/2…
This is SUCH a fun team to work on! Join us! (Role is in Cupertino)
Vatican News - Pope Leo XIV and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone this afternoon, focusing especially on the war in Ukraine. vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/20…
Award-winning, full-cast original audio dramas from the worlds of Doctor Who, Torchwood, Blake's 7, Class, Dark Shadows, The Avengers, Survivors, The Omega Factor, Star Cops, Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, Pathfinder Legends, The Prisoner, Adam Adaman…
Today marks the 45th anniversary of the final episode of the iconic television series The Waltons, which aired on June 4, 1981, bringing to a close a nine-season run that captured the hearts of millions.
statuskuo.substack.com/p/musk-…
Florian
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