Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models Company hired Google's book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize "all the books in the world." arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/ant…
As you probably heard animated PNG images (APNG) have been standardized! So here's a story on how I used an APNG file to cut a phone's power consumption by 10 times in a common scenario during the weeks leading up to the launch of Firefox OS 1.0. We'll talk about webpage layout, rendering, mobile hardware intricacies, driver bugs and of course APNG files. 🧵 1/16
Attached: 1 image
PNG is back!
https://www.programmax.net/articles/png-is-back/ (by Chris Blume)
A new PNG spec was just released! […]
[…] After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor!
What's new?
* Proper HDR support (future‐p…
In a private #Github organization, in a private repo filled with NDA code, Github decided that to automatically start reviewing that code using Copilot.
Mind you, Copilot is disabled for this organization.
Could we please just fucking not ?! Not even mentioning the fact that the Github organization didn't enabled this, there is no data policy to be found in sight. I have no clue what Copilot does with the data after it "reviewed" the code and I could potentially be breaking the signed NDA.
I read your article about your initiative for new licenses for dataset holders in the AI industry.
Let’s be clear: I do not want to re-license my hundreds of CC-By comic pages to please AI giants.
I wish you would support CC artists suffering from massive plagiarism. You should enforce your own existing licenses against AI mass crawling. It seems you’ve joined the battle only after the casualties and still managed to side with the wrong people.
Die Leseratten sollten ja erst einmal versorgt sein, aber auch die Bücherwürmer dürfen natürlich nicht zu kurz kommen. Also mal eben 63 #eBooks auf ebooks.qumran.org/ hinzugefügt. Bohrt Euch rein und genießt! Insgesamt 13.295 eBooks warten auf Euch
Demande moi ce que tu veux et j'y répondrais au choix :
– Ici si la réponse est courte.
– Sur mon blog si la réponse est longue ou que je réponds à plusieurs questions d'un coup.
– Par mail si tu me laisses ton adresse.
After listening to today's Access On podcast, I've learned and can confirm that the home annual license is now back on Freedom Scientific's Shop page but you must call them to order products with this license. store.freedomscientific.com/co…
This product is available in the US only. Your JAWS Home Annual subscription license includes: One-year automatic renewal managed from user portal Noncommercial use on your personal computers at home Installation on up to three of your computers Tech…
again, that’s a security risk. I’ve already sent them feedback to express my frustration. First, they don’t take PayPal, now they want you to potentially have to read your credit card number over the phone. I will never be OK with reading credit card numbers over the phone. Too easy for somebody up to know good to eavesdrop on either end.
@evilcookies98 It also means that you must place an order during business hours only and in this age where everything can be ordered online, I find it a bit ridiculous that the only way to purchase this license is via a phone call and only during working hours. It's rather silly. Btw, my intent here is not to engage in needless bashing but I do feel we have the right to analyze what's going on and to ask relevant questions. Considering that it used to be possible to order the home annual license online at any time and receive your activator immediately, this change is a step backward. I remember ordering mine in November of 2018 on a Saturday, shortly after the home annual license was released. It was an incredibly smooth and easy process.
right? I explained to them about operating for the individual consumer, not the big fancy agency. Looks like that’s what’s going on here. They’re operating for the big fancy agencies. What about the rest of us normal people
@evilcookies98 Well, not a big fan of boycotts, but maybe not purchasing the uprgrades might help convince them to offer some ulternatives. I will say though with giving out credit card info over the phone, I would imagine the employees have to go through a background check which while not perfect, they have to be trusted or they would be in trouble. But I don't see a reason why they cannot email you a Paypal invoice if they are going to insist on this phone thing.
@hallen they don’t even accept PayPal. Also, sure the employees might have to be watched carefully, but who says somebody up to no good couldn’t come into the office claiming an appointment just to eavesdrop on the phone. Scammers are getting creative. Last year I almost fell victim to a job scam and almost lost my Facebook account over it.
@evilcookies98 In theory yes, but not sure how practical that would be. I guess You're talking about someone having to tap the phone line on to hear creditcard info. Not impossible, but there's a high chance of getting caught.
@evilcookies98 Yes, but there is a sollution, A temperary card like a Visa Giftcard would be an option. You use it one time and then it is done unless you reload. But I do think they can and should do things differently.
@hallen @evilcookies98 My objection isn't that orders are being handled by phone as an option. FS, like a lot of other companies, do take orders by phone. With data breaches now being so commonplace, placing an order online certainly has an element of risk to it as well and there's no guarantee that the data that you provide online won't later become compromised.
@drew My guess is that A. they can make more money from the more expensive home subscriptions, b. there were probably a lot of non-U.S. residents who wanted to order the home annual license, found out they couldn't and felt very cheated and, maybe, possibly, c. Some non-U.S. residents may have tried to order them and provided U.S.-based addresses and, maybe, d. Some individuals and corporations might have ordered home annual licenses for workplace use.. Please understand that this is all speculation on my part.
@evilcookies98 @drew The home annual license is their way of selling directly to the consumer. And, as I pretty much knew, that option never went away but it was rather hidden with no explanation, making many of us think that it either had disappeared or that it soon would do so. I'm glad to see that it's back at the same price but this silliness with forcing consumers to purchase by phone is, as I wrote in an earlier post, a step backward. Also, those who still have the home annual license can renew it online, as far as I know.
@drew I would argue that they should’ve been looking at the consumer from the get-go. Not everyone has an agency that actually gives a crap. Look at mine for example. Had I relied on them to get jaws, I would still be waiting because they never pick up the darn telephone and they can’t be bothered to check their emails. Even when I pick up the telephone, I get the standard leave a message with your name and number and will call you back. Guess when they call back
@evilcookies98 @drew Yes, I can confirm that existing home annual license holders can renew on the license portal at portal.freedomscientific.com However, when you renew, they are defaulting to recurring billing but you can opt out of it after you renew.
I mean, if any of that’s true, they could easily state who is and isn’t qualified, by publishing it on their blog post in public. Speculation over! Instead they waste everyone’s time with a bunch of word salad like “the main difference between licenses is the price,” then never quote a price. Clearly they want the strategic ambiguity, for reasons known only to them. 🤷♂️
@cachondo @drew I read somewhere here on Mastodon a week or two ago that businesses were (deliberately) buying Home Anual licenses for their Employees... Which of course explains why they're "harder" to obtain now. Doesn't really answer the question, but still interesting to know.
@remixman @drew The UK's ccess to work scheme is still so stuck on JAWS it's unreal. Really hard to get NVDA addons and things custom written, even when they're a mainstream language rather than tied into JAWS's system.
Senator Bernie Sanders called for a four-day work week during a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, arguing that AI productivity gains should benefit workers rather than just technology companies and corporate executives.
Freedom Scientific published a blog post discussing the differences between the various licenses for JAWS, Fusion and Zoomtext. They do mention the home annual license but they just say that there are specific eligibility requirements for purchasing it but they don't indicate what those requirements are but they just advise people to call them about this. This is very different messaging compared to past years regarding the home annual license. Obviously, the requirements are that you have to live in the U.S. and that you have to use the software in a home setting and presumably not in a work from home situation. Are there more requirements? I left a comment about this on the blog post, as well as asking why the home annual license is no longer listed on the main shop page.
Choosing the right Edition and License option can make a big difference in your JAWS®, ZoomText®, or Fusion™ software experience. Whether you’re a professional, a home user, or an organization prov…
I remember having a good conversation with Eric Damery once, as I used to do on a regular basis. When home annual started in the US, he encouraged people who were working from home to just get home annual. Times are changing.
@brian_hartgen I stil have the old SMA type who knows how long they'll keep offering that. On a related note I haven't seen mention of convention season discounts from them yet but that's when I usually buy my SMA upgrades so we'll see if they disappear too.
@robini71 @brian_hartgen The Access On podcast indicated that FS would be offering convention discounts, at least for the NFB convention. I can only assume they'll offer the same ones for ACB attendees but so far I haven't seen any announcements from them, either.
How did you leave a comment on the Blog post? it says Comments are closed, but Trackbacks and Pingbacks are open. I also saw no comments, which would make sense, but this has me a bit confused...
I consider myself an expert on #NS #VIRM trains but there's still something to learn. Like this unit number 8741 has the interior of the newest modernisation, but on the outside, it looks like the 1st series modernisation, in contrast to what the app is showing.
Apparently this was the modernisation prototype before the Flow livery was introduced.
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
I see lots of people in my feed excited about Firefox landing vertical tabs, but honestly the game changer in the 140 release for me is the fact that you can finally add your own custom search engines without writing an entire dog damned extension for each of them. I think that was the last UI feature that sometimes made me miss Chrome.
Lobbyists and apologists and landlords who endeavour to gouge/justify the gouge, etc. w/ most landlords looking to pay their OWN mortgages, car payments, travel, etc. can f*ck a duck.
Montréal asking rents up nearly 71% in six years, according to Statistics Canada:
Igor Girkin (Strelkov) talking openly how about how the #Crimean regional authorities didn’t want to separate from #Ukraine in 2014 so Girkin and other #Russian soldiers broke into the regional parliament & forced them to vote in support of it under gunpoint
I discovered a fun and strangely obvious trick for summarizing videos faster and reducing costs: just speed them up. Cheaper, faster OpenAI transcriptions with a little ffmpeg trick.
Es hat lange gedauert, bis die Deutsche Datenschutzkonferenz (DSK) eine Entscheidung zu Online-Terminmanagementlösungen für Arztpraxen treffen konnte. Dabei waren die…
I still support my 87-year-old English teacher with her computer. It started in 2003 when I was 15. We bought her a PC, set up a WEB.DE email, and installed @thunderbird to avoid WEB.DE’s bloated UI. We’ve replaced the computer twice, but she still uses the same email address in #Thunderbird.
Today, she called and asked me to help her donate €50 to Thunderbird. When she hears how others struggle with ad-filled webmail, she’s always grateful for her clean, simple setup.
You might be the best student ever! Thank you so much for helping your teacher switch to Thunderbird all those years ago, and we're glad we're still here to help her avoid ads and webmail! Please tell your teacher thank you from all of us at the Thunderbird team! 😊 💙
"The Chamber of Deputies approved in general the bill on the new National Guard Law, which allows for the transfer of the National Guard to the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena), the monitoring of communications by the army and the possibility for military personnel to run for elected office.
"The reforms completely eliminate civilian control of the force and grant full management of its administrative and operational functions to the military. In addition, the National Guard will now be empowered to conduct covert operations, use 'simulated users', access geo-referenced data and intercept communications."
Mozilla Formally Discontinues Its DeepSpeech Project
One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project... phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Deep…
I wrote a little about the new Camera Remote feature coming to AirPods in iOS 26 and what it could mean for accessibility, but also what it says about Apple's approach to product development.
Ryan Christoffel reports for 9to5 Mac this week a new feature in iOS 26 is a harbinger of camera-equipped AirPods Pro. Among the enhancements coming to AirPods this year is a Camera Remote feature.
Many thanks to a number of SWLing Post contributors who shared the following news via Vatican News on Facebook. Below you’ll find an English translation and the original in Italian (note that…
"As computer systems get more sophisticated we've seen a growing trend to value deep specialists. But we've found that our most effective colleagues have a skill in spanning many specialties."
“Separating the art from the artist” is an idea that only benefits horrible people and their enablers. You can’t support someone’s work without also platforming their politics exquisite.social/@thomholwerda…
I'm presenting Knuth's LR parsing paper at Papers we Love Berlin tomorrow. Parsing nerds (and other types) come hang out. meetup.com/papers-we-love-berl…
Going back to the roots of parsing theory, Marijn will discuss Knuth's [1965 paper](https://harrymoreno.com/assets/greatPapersInCompSci/2.5_-_On_the_transl
Imagine what the world would be like if we scrutinized military spending (and use of the military) the same way we worry that someone "undeserving" might get public benefits...
I'm not offended if my tax dollars go to medical care for, well, anybody -- or for school lunches, education, etc. I am offended when my tax dollars are used to kill innocent people. Why this is not a mainstream opinion I have no idea.
CALGARY — Whether Alberta should withhold social services from immigrants is among the issues Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is tabling for debate this summer when she travels the province to consult citizens on potential referendum questions.
Here he is in a giant #beanbag that doubles as a #dogbed... strategically positioned in front of a tower fan [not pictured] during the first #heatwave of Summer 2025. :)
IzzyOnDroid ✅
in reply to IzzyOnDroid ✅ • • •Jetzt hätte ich doch fast die Papiertiger vergessen… 😱 Also hier gleich nochmal 50 #eBooks, damit auch diese lieben versorgt sind!
(und ja, da liegt noch immer einiges im Backlog, man kann halt nicht überall gleichzeitig, leider)
IzzyOnDroid ✅
in reply to IzzyOnDroid ✅ • • •