On est rentré chez nous d'un bon concert à St.-Aurélie. Je recommande fortement, y a deux orgues maintenant et l'église est très agréable avec une ambiance très amicale. #Strasbourg
We wanted to provide an update on the abrupt loss of Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funding that occurred in April, which represents 90% of the Braille and Talking Book Library’s operating budget.
Taking this moment to slow clap for all the idiot blind people who voted for Trump a second time. This is what you gave us. So much winning! I hope you're happy.
Über die letzten Sonntage habe ich mal einen kleinen #Kopfhörer #Test gemacht.
Zum Vergleich hörte ich immer wieder #Infidels. Das ist für mich eine der schönsten Platten von Bob #Dylan.
Musikalisch gefällt mir das darin zu hörende (wohl?) elektronische Schlagzeug, aber auch manche Gittarrenakkorde.
Und besonders sprechen mich bei Dylan natürlich so Zeilen an, wie
"Standing on the waters casting your bread" oder "Take the motherless children off the street and place them at the feet of a harlot" und und und...
Aber, ja, Kopfhörer 😉 AKG K 530 LTD: Verwaschener diffuser Klang, das Schlagzeug kommt überhaupt nicht akzentuiert.
#JBL 650 BT: Nicht schlecht, aber ich fühle mich etwas eingesperrt.
#Beyerdynamic DT 770 M: Habe ich jahrelang beruflich in Studios benutzt, empfinde seinen Klang jetzt aber regelrecht hohl wie in einer kleinen Kammer. Wahrscheinlich umsomehr, weil ich unmittelbar vorher diesen probierte:
Die absolute Überraschung! Der wohl 30 Jahre alte
#AKG 240 Durchsichtig, akzentuiert, nicht nur gute Stereobreite sondern irgendwie ausgewogen rundum lokalisierbare Klänge, Welten entfernt von DT 770. Klar ein wenig Bass muss man per EQ dazugeben.
Natürlich ist das immer subjektiv. Und seit ich schwer erkrankt war, traue ich nicht mehr wirklich dem, was ich meine zu hören. Es kann von so vielen Faktoren abhängen, wie man akustisch wahrnimmt.
Aber es war für mich eine Überraschung, mit dem ältesten Kopfhörer, den ich hier zu Verfügung habe, ein so frisches Klangbild erleben zu können. Wahrscheinlich hat er damals so um die 240 D-Mark gekostet...inzwischen sind die Alu-Sticker mit der Typbezeichnung abgefallen... aber der Klang 👌 #Audio #Musik #ZurFeierDesSonntags #WhoKnowsTheJokerman?
Time to introduce my last new project for this year:
«Zeroform» ... is a tool for generating minimalistic, self-hostable forms, with a twist: It can generate both static (html/css/js) and/or dynamic (php augmented) online forms.
My main motivation for zeroform is to create tooling that helps me gather more precise feedback while designing and developing (especially) #faircamp and #hyper8, and to do this in a way that reflects the values of those projects: Independence, simplicity, minimalism, freedom from maintenance, absence of tracking, etc.
Basically you start with a thought, put it down as a plaintext blueprint of the form/questionnaire/doodle/survey you have in mind, zeroform turns it into finished code and design, you can upload it, use it as long as its useful/needed, and then you can just delete it.
Think of it as your own google forms, without bigtech, without dependence on any infrastructure besides the cheapest of hosting plans, commissioned and decommisioned in a mere minute.
I'm now one week into the project, since today I'm developing in the open at codeberg.org/simonrepp/zerofor…, and I will put it to use in the next days already! I have roughly one more week reserved until the end of the year for making this usable for the general public - I'll announce when it's ready. ʕ◜0ᴥ0ʔ
Spotify's CEO, Daniel EK, supports Donald Trump, has invested in Helsing, a German firm that is developing AI warfare technology, and Spotify has been running ICE recruitment ads. I can't support any of this, and so I've removed my music from this platform. It will be gone in about a week. #CancelSpotify #NoFascism
Back to Windows 10 we go, Windows 11, you're getting to unrulely. Argh. I'm cleaning my RAM every 1 to 2 hours just because closing apps won't return it to baseline, my SSD gets chewed through like a mouse chewing through a bag on the Hungarian farm. 1 GB every 2 hours? Seriously Windows 11 what the fuck are you logging? Worse yet, unlike in Windows 10, I noticed this tied to my ram cleaning , on Win11 I think something gets written to disk when caches are perged like that. I don't know. A lot of problems I'm facing, ot to mention I'd have a way less leaky search box on Windows 10. So, Windows 10, here I come again. You're the better option, Windows 11 is like the Windows Vista to the Windows Xp of the 10. Ha. Almost. It starts up just as fast as Windows 10, I'll give it that, but it sure doesn't clean RAM and not over time spiral it up way faster than Windows 10 ever could.
The Cadence Tablet. Jess and I are likely to get some, the company got back to us and we're really sold on it. Right now 1 each, but we plan to do the 2 units thing if we really like them and connect it together. Downside appears to be that you don't get a full perkins keyboard with just a single one. However, this is really the one that sells us, it can last a week on a charge. It's wild. They have their own patented solenoid tech that is only driving the cells when it's refreshing by the battery and to keep them up there's no power to the cells. Wow.
@jpellis2008 a multiline tablet :) 4 lines of 12 cells, so one of the smaller ones, but you can connect two of them together on the sides to create one 24-by-4 line unit.
Wow! I look forward to reading your thoughts. Even if I can't afford one, it's good to keep up with the latest developments, and I really like what this company is doing with their modular design and other innovations.
Another year of spending nothing on commercial office suites. So time for my yearly donation to Libreoffice as a thank you for the excellent Libre alternative @libreoffice #floss #libreoffice
Hay una cosa que me encanta de @delta y es que te permita usar tu propia clave GPG de cifrado, o exportar la que te crea si no le proporcionas una propia.
Creo que XMPP debería implantar algo así, me parece vital tener el control de la claves y además mejoraría la "sincronización" entre dispositivos
While exporting private keys is supported, importing private keys is not supported because our security audits don't cover all kinds of key material, but the modern algorithms we chose in collaboration with experts. We only want to support a *subset* of OpenPGP to be able to give similar assurances as Signal about cryptographic security outcomes.
Verbose, rich live regions are a sign an author has not tested with browsers, screen readers, and users. This post has an example that I see too often in the wild.
Yep, this unfortunately is true. The Live Region spec seems to promise much on the surface but often fails in complex real-life situations. A developer who is not familiar with the accessibility domain obviously cannot know all the intricacies. And so we get what we get... I find the proposed advice is more often the better approach than I would like to admit! Especially that it allows the developers to control the screen reader output .
@vick21 Yeah, the ARIA spec is really for user agents. I’d link to think years of WHATWG HTML being wrong about browser support (and it’s driven by browsers) would have taught authors a lesson, but definitely not.
I agree. @delta did a great job with this UX. Built upon the email protocol (with e2ee encryption added) they are just as decentralized and federated as email, or for that matter Mastodon. They are a great deal MORE decentralized than Signal or say, BlueSky now. But their UX did an excellent job "hiding" the complexity. Others decentralized/federated platforms should learn from this example! #deltachat chaos.social/@delta/1154793927…
Si sois colaboradores de OpenStretMap @openstreetmap existe una herramienta web (con webapp para Android) para poder crear y colaborar en mapas temáticaos. Se llama @MapComplete y tiene bastante buena pinta. Hay ya mapas para ciclistas, de bares y restaurantes, etimología, recogida de residuos, deportes e incluso desfibriladores.
Group 1: "All these instructions on the internet say I need a computer or sometimes even two; who has that kind of money?"
Group 2: "I have sixteen fully operational laptop computers that I fished out of a dumpster that desperately need a good home, but no one will take them, so they're cluttering up my apartment."
It feels like some problems would be solved if these two groups could talk to each other, but somehow it never seems to work that way : (
I'm getting my ankle xrayed tomorrow and had to fill out paperwork online. It was fine until I got to the end and had to do one of those things where I had to move my finger around a control to give a signature. I ended up asking my sighted roommate to help me, and even then I only managed to make a mark--I had trouble keeping my finger within the control--but it was at least enough to make the next button work. I wonder if there's a trick for blindly handling these. One time, I had to deal with one for the city and somehow got the mouse positioned to where I could type in the control. I might also have issues that aren't necessarily obvious with a screen reader, like a window being covered or not sized properly. Of course, these things are annoying, and I wish I didn't have to deal with them.
After testing github.com/shazow/wifitui, I’m convinced it’s a great alternative to running nm-applet all the time.
For setups like mine (Slackware + Fluxbox + Alacritty + tmux), there’s no reason to keep a GTK applet sitting in memory just to manage Wi-Fi.
wifitui is a fast and friendly terminal Wi-Fi interface written in Go that works perfectly with NetworkManager or iwd — no GUI, no clutter, and full keyboard control.
Now I only open it when I need to change networks, and the rest of the time my system stays lighter and cleaner — exactly how I like it.
Soon we’ll have a SlackBuild for wifitui on SlackBuilds.org :)
Microsoft Removes “AI May Be Incorrect” Warning from Microsoft 365 Copilot — Here’s Why It Matters
The Quiet Disappearance of an AI Warning Artificial intelligence has become the backbone of modern digital work, and Microsoft 365 Copilot stands at the center of this transformation. But a quiet update is stirring debate in the enterprise world. The tech giant has decided to remove a once-prominent disclaimer — the small but important note reminding users that…
THIS is the sort of thing I expected us to learn was the reason the King blind-panic-yeeted Andrew out of the Firm last week. Although it's a bit small-scale—I expect to see something much bigger and smellier come out before the scandal finishes emerging. Something along the lines of a billion pound crypto ponzi scheme and a conspiracy to lean on the government to amend the law to make it legal. journa.host/@fulelo/1154798503…
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor arranged a private tour of Buckingham Palace while the late Queen was in residence, for businessmen from a cryptocurrency mining firm Pegasus Group Holdings, which agreed to pay his ex-wife up to £1.4m, the BBC can reveal.
My money (heh) would be on a financial scam leveraging the Crown to undermine the law on financial crimes. Which would be truly explosive b/c it calls into question whether monarchy is compatible with the rule of law.
monarchy is technically compatible with the rule of law if via the King's Consent they get to secretly lobby the government and get measures they don't like removed or watered down, e.g. how Buckingham Palace is still exempted from racial discrimination law, even if it is ostensibly no longer official policy that black or brown people are unfit for anything more exalted than cleaning toilets.
Then again, I tried to see if any Cabinet Minister or senior official was successfully prosecuted since WW2 for wrongdoing in office. The list goes on: Aberfan, Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, tainted blood, Horizon, Grenfell, COVID PPE and so on, with no accountability for the Establishment, not just the Royals.
It's a bit like how the US Congress has basically legalized nearly all forms of corruption (the Supreme Court having done the rest). They can then unironically lecture other countries on corruption.
I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.
It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.
It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.
Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?
I think about that a lot.
LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.
When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.
What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?
Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.
And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.
Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.
It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.
We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.
I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.
The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.
So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.
I'm pretty sure I'd be *especially* vulnerable to all the kinds of psychological damage LLMs can cause. I have OCD. I spent the last decade painfully learning that an ML recommender system can't tell the difference between someone who's developed a cool new interest and someone who's in the grip of a terrible bout of compulsive behaviour. Using the internet *amplified* my illness.
I've seen LLM chatbot use do the same thing to apparently healthy people; I don't even want to think about what it could do to me.
oof, I feel you. I have a tendency towards that style of thinking myself, and even tho it never got bad enough to seek help or a diagnosis, the intrusive thoughts and compulsions can be exhausting at times.
I wish there was some oversight of the harms that internet algorithms can do to people. I'm sorry you were a victim of that. 😞🫂❤️
It sucks. It's one of many things that has me considering getting out of the field I've otherwise spent most of my life on. I got into computers and programming as a tiny kid, but there's so little joy left in computing (and AI companies are doing everything they can to destroy what little is left) that at this point I find myself fantasizing about sending a message back in time, whispering into the ear of that little boy I once was: "Psst. Computers should just be toys. You'll probably be much happier if you focus on ancient history or reptile biology instead! See you in 40 years; hope you don't get as miserable as I became!".
😢 that's sad, that the little boy who was so excited about the (genuine!) potentials of technology was so let down by the capitalist realities of what it was turned to.
I've suffered a similar disillusionment, and am lucky enough to have been able to take a career break and retrain in an entirely different field. But I know that's a privilege of circumstances few share.
Does your past self have any words for you in response?
I think one of the reasons I never really got into retrocomputing - despite nerding out with a C64 or an Amiga sure did feel a lot more fun than computing in the current day - is that what made it feel so great back then was that it felt like I could just make out the contours of the future, and it looked like it would be amazing. So much creativity waiting to be unlocked! We'd make kinds of art not even conceived yet! We'd be making wonderful discoveries!
Now I live in that future, and it fucking sucks. The fruit of all those great discoveries have turned out to be mostly figuring out new ways to spy on people and manipulate them - and now, to declare all-out war against even the concept of human creativity. My C64 still runs (I no longer have a working Amiga), but playing around with it won't bring back that feeling of a promised future of wonders - all I see is that it turned out to become a present full of horrors instead.
I'm sure part of all this - from a purely personal perspective - is just that I've hit the point where I'm supposed to be having my regularly-scheduled midlife crisis. "Did I waste my entire life?" sure does feel to fit the stereotype. I've thought about trying to retrain to do something else, but I honestly have no idea what that could even be. I'm disabled, I'm getting old, and there's not a whole lot I can do that anyone would want to pay me for that isn't related to software development. (I'm currently an embedded dev; prior to that I taught CS at a community college for ten years.)
people should be more alarmed that a huge portion of the software that the world depends on for our daily lives is maintained for free by people who are now in their 50s/60s and there is basically no pipeline to replace them.
This week in 1969, the internet was born, and immediately glitched — only two of the five letters in the first computer-to-computer message were received
The foundations of internet communications were set 56 years ago, when 'LO' was transmitted from UCLA to SRI on the ARPANET. #hardware tomshardware.com/networking/th…
Kevin Russell
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