Reminder: Whistler, Blackcomb ski operations is owned by a US company. If you go there you are financially supporting the country that wants to invade Canada.
Over the weekend, did you see the much-shared story on Reddit by a supposed whistleblower?
It started like this: "I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore."
A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5
Interesting commentary on the differences in voice preferences by screen reader users and typical sighted users. My step dad has his Apple Maps voice set to an Australian man because it's "nicer" to listen to and he enjoys the dialect differences (car park vs parking lot). Such a different approach from the efficiency screen reader users typically want.
The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users: The past year has seen an explosion in new text to speech engines based on neural networks, large language models, and machine learning. But has any of this advancement offered anything to those using screen readers? stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html#ai#tts#llm#accessibility#a11y#screenreaders
To be fair to your step dad, Karen and Lee, the popular Australian voices found on most GPS devices, as well as on IOS, originally developed by Scansoft, later purchased by Nuance, then transferred to Cerence Automotive, before finally getting owned by Microsoft, are some of the nicest text to speech voices ever made for casual listening. Largely this is due to whomever was in charge of recording and curating the data back in 2002. They did an excellent job editing and aligning the recordings for use with the concatenative synthesis technology that was available at the time, resulting in the Australian voices sounding noticeably better than all of the other English options, even though they all used the same underlying methods. The fact the data capture was so high quality has meant that as technology and training methods improve, those voices have continued to remain a step ahead. The female version of the voice your father is almost certainly using is based on this woman: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Jacobsen If all of my favourite, fast and efficient voices were ripped away from me, those Australian voices are probably what I'd revert to. They're not as fast as I would like, but at least they're clear and accurate. Your step dad has good taste.
A hacker known as Martha Root broke in and deleted three white supremacist websites at the end of a talk during the annual hacker conference Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.
BREAKING: After 58 years, Trump dissolves the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB served as the primary funder for PBS, NPR and local TV and radio stations. Now it is no more.
Meanwhile, billionaires continue to buy up major legacy media to prevent criticism of Trump.
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A deep dive into the human rights issues affecting humanity. Pulling from my experience as a human rights lawyer—I bring the receipts to disentangle fact from fiction and advance the fight for univers
Looking through a README in a repo on GitHub, it said it was inspired by an earlier project. The earlier project sounded like it would meet my requirements better, so I clicked on it and...
... it was my own project. An incomplete one from eight years ago.
A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5
The author of a viral Reddit thread alleging fraud at a food delivery company tried to back up his claim by sending me AI-generated documents. Today I'm publishing those documents in the hopes that it helps other reporter see what we're up against in the age of AI platformer.news/fake-uber-eats…
A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5
Join Liam and Alyssa for the first podcast of 2026. Learn about Guide dog schools, strange city names, and find out what the Ervens are looking forward to in the new year.
Completely different topic, so ripping this quote out of the context from the article I just boosted:
"I wonder how much Venezuelan sensitive information was in fact stored on Google/Microsoft services and accessed by the US military to prepare their recent strike."
This is indeed a pretty interesting question to ponder. And if you're, say, Greenland, maybe consider your use of US cloud services...
AFAIK Palantir has their own copy of everything. They scrape and buy any data they can get access to and aggregate it so they can make sure they can target you with a hellfire missile while you're on the toilet scrolling reddit
I should state for the record that I think LLMs and other forms of AI have some valid and worthwhile uses, and that *none* of them should be tied to big tech or capitalism.
See things like: - accessibility - some types of research - spell-check and predictive keyboards - spam/scam filtering
Things would be very different if Harris was president. Democratic voters would be defending her attacks on other countries instead of opposing attacks by Trump.
Just like how they were out to brunch when Biden was increasing the military budget, financing genocide, attacking civil liberties, and killing hundreds of thousands of people when he switched to Trump's Covid strategy to please short term business interests.
Other's People Music returned from its very brief EOY hiatus with some groovy new tunes! Leftfield hip hop, singer-songwriter art pop, demented soundscapes, lo-fi electronic nostalgia & a post-rock concept album about ants. Enjoy!
I'm off Mastodon for just over a week when Med-mastodon was down and it is remarkable how things have changed. Before it went down I was posting about Trump bombing NIgeria. Ten days later, its about Trump recently bombing Venezuela. Will it be Greenland next week?
So I'm going to NAM in a few weeks. I got a hotel room with a spa tub in it for the occasion, because I am a boujee bitch. There was an option during the booking to request braille signage, which I thought was pretty spiffy, so I selected it.
I just got a call from them to inform me that the braille signage is only available for the accessible rooms. Naturally the accessible rooms are just the regular rooms and don't have the upgraded tub. So So I decided to just keep things as is and do without the signage (as I have done my entire life)
How do you deal with finding hotel rooms? I was in the states recently and pretty much couldn't do it. It was one of these weird hotels where the rooms were accessed from the outside (good job zoning regs). You couldn't count rooms because of the parked cars, there was no signage, and I just couldn't get the hang of finding door numbers with Be My Eyes.
@miki Most hotels in the US should have braille on the outside of the door, it's quite unusual in my experience for them not to have that. I did notice when I went to NL that they were less common there which was quite unfortunate. I think the signage in this case refers to stuff inside the room.
@vitallie @miki I did enjoy it! The food is great, it's very walkable, the trains are solid and everyone I met was super nice. I think of moving there sometimes. But then I would have to learn dutch ;)
I think this is just a case where the ADA has succesfully bullied everyone in the US to do the right thing, which is good. I make a point of mentioning it when I stay in hotels (not that I think it will matter, but, you know, you gotta say something)
Summary
When using multiple -b flags, the Cookie header was missing a space after the semicolon separator.
Bug behavior
curl -b 'a=b' -b 'c=d' https://google.com/
Produced: Cookie: ...
v stredu idem nakupovať rysovacie potreby, nohavice a ešte píšem diskusný príspevok ale ten si možno nechám na štvrtok.. a ešte by bolo celkom pekné keby aj rysujem
Today’s lesson: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. A viral Reddit post about an unnamed food delivery company that delays customer orders takes all of the “driver benefit fee” was probably AI-generated. “Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it’s easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing,” Elissa Welle writes in her vetting of the post for @theverge. Read the rest of her report here:
DoorDash and Uber Eats both deny the allegations in the viral Reddit “confession” post about a “major food delivery app,” and the post is likely AI slop.
In this issue: Pack your bags and get ready for the XMPP Summit 28, take part on any or all of the three XMPP events on Fosdem 26 and the other two on the RHL26. Learn about Monal IM internals. Last JMP newsletter of the year. Update your clients …
Хегсет высмеял Путина и его "аналоговнетное оружие"
"Три ночи назад почти 200 наших лучших американцев вошли в центр Каракаса. И похоже, российская ПВО сработала не очень хорошо, не так ли?", - заявил глава Пентагона.
In this issue: Pack your bags and get ready for the XMPP Summit 28, take part on any or all of the three XMPP events on Fosdem 26 and the other two on the RHL26. Learn about Monal IM internals. Last JMP newsletter of the year. Update your clients …
@menelion Yes. It's not a knock against anyone. The lady today was very sweet. But I have no confidence we adequately understood each other. This was not tech support. This was financial information that I was giving this person.
The packaging of the Fairphone and it's accessories has braille! I have never seen any packaging other than medicine have braille. I'm so impressed. Even the location of the qr code is highlighted with embossing. It seems to say "scan qr code for help".
For anyone interested in older assistive technology (namely screen readers and speech synthesizers) I am now hosting a mirror of the Vintage Access Git repository on my website. The original can be found at github.com/nstockton/vintage-a…, and the mirror is at datajake.braillescreen.net/vin….
Me: We all know PGP is bad because it forces you to support legacy bullshit like 1024-bit RSA keys, but I'm specifically going to write a blog post about email encryption as not just a technical challenge.
please read more carefully the source code. You are in the "else" branch of "if strict_tls" and strict_tls is True by default.
It's pretty deep down in advanced menus to opt out of the default strict tls handling (with RustTLS btw). Opt out is needed for some users who would otherwise have no TLS at all in their national environment, and where they often use public WIFIs, so eavesdropping cleartext from people around is trivial but cracking RSA1024 is not.
Is it too much to expect a bit of precision in your analysis and statements? Doing some click-bait comments like "their code: disables TLS security to support legacy 1024-bit RSA" is very misleading. The *opt-out* to allow 1024-bit RSA is for real-world people that can not change anything about the fact that the server they are using only offers RSA1024. Most people just use the defaults, and the default is strict_tls checking, and that has been security-audited independently twice.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Hubert Figuière • • •