Attached: 1 image
The jQuery team has released version 4.0, introducing breaking changes, modern browser support, and long-planned cleanups.
https://linuxiac.
When you spend a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot program paths, because you heard, uv as, of with your screen reader and kept typing it as, of, instead of, uv. So annoying! That's why I like braille access!
One thing that's tough for people who just join the Fediverse, like most of the folks on #theforkiverse , is that there are self-appointed experts who reply to their public posts saying that "the Fediverse" doesn't like that kind of content.
This is untrue. They don't speak for all of us. Nobody does. You can't spell "Fediverse" without "diverse"; for good or ill, there are different viewpoints on almost any topic found here.
Had to resort to Mona on iOS to edit a private DM. I couldn't find the option in fast SM or the web , but maybe I wasn't looking in the right place, but I know how to do it for regular posts soooo. Maybe it was user error though.
I will remember that in future, thank you. Didn’t help that I was dealing with Google. Logging me out of my Gmail for security reasons. At least I can still login on my known devices: Hopefully that will get resolved soon.
I'm helping an elderly person with a patient portal, and wow, there are about 4 different problems ranging from unclear instructions to pages that don't work well when the phone is zoomed in enough for an older person to actually read the text.
Plus, the iPhone keeps popping up unhelpful gunk.
This person isn't particularly afraid of technology either, but they literally can't do it.
I now think every web developer should be forced to walk through their processes with an 85-year-old.
*Round of applause, some cheerful whistles and yelling can be heard* Welcome to the club of people needing accessibility! We struggle with such things every single day. I mean, "we" as in "blind people" even more, but still 😊 On a more serious point, try reporting the issues to the dev. As you are in the US, your strong words to mention are ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), Section 508 and WCAG.
Accessibility is not an excuse. For some backstory: I was at lunch with my parents when they told me I could do classes online but would most likely have to pay for it to which I said, "I would have to do some checking to make sure the platform was accessible." My dad then said one of the worst things anyone could ever say, family or not. "Oh, there's always an excuse." Accessibility. is. not. an excuse. It might seem like it to someone who might not have to think about something like that, but this attitude is disgusting. Accessibility comes in many forms, and having to think about whether something is going to be accessible or not is so goddamn tiring and I don't like that thought being the first thing I say, but also, that's a reality I have to accept. Again I'll say, accessibility, no matter what form you're thinking about is no excuse. After this interaction, I'm left with -1 spoons and a desire to do nothing else for the day.
Sometimes you just have to jump in, yes not everything might be the best decision to make, but honestly getting a Raspberry Pi and not waiting for the perfect moment to start selfhosting when, I had better hardware, or more money, or better internet, or lived in my own home etc, was one of my best decisions 2025. I love beeing able to spin up seriously useful docker containers in seconds, and only today, I added Beszel and linkding to the list of useful tools amongst gitea, audiobookshelf, joplin. Not only does it safe money (to host a joplin server instead of paying for joplin cloud, for example) it's fun, it's satesfying, it takes almost no resources. Just had to say it again, this is good.
Following the example of María Corina Machado, who gave her Nobel Peace Prize, Arnold J. Rimmer also gave his Bronze Swimming Certificate to Donald J. Trump.
Anybody have ideas about where to host a podcast (low traffic)?
One thousand years ago, I started a thing on a podcast service that got acquired by Spotify. The podcast is served from Spotify today. I’d like to change that.
I did figure out a story for hosting the podcast feed directly from my Ghost dot org site, but it’s a bit too fiddly for me to want to take that on right now, especially with a back catalog of episodes I’d want to keep online (ideally without migrating each item manually).
Hello everyone and welcome to the official #FastSM Mastodon account. Automated release announcements as well as tips and tricks and support will be posted here. I hope you enjoy FastSM! You can find the GitHub repo here: github.com/masonasons/FastSM
Is there an easy way to accept follow requests on fast SM? Example, tried hitting CTR enter like I usually do on Tweesecake, and nothing happened. I also get that this is still pretty new, so if you can't accept follow requests right now, I get it.
Today was quite productive. Got my 1st seedbox and some torrents and resilio running. Setup linkding and migrated my Firefox bookmarks, really nice tool. Some game dev here and there. The weekend was too short but wellp, off to a new week...
@menelion Resilio is crap imo but a folder I wanted to get uses it. Transmission web interface is great. Initially I wanted to just put transmission on my Pi, but honestly my network is awfull (cable internet) so I'm just sharing the managed box and with that the price with someone. I use ultra.cc as provider.
I'm a human being. I have dreams. But the genocide changed my dreams. In the past I had big dreams. But now all my dreams are to live a normal life.
What normal life means for me?
A normal life is to sleep peacefully in the night. To have a home where my family gathers. To eat healthy food and drink clean water. To meet friends in the university. That's it! Unfortunately these basics became big dreams
Please donate to help my family overcome this tough time
I'm a human being. I have dreams. But the genocide changed my dreams. In the past I had big dreams. But now all my dreams are to live a normal life.
What normal life means for me?
A normal life is to sleep peacefully in the night. To have a home where my family gathers. To eat healthy food and drink clean water. To meet friends in the university. That's it! Unfortunately these basics became big dreams
Please donate to help my family overcome this tough time
Everyone hates all adverts. That's why the top extensions for browsers are always ad blockers. Someone needs to invent a better business model than advertising.
Muslim mindset: “I’m fasting, don’t eat in front of me or I might be tempted.” Christian: practices self-control and doesn’t make a public show of fasting.
Muslim man: sees a woman who isn’t fully covered and says, “Cover yourself or I’ll be tempted.” Christian man: sees the same thing and says, “I need to guard my heart and discipline my eyes so I don’t sin.”
Christianity deals with the heart. We emphasise self-discipline and self-control. Islam, on the other hand, tries to control the environment instead, asking others to change because the individual hasn’t learned to master himself.
When the heart is truly transformed, temptation loses its power. Self-control means taking responsibility for your own desires, not placing the burden on others. A disciplined heart governs the flesh, not the other way around.
What are your pain points, folks? Stuff that you hate doing or dealing with, or problems you can't find a good solution to? Stuff that other people might be frustrated with, too.
I'm looking for a way to make myself valuable to other people, as a way to both help people and also earn an income to feed my family in the process.
One thing I can do *really well* is create reliable software to automate rote tasks, generate financial/statistical/other reports, or calculate difficult solutions. Think it can't be done without LLMs? I might surprise you!
Sadly, there is no money in solving any of my problems. If there was, someone would have solved them. See, for example, my complaints about text to speech systems. stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html I can go into more detail about why all the options are bad if you want. But this is the sort of problem that eats years of your life, requires advanced mathematics (digital signal processing at a minimum), and advanced linguistics, on top of being a good systems-level programmer.
@fastfinge I just so happen to be an (unemployed) machine learning researcher by trade, with advanced mathematics, linguistics, and programming skills. Maybe not systems-level programming, but I could probably find someone who does that and work with them.
Given that the first two responses I've gotten were both about accessibility, there might be more of a market for this than you think, and also, it might make a good way to demo my skills even if it isn't paid work.
The reason I say systems-level programming is mostly because for a text to speech system used by a blind power user, you need to keep an eye on performance. If the system crashes and the computer stops talking, the only choice the user has is to hard reset. It would be running and speaking the entire time the computer is in use, so memory leaks and other inefficiencies are going to add up extremely quickly.
From what I can tell, the ideal is some sort of formant-based vocal tract model. Espeak sort of does this, but only for the voiced sounds. Plosives are generated from modeling recorded speech, so sound weird and overly harsh to most users, and I suspect this is where most of the complaints about espeak come from. A neural network or other sort of machine learning model could be useful to discover the best parameters and run the model, but not for generating audio itself, I don't think. This is because most modern LLM-based neural network models can't allow changing of pitch, speed, etc, as all of that comes from the training data.
Secondly, the phonemizer needs to be reproducible. What if, say, it mispronounces "Hermione". With most modern text to speech systems, this is hard to fix; the output is not always the same for any given input. So a correction like "her my oh nee" might work in some circumstances, but not others, because how the model decides to pronounce words and where it puts the emphasis are just a black box. The state of the art, here, remains Eloquence. But it uses no machine learning at all, just hundreds of thousands of hand-coded rules and formants. But, of course, it's closed source (and as far as anyone can tell the source has actually been lost since the early 2000's), so goodness knows what all those rules are.
@fastfinge Reading your linked article article and this reply, I get the sneaking suspicion that HDC (hyperdimensional computing) or other one- or few-shot learning methods that are designed to factor the model into independent components that can be quickly recomposed in new ways might be appropriate. The idea would be to, as you suggest, learn the values for these components using machine learning, but also the mapping between them and the sounds produced, so that each becomes separately tunable on the fly.
HDC has the added advantage that it is great for working with "fuzzy", human-interpretable rule representations, is typically extremely efficient compared to neural nets, and even meshes well with neural nets and gradient descent-based optimization.
Do you happen to have data of any sort that could be used for training?
In general, for training the rules for pronouncing English, the CMU pronouncing dictionary is used: www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict When it comes to open-source speech data, LJSpeech is the best we have, though far from perfect: keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset/ And here's a link to GnuSpeech, the only open-source fully articulatory text to speech system I'm aware of: github.com/mym-br/gnuspeech_sa?tab=readme-ov-file I'm afraid I don't have any particular data of my own.
Sadly, this is so far outside of my expertise and abilities it's not even funny. I have an excellent handle on what's needed, and the vague shape of the path forward, but actually doing any of it is way outside of my skillset. If it was anywhere near something I could do, I would have started already.
@fastfinge my thinking is that, sure, I can build a thing, just like all those other folks, but you know the actual needs it would meet firsthand. That's tremendously valuable and can make the difference between something awesome and something completely useless
Absolutely yes to all of the above. I can think of another 10 people on Mastodon at minimum who are also ready and willing to help where ever they can. Just none of us with the skillset to do the actual work.
When it comes to requirements, in general, if it can work with both the SAPI5 and NVDA addons API, it will suit the requirements of speech dispatcher on Linux and the mac API's. The important thing is that most screen readers want to register indexes and callbacks. So, for example, if I press a key to stop the screen reader speaking, it needs to know exactly where the text to speech system stopped so that it can put the cursor in the right place. It also wants to know what the tts system is reading so it can decide when to advance the cursor, get new text from the application to send for speaking, etc. I really really really wish I had a better example of how that works in NVDA than this: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/blob/master/eloquence.py
I wish it would. Unfortunately, that code is what we use to keep Eloquence alive in the 64-bit NVDA version. So it's awful, for dozens of reasons. This...is a bit clearer? Maybe? Anyway, it's the canonical example of how NVDA officially wants to interact with a text to speech system, written by the NVDA developers themselves. Any text to speech system useful for screen reader users needs to expose everything required for someone to write code like this. Not saying you could or should; there are dozens of blind folks who can do the job of integrating any text to speech system with all of the various API's on all the screen readers and platforms. But we have to have useful hooks to do it. github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/source/synthDrivers/espeak.py
@fastfinge I'm wondering if the best place to put text-to-speech processing is on the hardware of the video card. Therefore, the audio is being generated by a separate system. As long as we are blue-skying it here. therefore the system would not care what system was running, rather it could read whatever was sent to the video to display. As I'm thinking this through as I write this, obviously it would need to read descrete sections or it might be garbled gibberish, but...a thought.
@RegGuy@hosford42 The issue is that then you lose all semantic meaning. Older screen readers did, in fact, work like this, especially back in the DOS days. But also, you're conflating two different systems, here: the text to speech system, and the overall screen reading system. All the text to speech system does is take text, and turn it into speech. The screen reader is responsible for everything else. And in general, we have perfectly good screen readers. Screen readers can also, by the way, drive Braille displays and other output devices.
The sourcecode for dectalk is out there. Unfortunately, It's...legally dubious at best. It was leaked by an employee back in the day, and now the copyright status of the code is so unclear that nobody can safely use it for anything, but also nobody can demonstrate clear enough ownership to submit a DMCA and get it taken off github. GNUspeech is also pretty close to what's needed, but it won't even compile without all the NeXT development tools, I don't think. So at best all that would be is a base for something else; modernizing it would probably effectively be a complete rewrite anyway.
It looks like both DECtalk and DECtalkMini are being actively maintained, with commits as recent as 1 to 2 months ago. I was hoping the copyright for the "mini" version would be unencumbered, but no such luck. It would have to be a re-implementation from scratch using this code as a guide. That's a lot easier than implementing a new system out of nothing, though.
I also have no idea about any associated IP or patents, though. Wouldn't whoever does it need to be able to prove they never saw the original code, just its outputs? Otherwise you're still infringing, aren't you? In this regard, it's probably actually a bad thing that the dectalk sourcecode is so widely available.
And most of the commits seem to be about just getting it to compile on modern systems with modern toolchains. I dread to think how unsafe closed-source C code written in 1998 is.
If you're going to reimplement something, you might be better to go with gnuspeech, as it's known to be in the GPL. At the least, it gives you a vocal model to improve on, that was coded with open research in mind, rather than proprietary code probably written for job security.
Also, if you enjoy comparing modern AI efforts with older rule-based text to speech systems, and listening to the AI fail hard, this text is wonderful for that. As far as I'm aware not a single text to speech system, right up to the modern day, can read this one hundred percent correctly. github.com/mym-br/gnuspeech_sa/blob/master/the_chaos.txt But eloquence gets the closest, gnuspeech second, espeak third, dectalk fourth, and every AI system I've tried a distant last.
@fastfinge (context: both Aaron and I are USAians)
It doesn't help that:
1. it's 150 or so years old, so a few pronunciations have changed a bit 2. the pronunciations and spellings (and hence some of the apparent mismatches) are UK English, not US English.
At a minimum, you'll have to envision skipping "r"s after vowels at the ends of words for many of these to make sense. As for the rest, I recognized a few of those from past experience with older UK English (e.g. "clerk" with an "a" sound), but a couple left me scratching my head saying "that's how people actually said or spelled it then and there?"
@dpnash@hosford42 Right, but most text to speech systems have a UK English setting. And the mistakes they're making are on things much more basic than that. For example, far too many so-called state of the art AI TTS systems can't even pronounce "Susy", "plaid", "fuchsia", and "lieutenants".
For example, here's Eleven Labs, the billion dollar voice AI company that's supposed to replace all voice actors forever. I used the voice builder to specifically request received pronunciation. That was not at all what I got. Aside from that, notice the incorrect "tear", pronouncing "plaid" "played", having no idea that "victual" is pronounced "viddle", and a number of other mistakes. I reran it just now, to be as fair as possible. It has not improved.
Compare that with the version of GNU Speech released in 1995. It still messes up "tear" and "live". But once you get past the unnatural voice, it's far more precise. And once you get used to it, much much easier to listen to at an extremely high rate of speed (4x or more) all day. All text to speech advancement from "AI" is just the wow factor of "Wow, it sounds so human!" But pronunciation...you know, the important part of actually reading text...is either the same or worse. With five thousand times the resources.
Have your tried LibreOffice? I have read that it is accessible, but I trust real users better.
What specific features do you wish for most?
I have a feeling it's probably a big ask for a single developer, but I could at least take a look at the source for LibreOffice (unlike MS products) and see if I can add the features without retooling the whole codebase.
I just want the ability to read an manipulate stuff in financial statements where its formatted right and I can just get to the catagories I need to get to so I can put in the right numbers into the boxes where they belong so for example, balancing a balance sheet or understanding and interpreting a cashfflow statement.
@NicksWorld I would probably need to sit with you to understand the dynamics of the flow and where it gives you trouble. There are a few things to unpack here, on first reading:
* Not sure what misformatting you're finding. * By getting to the categories, do you mean navigating columns by their headers? * Do you have specific spreadsheets you are working with regularly? If so, I might be able to come up with a different way to collect and/or present the information that is more naturally suited to blind users, like a Q&A format with predetermined flow.
Spreadsheets are designed specifically with sighted users in mind, so there's an element of inaccessibility baked into them. By organizing the information into a more linear, language-based flow instead of a spreadsheet, that could potentially make the process much more natural for a screen reader, and the data could then be automatically formatted as, or loaded into, a spreadsheet. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this.
I would be willing to talk to you about htis if you're willing to talk to me through voice, if comfortable, because I'm better at speaking than writing, especially with what I'm looking for. As for libra office, I don't reallly have experience with it, because I kind of thought libra office was libravox lol.
Sure, I bet it's a bit of a pain for you with text-based discussions! I'm awkward on phones but willing to give it a shot, if you think it's worthwhile and can put up with my spoken awkwardness and fumbling with words. (I communicate so much better when I can write! lol)
Can I suggest, though, that first it might make sense to get familiar with LibreOffice and see if it does a better job with the interface than Excel or other such software? It would be a shame to waste our time and effort on a problem that's already solved. It might also turn out that you have different pain points with the open source software that I can actually modify.
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
@NicksWorld So I just downloaded this out of curiosity, and it seems like they definitely did some good work on accessibility. Unfortunately on macOS when used with VoiceOver, it doesn't really behave like a standard Mac app in terms of the UI and VoiceOver doesn't work how you would expect. This completely makes sense as it's open source and likely not developed using something like Swift UI, but for Mac users I would honestly stick to iWork.
A good friend of mine needs a lot of help. Facing health challenges as well as eviction, she needs enough covered to keep her, her partner and their cats from becoming homeless. Payment is going to be due by February or they get evicted, and they need as much covered as possible. They've personally helped me out before in my time of need nearly 2 years ago; please help me boost and cover their costs, I'll be forever grateful!
- New code doesn't work, misses dependency - Dependency can't be installed with old PIP - PIP can't update itself, since it is too old - Delete PIP, download PIP installer - PIP installer is too new for old Python - download old-style new PIP installer - install new PIP - install dependency
Now I'm sitting there wondering what the new code was supposed to solve. Forgot why I ever tried to change that thing.
"Trottel" soll nicht implizieren, dass dieser skrupellose Anti-Europäer im Rang eines Fraktionsvorsitzenden, der ganz sicher Merz' rostiger Sargnagel sein wird, so einen imperialistischen Dreck nicht mit vollkommener, berechnender Absicht öffentlich raushaut.
Trottel ist ableistisch und darf von dir zukünftig gern vermieden werden. Behindertenfeindliche Wörter sind Nazisprech ❤ Und leider auch verharmlosend, denn, wie du selbst schreibst, machen Menners wie Spahn das nicht aus "geringer Intelligenz", sondern aus Berechnung und einer faschistoiden Schläue heraus. brrr.
Ha. Wanted to read my home timeline without seeing replies. Control shift F, unchecked replies, and boom! The only thing it didn't do that it was supposed to was retain my buffer position, but hell yeah. Love filtering in realtime.
Uh, do we know why $source$ is not working for post templates? It's strange hearing $source$ every time I want to see what the source of the post is, especially mainly locally.
This is what I mean: Christopher Duffley (@ChrisDuffley): @Bri Uh, do we know why $source$ is not working for post templates? It's strange hearing $source$ every time I want to see what the source of the post is, especially mainly locally. 14:51:26 from $source$.
LOL, it doesn't say something like "unknown" when it's a remote source. You'll eventually want a fallback for this. It just says $application.name$, lol.
We're having a bit of a rough weekend. Had some things yesterday that locked the system out. Nobody could switch and the fronter had no connection to our headspace. We don't assume today will be that much better, but we're hoping tomorrow and the rest of the week will be less of a mess. How's everyone else's time? As always we hope everyone is well and taking care of themselves. - Samara
@Bri Yeah, hopefully it will. Yesterday was just rough because people were being jerks. Today seems to be a liiiittle easier though, but that's also not a very high bar. - Samara
I just thought of something, since it came to light that Bluesky are supporting Trump's stupid actions and allowing ICE on there, I was kinda thinking is it even worth supporting Bluesky at this point? IDK how many people would even use it lol
Good point lol, I guess if some crazy fediverse like thing happens where someone creates an ATProto service that becomes a viable alternative to vanilla Bluesky it'll be useful then.
OK, so all I can trace from my minidumps is, my crashes are happening with how I'm calling LibEspeak.dll. hmm. This engine may not be ready for awhile. I'm going to have to break down both X86 and x64 calling conventions for Espeak. At least it's open-source so this isn't hard just more work. OK, looks like The issue is with eSpeak initialization: calling FreeLibrary in the destructor may unload the module while leaving the static variable espeak_initialized true. Huh. Reference counters, here we come.
Just realized: Whenever I read outrageous news about politics, my outrage comes second. First, my brain makes an attempt to find a perspective in which it might make sense to act like these morons do.
That‘s not healthy for my brain. But I‘ve trained myself so well that I can’t seem to unlearn the reflex.
And this is the main reason why I have to avoid news these days. Of course it’s also because of the helplessness and all the bad emotions. But mainly because „understanding“ causes damage to my brain and soul.
Ok, @x0 will also be happy to know: I added two new language settings: 1) autoTieDiphthongs When enabled, the frontend scans token sequences and if it sees: previous token is vowel/semivowel, current token is vowel/semivowel, current is NOT wordStart and NOT syllableStart (so we don’t smash hiatus) and not already tied, not lengthened, and the second vowel looks like a typical offglide candidate (high vowels like i, ɪ, u, ʊ, …) …it marks them as tied internally (prev.tiedTo=true, cur.tiedFrom=true), so timing treats the second part as a short offglide. The second setting is autoDiphthongOffglideToSemivowel. Optional, off by default. If enabled and autoTieDiphthongs is enabled, then when we auto-tie we also try to swap the offglide vowel to a semivowel: i/ɪ/ɨ -> j u/ʊ -> w - This is the “make the glide more obvious” switch. I hope these will help people.
Let's assume that I follow these #hashtags: #unix, #bsd, #netbsd etc. Then for the sake of argument I filter #freebsd. Now if a #toot contains the hashtags #netbsd and #freebsd should I see it in my timeline or not see it? Is there a #mastodon rule or is it a #client-rule?
Gosh though. People are really helping me add engine-level settings, that's exciting I guess. More settings, the better. The more we can expose through things people can tweak, great. I'll also be updating the phoneme editor later on because I like the idea of using a spin-edit box, and auto-defaulting paths, and a few things will be improved. It's also not considering rules when speaking text from language-specific data and that needs fixing. Bugs bugs.
oh good dear God. Now the SAPI wrapper isn't even compiling after I canged some pointer types, oh no. This so far is really a huge huge disaster. Claud to the rescue? ha.
Continue, or "try it now" a popup from Gmail now asks, offering to compose your next message with Gemini. I guess the tiny "x" is the "fuck no" button?
Yesterday I switched to Windows Terminal and PowerShell 7 from the old Windows Console Host and batch syntax, and I do somewhat feel like I've been asleep at the wheel for years.
Proper UTF-8 support, aliases, a profile to configure things at shell startup, command output capture, correct parsing of ANSI escape sequences... In short, things people should expect from a real shell.
Hopefully this doesn't prompt NVDA to start shitting the bed at every opportunity as it apparently does for many others.
It shat the bed for me using CMD, but did so less in terminal. I haven't fully switched though, feel like I know more old fashioned DOS commands than terminal stuff even now.
@FreakyFwoof I think Microsoft is working on it. I formatted 2 months ago and at that time I could not even use Codex interface with it, because it would get lost trying to focus on old lines. Now, it seems to work perfectly fine.
If you know me, you'll know that I'm not a friend of AI - but like the original Luddites I am not against the technology per se, but the use of it to drive an exploitative societal development.
@pluralistic has put it more eloquently than I ever could. So, read this:
Sigh. Since we added a new setting, have eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay… - especially if you speak Portuguese, it might help. Or maybe it'll screw things up so bad your language won't sound the same. Who knows. Unlucky 13. Guess I wasn't supersticious enough to skip it. Ah well. it ever sounds like there’s “no diphthong,” it’s usually because the boundary gap or timing makes the two parts separate, or the glide is too quiet. We just added a setting to skip boundary gaps for vowel-to-vowel transitions, which is basically the diphthong smoother. Dedicated diphthong phonemes are optional and mostly for extra fine control. To use this for your language, toggle segmentBoundarySkipVowelToVowel: true (also default) or false. This should give folks even more control over gaps, and you can mess around with the others in default.yaml for a given language to see if they help change prosody.
.
Bri🥰
in reply to Brandon • • •Brandon
in reply to Bri🥰 • • •Bri🥰
in reply to Brandon • • •Brandon
in reply to Bri🥰 • • •