mastodon - Link to source
A woman will head to court in March after the City of Burlington fined her for letting her garden grow wild. Similar cases have cropped up in other cities, raising the question of where our priorities lie thenarwhal.ca/opinion-burlingt…

Ontario cities police gardens and ignore biodiversity | The Narwhal

The City of Burlington is taking a woman to court for unpaid fines after letting her garden grow wild. Similar cases have cropped up elsewhere, to the detriment of the environment
Elaine Anselmi (The Narwhal)

mastodon - Link to source
A random question for blind people mainly, but really for anyone comfortable. What is your mental landscape like? What I mean by that is how do you picture things? Visual imagery? More sensory based? Nothing at all? Something else? I'm curious because even though I'm blind my mental landscape is very visual, I think in pictures, maps, recreations of places/objects/ETC in my head in a very visual way, which from what I've heard doesn't seem that common in the blind community. But maybe I'm wrong, I'd be really curious on thoughts here if you all are comfortable.

mastodon - Link to source

@delta Where should I report errors like this (I cannot send a message to a group)?

Final-Recipient: rfc822; *****@nine.testrun.org
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; nine.testrun.org
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 500 Invalid addreess in MAIL FROM

Not only the message does not get through (it used to previously), but there is a strange typo in "addreess"

@Delta Chat

mastodon - Link to source

I've noticed there seems to be two main types of Linux distributions:

1) Aside from security updates this is going to take a LONG time to get new packages. Updated version of Wine or MESA drivers? See you in six months!

2) EVERY package the second it releases! Hope you don't mind KDE breaking something every couple of months!

I'm wondering if there's any distributions that are similar to the second one but on like a one-month delay, to filter out problematic updates?

#Linux

#linux

mastodon - Link to source

Bill C-15 would allow corporations to be exempt from most Canadian laws

policyalternatives.ca/news-res…

All you need is to bribe one minister.

#cdnpoli


Bill C-15 would allow corporations to be exempt from most Canadian laws | CCPA

Buried on page 300 of the government’s omnibus budget implementation bill is an extremely troubling clause regarding corporate power in Canada—one that allows all cabinet ministers to exempt any individual or corporation from any federal Canadian law…
Silas Xuereb (CCPA)
#cdnpoli
This entry was edited (53 minutes ago)

mastodon - Link to source
Something I'd really like to see from @fosdem - a graph of which social media addresses speakers have on their profile / presentations over the years. Last year it was still quite disappointing that the number of people with Mastodon on their slides was quite low. Maybe something for the stats session at the end?
#FOSDEM #fosdem2026
#fosdem #fosdem2026 @FOSDEM

mastodon - Link to source
I'm currently exploring options for local LLMs to be integrated into Home Assistant. Does anyone here got experiences with this already? Like, did you try running a Raspi5 with one of the AI hats? What were your results? Do you have any other affordable local AI systems running with Home Assistant, which models work best for you?
#homeassistant #ai #raspberrypi #ollama #smarthome
#homeassistant #AI #raspberrypi #smarthome #ollama

Jonathan reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan

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Toni Barth

@jonathan859 Nope, that is basically what happens in the end. You need a part that processes speech to text, interprets it, acts on it and generates either text output that then again is output via TTS, or voice directly. Technically all of that can happen locally, but you can off-load it into cloud services like OpenAI too. I'd like to run as much as possible locally, or on hardware controlled by me. If push comes to shove, i'll be getting a VGPU server I guess.
@Jonathan

Jonathan reshared this.

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"Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities.

#Code is a #liability. Code’s capabilities are #assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running.

…that's the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn't static, it's dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed." @pluralistic

pca.st/episode/ff6c7462-2117-4…


Code is a liability (not an asset)

Listen to your favorite podcasts online, in your browser. Discover the world's most powerful podcast player.
Pocket Casts
#code #liability #Assets @Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source
Ok nice, just found the tool that's going to replace my quickly copy/paste link from PC to phone thing. NTFY. If I needed I could even make a script or something for it, though the web interface will be completely fine. I can then just open the notification on my phone, click on it and have it in the clipboard right away. Even more straightforward than roaming around on WhatsApp first, completely own infrastructure with a tool I use anyway.

mastodon - Link to source
I'm feeling sad, maybe I should make a version of NVSpeechPlayer that self-destructs and switches back to the person's last synthesizer after 5 minutes, then deletes its dll so it can't be run no more. Sigh. The new phoneme table sucks, the old one was better, that's the end of that, the story of Speechplayer ends here. At least, that's how I'm feeling this morning and why no updates for awhile.
in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@fireborn part of what I'm fighting a bit I feel like is ESpeak being the phonemizer, I mean it's a great engine for supporting a lot of languages, but then you have to work around some of its rules for speech and things like hyphen marks or if ESpeak itself already had issues with a particular sound. And things like Canadian English, even though it's there in support, enever a chance of it working well because ESpeak is just horrible at the IPA. But a larger rewrite with a different phonemizer and Lexicon set could drop already supported languages and complicate things, so sticking with ESpeak made the most sense architecturally until all the sounds in the phoneme table are correct, then perhaps a rebuild with another Open-source phonemizer isn't the worst.
@aaron
in reply to Alex Chapman

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@alexchapman @fireborn The most promising is github.com/rhasspy/gruut - it supports many languages, although still not quite the set supported by Espeak, although I'd have to see how hard adding language support is for those not in their set that we have. It would support speech tags for words like wind outside vs wind up. Eloquence has this so NVSpeechPlayer needs to as well, but without a better phonemizer like that one it ain't happening, so I've been looking at it.

GitHub - rhasspy/gruut: A tokenizer, text cleaner, and phonemizer for many human languages.

A tokenizer, text cleaner, and phonemizer for many human languages. - rhasspy/gruut
GitHub
@aaron @Alex Chapman
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