Ah, the joys of multilingualism. My fiancee forgot the word for "veterinarian" in both languages we both speak, and landed instead on "cat dealership".
I haven't been paying much attention to the state-of-the-art in speech generation models other than noting that they've got really good, so I can't speak for how notable this new …
As Donald Trump formally inaugurated his so-called "Board of Peace" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, his son-in-law Jared Kushner presented his vision of turning the Gaza Strip into an upscale seaside resort with gleaming skyscrapers and entirely new cities.
The proposal is said to require an investment of at least $25 billion, and Kushner’s presentation showed a map of the besieged territory divided into different zones.
This all comes as Palestinians in Gaza struggle to survive with little food or shelter amid ongoing Israeli restrictions on aid.
“It’s hard to take these people seriously. I mean, they’re buffoonish.
But the problem is, is that they control the largest military and economy in the world,” says Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the Middle East and North Africa editor at Drop Site News.
He calls the Board of Peace “a parody of a colonial body” and says the plan for Gaza will result in “ultimate control and subjugation” of the Palestinian population
As President Donald Trump formally inaugurated his so-called Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, his son-in-law Jared Kushner presented his vision of turning the Gaza Strip into an upscale seaside resort wit…
The developer of Fast SM has said countless times they wouldn't add it. Not sure what Telegram obsession people have anyway these days. It's not secure, neither is its accessibility good. What's the problem with Unigram btw?
@TomGrant91 Per default Telegrams private chats are not e2e, only if you manually enable secure chat for each chat. WhatsApp collects metadata, and is by Meta, sorry but that says all, if you don't know why Meta is bad it's time to educate, I keep hearing new stuff about stuff they did previously basically every week, it's actually quite interesting.
@TomGrant91 @jonathan859 I would prefer not to be using Whatsapp or Telegram if I could avoid it. There is a chat service called Delta which may be more secure and Signal of course, which we have already discussed. It may be worth getting sighted assistance to make that work.
@JustinMac84 @jonathan859 so does this delta thing use HCaptcha as well then? I've never even heard of it. And what is its VoiceOver accessibility like?
@TomGrant91 @JustinMac84 How exactly does HCaptcha play a role here? No it doesn't. Voice over accessibility, and accessibility with any client is quite good.
@jonathan859 @JustinMac84 Oh, signal for PC uses HCaptcha. If you don't back up your chats, it will ask you to and they you get asked to fill in the captcha. On the phone, you don't have to do this.
@georgia yeah every cracker takes a backseat to saltines and/or oyster crackers. 99¢ store brand saltines will entice me ten times more than fancy crackers.
salted top Stone Wheat Thins are discontinued here. They had a nice thickness and wheat like taste (umami maybe) with small seeds providing texture. It provided a good combination with slices of multi-year aged cheddar (older/stronger than “extra old”). It was ok with other cracker toppings too. I used to like and prefer ritz, and vegetable thins though I have not been exposed to much. I think Sky Flakes or something like that was a nice bread like flavour. Please share more
People who were hoping the term "autopilot" would be so tainted or become illegal are probably going to be disappointed to learn that BYD copied it and consider their God's Eye system to be an implementation of "NOA" (navigate on autopilot)
It's never going away; Tesla picked the terminology and it will be with us forever
I think I hate this new GitHub pull request experience. How the actual Zarq are you supposed to quickly jump between lines with comments? I guess I can search for "has comments" and press focus mode and then enter on every single one, but that is utterly awful.
They've taken a relatively efficient screen reader code review experience (albeit requiring Greasemonkey) and turned it into something that makes me want to gnaw off my own limbs.
@bill I get that they've done a bunch of interesting work to make it possible to navigate code in focus mode, which is theoretically nice, but honestly, I find it far less efficient overall.
I agree. Personally I always used the plaintext view (append .diff to the URL) for the actual code review, and the files changed UI for comments, so this breaks far more than it fixes in my situation.
It's getting to a point where I'm considering doing as much of it as I can locally. It helps that most of what I'm doing these days is for myself and not comunity based.
The best part of enduring the way all the libs abroad and at home couldn't stop cheering on Carney at Davos is knowing that at home he continues to bootlick Trump, axe essential government programmes, and destroy the only earth we have : nationalobserver.com/2026/01/2…
Expensive aftershave when you're 16 years old is very important to you. When your 13 year old brother starts helping himself there is only one thing for it! When the bottle emptied I filled it with my urine on the advice of my grandad and let my brother spray himself for weeks!
@SrRochardBunson oooh especially because moisture would really gum it up
So if we got leaf blowers that can blow large amounts of corn starch or flour into the masks of undesirables, they'd be forced to take off the masks to breathe
A then you can hit them with chili powder, cinnamon, etc....
@SrRochardBunson flour is a little dangerous though because you can cause the air to combust. Wonder if corn starch may have the same risk (or is this a feature??)
@SrRochardBunson you know what else is great? Veterinary grade lube like they use when you are inseminating cows etc. I believe you can get it in a powder form and just add water.
@SrRochardBunson Mythbusters covered this years ago, any kind of aerosolized carbohydrate can make a big fireball (they used coffee creamer to test the myth). Not recommended to try at home. youtu.be/yRw4ZRqmxOc
Season 07, episode 03. 'Viral Videos'Airdate: September 3, 2008The Mythbusters test if they can create a 'creamer' cannon using non-dairy creamer, compressed...
@SrRochardBunson If you look up "grain elevator explosion", there're a few news reports per year of one blowing up randomly. So it's frequent enough that they put a lot of work into mitigating the risk factors. knobelsdorffenterprises.com/gr…
In this article, we will discuss what causes a grain elevator explosion and what are some preventative practices that minimize the chance of grain dust igniting. Learn More!
@MisterMadge @SrRochardBunson oh yeah that's true. I'm from farmland, USA and have heard of it happening locally. But they're still pretty enclosed airspaces
@SrRochardBunson thinking more about this: yes activated charcoal is kind of expensive in bulk, but lots of Minnesotans have wood furnaces with a lot of ash they need to "recycle"
maybe ask in support.delta.chat, you are jumping in my post with random delta chat questions, and you already exceeded the limit your "I'm feeling lucky" quota
if you want personal support become a monthly ArcaneChat supporter 😌 ko-fi.com/adbenitez
An amazing slice of my career that began with a job interview at Sun Microsystems Ireland on a stormy day in November 2000 has come to a close last week. So now I'm #Opentowork, searching for the next chapter and bringing back opendesktopmechanic:
I don't know if leaving was your choice or not, and I'm sorry if it wasn't, but it sounds like it was a good run, and not many of us are in one place for that long nowadays, either. Hopefully you'll find something that fits you well at this point in your life. It seems like an opportunity to think about what you'd like to do next. Are you going to stay in Ireland? I wonder if Igalia is hiring (I'm pretty sure you know people there or used to). I have no idea off-hand what SUSE has for openings, but it might be worth taking a look. Good luck, whatever you decide to do next.
"The FBI agent🚨 who sought to investigate the federal immigration officer who fatally shot Renee Good has resigned from the bureau, according to two people familiar with the matter, after leadership pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into the officer."
Well, we've just created a monster. My wife extracted a jumbo squeker out of one of the dog toys and we put it into a pool noodle. Now we can blow into it and young dog goes all bonkers! It's very entertaining.
Okay, my southern friends. I understand it's about to potentially snow. a lot, but that does not mean we need to act like the world is ending. Here are a few tips. get groceries because it never hurts to prepare but leave some for everybody else. Don't be greedy. Don't use warm water on something like your car to get ice off the windows, you'll crack glass. If it gets cold enough, keep your faucets dripping. If you can't drive on the ice and snow, stay inside. Hell, stay inside anyway. Make sure if you have pets that they're inside, don't leave them out in weather like this. Charge your everything. Phone, tablet, power bank, just in case you lose power. Feel free to reply with any other tips I might have forgotten and boost for those who might be a bit unprepared. Use common sense and stay warm.
Wow, glm-4.7-flash (30B-A3B MoE) was posted on #Ollama 3 days ago, and there are already 19.2K downloads! I haven't tried, but people seem to say it works better with agentic coding than other models around 30B! Also, it seems to be slower and use a lot more memory than other models around 30B for some reasons. #LLM #ML #AIollama.com/library/glm-4.7-fla…
PSA: #Anthropic #Claude API credits expires after a year. I bought some credits on Jan 22, 2025, and I only used less than 30%. Now they're all gone! 🤯
Tor-powered Android VPN that routes selected apps through the Tor network for private browsing, IP masking, and censorship bypass. Available in public beta alternativeto.net/software/tor…
The ShinyHunters extortion gang claims it is behind a wave of ongoing voice phishing attacks targeting single sign-on (SSO) accounts at Okta, Microsoft, and Google, enabling threat actors to breach corporate SaaS platforms and steal company data for extortion.
nations and borders are bullshit. we're on a giant rock zooming through space and we've covered it with imaginary lines and decided only certain people are allowed in certain places. could we be any more immature? #AbolishICE doesn't go far enough. #AbolishBorders too. earth belongs to everyone. let people go where they please. yeah I'm one of those scary anarchists you've been hearing so much about. better arrest me I guess 🤷🏻♀️
Our mastodon client just bugged out on this account and I was about to freak out because it was showing posts from the 15th of this month as the most recent. I was about to ask many questions as to how some of our posts just vanished into the abyss. - Alura
PS: our mastodon client is also trying to correct my name to something else again.
@Bri I don't even know how this happened but I can reproduce it on the other account too. It seems to load the buffer fine, but then spontaneously dump old posts in the top of the buffer for 0 reasons. - Alura
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I haven't heard that one in a long time, but I remember it being played at dances when I was in high school, and I never really paid attention to the lyrics.
I've got several Linux accessibility-related tasks on my mental to-do list, but WebKitGTK security updates for SLE have somehow become one of my day job responsibilities. So it's time for that semiannual ritual of patching the new release to build on our various old code streams. Hoping to get it done as quickly as I can.
On the plus side, I got myself some Pad Thai and some Thai iced tea. It's becoming my routine to go to the food truck down the street at the end of the week.
The cold front hasn't come yet, but it's coming, and we're getting some winter weather.
Probably the last build of NV Speech player, ever. Sorry y'all. I'm not sure if this will continue. Last change-log: - adopts the new sound from "experimental." This smooths out the voice, which no doubt some people will hate. If you do, just replace speechplayer.dll from an older build and you'll still get your sharper sound. - huge language pack update to add glottalOpenQuotient set from vowel height, Voice turbulence, and to reduce noisier phonemes. - removed driver clicking noise when rapid speech chunks occur. eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
I don't think it's a waste of time. you do fantastic work. Honestly take the break you wanted to take this weekend then see how you feel. Don't abandon it yet. I hope your break is a good recharge.
Disappointing, but okay. An eloquence rewrite is a 30 year project. At least. You're stopping for the same reason NV Access themselves stopped: this is a massive undertaking. It's a bit frustrating to me that everyone who takes this on so massively underestimates how hard this will be, then quits when they don't have something in weeks or months. If we're going to succeed we have to be into this for decades.
Either that, or a case of building the tools to build the tools to do the thing. The phoneme editor is an excellent, perfect start. But I suspect we're going to need tools to help us tune the klatt model any further. I don't think AI can get us much closer. But it might be able to help us build a tool to analyze the waveforms of the synths we like. We're probably going to also need a tool to help us tune the pitch/intonation table. If you look at the work of Dr. Susan Hertz, who built eloquence, she didn't start by building Eloquence. She built SSRS, a system for creating and editing text to speech rules. Then she didn't like it and wrote delta, a more powerful system. Delta was described as a hierarchical system for creating linguistic text to speech rules, where every rule could interact with rules on the levels above and below it. Based on her paper specifically on Eloquence, as well as her academic publication history, it looks like her team spent about 20 years writing tools, and then about five years writing eloquence.
@fastfinge I just pushed an update that really improves things. no more sharp consonant spikes. This is really shaping slowly, but it's going to be such an iterative process. V9 / latest master. Personally, I'm happier with the sound than I was with the original Speech Player, maybe that's what should count in the end. I had just this simple goal of reviving it, it wasn't until after I did so that I realized, "Oh this thing didn't even support American English?" that I began to take it on as a project, LOL.
Yeah, NV Access never really took it beyond the prototype stage. But then a butchered version got added to espeak, so now in everyone's memories, we remember Speech Player as having more features than it did. And it's totally getting a bit better with every update. But the problem is, as long as eloquence keeps working, everyone will just use eloquence. But if we don't start this work now, when eloquence is finally gone for good, we're all going to be screwed.
@fastfinge hey, I created two .py files in the tools folder: 1) klatt_tune_sim.py — the core single-phoneme synth sandbox A small, self-contained Klatt-style formant synth simulator (16 kHz) that can synthesize one phoneme at a time from your packs/phonemes.yaml parameters. It implements two source models so you can compare voicing behavior. It also prints a few spectral metrics (centroid and band energy splits) so you can track “brighter/darker” changes numerically, not just by ear. Input: packs/phonemes.yaml and a --phoneme key (like a, ʃ, t͡s). klatt_tune_sim • Output: optional WAV file + printed metrics. klatt_tune_sim 2) ipa_klatt_probe.py — a rough phrase “ear-test” harness built on the simulator What it is: A helper script that: 1. Gets IPA from eSpeak for a word/phrase (or accepts IPA directly), 2. Applies a few tiny normalization tweaks similar to what you’d do in a pack, 3. Tokenizes the IPA into phoneme keys from packs/phonemes.yaml, 4. Synthesizes the phrase by concatenating per-phoneme audio generated via klatt_tune_sim.py. I hope these tools can help us.
I think so. Next thing to do is build similar tools for eloquence, to make doing side by side comparisons of the exact same phonemes easier. Then we can rapidly do listening tests, instead of switching back and fourth in NVDA, and having to compare the entire system.
@fastfinge I don't believe we need 20 years to build an Eloquence successor. We aren't experts, but nowadays, all of experts knowledge are readily available, and it's easier to build and use targeted tools.
@alexchapman@Tamasg Of course there's a point in giving up. If it's hurting your mental health, stop now. Because this is going to be how things are for decades if you continue down this path. When I said disappointed, I didn't mean disappointed in Tamas. If stopping is the right thing for him, he should stop. But I can still be disappointed that this isn't happening, without assigning any blame or responsibility on Tamas or myself.
curl maintainer @bagder said the project is shutting down its bug bounty program after maintainers were buried under low-quality, AI-generated slop reports. Security disclosure systems that assume unlimited #OSS maintainer labor are reaching their limits.
Few weeks ago he begged us to stop using "slop" because it makes AIs sad. Days ago he complained "AI boom might falter" if we don't start using more spicy autocomplete.
Now he's begging developers to "do something useful" with lying machines, or they might lose the "social permission" to boil the planet. techradar.com/ai-platforms-ass…
What, is Microslop's Slopilot services not useful enough on their own?
It was a challenge trying to photograph this harlequin duck with its flashy colors in Lake Ontario. It was like waiting for a jack-in-the-box to pop up to the surface. #birds #birding #nature #birdphotography #Ontario #Canada 🍁
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