The US administration have held meetings with members of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist group that is pushing for the western province to become independent.
The group is openly seeking a $500B US line of credit from the US Treasury to help bankroll the new country, if they come out victorious in a referendum.
> Another example is Habitant pea soup, a French Canadian tradition with the phrase "Designed in Canada" on the front. But turn the can around and it says "Product of USA."
We ought to have more strict labelling. Including requiring to say where it's made like lot of other products omit.
Really enjoying #FreeCADDay at #fosdem but getting tired now... suspect the late shift with @kkremitzki and the @FLOSSK guys last night at Delirium might have something to do with it :)
Final User Testing in France The Ability project has recently conducted its final user testing workshops with future users with visual impairments. Following earlier trials in Lithuania and Germany, these sessions held in France made it possible to evaluate various usage scenarios, including understanding geographical maps, following routes, online shopping, and exploring images.
The consortium will now finalize its conclusions for deliverable. #ABILITYProject
I think I have to say that the Asus Zephyrus G14 (2024) has been the absolute best notebook I've owned. The audio quality from the internal speakers continues to blow my mind, every single time I hear it. I'm like, wow! Speech is boomy, and I can even actually gleem some enjoyment of music through it. Quite impressive. It is majorly speedy with its AMD Ryzen 8945HS CPU, 32 GB of lPDDR5 6400 MHZ RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, and its 6E WiFi. Battery life is mediocre at 8hours on the balanced performance profile, two hours with everything clocked up to performance mode. But eight hours is enough time to get me through a pretty decent haul away from power, which is rare. It is also rare for me to be as highly impressed with as many features in a single product. Awesome stuff!
The Matrix.org Foundation is hosting a hackathon at HSBXL as a warm-up for FOSDEM 2026!The results of the hackathon are presented in this live stream startin...
Time is up for our hackathon! Our mighty teams have successfully hacked their way towards the Matrix Caps! We'll start live streaming the results in a few minutes!
The Matrix.org Foundation is hosting a hackathon at HSBXL as a warm-up for FOSDEM 2026!The results of the hackathon are presented in this live stream startin...
#XMPP groups are centralized depending on a single server, if server dies the group is gone, server stores group metadata
#Matrix servers store a lot of group metadata across servers
with #DeltaChat the server stores ZERO group metadata/state you don't depend on any server and can easily migrate your profile keeping group state and history in your devices
if Delta Chat had "super groups" with admin/moderation for public rooms, would you switch?
Delta Chat Spec Proposal: Super Groups Terminology semi-public group: A group that is intended to be used for more or less public interactions, its invitation link can be shared in public spaces like social media or websites.
My partner's been looking into changing home health agencies for a while now for reasons that are a whole other thread. Her caseworker sent along a PDF of agencies supported by her program, but of course it was 62 pages of graphical PDF. Also, even though she can read the PDF just fine, all the agencies were listed by city and not county, and our county has probably something like 20+ cities/townships. None of the agencies had any context, either, just one giant pile of images with names/medicaid details.
Several hours and strategic prompts later, Claude Code OCR'd the PDF, extracted details for 38 agencies in the cities in our county, linked to and summarized reviews across Google/Indeed/Glassdoor about not only how the agency served its clients but also how it was to work there, cross-referenced sanction data from a Michigan government website and provided details on one agency's ongoing active litigation, and gave me a markdown report I piped through Pandoc and emailed her.
Could it have missed an agency or some details? Possibly, but it did at least catch the agencies I knew about and was specifically looking for in the output. Could it have gotten a link wrong? Yes, it was not absolutely right (in at least one case anyway,) I caught it and it fixed the error, though the link still showed what it claimed when I verified it. Could it have gotten a phone or CHAMPS number incorrect? Certainly, but it distinctly flagged the possibility that it might make OCR errors with numbers and that I should verify these details myself. Could I have made any of these errors myself, especially after a few hours of repetitive cut-and-paste? Yup, I have an do. And even if I'd managed to solve the original problem of making the PDF accessible, I'm still new enough to the area that I don't know all the little cities and towns in my county well. Feels like every other block in this county is another tiny township or other.
AI is heavy machinery. Use it incorrectly and it'll slice through your proverbial waterline like any other backhoe. It's unfortunate that it gives the impression of doing good and valid work even while slicing and dicing indiscriminately, but until we live in a world where our abilities to make choices about our care don't hinge on us having the ability and time to parse through a 62-page inaccessible PDF and review our options, I still maintain that one of its best uses is as access technology. Imperfect tool it may be, but without it, I'd have been dead in the water with no one else to help.
В Москве 16-летний подросток убил в здании РКН сотрудника Роскомнадзора, отвечавшего за блокировки и замедление трафика agents.media/vchk-ogpu-soobshh…
Канал «ВЧК-ОГПУ», публикующий утечки силовиков, сообщил, что 19 января на проходной главного здания Роскомнадзора в Китайгородском проезде в Москве 16-летний подросток убил сотрудника регулятора Алексея Беляева.
I'm not sure why Alberta Wexiteers wanting to join the US is suddenly a big story about treason 11 months after Jeffrey Rath went on Fox&Friends to announce it and DeSmog wrote about it. Except that Premier Eby only just read about the separatists ask for $500bn US credit in the Financial Times yesterday. #abpoli #media
CBC radio was all omigod about it this morning, although they don't like the word treason any more than they like the word genocide. They also gave AB Premier Smith a big pass, saying its not her fault, even though it was Smith who actually altered Alberta election law to help the future separatist referendum succeed.
Today's #USAF High Frequency Global Communications System traffic all seems to be coming from callsign "Sky Chief", and the messages begin with the strange phrase "four quarto". 11175 kHz USB
Ahahahaha. You all are going to laugh when I tell you why UK English sounds messed up in SpeechPlayer. I fixed it. It was a bug in the driver, well two: (A) always pass En-GB (not EN) to Espeak, and (B) make sure the YAML rules apply in the NVDA driver. As a result, UK rules were simplified, and it's back to sounding like UK sounded in the initial SpeechPlayer. I should probably release this for UK folks.
updated! That should help UK a lot. I can't promise headaches will be entirely gone, but perhaps minimized by it not mixing sounds as much from US into it. Use the "check for updates" button in the settings pannel at the end.
I haven't seen an llm that does things flawlessly, in that when you tell it to do a task that it theoretically has done before, it's always going to do it the exact same way every time. That's why I don't use Alexa Plus for example. Many times it will, sure, but sometimes it's gonna hickup and not do the thing you asked, saying it can't help with that, or try to do something else entirely. That's why I went back to the normal one. I like using them in environments where I can say no, that's not right, fix that, or I can fix it myself. That's why I use them for coding, and only in languages where I can read and correct the generated code.
@TheQuinbox yep. Think I feel the same way about this. As much as I'd love to pick up Rust learning, not knowing at least how classes, functions, objects, mutexes (for C stuff) work, threadding, locking, ETC... Shifting your mental model to Rust's... The LLM could probably write me something but then I lose all ability to debug it myself and point to lines and exactly say where to refactor and what. So probably to pick up a new language I'd use a combo of LLM and classical learning (IE read a damn tutorial) LOL.
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
Just heard about Jank, an indie PC games website which launched a few days ago, featuring the writings of Brendan Caldwell and Graham Smith. Colour me interested! jank.cool/
Me and a friend were talking last night, and she had some good ideas for AccessiWeather, including ISS tracking and the like. I thought, that's a bit out of scope for a weather app, so...
Hey everyone,
Just published AccessiSky, a companion app to AccessiWeather on GitHub.
"Stay connected to what's above."
While AccessiWeather handles weather forecasts and alerts, AccessiSky tracks what's happening in the sky:
- ISS (international space station) pass predictions for your location - Moon phases and rise/set times - Sunrise, sunset, and twilight times - Meteor shower calendar - Planet visibility — which planets are up tonight - Eclipse calendar through 2030 - Aurora forecasts and space weather - Tonight's Summary — a quick overview of everything happening tonight
Same accessibility focus as AccessiWeather, full screen reader support. Uses free APIs, no accounts needed.
Born this day in 1919, Fred Korematsu, one of the bravest and most honorable of American patriots.
In 1942 president Roosevelt ordered that persons he deemed threats to national security be relocated from the west coast to detention camps inland. 125,000 people, two-third of them American citizens, had to give up their homes, their jobs, and their businesses.
Korematsu resisted every step of the way. When he was rejected from military service (probably on account of his ancestry) he took work as a Navy shipyard welder.
Later that year Roosevelt's order came down. Korematsu went into hiding, but was found, arrested, and convicted. He was sentenced to five years' probation and he and his family were relocated to a prison camp in Utah.
Korematsu appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the Supreme Court's decision was to uphold the president's judgments about national security matters, however panicked or racist they might be. In the U.S., the case law was (and is) that if the president wants to strip 80,000 citizens of their rights, the courts can do nothing to stop it if the claimed purpose is national security.
Some say the decision was overturned in 2018. It was not. And, although current Chief Justice John Roberts has written "The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority", the Supreme Court seems determined to repeat the errors of the Korematsu case, to accept at face value and take as unreviewable, the president's representations, no matter how obviously bad faith, and no matter the cost.
This week, another EU Humanitarian Air Bridge flight to Gaza delivered 48 tonnes of supplies.
Since October 2023, over €550 million in aid, including health supplies, shelter, and educational items, has been delivered to Palestinians on behalf of EU and humanitarian partners.
The EU remains the largest international donor of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
The EU has been providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in need since 2000, supporting vulnerable families affected by emergencies and shocks.
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
We're starting to see the first results of the hackathon! Florian here is building a Rust bot that talks to Christian's receipt printer, and makes it print what they send to a room.
Prototypes are taking form, keep up the good work everyone!
Hey, pals, this study is headed by J Michael Bailey, Kenneth Zucker, and Lisa Littman, noted transphobes and pseudoscientist. Littman in particular ison the advisory board for the genocidal anti-trans group GENSPECT.
Do not, under any circumstance, participate in this junk study.
Tengo una duda existencial del primer mundo friki. Quiero experimentar con inteligencias artificiales en local. Para empezar, además de informarme mucho, me hace falta un hardware dedicado. Además del precio está cual escoger. Las máquinas más preparadas del mercado funcionan bajo Windows o se puede usar equivalente en Linux. Y son dos mundos que no manejo con soltura. Así que me da miedo a quedarme con un caro pisapapeles. ¿Alguna opinión?
Fact of the day: the Ford Edsel ("a 1950s flop so notorious that it’s taught in business schools to this day") outsold the Cybertruck 2:1, "in a country with half the population."
In theory, it’s people who care a lot about audio quality. They often claim to have better than average frequency range in their ears (many do, but a lot claim to hear things only bats can actually hear).
For a long time, a lot of consumer audio equipment was pretty terrible, so there were real reasons for wanting something better, I remember listening to a CD that I’d heard many times on my CD player and ripped to my iPad and discovering that CD player from the ‘80s had completely lost a load of low-volume bits and there was material that would probably have been audible on an expensive player in the ‘80s and was easily audible on a cheap player in the early 2000s.
At the same time, the Loudness War happened. Music execs found that people were more likely to like music if it was loud the first time they heard it. So they started making CDs louder. But CDs have a fixed dynamic range, so making it loader lost detail. They couldn’t do this with records because the needle would jump out of the track, so we had a weird period where LPs had better audio fidelity than CDs. Unfortunately, LPs are really finicky and it’s very easy to scratch them if you don’t perfectly balance the stylus to avoid more than minuscule pressure on the surface.
So, to listen to the highest-quality music, you needed a moderately expensive record deck, a decent amplifier (and pre-amp: again, LPs are annoying to play), and speakers. And it was fairly noticeable if you got any of these wrong.
But then DACs got a lot better. Cheap USB audio adaptors for computers had much better precision than anything available in the ‘80s, and could be placed outside of the case and away from RF interference from the computer. AAC audio supports a variable dynamic range (so bumping the loudness is just a scaling factor, not a loss of precision). Baseline speaker and amplifier quality improved a lot. By the mid 2000s, fairly cheap equipment gave better sound quality than anything you could buy in the ‘90s.
By then, an entire industry had grown up to cater to people who wanted the best sound quality possible and an even larger group of people who wanted to be seen as having the best sound quality. It moved from music appreciation to conspicuous consumption as a primary market driver. And that made it a ripe target for scams.
For analogue things, there were obvious things you could sell, like cables with gold-plated connectors. Gold is a good conductor and, unlike copper, doesn’t corrode, so this would make a difference (whether the difference is audible is another matter). But the move to mostly digital paths made this harder. You got very silly things like ‘audiophile grade’ Ethernet cables and optical connectors, which ignored the fact that the digital protocols had built-in error correction and that audio is staggeringly low bandwidth in comparison to other things carried over these connections so there’s space for a lot of error correction. A load of these things can be run over a wire coathanger with no loss in quality.
The entire ecosystem became dominated by very silly things. But they’re all quite interesting because they have some plausible-looking science behind them, which then goes off in a nonsense direction. For example, Ethernet is an electrical protocol, so signal quality matters. Gold is a good conductor. Gold connectors on Ethernet cables will reduce signal degradation. Pay no attention to the fact that the Ethernet standard is specified based on specifically rated cables and won’t be any better on ones with marginally better connectors.
My guess from the picture is that someone has noticed that electrical noise from a power supply can be a problem and has built something that looks very plausibly like it would solve that.
Not far from Brussels now, excited to have a chill afternoon before what I think is going to be a busy #FOSDEM - Tomorrow looks like it's got a lot of talks and sessions that I'm hoping to attend with Sunday currently looking slightly more relaxed!
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
Software engineer here. It was pretty obvious the volume of spam calls was going to go through the roof with AI being ubiquitous. So I always try some prompt injection when they call me. Proudest achievement was a 3 minute recital of the digits of pi.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to somecanuckchick • • •> Another example is Habitant pea soup, a French Canadian tradition with the phrase "Designed in Canada" on the front. But turn the can around and it says "Product of USA."
We ought to have more strict labelling. Including requiring to say where it's made like lot of other products omit.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Hubert Figuière • • •