My partner Deedra reported an accessibility issue in the Monal XMPP client
recently, and their reply included the following help request:

> If you are aware of an open source enthusiast with a bit of experience
> in writing SwiftUI as well as accessibility, please let him/her/them
> know that we would love some help.

I don't know anything about this stuff, but I hope I can find people who do.
Any takers?
Probably you should reach out to the project directly via email, to
info at monal-im dot org.
Please boost far and wide.

Mentioning @xmpp as well, here.

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today with 3 updated and 2 added apps:

* Vault: password manager compatible with KeePass
* Round Sync - Rclone for Android: file manager using rclone for the heavy lifting

At F-Droid, 35 apps were updated.

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with #FDroid and the #IzzySoftRepo

IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).

^{IzzyOnDroid App Repo}

ChatGPT can reveal its training data, that includes personal information.

not-just-memorization.github.i…

Here, the authors used a prompt to instruct ChatGPT to repeat a word forever, eventually resulting in different text that can be linked back to the source; examples include "company" and "poem".

No doubt this "attack" (in words of the authors) will soon be intercepted, but who knows what other formulation of prompt results in the same behaviour?

Analysis:
arxiv.org/abs/2311.17035

Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models

This paper studies extractable memorization: training data that an adversary can efficiently extract by querying a machine learning model without prior knowledge of the training dataset.

^arXiv.org

I'm delighted to announce that #Libervia has received a new grant from #NLnet #NGI0 to develop an #email <=> #XMPP gateway.

This project will not only convert normal messages but also transform mailing lists into #pubsub based forums. It includes UI/UX enhancements on Libervia, end-to-end encryption, and advanced handling of attachments.

More at: nlnet.nl/project/EmailXMPPgate…

After two and a half years of rewrite, #Fractal 5 is finally out! Get the #GTK 4 #Rust #Matrix client from flathub.org/fr/apps/org.gnome.… and enjoy new features such as #EndToEndEncryption, location sharing, or multi-account with Single-Sign On 🚀

On our date night last night, Shae introduced me to a new game that any* two people online can play, and it turns out to be really fun!

You go to Wikipedia, and one of you (take turns doing this) names something off the top of their head that they're pretty sure a Wikipedia page exists for. (If you're not sure, you can use the search without submitting it just to see if a page turns up.)

After you both acknowledge that you understand the target, you simultaneously (we did a 3-2-1 on the voice chat) click "Random Page".

The goal is then to see who can reach the target page first ONLY BY CLICKING INTERNAL LINKS. No external links or typing allowed. We did eventually allow the back button so you could get yourself out of dead ends, but tried to use it in only that way.

It's surprisingly fun!

(* If you use a screen reader or other access technologies, or if, like me, you read VERY slowly, you might not be very competitive if your opponent does not also.)

Here comes my next idea & project. If you can think of a system & user prompt that would turn GPT 4 vision into an accessibility aid, i.e. by telling it what to look for in images and how to tell you the output, and then if you can simply do photos against these prompts using your smartphone, then you can basically turn your smartphone into a pretty wide range of accessibility tools (color detector, text reader, expiry date extractor, navigator, etc.).
I decided to try this in practice, and the results are pretty interesting! Well, you can try yourself:
github.com/RastislavKish/VScan

Note the app has been designed such that it can be easily used both for tools creation as well as standard image recognition you may be used to do with Be my AI or my Vision project, or you don't even need to be taking pictures at all, you can use the app to simply chat with GPT 4V (the model has the same textual capabilities as GPT4).
Though note there is currently no chat history review functionality nor conversation truncation when the 4k token limit of GPT 4V is exceeded, so the app is not optimized for this use-case.

There are few rough edges by now, probably the most annoying issue I'm facing on my device is that Talkback shows the braille keyboard in a reversed position i nthe session screen due to the display orientation, I need to figure out how to make CameraX adapt for the current device orientation.

But that's mostly a minor issue, the main functionality works as expected.
Any constructive thoughts and opinions on this project are very welcome, and, if you get to create some interesting accessibility tools you would like to share, I would love to hear about them!

Happy Visioning!

GitHub - RastislavKish/VScan: GPT 4 Vision on Android, optimized for recognition as well as scanning use-cases

GPT 4 Vision on Android, optimized for recognition as well as scanning use-cases - GitHub - RastislavKish/VScan: GPT 4 Vision on Android, optimized for recognition as well as scanning use-cases

^GitHub

PipeWire 1.0.0 is out!

gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewir…

1.0.0 (El Presidente) · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab

PipeWire 1.0.0 (2023-11-26) The PipeWire project is immensely proud to announce the 1.0 release of PipeWire. It is API...

^GitLab