floof.org
Seeing adverts for quite an interesting looking UK based small electronic components shop "Enigma Components".
Visited their website :
Needed to ask a question, asked via chat. Recognised the names of the people. Turns out I know them and met them at a mutual friend's BBQ about a decade ago.
What a mad small world.
Check out the website though if you're into this stuff. It's really good. I'll probably be ordering some bits.
Children’s book about book bans banned by a Florida school district. A censorship hall of mirrors reflecting M. C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands.” We can relax in the knowledge that this book ban will keep the district's students from finding out about book bans.
#Censorship #Bookstodon #ChildrensBooks #BookBans #Libraries #Books
Ban This Book by Alan Gratz banned in Indian River county after opposition from parents linked to Moms for LibertyErum Salam (The Guardian)
As a complete tangent from the quoted post, but it's just reminded me: how do people pronounce "he/him" and "she/her" and so on? I've seen videos of people just completely ignoring the slash and pronouncing it like "sheher" or "theythem", as if they were one word. I tend to avoid saying these things at all, partly because it mostly comes up in text so I can type it instead, but also because I don't know how best to pronounce it. When I do have to say it out loud, or when I'm reading to myself, I normally pronounce the slash as "and", because anything else sets my teeth on edge as being horribly ungrammatical.
Fursuit Dance / ‘Blood On The Dance Floor’ // 🔥
Thanks for watchin!’
#fursuitdance #fursuitdancing #fursuit #furry
This morning, I learned that trailblazing computer pioneer and trans woman Lynn Conway has passed away. Her legacy will live on for hundreds of millions of computer users completely unaware of what she did to facilitate the device they're using.
Her legacy will live on for hundreds of thousands of trans people who saw her - and other trans pioneers of her generation - as role models, inspiration and proof that being trans doesn't stop you from being a leader in your field... however hard folks might try to stop you.
As a young trans woman in 2001, it was Lynn's story, along with other trailblazing trans people of her generation, that gave me hope, a reason to fight, and an amazing community of elders whom I could show to family and friends seeking to understand what it meant that I was making a journey of my own (and what it meant for my future)
Some of my friends and followers knew Lynn personally. I would like to express my deepest sympathies to them, and to her family.
Thank you to my friend Ina Fried for the lovely obituary https://www.axios.com/2024/06/12/lynn-conway-pioneer-passes-away
One of the more contentious announcements from Apple this week is that it trained its foundation models used as the basis for its forthcoming Apple Intelligence features via, among other content, t…Six Colors
I should set that local Whisper OBS plugin back up and just use a lightweight model. Being able to transcribe my audio in realtime to a stream without having to ship it to Microsoft or Google (and pay because it exceeds their free hours per month allowance) is really rad. Need to figure out controlling the load on my PC.
Edit: the plugin in question - https://github.com/occ-ai/obs-localvocal
Edit 2: oh hey I missed they made it work with CUDA now instead of being CPU-bound. Now if I can run this alongside OBS using nvenc and still get good game/substance performance we're set!
OBS plugin for local speech recognition and captioning using AI - occ-ai/obs-localvocalGitHub
There's a weird thing where people attempt "gotcha" reasoning about cars and car culture where if you're talking about wanting to improve public transit, sidewalks, and the like they'll try and jump in with "but disabled people need cars! why don't you care about disability?"
and
okay
two things
literally no one who isn't trolling has said "we are going to ban cars forever and you'll never be allowed a personal motorized vehicle again even if you live out in the middle of nowhere in unincorporated Ass-Shit County in west texas"
and a lot of people point that out
but what I always want to say instead is "you know that there are a lot of disabilities that mean you can't drive, right?"
"you know that not everyone can buy a car, right?"
"you know that stores being close by on even well-maintained sidewalk is still really helpful for people who use mobility assistance, right?"
like it's the silliest objection and I see it every time someone dares to be like "wouldn't it be cool if we drove less?"
"But sometimes people have no choice but to drive!" is reminding me of that Technology Connections' video about "but sometimes" using the example of LED traffic signals. Literally everything about them is better than incandescent except "but sometimes if it snows it might build up and they're not hot enough to melt it!" and how news and others criticized them for that instead of like...the obvious of "so we fix that one issue, done".
Like, yeah, duh, improving non-driving infra does not preclude them.
every time durov puffs his feathers about telegram being “private” i die a little
please use signal for communications that are sensitive
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/18/npr-elon-musk-signal
Rightwing media personalities on X transmuted a screed against NPR’s CEO into a fight over encryption via the Transitive Property of Bad PeopleRenee DiResta (The Guardian)
And here's my occasional Fedi outreach about my dream retrocomputer - does anyone have a Sun Ultra 45 they are willing to part with? I'm just a sad, pathetic person living in Arctic Sweden who has been trying for more than two decades (!!) to get his hands on one.
Boosts are definitely love.
#retrocomputing #unix #sun #solaris
Back when they started, I actually hosted (for free) a mirror of their download site for a while. I don't remember receiving even a thank you. 🤷♂️
I also bought a Pi back when they were brand new. I think I missed the first batch, but got one of the second batch. I did try it out, booted it to a desktop, connected to our living room TV. Then I put it in a drawer and haven't used it again.
WELP THAT'S THE END OF THAT I'M DONE!Raspberry Pi is now a publicly traded company. The #enshittificaton can only vastly accelerate at this point.
All right, Chooms, time to find alternatives!
WELP THAT'S THE END OF THAT I'M DONE! 
Raspberry Pi is now a publicly traded company. The #enshittificaton can only vastly accelerate at this point.
All right, Chooms, time to find alternatives!
After some conversations with friends NOT on the fediverse I've arrived at calling it "independent social media."
This is better than "open source" or other titles, it better conveys the central difference.
[Why is the solution to poverty and other social lack-of-wealth issues enabling the wealthy to get more money?]
Because that gives enriched rich people an incentive to fund campaigns? 🤔
#economics #corruption #politics #wealth #poverty #duh #campaignfinance
What repeated #COVID19 infections are doing to us:
On the left is data from the UK showing the number of people economically inactive due to long-term sickness. It fell for two decades and has exploded to record levels since the pandemic.
On the right is the US civilian labor force with a disability. It stayed steady for two decades and has exploded to record levels since the pandemic.
Both are at their record highs, and both still trend up. We're done with COVID, but it's not done with us.
As someone who works in tech, I'm honestly tired of hearing about the same few topics from the same companies:
1. Layoffs
2. Return to office (see #1)
3. Record-breaking profits
4. Press releases about large language models
Shut up shut up shut the FUCK up
@Devourer_ITA What's extra stupid is if you have a Pixel device, and you use the keyboard to do transcription, you'll notice that the Google colors end up around the microphone when you use the gboard to do it. If you don't have a pixel device, it probably never has that.
The reason it's doing that is to indicate that it's actually doing on-device transcription. If for whatever reason transcription can't behave correctly it will end up showing it without that. Like if it can't initialize the TPU.
That's my understanding at least, and part of why the transcription on it is so fast.
It does the same thing for when you do live captions mode or for the "screen/direct my call" feature when you don't have Fi as your carrier.
There is enormous potential for on-device transcription models, but those always end up being the ones that never get a ton of fanfare even though they are ostensibly the most useful.
Content warning: The heteros