we stay silly
#plasmamobile #postmarketos

@TarXZ @vkc I've heard from a blind person that having a robotic voice helps better understand what is said than having a 'natural' voice. espeak also manages better speeds than other TTSes (while still being intelligible, because the voice is so robotic)

@ariadne Oh, alpine, right.

@ska @ariadne @lanodan good computing movements such as FOSS and right to repair outperform their founders/"leaders"

@ariadne what?

@TarXZ @vkc what? (I can't understand your sentence)

@TarXZ @vkc I know a blind person who actually enjoys espeak so much it is also configured on the iphone it uses

and I can see why you'd prefer espeak over some AI speech thing.

TTS is not an issue on linux.

@vkc I will say, despite using Linux myself for many years and doing all my computing with it, that it isn't perfect either.

Let's not disregard blind folks who are sometimes unable to run Linux, because e.g. Orca doesn't work well for some particular thing, or maybe sound doesn't work, or even perhaps the distro doesn't even have any accessibility features built-in. It's a reality, and we should not forget these people.

You may be able to do everything you want on Linux, and that's great. I also do everything on Linux, and my entire desktop on Linux just works great and makes me able to get through my day efficiently. But that doesn't mean it works for everyone else.

What can be done however, and is being done (though you can help too!), is *improving* this ecosystem so it works better for people who genuinely otherwise cannot get through their day with Linux. Make it more reliable, improve support for more hardware, work on drivers, but also work on accessibility features, get desktops blind-friendly, and even contribute to the software you already use, etc. so that the landscape improves more and more as time passes.

GNU/Windows

still can’t believe we’re getting gifts from our DNS server. “you can’t get that in stores with BIND!”

@vkc I know you're not specifically talking about people who genuinely are sometimes unable to use linux in its current state because e.g. not accessible enough, but it is something we shouldn't forget.

@vkc I will say, despite using Linux myself for many years and doing all my computing with it, that it isn't perfect either.

Let's not disregard blind folks who are sometimes unable to run Linux, because e.g. Orca doesn't work well for some particular thing, or maybe sound doesn't work, or even perhaps the distro doesn't even have any accessibility features built-in. It's a reality, and we should not forget these people.

You may be able to do everything you want on Linux, and that's great. I also do everything on Linux, and my entire desktop on Linux just works great and makes me able to get through my day efficiently. But that doesn't mean it works for everyone else.

What can be done however, and is being done (though you can help too!), is *improving* this ecosystem so it works better for people who genuinely otherwise cannot get through their day with Linux. Make it more reliable, improve support for more hardware, work on drivers, but also work on accessibility features, get desktops blind-friendly, and even contribute to the software you already use, etc. so that the landscape improves more and more as time passes.

btw if you ever appear on the "google open source peer bonus" and supposedly receive some money from them, this is in practice more of a punishment than anything else

first they make you sign up for this "payoneer" thing, which has a bunch of verifications (of course, involving uploading your government documents, especially fun if your deadname hasn't changed yet) and later attempting to re-verify with a new name results in them wanting documents that your government potentially does not issue

the whole thing is entirely obnoxious, and contacting a human is a chore (they make you go through a particularly hellish AI assistant and then if you manage to reach a form to contact a human, it only works in chrome and makes you pick like 3 categories each with subitems none of which really matches what you want)

they supposedly sent me a payment card, which i never received, which then got blocked, which resulted in the entire balance getting blocked, which then resulted in me having to go through this, in order to possibly withdraw the money and close the damn thing

it's not worth it for 250 bucks, stay *away*

New from 404 Media: Flock exposed some of its AI-powered cameras to the internet. We know because we tracked ourselves with them. These cameras zoom in on passersby, sometimes so close we could read a random person's phone screen. Required no login to view cameras
https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@flexion/115752573933914452

The oldest Unix written in C was successfully recovered from tape this weekend -- and here it is running on IRIX.

The amazing bit is the contents of the big window in the middle, for children under 50, *not* the windows themselves.

@ariadne Still setting up windows?

Excerpt from a book I'm reading, Slow Poison, by Mahmood Mamdani, father of Zorhan Mamdani.

"FBI agents knocked on
my door...they asked what I thought of Marx. I said I had
never met him. Not surprisingly, this Ugandan Muyindi had never heard of Karl
Marx. “He’s dead.”

I said, “I'm sorry, what happened?”

“No, he died long ago.”

I wondered why, then, the question. “Why, then, are you asking me?”
Later, I would remind myself: the FBI introduced me to Karl Marx! "
#books #bookstodon #book

The "UNIX v4 tape" running in simh PDP11 emu on IRIX:

@ariadne Are you on stream right now?

@debacle @postmarketOS @phosh @mobian it does count!