222
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

New accessibility feature coming to Firefox, an "AI powered" alt-text generator.


"Starting in Firefox 130, we will automatically generate an alt text and let the user validate it. So every time an image is added, we get an array of pixels we pass to the ML engine and a few seconds after, we get a string corresponding to a description of this image (see the code).

...

Our alt text generator is far from perfect, but we want to take an iterative approach and improve it in the open.

...

We are currently working on improving the image-to-text datasets and model with what we’ve described in this blog post..."

669
submitted 1 year ago by frogman@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

based


image:

screenshot of a Tweet from Running With Scissors reading

"We've been told our games are too expensive in some countries but we've been using Steam's recommended pricing for a while. We trust Valve enough to not change this. If our games are still too expensive for you, you can pirate them until you have enough to support us."

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago

just a comment to try get this to the active tab. best of luck guys <3

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 30 points 1 year ago

not to cast doubt on anything he says here, but steve has increasingly been making 'dunk' videos for the past year or two. i feel like his channel has been trying to find (or create) exposés, because those are the videos that pop off. starting from the video of that NZXT case that caused fires.

again, not to cast doubt on the experiences of billet labs, but i question steve's intentions in presenting this. i hope this discussion doesn't end up revolving around gamers nexus.

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago

idk about the actual reason, but it's easier for me to recognise that someone is specifying pronouns when it's 'she/her' instead of just 'she'

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 26 points 1 year ago

just to add, inflammatory people aren't interested in 'debate' and that goes for both sides of an argument. chances are, you have no intention to change your position and neither do they. and that's fine. but a person should realise that at best, you're wasting your time. at worst, you're equipping them with more ways to argue with the next person who may not be as secure as you are. if you're debating, aim to change the perspectives of onlookers. don't do it without an audience unless the person you're talking to is truly discussing in good faith.

it's still good to learn these things so that you can recognise patterns when people discuss this stuff with you. if someone is discussing trans healthcare and brings up the 'dangers' of a medical transition, chances are they're uneducated and you should move on. or, if there's an audience you think you can reach, stage the discussion and cater it to them.

approaching these things from a winning/losing perspective can also be damaging to you, let's try to be healthy in our discussions :p

idk too much, if im being ignorant let me know coooooool

75
submitted 1 year ago by frogman@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org

"Researchers have developed a highly robust material with an extremely low density by constructing a structure using DNA and subsequently coating it in glass."


“I am a big fan of Iron Man movies, and I have always wondered how to create a better armor for Iron Man. It must be very light for him to fly faster. It must be very strong to protect him from enemies’ attacks. Our new material is five times lighter but four times stronger than steel. So, our glass nanolattices would be much better than any other structural materials to create an improved armor for Iron Man.”

im just glad someone is doing the real research

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

i wrote this comment on another post recently, i think you might find some value. the thread has some good discussion. note that i regret using a fairphone, but i dont regret supporting the company. in a 'lesser than two evils' sense, fairphone is MUCH less evil.

the fairphone company makes grand promises of 7 years support, despite historically really doing 2-4 years of support very badly. to the point where when the fairphone 4 released, it was going to take so long for it to make an android upgrade that a FOSS group CalyxOS ended up making the port for them. being this late for security and feature releases is insane, especially when they make claims outside of SoC OEM support periods despite knowing that they can't provide those updates. the fairphone 3 even launched on the same day as android 10 but instead of quickly porting over, they instead ported over their next line of phone (fairphone 3+)

the phone ~~removed expandable storaged~~ and a headphone jack, with obscene pricing for storage upgrades and at the same time as they released their unrepairable line of wireless products. this is just begging for e-waste.

the claims of being ethically sourced are not universal to the whole phone, the fair trade gold standard is limited to some parts that they source.

they have hardware for an extra SIM slot on the fairphone 4, but made it unusable to the user. clearly just an anti-consumer move.

there are other reeasons, and you'll also notice im not providing sources here. a lot of this is readily available info online and frankly im tired, i hope you can search these things up yourself if you want to confirm. i'm saying these things in good faith if that makes you feel more comfortable. there are reasons to consider the fairphone, but know that if you're doing this for a 'long-lasting' phone, then you're only getting that on the hardware side and even then you're vastly overpaying for the value of what you receive.

i still support fairphone in their journey to making mainstream fully modular phones with readily available replacement parts and open schematics. as a big 'fuck you' to smartphone producing companies, the fairphone does its' job magnificently and provides an excellent example of why samsung, apple, google etc are lying scum when they say these things aren't possible. if a small company like fairphone have been doing it since their infancy, we shouldn't believe that big tech can't.

EDIT: i was wrong about the expandable storage, please read replies to get see some further discussion.

5
submitted 1 year ago by frogman@beehaw.org to c/music@beehaw.org

this is a great song, i'd give a description but i think you'll get more from it if you go in blind. have an open mind.


Lyrics:

It's your young voice that's keeping me holding on

To my dull life, to my dull life

And it's your young voice that's keeping me holding on

To my dull life, to my dull life

(repeat and fade)

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 43 points 1 year ago

shutting down the server early was best. the nature of open source software is what allows these incidents to be mitigated as quickly as they are. thanks a lot to you guys, and to all of the team at Lemmy who worked to resolve this.

heroes <3

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 37 points 1 year ago

i think you've been mislead somewhere along the line. the fediverse is not infallible-- no decentralised network is immune to any attack vectors. this has happened in the past with XMPP. google took a leaf from Microsoft's book and implemented the "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. some more details on that and specifically how it relates to the fediverse can be found at the link below.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

but aside from XMPP and the fediverse, even major decentralised networks like email have succumbed to this. you would be surprised how infected email has become. small independent mail servers often struggle to even get mail into the inboxes of people on major domains like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.. some more details on that can be seen from the link below, but this issue on an email level is far more expansive than just this.

http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html

Meta is no stranger to anti-consumer practices and is definitely no stranger to devouring smaller projects in order to expand its' own influence and userbase. all for the purpose of squeezing every bit of data they can from its' userbase to sell to advertisers. i encourage you to learn some more about the weaknesses of decentralised networks, and about Meta's history of disgusting business practices.

i don't know why you joined the fediverse, but for me, this is directly against the ethos of what this platform is for.

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 26 points 1 year ago

i'm half way through reading only but this is such a cool resource, thanks for sharing. strongly recommend actually reading it, for anyone lurking.

4
submitted 1 year ago by frogman@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

this browser-based game tests your ability to create the perfect password. overcome various insane password rules to crack the code. awesome, super goofy puzzle-type experience. it's unique and a lot of fun :)

https://neal.fun/password-game/

85

Anyone who's been using privacy-respecting frontends for some time will recognise Piped. A YouTube frontend with no ads, integrated SponsorBlock, return dislikes, and a customisable UI.

Piped also allows you to subscribe to as many channels as you want without ever logging into a Google account. You can export your subs list from YouTube and import them to Piped seamlessly.

If you've never heard of it, give it a glance at https://piped.video. For more instances, check here.

126
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.

Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.

For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:

Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.

Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.

This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.

38

Thinking of self-hosting some basic tools; SearxNG, Bitwarden, Lemmy.

What kind of tools are you self-hosting right now? Which ones are easy to manage, which ones are awkward? 👀

19
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/entertainment@beehaw.org

Looking for some romances that aren't so childish. I'm okay with a high-school setting if the characters don't feel like infantile, for example Sakurasou vs Your Lie In April.

To start, some I enjoyed are:

Spice and Wolf

Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku

Golden Time

118

What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn't seem too horrific anymore.

But setting aside what I "can" do, is this something that I "should" do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 46 points 1 year ago

I want to see Apple contributing more to the open-source CrossOver project, both in terms of code and financing. Their contribution has been minimal and Apple's audacity in essentially repackaging open-source software is disgusting to me. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

79
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

"Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game."

The new software will allow Mac users* (see edit) to play 'Windows games' on their Apple silicon (M1/M2) devices. With development, this has the potential to bring gaming to Apple.

*EDIT: The Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to see how their game performs on Apple silicone to entice devs to create native ports. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this distinction. The CrossOver project on which it is built, I believe, is designed for end-users to run software on their Mac clients.

16
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/socialism@beehaw.org

A quote loosely attributed to Aldous Huxley, but contested here.

"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy, a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not dream of escape. A system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, slaves would love their servitude."

I interpret this as pro-socialist, but it seems it has roots in anti-communism? Food for thought nonetheless

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

so i did cave in and open https://libreddit.kavin.rocks/conservative/new and i promise you all, if this was an ironic subreddit, i would've pinned this to my browser.

it's just too goofy right now and they're all so proud, i cant help but love it.

i hope they continue to "conserve" reddit LOL. @bumblefumble said it best:

"Nothing says conservative like being happy about big and sudden changes."

EDIT: replaced link with libreddit alternative

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 40 points 1 year ago

this article was from 2 days ago, hopefully there will be new light tomorrow. although, reddit's history of corporatising at the expense of users, and their respect thereto, is still significant. let's hope to see some awareness from the less technically & socially active reddit user-base tomorrow :p

[-] frogman@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago

louis rossman talks about this in two of his recent videos on twitter and reddit. obviously he tackles it using layman's terms, but there's still a lot of valuable insights and it's super palatable.

essentially it boils down to what @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml says here:

"The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company."

view more: next ›

frogman

joined 1 year ago