Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen This was about espeak, not RHVoice; and to my knowledge, espeak is algorithmic in nature and not trained on a massive dubiously sourced set of training data, which means it does not suffer from the same problem.

I have my doubts that this discussion is going to be moving in a productive direction for either of us, so I'll leave you with this comment:
The way you've responded to this situation has damaged your reputation in my eyes *far* more than that article ever could have.

You've yelled at a blind person for expressing their frustration with being excluded, you've threatened pausing development on accessibility entirely (which feels rather "look what you made me do!"), you've repeatedly refused to take responsibility for your decisions by framing them as if they are out of your hands, and you've confirmed the long-standing rumours that you call all criticism "attacks" (which is something I'd remained undecided on until now because I didn't have enough information, but now got to see first-hand).

You yell a lot about how that article has "harmed the project", but if you're concerned about harm to the project, I think that you need to be looking inward instead, at the way you interact with criticism.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Once again, this is still just "we do not want to do it", regardless of how justified you feel your reasons for that decision are. But it is not that you *cannot* do it, so don't present it as if it is.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Like, to be clear: depending on circumstances, "we do not think this is worth the cost for the gain we get" *can* sometimes be a reasonable point.

But then be honest about what you're actually saying, take responsibility for your choice, and don't frame it as an impossibility that is out of your hands.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen As I have brought up before, that system appears to be based on LLM/GenAI tech and models, which means it cannot ever be open-source.

And what the author of the article decides to do frankly has no bearing on my arguments here. You are still presenting "do not want to do" as "cannot do", which are two very different things.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen (Which, incidentally, is *exactly* what the original complaint was about.)

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen That is just a lot of words to say "we do not want to do this, we do not think that accessibility is worth doing this".

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen I have literally suggested a solution for this several posts up, that would absolutely work.

"Do not want to do this" is a very different thing from "cannot do this".

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen "We want a decent feature" is great and all, but right now you have *no* feature.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen There are, to my knowledge, exactly *zero* models in the LLM/GenAI space that are actually open-source by any reasonable definition, and there's good reason to believe that they can't ever be (because this amount of training data is virtually impossible to ethically source), so the idea of this kind of model as an open-source solution is essentially vaporware.

There is already a viable system which can be implemented today, as has been presented to you by someone *who actually uses these accessibility tools*, which is espeak.

@GrapheneOS If the thread were 'very clear', I wouldn't be asking for a bulletpoint list.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Better options such as? And didn't you say two posts ago in this thread that "unless there's a good one we can use, this is blocked", implying that there isn't one?

@shine Historical reasons; "veganistisch" is originally the term for "vegan" in Dutch, and it's only fairly recently that this is anything but the most niche diet, whereas "vegetarisch" has been popularly around much longer and so got colloquially abbreviated to 'vega' because it is easier to pronounce than 'vege'

@Lemonandpeach Van wat ik ervan weet is het meer de Koreaanse versie van WhatsApp.

Hoewel ik ook niet bijzonder fan ben van Signal (om redenen die hier even niet relevant zijn) doet Signal wel een hoop meer qua transparantie en beveiliging dan LINE, volgens mij, terwijl LINE meer een 'klassieke' gesloten en gecentraliseerde dienst is.

@StaceyCornelius This is a bit tangential maybe, but I wonder if marketing yourself as an "off-hours plumber" (which is to say, evening plumber) might work there to work independently (ie. less sexism) and avoid the early jobs, while also being able to charge more?

Doesn't solve the nasty work part of course.

@dysphoricunicorn Then I have no idea!

@StaceyCornelius Yeah, I can see that being a problem ☹️

The one other thing I can think of is that plumbing apparently pays well and has been paying well for a long time, so maybe something similar is possible there, but I don't know if it pays well *enough* to reduce the hours worked

@StaceyCornelius (I do follow a slightly different version of this approach, for ethical reasons; I still provide lower rates for non-commercial customers and smaller businesses, but only after talking to them for a while and being reasonably confident that they will be respectful of my time and energy)