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

@benjojo Oh wow, it really *is* like those e-mails...

@liw I mostly agree, but I'd say that there's one notable exception: the "FOSS" projects with glossy marketing that are planned from the start to eventually become proprietary or otherwise extractive systems, once they've eaten the other FOSS projects, often with false marketing claims. Though initially they're often framed as community projects.

The JS world (and seemingly also Go?) gets particularly many of these, for some reason.

@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.