Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I swear, 2025 is going to have to be when I stop being even a little bit nice about "AI." We've had almost three years of this hype cycle, and we've got fucking nothing to show for it but theft of artistic labor at truly staggering scales, massive increases in energy usage, and mind-boggling wealth transfer to an end times cult.

Here's something I've been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we've mostly succeeded!

With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national "authorized entities" are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don't have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty

Project Gutenberg's accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don't like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you'd prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don't yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!)

Creating alt text for a work of fiction is both hard work and a lot of fun. The descriptions have to fit in to the narrative of the text, without adding subjective interpretation of the illustrations. Not easy at all!

For example, the alt text for the illustration showing Pooh peering up at the bees can't call them bees, because in the next sentence, Pooh thinks: "That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something."
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#img_images_illus15.jpg

For Pooh, some technical corrections were necessary as well. The horizontal rules around the illustrations needed to be silenced with the HTML5 aria-hidden attribute. Six illustrations needed to be moved up or down a sentence to fit into the narrative.

In Chapter 7, the sentence: "If this is flying I shall never really take to it." had been rendered across 3 lines with margins and spaces, jumbling the word order. A change to vertical-align rendering makes it more accessible to everybody - I could copy and paste it!
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#images/illus73.jpg

We've played with AI for image description, and the results are quite good for complex figures and the like, but it will be quite a while before AI image descriptions can be set loose without human editors, especially for works like Pooh. AI's can completely whiff on the simplest images!

We're working to create UIs for alt text editing and creation to enable more people to help out in accessibility mitigation. Maybe one of these people will be you! There are thousand of books that need help.

so yeah, the ladybird dev is boosting conspiracy theories and claiming he's been instructed to participate in "reverse racism" against white men as an exec, and how he was "scared to rock the boat".

if you weren't convinced by his transphobia before, then yeah.. here's him diving even deeper into this garbage.

it's always the same. starts with transphobia and pronoun hating, devolves into this bullshit. this is basically him saying he believes in white replacement theory.

https://archive.is/ZtQpj

Part 2 of "how to emulate fused multiply add" is up!

This one is about 64-bit floats (or, more accurately, the largest float type available to you)

https://drilian.com/posts/2025.01.02-emulating-the-fmadd-instruction-part-2-64-bit-floats/

Turns out there are a lot more edge cases in this one (the kind the papers tend to overlook 🙃

“This button vaporises the finger of anybody who presses it!”

“Why do you always focus on the negative? You critics should talk about the benefits of the Vaporiser2000™. Every press mints $100K USD. That’s an amazing societal benefit.”

“It mints it in the offices of those who make the button! The presser doesn’t get any. They’re using bribes and pressure to force the finger vaporisation onto others!”

“There you go again, focusing on the negative. This is why nobody takes critics seriously”

Uhhh, I have a strange request. If you own a bread knife with a flat-sided handle in your kitchen, and calipers or something else that will measure to the nearest millimetre or so, and want something to do for 30 seconds, could you tell me how thick the handle is?

Yes, I'd like to collect some random samples of bread knife handle widths. Doesn't matter what brand, what it looks like, how long the blade is or where in the world you are.

I will explain later. Boosts appreciated.

#AskFedi

I love new year's bugs. It's always hilarious when there's code that can't cope with the year changing. It's like a new Y2K every year.

Friendly reminder! Any of your beginning of the month stuff that you put off yesterday, do it today!
These might be things like:
- Once a month laundry
- Refilling med boxes
- Once a month cleaning things

For a lot of us, the holidays are major disruptions to routine. Getting back into those routines will make our lives feel less fraught.

#2025

Auf in ein glückliches 2025! 🥂🎊
Während Berlin noch feierte, haben wir in aller Frühe begonnen, die Reste der #Silverster-Party zu beseitigen. 670 Kubikmeter wurden eingesammelt - leider 50 mehr als 2024 😕Da lag die Menge des Mülls noch bei 620, i2023 sogar nur bei 520 Kubikmetern.
Natürlich können wir nicht überall sein: Daher wird der restliche Silvester-Müll innerhalb der regulären #Straßenreinigung 🧹 beseitigt. Wir geben wie immer unsere Bestes, dass #Berlin schnell wieder glänzt! ✨

There's no convincing or reasoning with people if they think your facts have a bad vibe. Explaining things, with references, has no impact because the references are gauged based on vibes and not how well the studies were structured or how well the paper is argued. There is no difference today between decision-makers in tech and the antivaccination crowd. They both operate on the same epistemology and worldview

One of my realisations I've come to during my newsletter/blogging pause is that the vibes crowd has thoroughly won, both in tech specifically and in general. Facts don't matter. Research doesn't matter. If it has research aesthetics and has the vibes you like, people treat it as truth. Motion and churn with the right vibes count as progress. Revenue is treated as evidence of inevitable future profit, no matter how irrational the underlying economics are.

Verlinkte Artikel von der Presse im Fediverse / Mastodon, die hinter einer Paywall sind, sollten die entsprechend markiert und/oder gekennzeichnet sein? 🤔

(Boost für Reichweite wäre nett )

#artikel #presse #fediverse #mastodon #web #paywall #internet #link #kommerz

The Treachery of Images now in the (US) public domain, for all your not-a-pipe needs

Kafka monitor #5 (antifascistische onderzoeksgroep)

Antifascistische onderzoeksgroep Kafka "is een antifascistische groep die onderzoeksjournalistiek bedrijft naar extreemrechtse stromingen in Nederland. De resultaten van dit onderzoek publiceren wij op deze website en in bladen. Met onze publicaties willen wij bijdragen aan een goed inzicht in de handel en wandel van rechtsextremisten en hun organisaties. Ons doel is om op deze manier bij te dragen aan de bestrijding van rechtsextremisme.

http://afanederland.org/2025/01/01/kafka-monitor-5-antifascistische-onderzoeksgroep/

for the younger ones, an mp3 file is like a spotify track that you can listen to offline and don't have to pay for each month and it doesn't run ads.