https://archive.is/2024.08.05-032033/https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-military-freaked-lasers-are-no-secret-weapon-against-hypersonic-missiles-207436

1. "Hand Talk" is already a commonly-used name for Plains Indian Sign Language, and so search results for the Hand Talk app end up burying or displacing search results for this endangered indigenous sign language.
2. Hand Talk's translations are according to multiple reviews absolutely fucking dogshit, so dogshit that it would in fact seem like no proficient signers were actually involved in its development.

When the app boasts about being powered by "artificial intelligence", and its website has a whole page titled "for your company", I can't exactly say that I'm surprised. It really seems like this is just some tech startup trying to make big promises about accessibility and AI in order to win investors, reminding me of much of the technology shown in this video — while Hand Talk's main purpose in practice is probably just to allow corpos to cut costs on accessibility by "letting the AI do it".

It becomes quite striking, then, that on the "for you" page of their official website, that all five reviews that they choose to highlight from regular everyday people come from hearing people with no prior knowledge of Deaf culture or SL, rather than actual Deaf people talking about how the app has helped them; that none of the awards they highlight on the "about us" page come from Deaf organizations, and only one of the awards is actually related to accessibility; and that none of the three founders of the startup have any apparent background in Deaf culture whatsoever... Yes, I am sure that "advertising graduate and strategic communication specialist elected by Forbes as one of the most promising young people in Brazil" decided to found a sign language translation app Out Of The Goodness Of His Heart.

But hey, it's not like I'm proficient in any sign languages myself, and it's not like I've actually given the app a try, so maybe I'm just being presumptive from just a few bad reviews and a general "gross tech startup" vibe that this app is shittier than it really is. If any Deaf people have any positive experiences with this app, or with any apps like it, then I'd quite like to know your thoughts.

What stood out to me about the Hand Talk app was how it uses animated characters, because this reminded me of my own idea for SLiki, a sign language wiki made up of collaborative character animations. The difference is that Hand Talk presents itself as a translation tool, whereas SLiki would assume its users to already be proficient in the sign language in question; and while Hand Talk has a closed set of signs that it knows, and fingerspells everything else, SLiki would allow users to freely modify and crowdsource signs. And also SLiki would probably use Reimu and Marisa or some shit as its default models instead of these generic corporate art style characters that Hand Talk uses, and SLiki would be FOSS that would actually, y'know, try to incorporate its target demographic into the development process.

Once again, If Only I Knew How To Code.

Intel doubling down more on being scummy

I always wondered what a ☐ was called.

Unicode input

Glyph availability

[...]

If an application does not have access to a glyph, the character will usually be shown as the font's .notdef glyph ⟨􏿮⟩ which often appears as an empty box, ☐ (nicknamed "tofu" based on the shape), a box with an X in it, ☒, a diamond with a question mark, �, or a box with a question mark in it, ⍰.

The image is from here - What is the technical term for a replacement character if a font does not have a representation - Graphic Design Stack Exchange

This dude is doing DIY photolithography

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3130286

piped: https://piped.video/watch?v=FJYvx42j7OU

a transwoman in a maid suit installing Arch Linux on an iMac to run a Minecraft server. extreme Druaga1 vibes if you've watched his stuff.

very quirky and also pretty enjoyable if you're a tech nerd.

precautionary slight CW for occasional horny

https://archive.ph/54V9o

This is one day after some guy in WallStreetBets put $700K in Intel Stocks lol

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/20181517

That’s a lot of layoffs.

Hey, so my friend wanted to sign up for Hexbear, but after failing the Captcha once they've been rate limited for a while now. They're using Chrome. Is there are any kind of solution you would recommend?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/01/argentina-ai-predicting-future-crimes-citizen-rights

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai

I've been doing some customization with Librewolf recently; this is still a work in progress, but what do you think?

Extensions and Themes - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nighttab/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimalist-nord/reviews/

Fedora, it fucking slaps and worked right out of the box. I'm using it for work and play on my main rig! I dual boot for some very specific hardware things that are not normal, but other than that it's been seamless! When I booted into Windows 10 again, they auto installed copilot... Glad to be done with this crap.

Between the 13th/14th gen degradation issues and this Intel is not having a good time

Good thing one of Brandon's major legislation "accomplishments" isn't majorly riding on Intel or anything