There are a lot more speech programs on Linux now. I was a bit curious and searched through the distribution package managers recently.

• Live Captions
• Linux Voice Control
• Speech Note
• Nerd Dictation
• Sherpa Speech
• Piper
• Numen

Some use Vosk or Onnx as runtimes.

Perhaps it’s just my imagination (related). Imagine you’re shown a bag making clip on YouTube (maybe from Brazil).

You (on a whim) zip on over to the channel for more sewing, only to be slammed with US engagement politics. The commenters (English) never seemed to have gotten the context that it’s a channel in Portuguese about bags (scroll to the end). Then everything magically disappears.

Do small channels like that just get randomly hacked, hijacked, and then sacked? Interesting.

Behold the modern day YouTube experience. That one gets premium points for landing an easy 6:26 (or 27) duration summary (embed).

There used to be spelling and grammar bots roaming around. They’d read your entire blog and mail in the misspelt words. If you replied, someone would respond to demo their ultimate proof reading solution.

One of them was really bothered by referer. I pointed out once that it was intensional and that came as a shocking revelation. Those bots were replaced by the swarm intelligence. Now everyone’s grammar and spelling is perfection.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to speculative ambiguity. Let’s hope that blowing up rockets over the Caribbean never achieves normalization of the 3rd form.

Any time someone asks if an online thing is fake or real;
Instead of going for the all or nothing:

1. Yes
2. No

There’s always the more amusing but empirical:

3. There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

I was shown this thing called SSI. It’s the sneakiest of tricks for primitively boosting any SSG. It’s supported in the web servers nginx, apache, lighttpd, and others.

server {
  ssi on;
  ssi_last_modified on;
}

To quiet down Firefox’s network activity at the application level:

Set global (about:policies) policies in /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json

Block untrusted connections with proxy.pac [?] in policies.json. Enable the PAC file URL in (about:settings) network settings.

Additionally user.js is configurable (mine). Firefox derivatives do similar pre-configurations. Chromium derivatives have policy settings too.

There’s a quick way to test the offline behaviour of programs on Linux.

unshare -c -n bash

$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK> mtu 65536 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00

$ lsns -t net
NS  TYPE NPROCS PID   USER  NETNSID    COMMAND
999 net  2      111   user  3          systemd
888 net  1      222   user  unassigned └─bash

My interest in mainstream tech is waning. Maybe it’s from counting too many c’s in externalities. A lot of us have been lucky in tapering expectations against the professional marketing psychologists.

I’m something of an NFT expert without actually gambling at the tables (not nftables). I peered into the movements of the crystal globe and almost saw a vision.

There’s a draft on my other blog sitting around about coins as a currency, drafted in the local mania. Luckily, I lost my naivete then and wrote something about web browsers somewhere. There are true believers and then those who speculate on the bread and the fish.