artyom

The U.S. government has charged Samuel Tunick with allegedly typing in a passcode to wipe his phone before officers could search it. “I hope people understand that the charges against me are meant to intimidate people,” he said.

Just another example of the Trump admin trying to intimidate protestors using whatever the fuck they can to bring up whatever charges they can.

Today is announcement day 🔥

Bonfire is shifting its centre of gravity: from social features to community tools. Four things ship today, and the whole story is here: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bo...

1. Bonfire for communities
   Groups and topics, community rules, decision-making (from quick polls through structured consensus to weighted score voting, where an objection can count for more than an approval), events, shared organisation profiles, announcements. A ready-to-use space you can then take apart: add what's missing, fork what almost fits, switch off what you don't need.

2. Our first Mosaic case study
   Six months with Jacobin's German edition, building jacobin.social from the ground up: a home for 3,000+ readers, wired into their Ghost publication, in their language and their look and feel. Their readers crowdfunded the project, which included a reboot of the magazine and a new community space. Now every publisher can benefit. What one community funds, every community inherits. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/case-stu...

3. A deep Ghost integration
   Keep publishing exactly as you do now, and Bonfire can become the home for everything that happens around the work: your archive imported, new articles followed, members and tiers synced, sign-in through Ghost, federated discussion under every piece. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/ghost/

4. The Telling
   One script tag turns any web page into a federated conversation. Readers reply with an account they already have, on Bonfire, Mastodon, anywhere. The thread lives on your server, and you can take it with you. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/telling/ Being straight with you: this is a 1.0 beta. Groups work within a server and don't federate yet. We're designing that in the open with the W3C groups task force, because we'd rather it work across the whole fediverse than ship a dialect only Bonfire speaks.

Want to poke at it? Groups are live on the campground, our open test instance. Make an account and try it out: campground.bonfire.cafe

Finally, we've rebuilt the website to reflect the new direction: bonfirenetworks.org/

Now back to following up with crowdfunding backers to organise install parties, co-design workshops, and other rewards. Thank you for your patience 💛

@Bonfire@bonfire.cafe

If you're not familiar with the LEGO scandal, the tl;dw is that this YouTuber Reckless Ben (Ben Schneider) has been investigating a stolen set of LEGO worth ~$100-200k (depending on who you ask) and the local police dept and criminal justice system has been colluding with the criminals (all members of the local Mormon church) to get him to STFU. The long version is, very long. You can check his channel for more.

Previously the local police dept managed to get a warrant to raid Ben's rental home with guns drawn and arrest him, based on what is clearly fabricated evidence. Here they appear to have done it again to get access to his Google account.

The linked video is mirrored on Peertube and timestamped to the relevant section.

Ben does also provide a copy of the subpoena in the video but I cannot vouch for its' validity, and he has used placeholder evidence before, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, the part that was relevant to this community was that in the course of their investigation they subpoenaed Google, and Google handed over basically his entire life to them. I'm sure this was very useful in their investigation.

I don't necessarily blame Google here for complying with a subpoena, but the moral of the story is to stop giving Google your data, because everything you say and do can and will be used against you in a court of law, with or without legitimate justification, and the more stuff you give them, the more ammunition you're providing the prosecutor.

This is also not exclusive to Google. Anything not local, self-hosted or encrypted a la Proton can be subpoenaed and the provider will have to comply. It just so happens that Google probably has more information about literally everyone in the world than any other particular entity.

This essay originally ran in 2016, shortly after its author published his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. We are republishing it on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment of the man he now serves as vice president has stood the test of time.

Hannah Montana Linux v26.0 is a modern remaster of the original Hannah Montana Linux. It uses Debian's live-build and the Calamares installer.

Much of this project is just a re-skin of KDE Plasma. Many of the Plasma components are direct modifications of Plasma's default theme, Breeze. As such, this project is licensed under GPLv3+.

This project was made as the focus of a video on my YouTube channel. You can watch the video here .

We are open-sourcing (AGPLv3) and going live with our mobile app beta on June 15th. This beta is locked to Android users and Plutonium iOS users. We plan a full rollout in 1 month to Google Play, Apple App Store, F-Droid, and Obtanium after we knock out a few more bugs and features.

A bit late but I didn't see anyone else sharing this.

We have completely overhauled swipe typing to introduce FUTO Swipe, our new swipe typing system that achieves leading accuracy.

This has been a long project in the making, starting with our dataset effort back in late 2024, where thanks to your contributions we built a dataset of 1 million swipes on QWERTY English. It's thanks to this dataset that we've been able to make absolute accuracy evaluations, do various experiments, and develop the system we are releasing with this update.

How accurate is it? In my opinion, a good measure is to look at the error rate (1.0 - accuracy), rather than just accuracy, since it becomes difficult to grasp the numbers that are mostly over >90%. So here are the error rates for a few relevant keyboards, tested on our public test set (filtered to first 20k non-single-letter swipes) in-emulator. A lower number is better, because it means fewer errors. Top-1 error is the rate at which the primary word was incorrect, and top-4 error is when neither of the 3 alternatives were correct either.

FUTO Swipe Gboard iOS Heliboard w/ Google library Old

Top-1 error 7.38% 11.05% 10.82% 13.12% ~34%

Top-4 error 4.19% 5.66% 7.14% 7.63% ~27%

That's right, we are not matching the big keyboards on this benchmark but rather exceeding them, achieving 26% fewer errors relative to Gboard! Hopefully, swipe typing accuracy will no longer be an issue for you on FUTO Keyboard.

The suggestion bar will now show 3 alternatives after you finish swiping. This is so that you can make full use of the top-4 accuracy (1 accepted word + 3 alternatives). If you prefer the old behavior of showing the accepted word in middle, you can change this in settings. There, you can also find options to change the spacebar and backspace gestures, including disabling the spacebar cursor movement.

We will be working on more evaluations and improvements as we work on a paper, and we welcome feedback about specific cases where the new swipe system is lacking.

In the meantime, FUTO Swipe is also released for you to use in your own open-source projects! We recognize that this technology has been locked behind proprietary and closed-source walls for far too long. To learn more, check out https://swipe.futo.tech/

Emoji compatibility

We added Unicode 17 emoji, and reworked the emoji menu a bit. For a while, you may have experienced missing emoji in the emoji menu if you're on an older Android version - this is because we depended on the system font to provide emoji, and if an emoji was from a newer Unicode version that wasn't supported on your system, then it wouldn't be displayed.

On Android, the typical workaround for this is to use an emoji compatibility library called emoji2, but unfortunately the default implementation requires internet access to dynamically download fonts for missing emoji on the system, which is unacceptable for us as an offline keyboard app. Emoji2 provides a bundled library as an alternative, but this would add a shocking 9MB to the app just to support a handful of emojis on some older devices!

It appears that many of the emojis they bundle are unnecessary, so this new update includes a significantly trimmed compatibility font at only 1MB. Now, you should be able to insert 🫪 from FUTO Keyboard, even if you're on Android 7. You may still see tofu rendered by apps - unfortunately this is beyond our control and is on application developers to fix.

If you're unfamiliar with Surf Social it's a pretty simple concept: It allows you to make feeds that incorporate RSS, BlueSky and Mastodon accounts (and thus some Threads accounts), podcasts (yes, also RSS but formatted appropriately), inter-network hashtags, and YouTube (and maybe more, I don't have an exhaustive list). Peertube also works via RSS.

I suppose these are all things that you can technically get with an RSS reader (can you follow bsky with RSS?) but really it has more to do with the way the content is formatted, as well as the fact that I can share feeds, and browse others' feeds.

You can also sign in with bsky/threads and comment using those accounts.

It's very cool, and I've been having a lot of fun with it, but it is and will remain closed-source. The monetization strategy is unclear but it sounds like they're going for a sort of Patreon-style approach, in addition to potentially paid ads. And also you cannot use it without a Surf account, which I do not like.