Mozilla wants to make it easier for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. From a report: Toward that end, it's today releasing the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data that now comprises over 1,400 hours of voice samples from 42,000 contributors across 18 languages, including English, French, German, Dutch, Hakha-Chin, Esperanto, Farsi, Basque, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Welsh, and Kabyle. It's one of the largest multi-language dataset of its kind, Mozilla claims -- substantially larger than the Common Voice corpus it made publicly available eight months ago, which contained 500 hours (400,000 recordings) from 20,000 volunteers in English -- and the corpus will soon grow larger still. The organization says that data collection efforts in 70 languages are actively underway via the Common Voice website and mobile apps.

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I’ve been getting more NetNewsWire feedback now that I’ve called it actually usable now.

Feedback is always an education. (See the most recent issues for some of it.)

There are things I expect to see, and then do see. Things I expect to see, and then don’t see. And things I didn’t expect at all.

It’s a great reminder that everybody’s different, and people want different things. They want to use the app the way they want to use it.

The tricky part is deciding what to do, of course. When I was younger, and selling NetNewsWire, I was reluctant to add features and preferences — but I did it anyway. A lot. I wanted people to buy the app!

But it did mean that NetNewsWire became, in at least one person‘s words, a kind of “Swiss Army knife” of RSS readers. This made it difficult to move forward with new features that I thought would be cool and useful.

Now that I’m older, and I’m not trying to please everybody and make money, I’m even more reluctant. I want to keep the app as simple as possible — because I like simple apps, and because it means I have time to add other features that I’ve never done before, but that I always thought would be cool.

But, at the same time, I really do want it to be used by as many people as possible. So there’s a tension there which I find interesting. My position on it is just to go slowly — which I can’t really help anyway — and think hard about each issue.

One That I Did Not See Coming

One of the unexpected things is Add way to see how many total unread items there are within the app.

There is a way, of course. There are two ways, even: the unread count appears in the Dock icon and beside the All Unread smart feed.

You’d think that would be enough — but it’s not. Consider that you might have the Dock hidden, and consider that you might have enough feeds and folders in the sidebar so that you can’t see the All Unread smart feed — it’s scrolled off.

Then what?

It could go in the toolbar — but some people run with the toolbar hidden. And, anyway, I never like status-y stuff in the toolbar. It could be a non-default toolbar thing — people could add it. But I’ve learned that lots of people don’t know you can customize toolbars.

How about a status bar at the bottom of the sidebar that can’t scroll off? Older versions of NetNewsWire had this.

Sure — but the trend these days, which I like very much, is to have a clean bottom edge to the window. No chrome. Look at Mail, Safari, Pages, and Numbers.

Well, okay — do that, but make it a View menu option, off by default, so we keep the clean edge.

Ugh. Now we’re going down the road of endless permutations of little things you can configure. That’s the road I want to avoid as much as possible. Do we really add that just because of the probably rare case where someone hides their Dock and the All Unread smart feed is scrolled off?

Another idea: that bottom-of-the-sidebar status view could appear only when the All Unread feed is scrolled off. But I really hate non-stable UI with weird little changes like that. It always seems too clever, and it makes me think the designer thinks they can paper over a design flaw by showing off.

Or there could be a non-scrolling indicator at the top of the sidebar. That ruins the nice line going along the top, though. But maybe the timeline needs a thing at the top for sorting, so maybe that line will go away anyway? And: wouldn’t this look weirdly redundant when the All Unread feed is not scrolled off?

So… what to do? I’m not actually asking for suggestions — though I’ll get some, because people tend to read things like this as problems-to-solve. (And I don’t mind suggestions. Not at all.) But what I actually intend here is just a look behind the development process at the point where people start giving feedback on an app.

Here’s what happens at this point: your design meets conditions you didn’t account for. They’re often rare cases, but they’re legitimate. And all the options seem pretty bad.

What will probably happen, in this case, is that I’ll punt on figuring it out till after 5.0 ships. I have no idea what I’ll end up doing. Which is part of the fun. :)

Although hundreds have defected, analysts say until there are breaks in upper ranks, there'll be little effect on Maduro

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Windows 10 Insider Preview Slow Ring -- the beta track that's meant to receive only those builds that are free from any known serious problems -- hasn't received an update for months. While the fast ring is currently testing previews of the April 2019 release, codenamed 19H1, and the even-faster skip-ahead ring is testing previews not of the October 2019 release, 19H2, but of the April 2020 release, 20H1, the Slow Ring is yet to receive a single 19H1 build. This has prompted some concern among insiders that perhaps the ring has been forgotten about, and it has even caused a few complaints from companies that are using the Windows Insider for Business program to validate new Windows releases before their launch. Without Slow Ring builds to test, there's nothing to validate, meaning that they'll have to delay deployment of 19H1 once it ships. Microsoft's Dona Sarkar, chief of the Windows Insider program, explained yesterday what the problem is, and in many ways it's a throwback to Windows' past, before the days of DEP and ASLR and PatchGuard and all the other measures Microsoft has implemented to harden Windows against malicious software: the build is crashing when some unspecified common anti-cheat software is used. Sarkar's tweet says that the software causes a GSOD, for Green Screen of Death; the traditional and disappointingly familiar Blue Screen of Death, denoting that Windows has suffered a fatal error, is colored green for preview releases so they can be distinguished at a glance from crashes of stable builds. Fast ring builds have the same GSOD issue, and indeed, it has been listed on their known issues list for many months. Sarkar says that the fix must come from the third-party company that developed the anti-cheat software. In an update, Ars Technica's Peter Bright says Microsoft has pushed a build to the Slow Ring, number 18342.8, but the GSOD issue remains. "To avoid crashing machines, the build won't be offered to any system that has the offending anti-cheat software installed," Bright writes. "It's not clear why this approach could not have been used months ago."

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Unity government leader Fayez al-Sarraj and Khalifa Haftar, who rules eastern Libya, hold talks in Abu Dhabi.

House Oversight Committee chair says there's a 'good chance' the panel may call on those mentioned in Cohen's testimony.

The religious-political group, banned for five years, is accused of supporting armed rebellion in the disputed region.

U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before, as cheaper and more flexible machines put them within reach of businesses of all sizes and in more corners of the economy beyond their traditional foothold in car plants. From a report: Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017, according to data seen by Reuters that was set for release on Thursday by the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shipments increased in every sector the group tracks, except automotive, where carmakers cut back after finishing a major round of tooling up for new truck models.

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I remember as a college student in New Orleans I felt lost. I was pretty unhappy. I had a pain in my stomach most of the time. New Orleans was not a great choice for a kid from the northeast in the early 70s. New Orleans, partly an international city and partly the Deep South, was a really strange culture for a Queens kid, a culture that I never really adjusted to.

Even so, when I called home every week from a pay phone in the student union, I'd always put on a happy face. I'd tell stories of how great everything was, even though the grades I was getting pretty much proved it wasn't. I was unhappy. Lonely.

But if I ever said anything about not being happy, my parents would explode, maybe they thought I was holding them responsible or something. I never could get them to explain why they reacted so explosively, if I tried to ask that they would really explode. They'd deny any wrong-doing, thinking I was accusing them of something. They'd probably turn it back on me, talk about something I did that was wrong. I learned it was easier to just make everything sound great. And that made my stomach ache even more.

It wasn't just my family that's this way. I was visiting a friend in another part of the US a few years ago, on my way through his home town to visit another friend in another town down the road. I was really drifting. I didn't have a job, nothing to do every day. What friends I had were generally pretty busy, and my family, well they were just as I described above, still, even though by then most of them were gone. So my friend asked me to tell him how was great everything was for me. I thought for a moment and decided to tell the truth. Everything is kind of nothing, I said. It appeared he had no idea what to do. We're about the same age, in full adulthood, we had both dealt with considerable pain and struggle in our lives. But I broke protocol and told the truth. I'm pretty aimless. Could use some structure in my life. Not sure what I'm doing. No it's not great. Crickets.

I think we're also dealing with that approach in our political culture. Sarah Kendzior explains it this way. "People have normalcy bias. They thought: 'If Manafort is really such a criminal, clearly someone would do something.' Well guess what? No one did anything and now we have a Russian asset as POTUS backed up by a transnational crime syndicate!"

In other words everything must be okay because it's always okay because we wouldn't know what to do if it's not. Not a good way to run a family, or friendships, or the world. Shit is always falling apart. It'd be better if we were truthful about that, imho.

US president and North Korean leader end discussions in Vietnam without a deal.

Pyongyang says it seeks partial - not total - sanctions relief, laments US wasted opportunity that 'may not come again'.

Syrian Kurdish-led forces will announce "a complete victory" over ISIL within a week, says SDF's commander-in-chief.

The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have issued new rules designed to protect air passengers from the potential dangers of lithium ion batteries. From a report: The new Transportation Department rules come after Congress last year directed the agency to adopt the new rules. The new restriction doesn't apply to passengers or crew bringing electronics aboard aircraft. "This rule will strengthen safety for the traveling public by addressing the unique challenges lithium batteries pose in transportation," US Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao said in a statement. In the past couple of years, the use of lithium-ion batteries has been linked to fires and spewing smoke in a slew of products, including Samsung's now-canceled Galaxy Note 7, hoverboards and Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.

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African country rocked by an unprecedented wave of protests over Bouteflika's candidacy for a fifth term in office.

YouTube said today it will disable the ability for viewers to leave comments on most videos featuring minors, as it tries to contain the damage from a scandal involving child predators leaving coded sexual comments on the site. From a report: YouTube said in a blog post Thursday that over the past week it had already disabled comments from "tens of millions of videos" that could be subject to predatory behavior. Now, it will expand that to suspend comments on virtually all videos featuring young minors, as well as videos featuring older kids that "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior." In a tweet, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki linked to the update and explained the change: "Recently, there have been some deeply concerning incidents regarding child safety on YouTube. Nothing is more important to us than ensuring the safety of young people on the platform."

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