#Microsoft Training Program i

[pleasantgentlementale]

Welcome to Our Microsoft Training Program at Fusion Software Institute

Welcome to Our Microsoft Training Program at Fusion Software Institute

At Fusion Software Institute, we believe in equipping individuals with the skills they need to thrive in today’s tech-driven world. That’s why we’re proud to introduce our Microsoft 365 Training Program — a comprehensive learning journey designed to build your expertise in Microsoft technologies and boost your career potential.

Why Microsoft Training Matters

Microsoft is at the core of digital productivity in businesses across the globe. Tools like Office 365, Azure, SharePoint, Power BI, and Microsoft Teams are essential in today’s workplace. By enrolling in our Microsoft Training Program at Fusion Software Institute, you’re not just learning software —you’re gaining a competitive edge.

What Makes Our Program Stand Out?

At Fusion Software Institute, we offer more than just training — we deliver transformation. Here’s what you can expect:

Certified Trainers: Learn from Microsoft-certified professionals with real industry experience.

Practical Learning: Engage in hands-on labs, real-world scenarios, and live projects.

Updated Curriculum: Our training content is aligned with the latest Microsoft technologies and certification standards.

Flexible Schedules: Choose between online, offline, or hybrid learning modes that fit your lifestyle.

Career-Focused: Get guidance on certification paths like MS Office Specialist, Azure Administrator, and more.

Who Can Join?

Our program is ideal for:

Students looking to enhance their resume with Microsoft certifications

Working professionals aiming to upskill and grow in their careers

Corporate teams seeking digital transformation

Job seekers who want to increase their employability with in-demand tech skills

Program Highlights at Fusion Software Institute

Personalized learning plans

Access to course materials and revision resources

Interactive sessions with Q&A

Post-training support and career counseling

Begin Your Microsoft Journey with Us

Whether you want to master Excel, manage cloud infrastructure with Azure, or lead digital collaboration with Teams, Fusion Software Institute’s Microsoft Training Program is your stepping stone to success.

Enroll today and unlock your full potential with Microsoft technologies! 📞 Call us now: +91 7498992609 / 9890647273

[mythalism]

i know everyone is really excited for the oblivion remake because i was too. oblivion was the first real video game i ever played when i was a kid, and is literally the reason i am a gamer today, but BDS has called for a microsoft boycott, and that includes anything made by bethesda.

this isn't just a "oh they have some obscure business partnerships in isr*el" or "oh they donate to this or that lobby" sort of boycott either, although those are important too. my tone is not meant to be flippant about them, but rather i want to emphasize the gravity of how microsoft directly and deliberately contributes to the palestinian death toll daily, in a way that is uniquely cruel and complicit.

microsoft has had a $35 million dollar contract with the isr*eli military since 2002. they provide cloud storage for surveillance data of gazan civillians, and an artificial intelligence program called a "mass assassination factory" to assist in planning and targeting their attacks, many of which are on civilians or involve mass civilian casualties.

microsoft's service agreements with the isr*eli military also includes the CPU responsible for the military's tech infrastructure, military intelligence units that develop spy technology used against palestinians and lebanese, the maintenance of the palestinian population registry that tracks and (illegally) limits the movement of palestinains in the west bank and gaza, their air force targeting database, and much more. they work closely with isr*eli military intelligence agencies on surveillance systems used to monitor palestians, provide specialized consulting, technical and engineering support, hosts training software for the IOF, provide financial support to organizations based in the illegally occupied west bank, and have repeatedly invested in isr*eli start ups specializing in war technology.

in 2020, internal and external pressure forced microsoft to pull out of its 74 million dollar investment in an isr*eli company that violated international law due to its use of facial recognition technology for military surveillance.

in 2021, microsoft signed a new, 3-year contract with the isr*eli ministry of defense worth $133 million dollars. the isr*eli military is microsoft's second largest military customer. the first? the united states.

you can read more (w/ sources) about microsoft's complicity here.

BDS asks us to boycott microsoft products whenever possible.

microsoft is directly complicit in countless isr*eli war crimes, and the money you provide them will further proliferate this violence. i know the oblivion remake was exciting, but please, consider the lives of palestinians above your own nostalgia. no one is free until everyone is free.

[foone]

I did a self-directed voice training program that was software that ran on windows 98, so the slight downside is that now I sound exactly like Microsoft Sam

[blue-ten]

Windows 11 and the Last Straw

Bit of a rant coming up. TL;DR I'm tired of Microsoft, so I'm moving to Linux. After Microsoft's announcement of "Recall" and their plans to further push Copilot as some kind of defining feature of the OS, I'm finally done. I feel like that frog in the boiling water analogy, but I'm noticing the bubbles starting to form and it's time to hop out.

The corporate tech sector recently has been such a disaster full of blind bandwagon hopping (NFTs, ethically dubious "AI" datasets trained on artwork scraped off the net, and creative apps trying to incorporate features that feed off of those datasets). Each and every time it feels like insult to injury toward the arts in general. The out of touch CEOs and tech billionaires behind all this don't understand art, they don't value art, and they never will.

Thankfully, I have a choice. I don't have to let Microsoft feature-creep corporate spyware into my PC. I don't have to let them waste space and CPU cycles on a glorified chatbot that wants me to press the "make art" button. I'm moving to Linux, and I've been inadvertently prepping myself to do it for over a decade now.

I like testing out software: operating systems, web apps, anything really, but especially art programs. Over the years, the open-source community has passionately and tirelessly developed projects like Krita, Inkscape, and Blender into powerhouses that can actually compete in their spaces. All for free, for artists who just want to make things. These are people, real human beings, that care about art and creativity. And every step of the way while Microsoft et al began rotting from the inside, FOSS flourished and only got better. They've more than earned trust from me.

I'm not announcing my move to Linux just to be dramatic and stick it to the man (although it does feel cathartic, haha). I'm going to be using Krita, Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender for all my art once I make the leap, and I'm going to share my experiences here! Maybe it'll help other artists in the long run! I'm honestly excited about it. I worked on the most recent page of Everblue entirely in Krita, and it was a dream how well it worked for me.

Addendum: I'm aware that Microsoft says things like, "Copilot is optional," "Recall is offline, it doesn't upload or harvest your data," "You can turn all these things off." Uh-huh. All that is only true until it isn't. One day Microsoft will take the user's choice away like they've done so many times before. Fool me once, etc.

[autistichrlady]

The Cover Letter Toolbox

Or, how to write cover letters while autistic.

One of the autistic traits I have is difficulties with what's called "expressive language" - I don't think in words, and putting my thoughts into words takes a lot of time and effort. For me, going straight from a blank page to a full sentence that makes sense is difficult, and making that sentence sound professional is even harder. So I came up with a way to avoid starting from a blank page. This is what I do instead.

When I've read a job posting and decided I want to apply, I start by making a list of qualifications and things from the job posting that I have or can do, just a list of words or short phrases like

Customer service experience Scheduling Microsoft Office

Then I go under each of those list items and make it into a full sentence.

Customer service experience: I have five years of experience in customer service.

Once I have the most basic version of that sentence, I think about details that I can add to it. The point of a cover letter is two things-

to summarize the things from your resume that are relevant to this job, so the person doing the hiring doesn't have to read the whole thing and connect the dots themselves.

to add details and explain things that might not be in your resume.

So some details that I want to add here are that I didn't just talk to customers myself for five years, for part of that time I was a manager responsible for training other people to give good customer service. And I was good at that- we always got good results on our customer surveys, and we also always hit our goals for stuff like signing people up for the loyalty program. So now I've got a second sentence:

As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

Another thing from the job posting that I want to address with this bit is that the job I'm applying for involves helping people over the phone a lot. So I want them to know that even though my experience is in a different environment (retail instead of an office front desk) I did still have to answer phone calls and help people over the phone. This is the type of detail that's not in my resume and that someone wouldn't necessarily guess, but I really did answer a lot of phone calls working in retail.

I also added a little bit of Flavor, so it's not just assisting customers, it's "welcoming, respectful assistance". Yes, I did try like five different words there before picking these ones. Usually I look back to the job posting and pick something that relates to what they've said they want. But I find it a lot easier to figure out details like this after I have the basic structure.

This is what I ended up with for my Bit About Customer Service:

I have five years of experience in customer service, providing welcoming, respectful assistance to customers over the phone and in person. As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

If I really wanted to add a lot of detail, I'd put numbers in here- how big "our entire team" was, what the "best results" were and how we were measuring it. But the position I'm applying for is with a small organization, and probably doesn't involve measuring sales in the same way, so I decided not to add that. If I was applying for another retail job, I'd include those things.

I repeat this same process with each of the qualifications from my list, copy-paste each of those bits in order of how important they are, and then I need an opening and a closing. For the opening, I start by stating the obvious.

Dear hiring manager, I am applying for/interested in/etc. [this position]

and then I apply my school-essay-writing techniques and do a one-sentence preview of the qualifications I just got done writing about.

I am confident I have the customer service skills, computer expertise and organized mindset to excel in this position.

For the closing, this job posting specifically mentioned putting your contact information in your cover letter, so I did that, and then I like to thank them for looking at my application because that's a nice polite note to end on.

I can be reached at [contact info]. Thank you for taking the time to consider my application, and I look forward to hearing from you. [signature]

Extra Bonus Brownie Points:

Go to their company website and add something that shows you have looked at their company website. Like yes, the main reason you're applying for this job is it's available and you need money, but besides that, there's gotta be something at least a little interesting about this company that might be cool if you get to work for them. In this case they had a whole big section about charities they donate to and how they get involved in their local community, so I added this right before my closing:

[this company's] contributions to charities such as [things from their website] are truly admirable. I've grown to love [this city] since moving here, and I would be honored to be part of an organization that does so much to contribute to the community.

Now wait before you go here's the important part:

I don't delete any of this stuff.

I copy/paste out the finished bits into a new document to send to the recruiter, but I keep that list of qualifications with sentences under each one.

Now I have a document with a list of qualifications I have and nice professional-sounding descriptions of those qualifications, and for the next cover letter I write, I can reuse them if they're relevant, so I don't have to redo all this work of making words make sense. If I decide to change them a little bit for the next job, I'll keep the new version next to the old one under the same heading. I also keep my openings and closings.

I used to have a big file like this but I apparently didn't back it up before my old computer died, so I'm having to re-create it, but you guys this saves me so much time I would otherwise spend staring at a blinking cursor. And it's easier than saving the full finished cover letter and trying to pull sentences out of it, because all the Bits are already organized by topic. (And it lowers the risk of accidentally copy-pasting the wrong company's name.)

I <3 my cover letter workbox.

[no-stupid-questions-official]

what do you put for experience on a resume when you have no experience?

covid hit right when i was heading into high school, and for a variety of reasons, i kinda just... never got a high school education. i have eventual plans to get a GED, but that's a ways down the road as i'm hardly stable at all right now and just need work.

i attended maybe one culinary class as a kid, and got training in microsoft and google programs with the school i did attend (and my own time learning as well.) i also did choir for a couple years, and helped participate and organize for my school's GSA for a year or so by doing some small fundraising and graphic design projects, which i no longer have access to. it feels like this is every possible thing i could list on a resume that i have formally done besides elementary school gifted programs, and it... doesn't feel like a lot.

any help would be appreciated, it's desperately needed right now

-

[i-am-a-fan]

Google is stealing all your docs for AI. Microsoft is stealing everything on word for Ai. Instagram is training Ai by stealing your art. well i’m going to go steal berries from the woods. I’m going to go train my soul by experiencing hardship. I’m going to start writing in pen and paper again. I hope your computer programming fills with roaches and you lose every ounce of profit you ever made.

[lizardywizard]

i really liked your addition to the tech literacy post, it felt very poetic (and also true)

Thank you!

It's funny, but I was terrified of computers when I was young. I had a fear of tech in general- cassette players, radios, TVs. To my tiny mind they seemed inscrutable; even when you had a cassette or a record that theoretically allowed you to play the same thing in the same way, the sound would sometimes skip, distort, or fill with static. It was such a small thing, but that unpredictability made them seem alien yet alive. I was having analogue-horror fears long before analogue horror was a genre.

When I was 10 or so, I got an Amiga 1200. I didn't want to mess with the computer at first, but I loved to read instruction manuals. I remember sitting with the manuals for the machine and its programs, each about an inch thick, and having the realisation that it wasn't some black box of a beast that wanted to prey on me, to trick me into making some mistake so it could jumpscare me; it was just a very, very complex series of 0s and 1s. We'd created computers to help us, and as long as you knew how to tell them exactly what to do, they would do it.

The Amiga's time passed, and Windows PCs took its place in the ecosystem. I never got great at coding, but I did teach myself HTML, mostly by pulling apart the code of other websites. I got used to digging around in the settings of applications and making them work for me, editing config files and registry keys, tweaking the BIOS. There was something exhilarating about being a "power user" of sorts, knowing what things did and how to manipulate them. It was also a very convenient skill to have: that combination of curiosity and having an idea of where to start out looking, even if I'd never touched a particular program before. The computer had gone from being a minefield, to being a plaything, to being a useful extension of my memory and abilities.

But with every major update, Microsoft's noose seemed to tighten. They took away more and more of the power to tweak the backend, or locked it behind more expensive "professional" editions priced for businesses. Search slowed to a crawl and became useless. To get features that were standard to older editions, I'd have to install third-party hacks.

At the same time, there were more and more ads. Not just the ads in your browser (which had always been scammy and rigged with malware, and I'd been using adblockers for a while at this point), but in the OS itself. I'd set my default browser to Firefox like I always did, and the computer would wheedle at me- "but Edge is better! Don't you want to use Edge?" (Edge is not better. Currently, Firefox and its forks are the only browser whose makers even remotely care about privacy.) I'd uninstall the games that bombarded my eyes every time I opened the Start menu, and a forced update would bring them right back, waking both me and my computer from sleep at 3am no matter how many registry settings I changed. The word no disappeared; now it's "remind me later", that horrible little henchman of the uninformed lack-of-consent that lines these companies' coffers.

And don't even get me started on AI: again, enforced, unless you know how to block it or turn it off. And they don't make that easy.

Anyway, now I use Linux. But I can't be smug and smarmy and just-use-Linux about it, because kids can't "just use Linux". Kids today might not even get a real computer; they get a phone, an iPad, and those don't teach you how to pick things apart. Yes, you can root your phone and get better access to its features, but if you didn't already know that, how would you find out? Back in the day, computers would tell you how to unlock the advanced settings, remove the training leash- but the people who make them make money from not doing that, from deceiving you for as long as possible.

The modern computer has become the thing I was scared of as a kid: an alien black box that wants to trick you. If I'd been a kid growing up today, I don't know if I ever would have seen the same value in computing as I do now. And that's really saddening.

[concerningwolves]

Hey-- coming here from your profanity vs vtt post.

How have you found the transition to using voice to text? Has it been frustrating? What have you done to help it understand you better? Are there ways to make it understand specific things you want to say like an odd name, or do you have to swap back to typing? How do you manage swapping between the two?

I have chronic pain in my hands and many people have told me to try vtt bc im a programmer for work and a writer for hobbies and honestly typing too much. I'm curious bc the things I asked about are worries that have held me back from trying it, bc i have a low frustration tolerance when I'm in enough pain to require using it

I... do not know if I am the best person to ask because I am deaf and have a speech impediment that, although minor, is significant enough that I think voice to text is going to be more difficult for me than other people. But I also love giving my opinion on things lol (just bear in mind my experience will skew a little ways off the typical).

I am still very much in the teething stage - getting used to what it can and can't do, and trying really hard to work against my own very low frustration threshold. Everything you've asked about also held me back from it for ages until now, when I had deadlines to meet and no other option. The big thing I have to keep reminding myself is that vtt learns as you use it. I don't know if they all do this, but the built-in Windows one I'm using on my laptop does. So, yes, you can make it more accurate – by using it more often. Also, not all vtt software is made equal: Some other vtt programs have vocab lists so you can add in words and train it, some are better at automatically filtering filler phrases like um or uh, some handle background noise better, etc. at some point I'm going to look more into all the alternatives out there but Im going to get used to it on what I have first.

Coming back to the whole "it gets better the more you use it" thing. At the moment I am making myself use it at least a little bit every day, in short bursts, focusing on repeating and enunciating any phrases that it does not understand. I think I've noticed some improvement over three days! But I really recommend doing this before you are forced to use it out of necessity, which is something I didn't do and I'm now absolutely paying the price for. It's frustrating trying to wrestle with vtt AND deadlines AND pain 🙃

It's pretty easy to swap between vtt and typing. On my phone (how I dictated this answer) I just hit the microphone button. On the laptop a voice to text bar remains on screen so I can toggle it on and off with a click. When using the full voice control feature all I need to do is tell it to enable voice access or disable voice access (then correct or type by pecking with my single pain free finger). Windows vtt also has built in voice commands to delete and select text, insert punctuation, and start new paragraphs. How well these commands works DOES depend on your program though – backspacing doesn't work in Scrivener, for example, but works fine if I dictate a post on Tumblr in browser and the whole thing functions best in Microsoft Word. Of course. Because Microsoft want you to use their products.

So all in all, yeah. It's frustrating. Or at least, it's a serious learning curve. The essay I've been doing for uni using vtt is.. a terrifying mess, but at least vtt now understands me when I say the name Orsino, which is certainly hopeful. And knowing I at least HAVE an alternative to just exacerbating chronic pain + hypermobility has helped with my sharp downward emotional spiral that I always get when my pain is bad. Just wish I'd adjusted to it before I had to learn via trial of fire.

Oh, and top tip from my experience so far: DRINK FLUIDS. water is probably best but I think as long as you do not do what Charles Dickens did and suck down like five different alchocolic drinks before speaking, you're fine with most anything. Point is, if your mouth gets dry/too full of saliva and/or your throat gets sore, enunciating is harder, so the vtt engine will struggle more and then YOU struggle more. So drink. (I do not think I have ever been so well-hydrated)

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2025-03-10

Sun's back

Listening: While browsing through my bandcamp wishlist with my partner I saw that I had followed Ostinato Records, a label whose thing is finding old, mostly third-world, music, restoring, and publishing it.

Here's the album Synthesizing the Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uyghur Rock & Tatar Jazz from 1980s Soviet Central Asia, featuring some really incredible Central Asian synthrock. Unknown creator, Sen Qaidan Bilasan (How Do You Know)

This whole album, and a lot of this label's work, is really neat: Most of this album was recovered from unsold stock in Tashkent.

In the summer of 1941, as the Nazis invaded the USSR, Stalin ordered a mass evacuation. Sixteen million people were put on trains bound eastward to Soviet Central Asia, especially Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s picturesque capital. Among those onboard were gramophone engineers who later established the Tashkent Gramplastinok plant in 1945. This factory became central to Soviet record production, part of a network of plants churning out 200 million records by the 1970s. Rare dead stock of 1980s vinyl from this plant, shut down in 1991, forms the backbone of our groundbreaking 15-track compilation, complemented by live TV recordings and curated in collaboration with Uzbek label Maqom Soul. Fully licensed directly from the artists or their families and meticulously remastered, these songs – all recorded in Tashkent – unveil a diverse tapestry of sounds from Soviet Uzbekistan and its neighbors. ... Tashkent’s musicians often had access to a wider array of technology than their Moscow counterparts. Thanks to Uzbekistan’s Bukharan Jewish community, leading importers of state-of-the-art music tech from the US and Japan, artists on this compilation were crafting sounds on Moog and Korg synthesizers, creating the signature sonic palette that emerged from the region.

Reading: Mostly boring work stuff, the O'Reilly Active Directory book.

As far as I can tell, Active Directory is an enrichment program for Microsoft developers where they get to design a Domain Controller that does exactly one thing and has bizarre requirements on how it can be run.

Making: Ongoing silk project.

Currently editing some photos for printing. It's important to remember that on a standard modern monitor at 1:1, your average DSLR/Mirrorless photo is scaled up to like 2-3 meters across minimum, so you shouldn't really trust 1:1 when trying to figure out if it looks good. It turns out fulscreen on my monitor is almost exactly 30×40cm which is what I'm printing, so that's great for me.

Some options I might print include these

Still going through some favourites though. Oh, and The Hare

Playing: Co-op Borderlands 2 for a while with my partner. They ragequit easily so it was a short one but we did get up to fighting and losing to midgemong.

Good trial for the Legion Go and the lapboard, incidentally, because they took over my PC and I played on the TV with the handheld as a console with the lapboard and trackball. It works about as well as I hoped it would.

Watching: A few!

Wing Commander (1999) at Bad Movie Night. A truly baffling film. Pretty good sets, okay special effects, baffling storyline. We got rid of the Jedi from Star Wars and replaced them with an offshoot of the human race that can home like space pigeons towards black holes, and people are racist towards them.

You have to watch this kind of movie with friends because that's how you get phrases like "Holy shit how did the twink not know that Quebecois Space Mormon CIA Pope was a Space Mormon?"

Also watched Escape From New York because I have had it kicking around and Kill James Bond did Escape From L.A.. I am already a John Carpenter x Kurt Russel fan but damn. They put this man in so many situations.

I do really like how they manage to make Snake look very small even though he's strong. A lot of action heroes are enormous, Snake is obviously muscular and athletic but he's also just a little guy!

I can literally feel myself wanting to get a black tank top this movie is a cognitohazard. He's so cool!

Lee Van Cleef is here looking like he does! I was so thrilled when I saw LVC come up in the opening credits and even more when I realized he'd be in the whole movie. I gotta watch Sabata sometime to see him play not a huge heel and see how that goes but he is a great heel.

Finally honorable mention to the week's new Friday Nights from Loading Ready Run, which is their Magic themed sketch comedy spinoff, this one being a really good Wes Anderson parody. It says it's 20 minutes long but only 10 minutes are show, the rest is credits and BTS, don't worry.

Tools and Equipment: Part of Silk Project is pinning a lot of silk. I ended up going to get 0.5mm sewing pins, which are the finest like, normal everyday pins you can usually get. There's finer ones but they're less common. These are a huge improvement over your average 0.6 and 0.65mm pins when you're working with a stiff, tightly woven fabric.

[accessibleaesthetics]

Image-to-Text AI

I wanted to discuss image-to-text AI, what it's good at, what limitations it has, and how you can use it to help make accessibility easier.

How It Works

To demonstrate how this works, I'm going to use the image from this post.

This photo shows a sleeping kitten laying on desk beside a computer, in between the keyboard and the mouse. There is also a corner of a frame of some sort in the upper right corner of the image. Text displays in the center of the image and reads: my coworker got her new kitten to work and the little nugget was just too tuckered out from being adorable all day.

Image-To-Text AI

Image-to-text AI is basically the exact reverse of the famous (or infamous, depending who you ask) text-to-image AI that has taken the world by storm since early 2021. There are a ton of websites for this, some free, many not. For simplicity, I chose to use the image-to-text feature built into Microsoft Word.

When I paste an image into a Word document, the program automatically generates alt text for it using Microsoft's AI. You can view this alt text in the Alt Text panel when editing the document. It will add "Description automatically generated" to the end of the alt text for transparency though, so if you want to keep the alt text it made, make sure to delete that. You can also edit the alt text directly to make it more accurate.

Microsoft's AI came up with "A kitten sleeping on a desk text to a computer mouse." Honestly, not a bad description at all, except it's missing one important thing: the text overlaying the image. This is because Microsoft's image-to-text AI, like many AI of this kind, does not have the ability to transcribe text directly from the image. However, there is a technology that can.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that dates back to the 1970s, possibly earlier depending on how you define it. While it's application and accuracy have grown extensively since then, the core function remains the same: recognizing text in an image and transcribing it into a true text format.

I took the photo from the previous section and put it into a Free Online OCR Image To Text Converter.

It recognized there was text on the image and transcribed it exactly. Very useful, but it doesn't give us any info about the actual image outside of that.

Limitations

Now, the examples I used above were kind of an ideal situation. AI is not as good with more complex images. For example, I tried putting in a screenshot of a tweet from nym™ (@aretteepls) with a photo of The Sphere at the Venetian Resort in Los Vegas. It is currently displaying a image of SpongeBob's face that fills the entire globe and glows very brightly, turning the night sky's clouds a tinge of yellow. Above the photo, the actual tweet says: The sky is turning yellow because of Spunch Bob.

Microsoft's image-to-text AI came up with "A screenshot of a phone." Defintely much less impressive than our first example, but AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. Things like "screenshot of a phone" or "screenshot of a computer" are not uncommon when AI recognizes that you're giving it a screenshot of something on a screen, but can't make heads or tails of what's in it beyond that. And once again, it has no OCR capabilities, so none of the text on the image is transcribed.

But even OCR isn't infallible. The output for this image from that same website I used earlier would be:

nym ,M @aretteepls The sky is turning yellow because of Spunch Bob

The trademark symbol is kind of faint on the screenshot, so the OCR struggled with making that out, transcribing it as "comma M" instead. The less clear the text is visually, the less accurate the OCR output is going to be.

What Do We Do With This?

AI is best when used in conjunction with human aid, and image-to-text AI is non exception. I think the best way forward with this technology is to use generated descriptions as a starting point, not a replacement for human-written ones. And of course, we need to be careful what programs you use to generate the descriptions, especially with art. Programs like Chat GPT have image-to-text functions, but there is no guarantee that an image you upload to it for that purpose will not be used to train it's text-to-image AI as well.

Unfortunately, the more ethically-sourced a training data base for AI is, the more limited it will be compared to it's less-ethically sourced counterparts.

But there are legal precedents being put in place around this, and many text-to-image AI programs now have explicit and detailed terms of service for what you can and can't do with its output, as well as what you should be uploading as input.

So, for the time being, be very cautious with how you use this technology especially when describing others' art. And even with your own art, read through terms and conditions before uploading your work to a website. I think the Microsoft Word one is fairly safe though.

I also think it would be great if someone developed a image-to-text AI that could incorporate OCR to make the end result more informative.

[meret118]

When logging on to HBO Max at the end of May, people noticed something strange.  Usually when someone logs into the site, HBO asks them to verify that they are human by solving a captcha — you know, the little "I am not a robot" checkbox or the "select all squares with stoplights" image grids that prove to the website that you are, in fact, a human. 

But this time, when users logged on they were asked to solve a complex series of puzzles instead. The bizarre tasks ranged from adding up the dots on images of dice to listening to short audio clips and selecting the clip that contained a repeating sound pattern. These odd new tasks, ostensibly to prove users were human, haven't been limited to HBO: Across platforms, users have been stumped by increasingly impossible puzzles like identifying objects — such as a horse made out of clouds — that do not exist. 

The reason behind these new hoops? Improved AI. Since tech companies have trained their bots on the older captchas, these programs are now so capable that they can easily beat typical challenges. As a result, we humans have to put more effort into proving our humanness just to get online. But head-scratching captchas are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how AI is rewriting the mechanics of the internet.

(Me: I was starting to wonder if I was turning into a robot!)

. . .

NewsGuard, a firm that tracks misinformation and rates the credibility of information websites, has found close to 350 online news outlets that are almost entirely generated by AI with little to no human oversight. Sites such as Biz Breaking News and Market News Reports churn out generic articles spanning a range of subjects, including politics, tech, economics, and travel. Many of these articles are rife with unverified claims, conspiracy theories, and hoaxes. When NewsGuard tested the AI model behind ChatGPT to gauge its tendency to spread false narratives, it failed 100 out of 100 times. 

AI frequently hallucinates answers to questions, and unless the AI models are fine-tuned and protected with guardrails, Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard's co-CEO told me, "they will be the greatest source of persuasive misinformation at scale in the history of the internet." A report from Europol, the European Union's law-enforcement agency, expects a mind-blowing 90% of internet content to be AI-generated in a few years. 

. . .

While user-run sites like Reddit and social-media platforms are always fighting back against bad actors, people are also losing a crucial place they turn to to verify information: search engines. Microsoft and Google will soon bury traditional search-result links in favor of summaries stitched together by bots that are ill-equipped to distinguish fact from fiction. When we search a query on Google, we not only learn the answer, but also how it fits in the broader context of what's on the internet. We filter those results and then choose the sources we trust. A chatbot-powered search engine cuts off these experiences, strips context like website addresses, and can "parrot" a plagiarized answer, which NewsGuard's Crovitz told me sounds "authoritative, well-written," but is "entirely false." 

Synthetic content has also swamped e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Etsy. Two weeks before a technical textbook from Christopher Cowell, a curriculum engineer from Portland, Oregon, was set to be published, he discovered a newly listed book with the same title on Amazon. Cowell soon realized it was AI-generated and the publisher behind it likely picked up the title from Amazon's prerelease list and fed it into software like ChatGPT. Similarly, on Etsy, a platform known for its hand-crafted, artisanal catalog, AI-generated art, mugs, and books are now commonplace. 

In other words, it's going to quickly become very difficult to distinguish what's real from what's not online. While misinformation has long been a problem with the internet, AI is going to blow our old problems out of the water.

. . .

And soon hackers may not have to go through too much trouble to obtain your sensitive information. Right now, hackers often resort to a maze of indirect methods to spy on you, including hidden trackers inside websites and buying large datasets of compromised information off of the dark web. But security researchers have discovered that the AI bots in your apps and devices might steal sensitive information for the hackers. Since AI models from OpenAI and Google actively crawl the web, hackers can hide malicious codes — a set of instructions for the bot — inside websites and make the bots execute it with no human intervention.

More at the link.

[nebulaad]

more and more posts are like flipping out about smart lights so lemme just make something totally clear. I don't think it's insane to want tech conveniences. It's not inherently evil for a person to want to control their lights without any dexterity or ambulation (whether or not that's an issue for the individual), it's not even surprising that people want to skillfully edit their own photos to post on facebook, of course people want robot vacuums to do it for them with minimal input from them, and I maintain from the moment the Home-style robot assistants existed, I think if they weren't being used for a broader tech evil I think they were truly the last bastion of anyone on a tech team even trying by accident to create something useful to reshape the landscape of tech use.

the problem isn't that people are lazy and stupid inherently, it's the way businesses 1) immediately design a pump and dump with these devices and technologies, 2) as quickly, create a scarcity of the prior methodology to force people to engage with their pump and dump scam, 3) deploy these technologies to instantly begin scraping data from us, 4) make use of such technologies that would be convenient for the individual to cut corners on their business expenses which always translates to laying off workers, and 5) don't even create that efficient of a product in the first place.

I don't think there's a huge problem if like your mom wants to use AI to cut strangers out of the background of her photos. I personally find such doctoring of photos to be inauthentic and against the actual spirit of taking photos in the first place, but that's completely irrelevent. The real problem is that a scammy website is going to make your mom pay a subscription in order to use a program that barely works to do a slash job on her pictures and add a bunch of weird features like forcing everyone to smile because some wannabe tech mogul who was never in touch with reality to begin with thought that sounded like a good idea, the service is going to be gone in four months (and probably charge the subscription for another five months after that), they're going to make their money off of selling your family photos to train datasets that identify the demographical information of your family to better sell you ads at best and train military equipment to better identify people to kill at worst, and then Windows will shut down whatever program she was using to regular edit her photos because everyone started using Blorpy so they'll come out with Microsoft Schlorpy. And then you get laid off because your boss decided Microsoft Schlorpy can basically do your job.

[crowsintheforest]

working for a public library in rural red state midwest usa is a roulette between horror, chaos, despair, and the most deep-hearted love for community and the work. just this week, it's been:

microsoft: nah we don't need to help fund your patron PC access to our service, gl with that

patron's baby smiles for the first time upon receiving library plushie

the libby hold counts are dropping but it will affect like 10 people across the whole system, don't worry

what even are our archivists doing

unknown patron unscrewed parts in the makerspace for reasons no one in IT can figure out

reminders about when and how to call our congresspeople at state and federal levels because everyone at this point has our awful awful senators contacts stored in our phones

during program, patron talks about parent's love of horse training and the stack of photos of parent's wins they're excited to learn how to digitize in our memory labs, allowing them to share their long-dead parent with their friends and extended family.

state library council fires about a dozen people due to budget cuts

I love my job, but I'm so tired.

[raeraehehe]

Communication: Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges by John Ray V. Valeza

Have you ever pondered why some of the most innovative technological concepts come up straight? Sometimes it's just because the message wasn't clear, not because of bad design or bad code. A Harvard Business Review study found that poor communication accounts for 69% of conflicts at work. This demonstrates that communication abilities are equally as crucial in the field of computer science as technical abilities. I've learned as a computer science student that if I am writing perfect code is just one step in the process.

Real success means when we are able to know creative concepts to non-technical things, simplify complicated technological things. The gap between technology and its users can be closed through communication. In our industry, misunderstandings of technical language or unclear collaboration between programmers, designers, and clients frequently result in communication barriers. To overcome these obstacles, teamwork, empathy, and active listening are essential. Because they recognize that great technology requires great communicators, tech behemoths like Google and Microsoft make significant investments in communication training.

In addition, in our era which is digital age, communication takes place not only in person but also via social media. Effective communication in a virtual setting is a crucial ability for computer science professionals. According to Forbes studies, effective digital communication improves teamwork and increases productivity, particularly in remote work environments. Communication is about building relationships, not just sharing information. A program will not be working by a single mistake in coding.

Likewise, a minor mistake thru coding can ruin a project or a work. For this reason, like programming itself, communication should be an ongoing learning process. The similar between technology and the real world is communication. Human connection will always be the same as technology, depends, of how advanced it gets.

[serendertothesquad]

Seren's Studies: Odd Squad UK -- "A Dish Served Odd" Episode Followup, Part 1

As opposed to cold, which, really, would just freeze your mouth and your brain.

We continue the followup train with one for "A Dish Served Odd". This one will also be split into multiple parts, though I don't think we'll amass a whole five pa- five parts?

Five parts...dear God.

Below the break, get Orli the tourist, a trifler who trifles trifingly, and Odd Squad: The Movie. (Okay, I'm sketchy on that last one, but no one's mentioned it yet besides me and I need my curiosity satisfied.)

And as usual, make sure you've watched the episode first before proceeding. There will be spoilers.

Let's start with the intro, which has, of course, Orli narrating it. Now that her character has been revealed in the flesh, we can have her take over narrating duties from Captain O.

Now, as for this thing...capital sin against Olive. Go to jail. No cards can get you out.

I see they have no qualms about dropping the spoiler of Opie being promoted to the Department of Help.

I also see Orla will have some competition in the violin-playing department.

The difference here, of course, is that we will get no lesbian French brides. Instead we have gay triangle villain, and that is enough for me.

(I do want more, though. But PBS has always been minefield-walking on this stuff.)

Only a few new bits in the intro; otherwise everything else is recycled.

Except for this shot, which the fandom has analyzed to hell and back. I don't really feel like throwing in my two cents just yet; still weighing on doing a Seren's Study where I put in my "once and for all" opinions on the season/series.

And your writer for this episode. I...can't say much about him, because 1) I haven't done the research on him yet and 2) I need to get over the Lightning McQueen brainrot first before I do so.

Also 3) WE GOT COLD OPENS AGAIN PEOPLE. AFTER SEASON 3 KICKED THEM TO THE MOON AND STOLE THEIR KIDNEYS. GOD MOTHERFUCKIN'.

Your producer credit, which is...pretty much the same. Methinks she'll be producing throughout all of this season, so I'm not going to point it out every time.

Bold of this announcer to assume she's not going to eat an egg and a few wings. She can do that. She's an adult.

An adult with...braces, which I'm pretty sure was 100% intentional casting for representing every parent in existence who has braces. How we went from a child with Down syndrome to an adult with braces, and how we'll later go to gay triangle villain, is beyond me.

If you're not going to hire fans to work for you, at least hire some disabled people, huh? (And maybe they do hire them...but I dunno, you'd think we'd actually hear about it in an interview, y'know?)

Wow, that tomato really just up and yoted itself.

Lettuce observe this very important lesson- *bonk*

So with this, we get a first look at Ozzie's and Orli's new desks. Quite a vast difference from the desks in the original series/S1 and S2 -- we have fancy new chairs, Microsoft computers over Apple ones, and desks that actually have a lil' shelf underneath them but, as far as I can see, no drawers. I dig it!

Orli up and snatchin' the paper out of Ozzie's hands is funny, too.

"Done? What done?"

"Everything done."

"...Orli, it's only been a minute and 40 seconds."

"Hey, this episode is about me going out on the town. It's not about us sitting at our desks all day. Get with the program, partner."

SHE TAKES MORNING A N D AFTERNOON NAPS?!?!?!?!?!

I'm sorry, this does make sense considering where she was before, but the fact that the girl requires a morning nap and then an afternoon one already makes my fucking day.

How she's able to even sleep within THE FUCKING NIAGARA FALLS is beyond me, though and I can only assume the answer is "I put small animal tranq in my juice, twice a day."

(Look, in the Oddverse, tranq is Fancy NyQuil. Everyone loves Fancy NyQuil. It's like liquid opioids, for kids, safe to take!)

Ozzie outright commenting on said naps being twice a day was something I was not expecting, and now I'm laughing way too loudly for 2 in the morning.

In Ozzie's absolute lack of defense...partners solving cases without each other is fairly common. If he were familiar with Olive and Otto, and Olympia and Otis, he'd, y'know...probably know that shit.

"Don't you think we should do this on our day off?" the idiot asks, knowing that Orli being there does not solve the oddness crisis despite what "Odd Ones In" wants people to believe and that "a day off" does not exist as a concept.

Assholery and stupidity all within the first two episodes. Sweet Jesus.

A sightseeing tour happening once every decade is not exactly something you wanna put in a "Come to Britain" ad.

Five years, I can look over. Ten years, not a chance in hell.

HA!!! IT'S THE SCENE FROM THE TRAILER I CALLED IT YA HACKS. GOD I'M GOOD AT MY UNPAID JOB.

*silly giggle and another mark on the bingo card*

"And all the world shall know my name!" this idiot says, unaware that the Villain Network was a thing a good four years prior to this episode.

"Terrible..."

"DELICIOUS...and if you say otherwise then I really will call that toe-eating, finger-eating boogeyman."

This fuckass argument about desserts within an 11-minute episode...I'm not even mad it's eating up runtime. I'm living for the absolute sass Captain O is laying on her subordinate right now.

SHE HAS TO BRING IN SOMEONE WHO WORKED ON HER SHIP TO SETTLE A GODDAMN TRIFLE DEBATE. WHERE IS MY SPARE LUNG. WHERE IS MY S P A R E L U-

If you had asked me a few months back what I thought Captain O's ringtone would be, I'd have laughed and said, "You fuckin' nuts? Same ringtone as nearly everybody else."

If you had asked me today what I thought Captain O's ringtone would be, I'd have shivered and said, "Not a horrifying mix of a tuba and a fucking foghorn, that's for sure..."

"Ahoy ahoy."

...Close enough, marking it off on the bingo card.

This is the live-action reenactment of a real-time Facebook post.

And I may not be on Facebook anymore, but I don't think the way people post has changed. Much. Not...in...y'know, with the boomers...y-you should get what I mean, surely.

Gotta say, she's a hell of a lot more enthusiastic than creepy Oceana, ambiguously-gay Octavius...no, wait, he was enthusiastic too, I take that back.

And Mr. Fonts. Definitely more enthusiastic than Mr. Fonts.

"And one person is more than enough, don't you think?"

Someone better get the woman a shushing stick.

No, not for shushing. For bopping over the head with. Get her a box of Gushers and really make her day, huh?

I will say, with all these new editing tricks and transitions and such, it's an incredibly jarring jump from Season 3. I mean, Odd Squad UK is a spinoff, so it being so distinct from Odd Squad and Odd Squad Mobile Unit it barely feels like either at first makes sense...

But in 12 episodes? No fuckin' way am I gonna get used to that.

Y- lady. LADY. This is why America has online library catalogs. FOR THIS EXACT REASON.

Name of the book, author, boom, photo. You don't even have to use the catalog -- Amazon or any bookstore chain will do!

How in the everloving fuck they managed to clean all the trifle off of the photo and brighten it so the toolbox shows up as red instead of dark-chocolate brown is so beyond me it's outta the Milky Way.

(On to Part 2!)