Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Posts for 2022

22 Dec 2022, 15:10 p.m.

Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why

Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into …

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20 Nov 2022, 16:05 p.m.

An Intro-To-Rust Course

Lars Wirzenius generously offered to teach Rust basics in a few free trainings for programmers who already contribute to free and open source projects via code. I got a lot out of an intro-to-Python workshop …

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14 Nov 2022, 16:40 p.m.

Next Twitter Announcements - A Bingo Card

Since I was joking about this with two friends over text message about the poor decisions that the new head of Twitter is making, and I asked "Is there a bingo card?" and one said …

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10 Nov 2022, 11:20 a.m.

Mastodon, the Fediverse, and A Warning About Mastodon.social

As of this week I'm not posting much to Twitter anymore. I used to post the same stuff on Twitter and on another microblogging platform called Mastodon, and now I'm really just posting on my …

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05 Oct 2022, 21:45 p.m.

Stand-up comedy in November

I'll be performing stand-up comedy about technology and the open source industry at two virtual conferences in November. I'm developing and rehearsing new material now for these performances. The content will overlap some but won't …

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26 Sep 2022, 10:40 a.m.

The Goes Wrong Show

If you need a hearty laugh, you may enjoy what Leonard and I enjoyed recently: The Goes Wrong Show, a British farce TV show (JustWatch for US to advise on streaming options; watch the first …

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20 Sep 2022, 12:30 p.m.

What You Miss By Only Checking GitHub

Too many researchers, entrepreneurs, marketers, open source sustainability activists, and commentators assume that activity on GitHub and data from the GitHub API is a reasonable proxy for activity in and data about open source as …

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15 Sep 2022, 10:20 a.m.

Six Key Maintainer Skill Guides

Earlier this year I ran several maintainer skills workshops sponsored by Open Source Collective. I’ve developed six resource documents based on those sessions, which are all now live:Recruiting Financial Sponsors: Inventory your potential donors and …

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13 Sep 2022, 18:00 p.m.

"The community spectrum: caring to combative" - Insight From Alex Bayley

As I mentioned last week, my friend Alex Bayley wrote a lot at their old blog Infotropism about open source/data/culture, community facilitation, and related topics. (Alex is currently concentrating on Bayleaf Handmade Goods where you …

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09 Sep 2022, 11:00 a.m.

"The Pathway To Inclusion" - Insight From Alex Bayley

My friend Alex Bayley is one of my inspirations in working in and on open source and open culture. Alex founded or cofounded the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, for instance. They were ahead of …

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