In 2024, at least 28,900 people were forced to flee from their homes and internally displaced in Mexico, primarily as a result of the actions of organized crime.
On June 28, 1969, police raided the #StonewallInn, a New York City bar that welcomed the most marginalized members of the fledgling queer "community": young, poor, and #BIPOC #LGBTQ+ people.
Fed up with being on the receiving end of state violence, drag performers, trans and gender nonconforming people, homeless youth, and queer people of color fought back.
The scuffle became a weeklong riot and marked a pivotal turning point in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States.
In my Portable Puzzle Collection, it was recently (a few weeks ago) the 20th birthday of the game "Mines": a reimplementation of Minesweeper which ensures every grid can be solved by reasoning rather than guesswork. The first click in a completely blank grid is guaranteed to be safe, and to open an area of more than one clue, and after that, you can always identify a safe square to open next by thinking about the currently visible clues.
This makes it possible to generate grids with a much higher density of mines than standard randomised Minesweeper, such as the example shown here with 99 mines in only a 16×16 grid. I actually didn't predict that this would be possible when I wrote the grid generator originally: I only expected to be able to play on settings like the standard Windows ones, without those nasty last-minute frustrations. The ability to turn up the density by more than a factor of 2 was a very pleasant surprise – my algorithm was far more effective than I had anticipated!
The odd thing about Mines is: in the past 20 years, this one game has received far more bug reports about insoluble game instances than any other puzzle in my collection. Very likely more than all the other games *put together*.
But not one of those reports has turned out to be a real bug in the grid generation. In cases where they sent a save file or a game ID, I generally played through the game myself to make sure; if they only sent a screenshot, I've always at least pointed out something I could see in the picture. *Everybody* who sent this kind of report turned out to have missed something.
Read this a whine ago. It's kinda depressing that I feel like I needed to read that. Everyone who lives in a country in which rght wing forces are gaining more and more momentum (so basically: everyone).
It describes strategies to slow down, hinder, make lifes harder of such forces when they are grasping for power. It describes how such forces gain power.
So pretty essential. And good to know that there are strategies to fight back.
The main selling features I'm looking for are #E2EE interoperability with such competitors as @protonprivacy and @mailbox_org, and a shared non-proprietary API to locally bridge Tuta and competitors with common desktop mail, contacts, and calendar apps.
No one should need to maintain multiple subscriptions or break end-to-end encryption to carry on a three-party email exchange with subscribers to one of the three services each, nor to invite the other two to an event in the calendar. Anyone should be able to view their work email and their private email in the same UI. And many customers will want to bulk drag and drop or cut and paste mail and events from their old Google or Microsoft accounts into their new Tuta, Protoon, or Mailbox accounts.
Make E2EE mail and calendars federated (i.e., protocol-compatible across competing services) and compatible with desktop clients (via a single cross-compatible locally client-hosted bridging server), and you'll remove one the main barriers to customer adoption.
A non-profit trade association (like the W3C, but for E2EE mail, contacts, and calendars) would be the best place for the copyright etc. in the bridging software, and the best employer for the lead maintainers of it. Eliminate the trade-off between vendor lock-in and privacy.
Other features are nice, but till no one needs multiple concurrent competing subscriptions, or multiple mail, contact, or calendar apps, other features are practically irrelevant. What uses is an overview of my personal calendar when I can only see my own schedule there, without the context of my work and university calendars in the same view?
I got an old projector screen with motor to open/close it automatically, working on 220V. I'm opening it up to review it, but got a mysterious component.
Anyone an idea what this is at what it serves? I suspect it is a capacitor.
instructions for motor diagram are mentioned under "connecting"text. ~ on the right side indicates AC line input (phase & neutral) (220V/50Hz as noted above). And if you connect that AC across contacts tagged "0" and "1" it will go turn in one direction, and if you connect it between "2" and "2" it will turn other direction. (provided it is still working, of course).
Hi, I will be one week in #Prague to learn #CzechLanguage in a language school. Does anybody like to meet and speak with me in Czech, so I can practise? In #Praha or later, when I travel for another week through #CzechRepublic.
I can offer Tandem in German or Farsi.
Please share, if you know peoble in Czech. #FediHelp
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wanted to have at least 5 Saudi universities among the top 200 in the world by 2030.
So he paid lots of scientists to falsely claim they worked in Saudi Arabia! Some got up to €70,000 a year just for pretending to work there.
Unfortunately they got caught. The newspaper El Pais exposed the scam.
In 2022, Saudi Arabia had 109 professors on the List of Highly Cited Researchers, compiled by Clarivate. After a bunch got caught, the number dropped to 26. 🤣
Someone should carefully check those 26 researchers.
In fact this "List of Highly Cited Researchers" is a fraud magnet. As of 2024, one in three apparently highly cited researchers has been caught engaging in bad practices.
This is a great example of Goodhart's Law: ""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
This newspaper unveiled that Saudi universities were paying up to €70,000 a year to prestigious researchers to artificially pump up Arab institutions in international academic rankings
Nous avions développé Panolinker comme PoC durant le hackathon de la fabrique des géocommuns de @ignfrance il y a quelques semaines.
Le principe a été repris par la startup d'État "AccèsLibre" qui répertorie l'accessibilité des Etablissements Recevant du Public (ERP) qui a ouvert un challenge sur son site:
Daar staan we weer. 1 halfuurtje voor de vakantie, tegen de luchthaven van Deurne. Want wij willen geen (privé)jets meer en een park in de plaats‼️
🌳Meer groen daar is het ons om te doen❗️OPEN een park, sluit de luchthaven ❌️✈️ stand up against climate crisis en sluit je aan elke zaterdag van 11u tot 11u30 🕐
V hospodě kam teď v létě s dětmi chodíme je trampolína, a přímo nad ní je ptačí hnízdo. Děti jsou tím nadšené a jinak samozřejmě zadělané až za ušima! 😅
Me to prijde jako vyber random veci. A confirmation bias.
V tom vyberu asi nejsme tak liberalni jako Nemci. Ale jestli si nekdo o Cesku mysli, ze je to konzervativni zeme, tak by mel vyrazit treba do Ameriky, Polska... to by se divil.
@mwenisch Klidně by ten výběr mohl být širší. Já si osobně nemyslím, že bychom byli konzervativní země, ale bohužel máme přetlak konzervativců a zastánců statusu quo v obou komorách parlamentu. Bohužel, v některých věcech bychom se mohli inspirovat i u toho konzervativního Polska. Stejně jako v Německu je tam dostupné konopí na předpis pro každého (nemusí mít ani diagnózu).
@mwenisch Amerika jak kde, já byl teď v Kalifornii a z těch 🏳️🌈 vlajek by se tak třetina čechů co znám asi s prominutím posrala. Asi si každý může za lidi ve svém okolí, ale já s textem bohužel musím souhlasit. @donbahno
@mwenisch Nemyslím si, že bychom byli méně konzervativní, jen to má jinou podobu. Češi jsou spíš pasivně konzervativní. Odmítají změny, volí ty, kteří jim je slíbí blokovat, ale nejsou militantně konzervativní, že by kvůli tomu zvedli zadky a něco udělali (což je v tomto případě moc dobře). Zároveň u nás není ten náboženský konzervatismus, ale o to silnější ekonomický. Co se týče třeba podpory obnovitelných zdrojů nebo rozvoje elektromobility, jsme opravdu jedni z nejhorších v Evropě. Polsko je na tom podstatně lépe. Nevím, jestli to je vlastnost naší společnosti, nebo jen spíš byla vychýlená naším polistopadovým vedením. Klaus a spol. tady dost nastavili atmosféru, že jakákoliv změna je eurohujerismus a ekošílenství.
Lost iPhone voices like Ava or Samantha after an update or new device? Learn why it happens, how to reinstall voices on iOS 17–18 and iOS 26, and discover Speech Central for next-gen AI speech.
Lost iPhone voices like Ava or Samantha after an update or new device? Learn why it happens, how to reinstall voices on iOS 17–18 and iOS 26, and discover Speech Central for next-gen AI speech.
this one hallucinates a cat, says the dog is standing, mistakes the pink blobs for balloons and hallucinates a yellow balloon, makes up trees that aren't there, and doesn't mention the main focus of the comic, which is the two animals flying through the air thanks to the bubble gum bubbles they're making!
but yeah no cool, really really great technology for disabled people: just lie to blind folks about what's in a picture! what could go wrong!
garbage garbage garbage, if you're pushing this shit technology instead of advocating for people to take a minute to write a decent alt text then fuck you
It's unreliable, but it's better than the alternative which in most cases is nothing. Descriptions of unusual images are iffy, but for example finding out what a screen says, which lights are on on a router, what sort of liquid is in a jar... Lots of blind people are benefiting from this routinely. And there are no good alternatives. There's no reasonable world where we can count on a sighted person being always there to describe anything.
I hear what you're saying about VI people using it. There are other options. Like, it's not like we're left without options. For example of a description effort without AI, explain how #Alt4Me works so well on here, as an alternative. Is it just a fluke in your eyes? @modulux @dumpsterqueer
Oh, that's definitely viable for images posted on the fedi. But image description of things around us for example is a lot harder. If I need to know what's around me, or what things are on a shelf or such, there's not much way around it. Projects with human volunteers are fine, but, for me at least, I'm pretty inhibited about letting some stranger see my living environment and such.
as someone who ran a heathcliff edit account on twitter for years, hand-wrote alt text for four comics posts every day, and convinced several of the other folks in that community to do the same, the alternative is this. it is doing the work, writing the text.
and while i might agree with you that it’s better than nothing on a silly social media post, it’s real bad in my professional life where it just lies about financial numbers in a chart &c.
Right, where alt text can be provided, a human should provide it. But the world doesn't come with alt text, and can't. There are lots of things that can be done in tech to mitigate it, for example a device might beep in order to give feedback instead of just having lights. But there's tons of visual information in the world that's not really subject to this sort of solution.
i get it, i just really worry about the ‘better than nothing’ argument when like… even the op we were talking about… sure it’s low-stakes, but that alt text has zero bearing on the actual image. is having a fundamentally different experience really what we want to be pushing? and again, it trickles down and is getting harder and harder to push back on stuff in my professional life where it’s like… actually important. it worries me.
Yeah, worries me too; and I definitely don't want AI to be another excuse for people to give up on alt text or a11y, which already some people are doing. I'm just saying, there are cases for which I really can't see how it would be possible to do better, regarding descriptions of physical things in the world.
This is wonderful. I love hearing about all the successes with the Monarch but it also makes me sad. Like I have moneyffbuy one if I really wanted, and I'm hoping that the membrane on the Monarch I tried was messed up somehow. or that the unit by defective. Theguy showing it to me was a sighted person so I'm not sure he would have known how Braille should feel. the thing just sounds so awesome, but I couldn't read through it. Talking to other people, no one is havingth. Hoping to find another one near Portland, Oregon or Vancouver, washington to try.
If you run into anyone in PortlandeaWashington Vancouver, Washington area who has one, that would be great. I think it was a combination of sjtting in that awful student chair in the school for the blind and feeling rushed and startled by the membrane because I couldn't even read words that I knew what they were. He read Braille by sight, the instructor. I'm so sad because I want a multi so bad and could actually buy one. I just can't buy something I can't read.
@EdenLinnea If I may ask, does the seller not offer a thirty day return policy? One of the few great things about our equipment is that, even before the policy became widespread, the vendors of adaptive stuff offered thirty day, no questions asked, returns.
@techsinger Yes, of course. Bt is 18 grand. It is a lot quicker to spend than to get back. If I put this much on credit, while it would not max me out, I would have to use about four cards. I would then just pay it off a good way to get some rewards. And I might have done that, had my first experience not been so horrid. But just since I've not heard this complaint from others, I mean, some don't really like it, but they can read through it. So I just think before knocking it for good I should try another one.
@EdenLinnea I see what you're saying. It makes sense, and I'm sorry about the difficulty. It's obviously the price tied to the rarety and general headache of getting the product for a test.
The Honor 400 is a well-built device that balances performance, design, and accessibility. With Android 15 out of the box, 6 myears of Android upgrades and
To view this resource as a PDF, click here. Note: This resource is not intended to be legal advice and should not be used as such. These are tips for organizers and attendees on making protest spaces more accessible so everyone can use their power.
On Friday, the Supreme Court voted to uphold the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) program. The program brings phone and broadband internet access to underserved communities and is funded by telecommunications services which are required to pay into…
Auf dem ehemaligen #Twitter kann man offenbar wirklich alles machen, ohne, dass man (in der #EU) belangt werden kann: #Hass, schwere #Beleidigungen, #Morddrohungen, ...
Alle Abkommen wie der #DigitalServiceAct, die da etwas anderes behauptet haben, sind wirkungs- und sinnlos. Wie so viele Abkommen mit den #USA.
Danke für's Durchspielen an den Anwalt Philipp Längle der Kanzlei Längle-Fussenegger-Singer in Dorbirn. 🙇
Warum es praktisch unmöglich ist, anonyme Hass-Postings auf X zu bekämpfen: Die Gesetze sind zu schwach, X ignoriert sie, zuständige Behörden verweigern die Arbeit. Ein Erfahrungsbericht in zehn Schritten.
SuspiciousDuck
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