mastodon - Link to source
I decided to write a post where I talk about my experiences finding work as a blind person and attempt to give some general advice to blind people who are either looking for work or looking for a position that better aligns with their goals or values. I'm not sure why the strange URL; hopefully it doesn't cause problems. mikegorse.substack.com/p/4834h…

Me, the disabled employee

For various reasons, finding gainful employment as a disabled person tends to be difficult for most people, so I wanted to write down my experiences.
Mike Gorse (Chronicles from an unstable era)

Peter Vágner reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source
This is one of those places where Linux accessibility drops off a cliff. The MOK screen isn’t accessible because it runs before the kernel (so no espeakup, no console, no Orca). Debian upstream knows about the issue, but it’s been considered “low priority” for years because most users just press the keys once and never touch it again. Unfortunately, for blind users, that makes Secure Boot basically unusable without sighted help.

André Polykanine reshared this.

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Well I have done it. as of November 4, or 5 my JFW will no longer work. it is still on the laptop, but I will get that removed as soon as I am done reading the fan fic I am reading. So basically, I am now on #NVDA for the fore seeable future. there is a reactivate button, if I choose to do this before the fifth. the fifth of next month is when I would be charged for it, so there you go. If something doesn't work with NVDA, I just won't use it I guess.
#nvda
This entry was edited (2 days ago)
in reply to NV Access

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JamminJerry

@NVAccess I will say the one thing I really like ab out the program I use are two things. one is that I have it set up so that it shows up in my system gray, and if the CPU usage is over 2 percent, I not only see what it is, but what is using the most, so for example, it might say something like CPU usage: 10 percent, NVDA.exe 5 percent. the other thing I like, is another option I can have it show me in the system tray is how much ram I am using.
@NV Access

mastodon - Link to source
Someone just sent me something to review for feedback. It's a PDF, but it's the kind that have absolutely no text. I'm guessing it's an image or scan. Paperback doesn't yet have OCR, so I'm kind of stuck. I want to reply to the sender (someone I've known for years), but I honestly don't want to try to explain the problem. To sighted people, if they can read the text, that's readable. People who aren't good with computers can't understand why some PDFs work and some are useless. I hate this stuff
in reply to Timothy Wynn

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Andre Louis

@twynn My friend @ednun_p just told me about this online converter as well. Said he used it to convert a 108 page PDF.
tools.pdf24.org/en/ocr-pdf

PDF OCR - Recognize text - easy, online, free

Free online tool to recognize text in documents via OCR. Creates searchable PDF files. Many options. Without installation. Without registration.
PDF24 Tools
@Timothy Wynn @Helidonkey

mastodon - Link to source

xAI to Raise $20 Billion After Nvidia and Others Boost Round

> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is raising more financing than initially planned, tapping backers including Nvidia Corp. to lift its ongoing funding round to $20 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
archive.is/2025.10.08-081137/b…

raymondpert.wordpress.com/2025…

#ElonMusk #NVDA #sticks #Nvidia #xAI #finance

XAI and Nvidia logos side by side

Elon Musk’s xAI Secures $20 Billion in Massive NVIDIA-Backed Funding Round

This asset-backed financing model could serve as a template for other tech firms looking to manage high debt exposure while building expensive AI infrastructure. Published: October 8, 2025 Elo…
raymondpert
#nvidia #elonmusk #nvda #finance #xai #sticks
This entry was edited (5 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

If every country starts requiring that people provide official ID in order to "verify their age" to use social media, there will be no way to use any social media without associating the account with a legal identity.

This is horrible for democracy,
and should terrify everyone.

It doesn't matter if platforms use third-parties or not. It doesn't matter if they use some special encrypted code, the result is the same. This gatekeeps open discussions and government criticisms free from reprisals.

This is bad.
This is China "free-speech" bad.

#Democracy #AgeVerification #Privacy

#privacy #democracy #ageverification
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Em

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Mikołaj Hołysz

This is not true, there are cryptographic protocols that let you verify some assertion about your identity without revealing anything else about yourself.

The simplest, low-tech solution would be to require a single-use scratch card to sign up for any website. Stores could then be required to verify ID before such a scratchcard could be sold, just like they do now for alcohol and cigarettes.

in reply to feld

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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@feld
Back when OSS was designed, keeping an output buffer filled to avoid stuttering or reading from a microscope input source before the ring buffer looped and you lost samples was hard. You basically wanted to read or write whenever you had cycles because otherwise you couldn’t keep up.

Since then, computers have become a lot faster and now sound is a very low data rate device. Rather than hammering the sound device as often as you can, you want to be told the microphone buffer has passed some watermark level (so you can process a reasonable number of samples at once) or the sound output buffer is below a watermark level (so you can give it a few ms more samples to write for interactive things, or a few seconds for things like music playback).

Things like music are great for this because you can decode a few tens of second and then sleep in a kevent loop just passing a new chunk to the device whenever it has a decent amount of space.

@feld
in reply to feld

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JdeBP

@feld @david_chisnall
More generally: #kqueue still has several ragged edges, compared to poll/select.

tty0.social/@JdeBP/11457405478…

tty0.social/@JdeBP/11457514245…

Every little helps in order to fill in all of these gaps.

#FreeBSD

JdeBP (@JdeBP@tty0.social)

@meka@bsd.network It is always welcome to see more kevent(), if only because it lets other people share my pain, in the hope that that increases the push for kevent() to be fully completed and as good as select().
tty0.social
#freebsd #kqueue @David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @feld

mastodon - Link to source

Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.

Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.

mastodon - Link to source

I think background music in public places -- stores, hair salons, dentist's offices, etc. -- might be generally a bad idea. It's impossible to pick music that pleases everyone, we can listen to music as much as we want in private, and background music tends to just add to the noise (on that last point I'm reminded of this song: youtube.com/watch?v=yzEncLnmUe…).

Was thinking about this as my mother and I were at Great Clips waiting to get our hair cut. I'm guessing she didn't like the music.


Adding to the Noise

Provided to YouTube by ColumbiaAdding to the Noise · SwitchfootThe Beautiful Letdown (Deluxe Version)℗ 2003 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENTReleased on: 2007-12-...
YouTube
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Mikołaj Hołysz

It's a coordination / discrimination problem. It ultimately adds more profits than it takes away, hence why business owners won't stop doing it on their own. While the positive impact is spread through society, the negative impact is mostly concentrated in a few particularly sensitive individuals. This makes it an ideal target for regulation, and one of a few situations where I actually think regulation makes sense.

mastodon - Link to source
**Tears of joy alert!!! "On Alaska's frozen shoreline, oil rig workers made a discovery that stopped them cold—a walrus calf, alone and wailing, separated from his mother in waters over 50 miles away. Most walrus pups don't survive 24 hours without maternal contact. This one had already been crying for days.
The Alaska SeaLife Center team didn't hesitate. They designed something unprecedented: round-the-clock "cuddle therapy." Staff members now work in rotating shifts, bottle-feeding every three hours while cradling the 85-pound infant against their chests, mimicking the constant warmth he'd know from his mother. They hum. They rock. They never leave him alone. The transformation has been miraculous. Within weeks, the calf—who arrives limp and dehydrated—now nuzzles into his caregivers' arms, makes happy chirping sounds, and has gained 12 pounds. He recognizes voices. He reaches for familiar faces. Sometimes survival is just about showing up with love."
#Alaska #AlaskaSeaLifeCenter #WalrusPup #Love
Picture of three handlers at Alaska SeaLife Center cuddling with and feeding a walrus pup that was found stranded on the beach near the Slope in northern Alaska. They work in shifts of 3 hours, 24 hours a day.
#love #alaska #alaskasealifecenter #walruspup

mastodon - Link to source

"Canada Post exists to serve people, not shareholders, just like other many essential services that 'cost' Canadians millions per day. Think about it: Long-term care and personal support workers cost Canadian taxpayers millions a day. Should we close the old folks’ homes and put our seniors on the street? Public transit costs millions a day. Should we fire the bus drivers and make everyone walk? Public school support staff — crossing guards, lunch monitors, custodians — cost us millions a day. Do we fire them all and make those lazy teachers do everything?"

Maybe we'd finally be 'productive,' or 'ambitious,' or 'competitive' enough, then.

I’m a letter carrier. Canada Post exists to serve people, not shareholders, just like other essential services
thestar.com/opinion/letters-to…

archive.is/cchRs


I’m a letter carrier. Canada Post exists to serve people, not shareholders, just like other essential services

How the Liberals changed course on Canada Post, Oct. 6
Unknown (Toronto Star)

mastodon - Link to source

Bored today? Use your downtime to learn How to Synth! Dive into the wonderful world of making weird synthesizer noises with my simple, hands-on guide. Still a work in progress, but there's plenty there to get you started!

etherdiver.com/how-to-synth-a-…

#synthesizer #SoundDesign

How To Synth: A Guide to Programming Synthesizers – Ether Diver

www.etherdiver.com
#sounddesign #synthesizer
This entry was edited (1 hour ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Паглядзіце дакументалку пра НРМ.

youtu.be/e49klkZZHXw?si=NE1GHO…


NRM і трагедыя культавага рок-гурта. ВОЛЬСКІ і ПАЎЛАЎ пра партызаншчыну, забароны і галоўны канфлікт

Гэта сапраўднае кіно пра культавы беларускі гурт NRM. Яны пачыналі на аскепках свабоды і Мроі, вялі партызаншчыну і запісвалі найвядомейшыя песні ў гісторыі ...
YouTube

mastodon - Link to source

for you hax0rs: Google "AI" is currently vulnerable to prompt injection by "ASCII smuggling"—this is when you convert ASCII to Unicode tag characters, rendering them invisible to the user but visible to the LLM. here's how it's done:
gist.github.com/Shadow0ps/a7dc…

here's someone using this to make Google Calendar display spoofed information about a meeting:
firetail.ai/blog/ghosts-in-the…

others say summarising functions were affected too, so I wonder if you can add tag texts to your website and poison the Google so-called "AI summary" anti-feature.

ChatGPT filters out tag character but, usefully, Google is refusing to, so unless they get a backlash this might be a fun exploit to explore: pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/11/goo…


Ghosts in the Machine: ASCII Smuggling across Various LLMs

Researcher Viktor Markopoulos discovers ASCII Smuggling bypasses human audit via Unicode, enabling enterprise identity spoofing and data poisoning on Gemini & Grok.
Alan Fagan (FireTail)

gotosocial - Link to source

Well, well, I guess this had to happen eventually. Got my first music offer rejected by a film studio working on a documentary because "we got this covered by AI, but thank you very much for your kind offer."

The rejection itself doesn't really make me sad, this is perfectly normal and especially now the competition is huge. What makes me sad though is that this is a pretty big name in the industry, so it'll only get worse from here on. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

mastodon - Link to source
The NATO phonetic alphabet that we use today had numerous permutations along the way.
This video chronicles that development.
youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M?si=35f3ZM…
#communications #HamRadio #AmateurRadio

The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet

Let’s uncover the secrets of the NATO phonetic alphabet! 🌏 And you can get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here → https://nordvpn.com/robwordsvpn...
YouTube
#hamradio #amateurradio #communications
in reply to Chris Smart

mastodon - Link to source

Chris Smart

Alpha said “Bravo, Charlie” and Delta Echoed the sentiment. We danced the Foxtrot at one of those Golf Hotels (it was in India) when Juliet (who had put
on a few Kilos) gave a Lima bean to Mike. Last November, Oscar’s Papa went to Quebec to meet Romeo. He wore a Sierra and Tango coloured Uniform. Meanwhile
Victor drank Whiskey as he looked at the X-ray of the Yankee, whose arm was broken by a Zulu.
⇧