Draconis - [Windows Products]
Draconis Entertainment - Delivering the best in Accessible Games for the blind and Visually Impaired.dracoent.com
Updated my search engine article to add information on Ghostery Private Search’s reliance on Brave Search. In my tests, all Ghostery results seem to come straight from Brave. Excerpt from my article (linked):
Ghostery’s own documentation at the time of writing is extremely misleading, using clever language that seems to heavily imply the use of an independent index and crawler while not saying so outright: Ghostery says it “gets you objective results from a unique search index” and that it will “crawl it’s [sic] search index.” Privacy claims require trust, and word games do little to build it.
A look at search engines with their own indexes
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.Seirdy’s Home
This is even more misleading than DDG saying it has “over 400 sources” (one source for organic link results, at least 399 for infoboxes) and its CEO claiming that it downranked Russian propaganda (Bing downranked it, and DDG doesn’t have permission to modify Bing results. DDG just took credit for it).
Oh, and there’s no such thing as an “unbiased” engine. If an engine tells you it’s unbiased, it’s straight-up lying.
The closest thing to an “unbiased” search engine is one with no result quality standards that ranks results randomly. Full of spam without any criteria, let alone bias, for “better” results. If you thought Google results were full of slop and SEO bait, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Hell, even that hypothetical “unbiased” engine would have emergent bias towards whoever has the most pages. Own your bias, both intentional and emergent.
They are all trying to run a "search service" on the cheap. They don't want to do the hard work of building their own index. Some claim they are but it's not a serious spidering.
Anyway, you know far more about this than I do. And it all seems like a dark pattern in the end.
@bradenslen They don’t have to build their own index if they can’t afford to (it costs tons of money, talent, and not-very-public knowledge on how to deal with spam and whatnot). They can just be honest and say where their results come from and what they offer that their sources/competitors don’t.
I honestly like DDG’s predictable infoboxes more than Bing/Google ones; if they leaned into that they could have a lot more users.
Decades after the first images from Mars rovers, I still can’t get over the fact that we have actual photos of landscapes, sunrises, skies, and formations from the surface of another fucking planet. Sci-fi creators have imagined the extraterrestrial landscapes for centuries, but NASA went out to see the real Martian surface (holy fucking shit) and it was gorgeous. I’m reminded of the “Holy Shit: Man walks on fucking moon” headline from The Onion.
Quote posting to add alt-text: various photos of a Martian landscape. It resembles a desert with large sand dunes. Soil colors range from brown dunes to reflective cracked orange flats below. The sky is a pale yellow-orange. In some images, parts of the Perseverance rover are visible.
Original post by @pomarede
RE: mastodon.social/@pomarede/1128…
Daniel Pomarède (@pomarede@mastodon.social)
Attached: 4 images Check out these views with amazing levels of details! #Mars #Perseverance #rover #Sol1178 #BrightAngel #outcrop #RedPlanet #Mastcam #MastcamZ #camera #image #gallery #mosaic #NeretvaVallis #MastcamZForAll #space #Astrodon #scienc…Mastodon
Microsoft-CrowdStrike Memes Celebrate 'Happy International Blue Screen Day'
Social media mocks the global outage, looks for a scapegoat, creates a holiday and wonders why our work computers are still up and running.Gael Cooper (CNET)
Why are Japanese developers not undergoing mass layoffs?
On 14th June, Tango Gameworks employees had a pizza party. It was the studio's final day following the announcement of …Alicia Haddick (GamesIndustry.biz)
🎶 “Once again I fall into my feminine ways” 🎶
Full of gratitude that this immersive exhibit was extended at the SFMoMA. I cannot recommend it enough. A beautiful reflection on community, friendship, and music.
This was my third time experiencing it, and I still cried and sang. So moving.
Christy S (@Faylen@disabled.social)
Lol what... Doordash really should have had someone proofread their accessibility statement. "We take customer obsession and accessibility of our websites very seriously and are committed to meeting the needs of our Consumers," Somehow I doubt "ob…disabled.social
Look, I've had numerous (well documented) complaints about the Biden administration and the fact that I don't think its liberal, incrementalist policies go nearly far enough in the face of a fascist project to control every aspect of our society, backed by corporate power. With that having been said however, I dunno how *anyone* can still be arguing that there are political, institutionalist answers to the fascist takeover we're experiencing in America when even straightforward incrementalist policies by an elected Democrat President are being struck down or otherwise blocked by Calvin Ball rulings from federal courts stacked full of fascists:
truthout.org/articles/appeals-…
Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan
"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit’s temporary ruling against the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan comes just over a year after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s sweeping student debt cancellation proposal."
This case isn't even about using political power to stop fascism, it's a clear cut situation of providing debt relief for folks being ground up by the student loan industry. If fascist judges are prepared to interfere with regular policy issues and block milquetoast presidential initiatives, you can sure as shit bet they're going to do the same thing about any political efforts to stop the fascist takeover of our society. Whether you're for taking to the streets, or you believe in stopping fascism at the ballot box, it's 100% clear to me that we're not going anywhere good as a country so long as these corrupt, be-robed nazis are running Bartertown.
There's more than one way to reform the American federal court system, and I don't have all the answers for you. It's entirely possible the Biden administration can keep working around these rulings for a little while to continue offering student loan debt relief to millions of Americans victimized by the student loan industry. What I do know however is that sooner or later the political issues raised by the fascist takeover of our courts will come to a head, and by hook, or by crook, we need to find a way to shatter the power of corrupt judges who're now running the country for their reactionary corporate donors; rich donors and corpos who clearly support the larger fascist project, might I add. Ignoring this reality is a nonstarter - both politically, and in our greater society.
#StudentLoans #USPolitics #CourtReform #Biden
Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan
More than half of the more than 8 million borrowers who have enrolled in the program have a $0 monthly payment.Jessica Corbett (Truthout)
events.gnome.org/event/209/tim…
#GUADEC2024
"The ... PAC effort is spearheaded by Mike Novogratz, the cryptocurrency billionaire who backed Dean Phillips in the Democratic primary"
Folks, the movement to replace Joe Biden is being led and funded and promoted by media moguls (who hate that he's going after them for antitrust) and by cryptocurrency bros (who hate that he's regulating and taxing their magic internet money), and rich folks in general (who hate that he's staffing and funding the IRS to make them pay their fair share).
The people standing by him? Bernie Sanders. AOC. The Congressional Black Caucus. The United Auto Workers.
Of those, which side do *you* think is more likely to be right about this?
hawaiitribune-herald.com/2024/…
Major Democratic donors devise plans to pressure Biden to step aside - Hawaii Tribune-Herald
After several days of quiet griping and hoping that President Joe Biden would abandon his reelection campaign on his own, many wealthy Democratic donors are trying to take matters into their own hands.none (Hawaii Tribune-Herald)
events.gnome.org/event/209/tim…
#GUADEC2024
After many years away from the stage, I am back! It looks like I’m accepted to give a talk at the Matrix Conference (2024.matrix.org/) to present ✨ native simplified sliding sync ✨: how it differs from the first version of sliding sync (an experimental project implemented inside a proxy), how we’ve implemented it inside the Matrix Rust SDK etc. Gonna be fun!
Matrix.org
The Matrix Conference is coming to Berlin, Germany on September 19–22, 2024.2024.matrix.org
A short story of a question turned into a new pending #curl feature:
github.com/curl/curl/discussio…
How to Request rate limiting with fraction/custom time unit? · curl curl · Discussion #14242
I naively tested to rate limit curl with --rate 5/10s but complained with following message: curl: unsupported --rate unit curl: conf:1: '--rate' is badly used here curl: cannot read config from 'c...GitHub
#GUADEC2024
GUADEC 2024 – Day 2, track 2
GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...YouTube
youtube.com/live/ynIKMiRwn3s?f…
#GUADEC 2024
GUADEC 2024 – Day 2, track 1
GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...YouTube
GUADEC 2024 – Day 2, track 2
GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...YouTube
an old libcurl answer of mine on stackoverflow being questioned because I did not provide links to back up my statement when answering questions about code I wrote...
stackoverflow.com/a/28714247/9…
😂
(but yeah, I have stopped answering questions over there)
Persistent connection with libcurl
The following is from the libcurl homepage: curl and libcurl have excellent support for persistent connections when transferring several files from the same server. Curl will attempt to reuseStack Overflow
This reminds me of a "discussion" over at the dark side (twitter), as Grady Booch replied to a post of Elmo that he has no idea of software engineering. Shortly after a fanboy ask Grady what he has ever done for software engineering and he thinks Grady has no clue.
That was popcorn time 😁
Allow us to introduce you to Mike, our potential mascot. He made his debut last year at #FOSDEM, but never made an appearance since. What do you think, should we embrace him into our family? Let us know in the poll!
#mascot #branding #OpenSourceDesign
AntennaPod reshared this.
It immediately reminded me of Cl***y, even before I read any comment. That is, not really good memories.
As long as it comes hidden behind a content warning, I guess I can live with it.
I don't mean to be harsh or devaluate the work done here, so I'll try to be more specific. The combo metallic-object-that-sit-on-a-desktop with eyeballs-that-stare-at-you-all-day under those exageratingly-friendly-eyebrowns, it reminds me of office work, management, and surveillance.
Michael Gemar (@michaelgemar@mstdn.ca)
@Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social @davew@mastodon.social More details specifically on Crowdstrike moving its macOS implementation off of kernel and into user space (in 2020): https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/crowdstrike-supports-new-macos-big-sur/Mastodon Canada
the ocsp fetcher on seirdy.one has problems now. i need to switch to a proper ocsp fetcher to complete my “I can’t believe it’s not Caddy™” setup. Disabled OCSP Stapling in the meantime.
using shell scripts for ocsp stapling file refreshing is bad for puppy.
Seirdy’s Home
My personal IndieWeb site. I write about and develop software to promote user autonomy. Topics include accessibility, security, privacy, and software freedom.Seirdy’s Home
events.gnome.org/event/209/pag…
#GUADEC2024
I see a joke template.
"As someone fascinated by infant baptism, The Godfather (1972) was a real disappointment. How would you like it if I took you to see a film called 'Sicilian New Yorkers Murdering One Another' and it was just an hour and a half of people promising to bring up a child as a Christian"
youtube.com/live/ynIKMiRwn3s?f…
#GUADEC2024
GUADEC 2024 – Day 2, track 1
GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...YouTube
Apocalypse
#technomage #unix_surrealism #comic #glenda #openbsd #cirno #9front #fediart #mastoart #penguin #counter #crowdstrike
Pencils Made From Recycled Coffee Grounds Are Functional and Smell Great » Moss and Fog
Utilizing discarded coffee grounds, this pencil shows that food waste can be turned into something useful and beautiful.Moss And Fog (Moss and Fog)
victor tsaran reshared this.
I just stumbled across a truly cool design hack that leverages unicode to bold characters where no bolding is possible.
When i went to bookmark thetinypod.com/ the title inserted into the form was bolded.
I wrote the code that put the title in that form. There's NO way formatting should - or can - come through.
Then it got weirder.
🧐 Mini Investigation Time
🧵 1/?
NVDA on Windows with eSpeak NG reads it like this:
back hand index pointing right letter 1d601 letter 1d5f6 letter 1d5fb letter 1d606 Pod back hand index pointing left
Seirdy likes this.
Both NVDA with the Windows OneCore David voice (the default for new NVDA installs) and Windows 11 Narrator with one of the newer natural voices read it as "back hand index pointing right Pod back hand index pointing left".
I don't have JAWS on this machine.
@matt
TalkBack / Firefox: right finger tiny pod left finger.
IIRC, TalkBack started treating math symbols as letters a couple versions ago because of their misuse on social media. Which has left the blind mathematics community annoyed.
Sensitive content
Best analysis I've seen of the disastrous failures at Microsoft and Clownstrike" that took down so many vital services: wheresyoured.at/crowdstruck-2/…
"What we're seeing today isn't just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder."
CrowdStruck
Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala) When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to …Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)
Erwin
in reply to Archos • • •