About the mass layoff at fly.io last month, which I just learned about (see my last boost, gts.thewordnerd.info/@nolan/st…), I don't know what to make of this except that they must have recklessly tried to grow too fast. Anyway, it makes me much less inclined to use this infrastructure provider, especially since a friend was one of the ones laid off.
Well, that's a first. Today I was part of a mass layoff at fly.io.I guess the only consolation, if you can in fact call it that, is that most of my team seems to have gotten laid off too, including my manager. So it didn't have anything to do with me.
Still processing everything, but I was planning on leaving Texas next year and this definitely messes with those plans.
I'm not anywhere near dire financial straights, so there's that, but as someone with a severe disability I'm used to exploitative employment situations, and Fly wasn't that, so I don't know where I'll look next if I want to avoid the "hire disabled folks because they're desperate" trap.
Gonna keep breathing, taking it one day at a time. That's all I can do right now.
From a Mailing List:
As some of you may already know, System76 is working on their new Linux graphical interface, the COSMIC desktop. They have created a form with some questions related to accessibility. If anyone is interested in participating in the survey, please access the address below:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
#accessibility #Linux #foss #orca #blind
reshared this
Well, not the happiest intro but I’l cut/paste this here while I still remember then add a proper intro spoons allowing..⬇️
Please #boost and share to other platforms spoons allowing.
Seems I’m desperate enough to go to the media for help. Yes, the trapped woman in the article below is me.
My story: thecanary.co/global/world-anal…
More info on how to help:: buymeacoffee.com/halcionandon/…
I’ve tried every level of government and they simply won’t help. Please ask people if they have a spare room or somewhere to go. Maybe you have somewhere?
Is anybody a #DisabilityAdvocate? #SocialWorker? Need help.
Please don’t give me contacts for domestic violence orgs. They don’t help disabled people with housing & only offer counselling. Also, that list of disability advocates going around for #Melbourne #Australia (where I am) is outdated - there aren’t any in my catchment. So I’m looking for volunteers with some background.
Thanks for reading
#PwME #LongCovid #MECFS #Hypothyroidism #ChronicIllness #Neisvoid #NacissisticAbuse ##Housing #Dysautonomia #SocialWork #MedMastodon #PWLC #MutualAid
#HumanRights #Press
@mecfs @chronicillness @neisvoid
@disability @disabilityjustice @socialwork @dyssupport
@mutualaid
(If I’ve broken any rules in posting this, please let me know.)
Very pleased with the news that iOS on the newer phones will use JPEG XL instead of HEIF.
Now we wait for the chrome team to change course and for image optimizers and CDNs to support and process JPEG XL images.
one of my regrets is when i wrote that article on stylometric fingerprinting. i should have waited to get better at stylometric mimicry and focused on how i did that to improve anonymity and make it harder to connect alts (a bunch of custom vale.sh rules to remove style and conform to a boring technical style, then reintroducing a target’s style). instead i kind of spawned this community of people interested in using it for forensics.
i know they’ll see this post but idc at this point lmao
on the other hand, LLM slop awareness has created more bad stylometric analysts than any blog post of mine ever could.
“this was clearly written by an LLM because it uses [very common vocabulary preferences]!”
There are clear tells, and LLMs like ChatGPT do have a set of (cringeworthy) emergent loose style guides, but I usually don’t rely on this sort of thing. I don’t have a linguistics background. I can claim to be good at fingerprinting avoidance but actual fingerprinting is too error prone.
They have shown a consistent commitment to accessibility in their apps, and if you needed support, they always provided detailed blind-friendly instructions.
It appears the company is now out of business. People updating their iPhones this weekend are finding the app is not being pushed to their new phones. That's because it is no longer in the App Store. My research indicates that they've not been answering emails for some time, and there are records of bankruptcy filings for some of their country-specific companies.
If you want the app to continue working and you use iOs, you may be able to use an app called iMazing to copy it from your old iPhone to your computer, then copy it from your computer to your new iPhone. But if this works at all, it may be temporary, because at some point one would expect their cloud services to stop working as well once the bills aren't paid, and then the products will be useless.
Such a pity.
I don't run a BT Speak Pro, but I do develop hardware based on the CM4. An internal temperature of 50 C is faintly warm, but not much to worry about.
By comparison, an almost completely idle Raspberry Pi 5 on my desk is sitting at 54 C.
There are ways to reduce thermal activity, but they might affect the BT Speak Pro's usability
turning off cores is the big one.
Seriously, I'd check with Blazie if they think this could cause problems. You're not hitting thermal problems at the moment, and you might find the device becomes slow or unresponsive
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they're quoting Fight Club.
Fight Club.
A satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized. And that Tyler Durden isn't the hero but a personification of the main character's mental illness.
His “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.
#FightClub #MentalHealth #ToxicMasculinity #Psychology #MentalIllness #Snowflake
formless, shapeless
water can flow, water can crash
be water my friend
Bruce Lee
Gruß Thomas
Ja, nutze bitte Spam-Rules: tuta.com/support#spam
Wenn du es einfach verschiebst, trainierst du zwar den Filter für alle; aber für einen direkten Effekt für dich gibt es Spam-Rules.
Gruß Thomas
While Mastodon has been moving slowly in this direction over the last year or so, nothing (here or elsewhere) has managed to replace before-time Twitter for breaking news, local emergency alerts, or a getting a quick general sense of what's going on in the world.
Yes, I know there are some people who don't want real-world information here, but I think this is a real, significant loss.
I’ve never understood the “Sellout Singh” moniker. From the position of having (only!) 25 seats in a Parliament of 338, the NDP has seen real substantial action on key elements of their platform: national dental care, pharmacare, and childcare programs. This seems to me like a job well done!
It’s only a ‘sellout’ to ideologues who don’t want these things. So every time PP launches that phrase he’s telling Canadians that their health and wellness are not his first priority.
@menelion
Salut - j' ai d' abord regardé cette super vidéo :
m.youtube.com/watch?v=rlNtyhGL…
Et comme j' ai un 2eme ancien portable qui a complètement planté (à l' occasion d' une mise à jour de Windows ! que je ne supporte plus),
J' ai demandé à un réparateur de m' installer Linux Mint. J' en suis très satisfait. Aucun problème d' adaptation pour moi habitué à Windows ( et complètement nul en informatique).
The term you are looking to dislike is "Generative AI". AI/ML has been used for decades and continues to be used for many useful, ethical, and not at all wasteful purposes.
It's what makes your low-light photos less noisy, it's how OCR works, it's how speech recognition works, it's how low-cost motion capture works.
Remember the original Kinect? That was powered by ML (paper).
GenAI, specifically, is the grift.
hackers.town/users/calcifer/st…
Please stop demonizing “AI”; the stuff you have a problem with isn’t AI research or AI tech, it’s a very small subset of that domain that (a)has ethical issues with training data sourcing and (b)is being horribly misused/way overly trustedAI research is valuable and important, and MOST of it doesn’t have these problems. It’s doing things like increasing the reliability of cancer screenings, helping astronomers make better observations, improving assistive technology, accelerating medical research, etc.
Not all AI is “train a chat bot” or “train an image generator” for nefarious or stupid purposes
Another small detail: I often need to scroll up in #chatty to reread something when composing a msg. Going back to the last msg of the conversation by taping the 🔵 would close the ⌨️ forcing me touch into the text area again (and causing visual distraction). We can fix this by having the 🔵 not take focus.
Posting this to demo it can be a one line change in a UI file to make #LinuxMobile work better. So please get involved! #Gtk 's GtkInspector is great to figure such things out.
“what if we just stopped having AI, because it’s bad and I don’t like it”
is magical thinking that makes the horoscope look rigorous, and gets posted here three times an hour as though it’s a revelation. The toothpaste will not go back in the tube because you will it.
If a thing is bad and it harms us, the solution is a POLICY REMEDY
How will we make AI more expensive, limiting its wasteful application? What regulatory burden will you place on industrial consumption of energy and water?
Register at meetup.com/openstreetmap-belgi…
had a desire to do some cryptography today and I'm very grateful for Cryptographic Right Answers latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/c…
looks like there's also a 2024 post-quantum version here latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/c…
#SoftwareFreedomDay2024 #OpenSource #FOSS
Google have really stolen an accessibility march on Apple with image descriptions with rich detail, built right into Talkback.
No more sharing to other apps, just focus on an image, single tap with three fingers and select Describe Image.
Browsing images on social media has never been so interesting or easy.
Here is an example, taken at Bewdly safari park:
A rhinoceros is standing in a grassy field in front of a wooden fence. The rhinoceros is facing the left of the image, its head is down and its long horn is visible. The rhinoceros is gray in color with a large, bulbous body and short, thick legs. The grass in the field is a vibrant green. The fence is made of brown wood and has a wire mesh on top. Beyond the fence, there are trees with green foliage. The image is taken from a slightly elevated angle. The time is 11:29.
Thank you Google. As a totally blind person from birth, I never thought I would be interested in pictures, I love them now.
This thread highlights one of the things I don’t like the most about people on the fedi: the insufferable arrogance of people (usually tech folks) who think this place should stick to their narrow vision and openly disparage anything that deviates from from that.
The beauty of the fedi is we can literally do anything we want here. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other. There is enough space on the internet for us to have our own special little places.
The dogma I see from people complaining about not wanting ads, when you are literally promoting stuff in your bio or not wanting influencers when we boost the sentiments we agree with and saying everything should be free when being on the fedi costs money is so ridiculous it’s beginning to border on straight up bigotry. It’s ok if one doesn’t like these things, but fighting to keep them out of the fedi because of that is replicating the centralized environments we say we allegedly one to get away from.
Not having these things is not what differentiates the fedi from centralized platforms. Giving people the tools to build whatever experience they want safely is what is going to put this place over the top.
Anything less than that and it’s just recreating less featured versions of stuff we already have.
Mekka does a good job of laying out why basing the direction of the fedi based on what we don’t like is a losing game, especially when those dislikes are based on shallow and myopic points.
My dislikes of places like TikTok outpace my likes, but one of the things it has over the fedi is diversity of content, which is ridiculous to me considering it’s a closed platform with wonky curation.
I can fun stuff, serious stuff, comforting and informative stuff all together because it has a variety of people from all walks of life sharing what they think is interesting.
The fedi has always fought against this diversity while claiming this place is ‘better’ while refusing to acknowledge the tooling is worse, safety is an after thought in most places and most fedi projects are managed by untrustworthy people.
I believe in the fedi becoming the de facto experience on the web, but there is a lot of to do to get there. We still haven’t realized the potential of this place because, quite honestly the platforms we have at the moment are not good enough for use by people who don’t have extensive experience in tech. And that’s not even getting into the inherent bigotry of the fedi for anything not white.
This place still just lacks the basics when it comes to building dynamic communities.
Just learned about Emissary, the social web toolkit.
At first glance, it looks like an extensible server that lets you define/extend ActivityPub types with your own, or with custom workflows/access rules.
Now I have to keep myself from going down a million rabbit holes with this. Tempted to dust off my old federated Steam/Itch game/digital project distribution idea, seems a whole lot more doable with something like Emissary than entirely from scratch.
Seirdy
in reply to Christine Hall • • •