They say AI isn’t profitable. That’s not true.
Twice just this past week, I’ve been contacted and paid to fix problems caused by developers who relied on AI to configure servers.

#AI #IT #SysAdmin

I really love this one bug where Firefox dev tools' right-click Inspect Element button works reliably for a bit, then inexplicably stops and pulls up the browser console instead, meaning the item doesn't actually inspect the element. It pulls up the browser console input area instead, which is of course what I wanted to do in the first place when trying to inspect an element.

Related, I like this other bug where tabbing from the browser console switches focus between the text input and console messages, but shift-tab lives in its own world with its own unique list of elements, navigating instead through the console messages area and what looks to be a long list of CSS selectors and styles. I tried using this to reach the element inspector but can't do that either.

Becoming less and less apologetic about my AI use by the day. Want me to not use the water-and-power-guzzling mechanoid? Don't make it so difficult to use every basic tool that I have to ask another tool to use it for me.

Trump threat leads Greenland to release ‘crisis’ guidelines

ctvnews.ca/world/article/green…

We need the same here. If the Hummers roll in.

Greenland releases ‘crisis’ guidelines as Trump threat looms

Greenland’s government unveiled a new brochure on Wednesday offering advice to the population in the event of a “crisis” in the territory, which U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to seize from ally Denmark.

^{AFP Staff (CTVNews)}

During the early pandemic, everyone was using online tools for lessons, work, & events. As soon as hegemons wanted not just "essential workers" but everyone back at the grindstone, the accessibility that online can offer was yanked back from disabled ppl.

We warned at the time that the lesson to take from how "horrible" people thought online schooling was was to *improve* it. That the years of ableist underinvestment in creative accessible online tools & training for presenters/teachers was largely to blame. Abled ppl ignored this or wrote op-eds saying online was inherently bad.

Just this week alone, we've heard how schools in Minnesota are trying to instruct students online and doctors are doing telemedicine because of ICE kidnappers. A rail crash in Catalunya resulted in a university cancelling exams because students can't commute to school.

Even if you're naïve enough to assume there will only be one pandemic, there are other reasons for accessibility.

#Ableism #Accessibility #EmergencyPreparedness

Reading about #Nvidia CEO crying about people not liking #AI, though it was a good time to recover this historic piece of art from the Copyright wars of the start of the century. Cc'ing @pluralistic

Original at flickr.com/photos/akma/9208227…

In episode 1 million and 1 of Google breaking accessibility, someone decided to slap aria hidden on basically the entire page on google drive public link pages, but here's the weird thing, only in Firefox. I don't know if chromium and Safari browsers just have a workaround just for this kind of developer/AI stupidity and bypass it and firefox doesn’t, or if something in google's code only breaks this on firefox.

Either way recovering out of this is fun. I have to use AXSHammer to kill all aria hidden. But, this doesn't always work. If I get lucky and the right thing gets focused Shift+F10 will give me the firefox context menu and I can do it. If not, well, just gotta keep refreshing the page until it does because due to the whole invisible to the screen reader problem NVDA/VoiceOver won't let me bring the mouse to anywhere useful to pop up the menu.

You know how far-right grifters use the rhetorical technique of naming a real problem and then offering a scam solution?

People are falling for that with Mark Carney's speech

After a good 30 minutes, I've gotten Emacspeak working rather well with mastodon.el. Goodness all those Emoji. For now, n and p read next/prev post well, and t lets you know you're doing new toot. And that's all the making stuff I can do right now.

Dropbox link: dropbox.com/scl/fi/zz4632vjlau…

#Emacs #foss #emacspeak #accessibility #blind

Are you or is anyone you know colourblind?

Windows has a feature called colour filters, which may help the colours on your screen appear more distinct

You can turn it on and off with WIN + CTRL + C (if enabled in Settings)

#Windows #Tech #Accessibility

Have you ever helped people use their computers by talking to them over the phone, without seeing their screen? It can be frustrating if they tell you mostly irrelevant details that bury the important stuff.

This is the major problem with image description by AI. AI has no idea why the image was posted, so it gives irrelevant details.

Human-written image descriptions are much better at communicating an image's purpose.

More accessibility tips: fedi.tips/how-do-i-make-posts-…

#FediTips #Accessibility

How do I make my posts more accessible to blind, deaf and deafblind people on Mastodon and the Fediverse? How do I add alt texts? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

^fedi.tips

I live in a small town in Sweden. This morning I went out to my car (realising that I'd once again forgotten to lock the front door last night), drove along empty, wide roads to the nearest largeish town and parked in the brand new multistorey carpark by the railway station, where the first two hours' parking is free and the remainder of the time is very cheap.

I got out of the car without checking my surroundings, and as I leaned back in to get my bag out, I thought "In large parts of the world, I'd be asking to get mugged, or worse".

Then I walked along the clean, well-kept streets to the hospital, where I waited for less than 2 minutes for my mammography, which was completely free of charge.

This is Sweden. This is Europe. Why the FUCK are we trying to emulate, listening to, investing in or in any way having anything whatsoever to do with the utter insanity coming out of the USA?

And I don't just mean under the current, obviously barking, incumbent. I mean ever? They don't do things like we do. They don't believe in the same things that we do. This really is an us and a them situation, and we've been kidding ourselves for the last 80 years that they're like us.

Hello again, everything is still scary and hard and the tech job market is wild right now, so here's my semi-regular thread of open jobs I've found where your work could make the world better (or at least, not make it worse)

#FediHire #FOSSjobs

GenAI, The Snake Eating Its Own Tail: How tools like ChatGPT and Claude are destroying the ecosystems they rely on, and what to do about it ybrikman.com/blog/2026/01/21/g…

Great blog post. This one explained how Google, OpenAI and other AI companies killed the open web, which was once made of independent forums, news sites, wikis, blogs, high quality journalism websites, books, and fan fiction or art.

GenAI, The Snake Eating Its Own Tail: How tools like ChatGPT and Claude are destroying the ecosystems they rely on, and what to do about it

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have two superpowers. The first superpower is a boon: they can dramatically increase ...

^{Yevgeniy Brikman}

KEYBOARD NERDS ASSEMBLE!!!!!!!

youtube.com/watch?v=N3FEv1qw4_…

Fixing the Biggest Problem With Mechanical Keyboards

Adam recently met Ryan Norbauer, a designer and propmaker who is obsessed with mechanical computer keyboards. He has spent the past five years building what ...

^YouTube

Hey #believeinfilm friends,

Eastman Kodak Company has just announced that it will be distributing Tri-X and Ektar!

That's great news for folks who know about Alaris and its diminishing role as a 3rd party distributor, but does that really mean cheaper film?

My findings suggest no. This is not making film cheaper right now. It's making it more expensive.

The breakdown: analog.cafe/comments/2p2r

#filmphotography #analogphotography #photography

neat piece of invisible infrastructure: the Rust portable-atomic crate

your platform doesn’t support a particular type of atomic natively? not a problem, this crate gives you an implementation anyway

how? well there’s a global lock, you see. or, rather, 67 global locks, and which one gets used depends on the address of the atomic mod 67.

but, that’s kinda inefficient, so you wouldn’t want to use it unless it’s your only choice, right?

so they have a bunch of platform specific implementations, such as “let’s detect at runtime if cmpxchg16b is supported” or “this is a microcontroller so if we read it within one instruction we’re fine, and otherwise just disable the interrupts”

and as a result you can just use it and not really think about it, because in 99% of cases it’s gonna do the same thing as what you’d end up with if you bothered to optimize it manually

the ratio of elaborate internals to unassuming API surface is so great here you could easily blink and miss the fact that someone is pulling off heroic feats to make this happen

greetings folks i discovered an awesome addon that allows wikipedia search using nvda
@FreakyFwoof
wrote it and his addons can be found at link below :)

onj.me/nvda

It’s interesting to me that Trump has so quickly backed off on the threat of using force in Greenland. Someone talked him off the ledge. Maybe the massing European troops raised the stakes enough for his advisors to hesitate. Maybe the generals said they would not attack a NATO member nation (a clearly illegal order). Maybe he never had military support at all, and was talking out of his ass all along. Who knows? The point is, they called his bluff, and he folded like wet napkin. I think people need to learn from this. Calling Trump’s bluffs works, especially when you team up with other communities to call his bluff together.

#kakistocracy #greenland #davos

reuters.com/business/davos/det…

Americans: they removed the "de minimis exemptions" through the post.

Canadians: the what?

(brokerage fees)

RE: 101010.pl/@rzeczpospolita/1159…

O proszę, jaki rozwój.

• The "L" in salmon (16%, 2 votes)
• FBI warning on a DVD (50%, 6 votes)
• A Twitterer's opinion (41%, 5 votes)
• Nipples on the batsuit (16%, 2 votes)
• A spork (0%, 0 votes)
• Adobe updates (16%, 2 votes)
• This poll (8%, 1 vote)
• 1 ply toilet paper (33%, 4 votes)
• an ICE agent's testicles (75%, 9 votes)

(serious) Question.

If you run Linux servers without outside network access, how do you keep them up to date?
If a software vendor give you access to a repo to install their multi-package software, how do you do it? Or better, what do you expect from the vendor (but may not get)?

Thanks

(Edit: just to clarify. I'm not the sysadmin here. I have no control on any of these system, I'm just trying to figure out a way to make it easier for these customers)