mastodon - Link to source

We've had great feedback on our recent In-Process article on creating portable copies of NVDA. A lot of people use them for testing out beta's of new versions, particularly 2024.1. Have you been trying the 2024.1 betas, and do you use a portable version to do it? If you'd like to find out more, check out our article here: nvaccess.org/post/in-process-9…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #Testing #Beta #NewVersion #PreRelease #Accessibility

Screenshot of the NVDA launcher window showing the license agreement. Of the four action buttons, the "Create portable copy" button is selected.

In-Process 9th February 2024

We are continuing to get closer to the release of 2024.1. As well as a new beta for that, we also have a new 2023.3 point release. Also this week, we have a look at portable copies of NVDA. What ar…
NV Access
#Accessibility #nvdasr #testing #nvda #beta #newversion #prerelease

David Goldfield reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source

Folks in the #UK, my old colleague Dr. Adrian Bowyer is running a petition:

"New rules for manufacturers of medical device implants

We believe it should be made illegal for manufacturers of medical devices implanted into patients to regularly charge the patient for upgrades or maintenance."

It also calls for "IP" to be released if a manufacturer fails. I feel this subject is important enough to ask you to disseminate the link. Thank you.

petition.parliament.uk/petitio…


Petition: New rules for manufacturers of medical device implants

Petitions - UK Government and Parliament
#uk
in reply to miki

mastodon - Link to source

Incident Creator ❎

@miki Either that company is still going to be running, in which case the code is licenceable, or the company is defunct, in which case the medically approved IP is now available. No doubt there will be buggering around, but I would expect that buggering around to be taken into account when a licence for the next medical device comes up for approval, and that may prejudice its chances.
@miki

mastodon - Link to source

Yes, #Mastodon supports #HCaptcha, but HCaptcha mines details of some of us with disabilities by asking us to sign up with an email address to, as they put it, 'get an accessibility cookie.' If you use that service, it is a bad time for many. HCaptcha is not my friend.
Edit: For reasons why I categorically state HCaptcha is evil, see this post I made in response to someone else. People have quite rightly asked me to clarify my stance, so here it is: universeodon.com/@FreakyFwoof/…

Andre Louis

2024-02-19 07:18:12


@craftxbox It's evil, because *only* if you're blind or unable to complete the visual captcha, do they require your email address.
'Oh, let's be another corporation, but we're niche and specific. We only want email addresses of those who are blind/visually impaired, so we could, at our discretion, spam them with blindness-specific products or services that our visual users would never see, as they never had to provide an email address.'
When you go to the chemist (drug store or whatever it's called today) to buy, oh I dono, tampons, do you have to give them your email address because you're a woman?
Nope. Very, very definitely nope, but because I'm blind, I have to give some nameless, faceless company my address, to have a cookie that hardly ever works anyway at the best of times, and even when it does, is now tracking me across any site with *their* version of so-called captcha?
No. Absolutely not. Get the hell out with that.

#Mastodon #hcaptcha
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

reshared this

in reply to John Ulrik

mastodon - Link to source

Andre Louis

@craftxbox It's evil, because *only* if you're blind or unable to complete the visual captcha, do they require your email address.
'Oh, let's be another corporation, but we're niche and specific. We only want email addresses of those who are blind/visually impaired, so we could, at our discretion, spam them with blindness-specific products or services that our visual users would never see, as they never had to provide an email address.'
When you go to the chemist (drug store or whatever it's called today) to buy, oh I dono, tampons, do you have to give them your email address because you're a woman?
Nope. Very, very definitely nope, but because I'm blind, I have to give some nameless, faceless company my address, to have a cookie that hardly ever works anyway at the best of times, and even when it does, is now tracking me across any site with *their* version of so-called captcha?
No. Absolutely not. Get the hell out with that.
@craftxbox
in reply to Andre Louis

mastodon - Link to source

miki

I get your point, I really do, but what alternative do you suggest?

Sure, ReCaptcha works with no email requirement, but that's only because they're Google and have it already. Audio captchas are a terrible idea, I've helped out non-english speakers over the phone with ReCaptcha enough times to know this first hand. Everything else (including audio) is trivial to solve in the age of LLMs and provides basically 0 protection. You can use weaker solutions and rely on IP reputation, but then blind people on "shadier" networks are completely out of luck, Google has this problem too.

HCaptcha is the worst system of all, except for all the others.

in reply to modulux

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@modulux Just tested with textcaptcha.com. GPT 3 is surprisingly bad at this, about 25% success rate, but GPT-4 gets it all on the first try, with a minimum amount of tokens used, probably less than 20 per request overall.

All that with a 4-line bash script as follows:

Q=$(curl -s api.textcaptcha.com/myemail@ex… | jq -r .q)
echo $Q
llm -m4 --system 'You are a helpful assistant. Answer the question given in the briefest way possible, provide just the answer, no explanation. Write numbers as digits, not words.' "$Q"

@modulux
in reply to modulux

mastodon - Link to source

miki

@modulux Visual captchas, especially the "pplease click x" are far harder to solve, their entire point is that these images are hard to classify by AI, and you're doing the work for them. Besides, it's not just the clicking that matters, but also other things, like the how natural and human-like the path your mouse travels on is.

Then there's also the Chinese-style "put the scissors inside the square" captcha which modern vision models can't really help with due to their inability to provide coordinates and manipulate image objects.

@modulux
in reply to John Ulrik

mastodon - Link to source

Drew Mochak

@ujay68 Their solution was developed entirely on their own without outreach to the blind community. It forces us to disclose our disability, which allows us to be tracked by Intuition Machines, and across the internet by whoever has a business relationship with them, and/or knows to look for the cookie. It also allows them to deny us access to any service that uses them, for any reason or none.
@John Ulrik
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

pleroma - Link to source

Is there any good resource for the nitty-gritty details of building #Curl (mostly concerned with the library) for Windows, specifically with MSVC?

I muddled through getting things working from the little bit in the Readme.md in the winbuild folder, but I could really use more, especially since I'm having a hell of a time getting it to compile with native SSL support from within Visual Studio (weirdly, I can get it fine from a CLI session?).

Web searches seem to really love proffering everything.curl.dev/ to me, but it'd be barely more helpful even if it wasn't entirely based on out-of-date stuff that doesn't apply anymore :(

Today I Learned for programmers

tiloid.com
#curl
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

pleroma - Link to source

keithzg

@bagder Yeah fair, part of my problem though is honestly I'm muddling through poorly enough that I haven't always known what questions to entirely ask, or what problems even really relate to Curl specifically rather than, say, the crazy idiosyncrasies of Microsoft's various build systems! In fact so far other than silly mistakes I've made, it has all turned out to be specific weird Microsoft stuff, hah!

And at this point I feel confident I understand the Curl MSVC build specific enough that I could ask meaningful questions on the forums or lists if I run into any further problems. But, the sparseness of documentation did make it a bit hard for me to get to that point — not that Curl's build documentation wasn't far more readable and immediately useful on things than that of any of the Microsoft bits I tripped over, mind you ;)

@daniel:// stenberg://

mastodon - Link to source

:mastodon_oops: FLOSS.social users, despite constant firefighting of many hundreds of spammers in the past couple days, the traffic has unfortunately pushed our database size into the next tier of hosting costs, increasing our monthly Mastodon server cost by 20%.

⌛ We're currently at 76% of our weekly goal to meet costs. Can you chip in? Even $1/€1 can make a big difference.

liberapay.com/FLOSS.social


FLOSS.social's profile - Liberapay

FLOSS.social was launched on 1 April 2018 as a Mastodon instance for people who care about, support, or build Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Of course, our …
Liberapay

mastodon - Link to source

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today with 12 updated and 2 added apps:

* Snaptick: a task list manager
* Fossify Voice Recorder: extends your green collection with a voice recorder

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzySoftRepo :awesome:


IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
IzzyOnDroid App Repo
#android #free #apps #AndroidAppRain #IzzySoftRepo

mastodon - Link to source
Join Deane Blazie, David Goldfield and Stephen Clower on the next episode of Tek Talk on Monday, February 19 at 8:00 PM Eastern Time. We'll be talking about the BT Speak as well as answering your questions. Here's the Zoom link.
us02web.zoom.us/j/839935813?pw…

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems.
Zoom Video

mastodon - Link to source

Ads are Google's bread and butter.

If you watch YouTube on Firefox, be warned: You might experience a 5 second delay.

Google says: Disable your ad blocker, pay to watch or use Google's Chrome.

androidauthority.com/youtube-r…


YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users (Update: Statement)

Users are reporting that YouTube has begun adding a five second delay when loading a video on non-Chrome browsers like Firefox. Read on!
Aamir Siddiqui (Android Authority)

mastodon - Link to source

I received this email from Duxnews, a service of Duxbury Systems. It is from Caryn Holladay regarding the streaming of David Holladay's funeral service.

From: duxnews-bounce@freelists.org <duxnews-bounce@freelists.org> On Behalf Of Anne Ronco

Dear Duxbury Community,

I am responding to the devastating announcement about my dearest husband David Holladay's passing, to add the information on streaming his funeral service.

Streaming of the service, scheduled for noon Eastern Standard Time on Monday, Feb. 19, will be available during or after the service at:

congregationshalom.org/worship…

Press the Play button just after the level 3 heading "Live streaming of services is now available!" Note that if your screen reader does not recognize that as a button, you can use an alternative, such as a simulated left click.

With warmest regards for the community that meant so much to David,

Caryn


Worship - Congregation Shalom

Worship Shabbat Service schedule for 2022/23. We invite you to join us for Shabbat Services – everyone is welcome! At Congregation Shalom, prayer and religious celebration are an important part of the community’s life.
Congregation Shalom

mastodon - Link to source

Someone on tumblr posted this survey to get the math people all riled up and I think it's working.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…


Mathematical Conventions Survey

Everyone knows that 36 questions can lead to love. But can answering questions lead to hate? Research has shown that answering the following 100 questions with friends or potential lovers is a leading cause of murder among mathematicians in the Uni…
Google Docs

mastodon - Link to source

Today I got some questions about logic, like:

what do provability, decidability, consistency, and completeness mean?
how do we work with equality in set theory?

I don't know articles that explain topics like this *to non-mathematicians*, clearly and crisply, without becoming overlong or heavy with notation. Do you?

I looked around and found this "Introduction to First-Order Logic":

builds.openlogicproject.org/co…

but the very first sentence is

"You are probably familiar with first-order logic from your first introduction to formal logic."

which is basically a way of saying "fuck you - if you don't know this stuff already I won't explain it to you".

As a student I liked Boolos and Jeffrey's book "Computability and Logic":

alcom.ee.ntu.edu.tw/system/pri…

but that's more like a course than what I'm thinking of here: a collection of essays that explain different topics in plain English.

I also liked Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach", but that's a massive quirky elaborate tale, not a simple clear explanation.

Wikipedia articles are packed with information but they aren't self-contained, clearly written essays. Articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are better in some ways, but they often "show off" by including more advanced material.

Sigh....

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

mastodon - Link to source

There’s a lot to chew on in this short article (ht @ajsadauskas):
bbc.com/worklife/article/20240…

“An AI resume screener…trained on CVs of employees already at the firm” gave candidates extra marks if they listed male-associated sports, and downgraded female-associated sports.

Bias like this is enraging, but completely unsurprising to anybody who knows half a thing about how machine learning works. Which apparently doesn’t include a lot of execs and HR folks.

1/


AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants

As firms increasingly rely on artificial intelligence-driven hiring platforms, many highly qualified candidates are finding themselves on the cutting room floor.
Charlotte Lytton (BBC)
@Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
in reply to Archos

mastodon - Link to source

Jachym Cepicky

@archos No ... díky. Před 15 lety a 10kg jsem běhal 30 jednou týdně bez vody a bez tyčinek.

Ále co, po delší době je to něco přes půl marathon a kdybych si nabral víc jídla, mohlo to být i jakž takž na pohodu (i když teda 30 na pohodu jsem vlastně nedal nikdy, většinou jsem šel hned spát).

Už jsem starší, a poznám, když se o mě pokouší křeče, nikam se neženu. Ale okolo 6min/km v tom bahně je vlastně pro mě dobrej výsledek.

@Archos

mastodon - Link to source

Had a wonderful time with Tunmi13, @blind_lightning, and @meatbag on our #FinalHour stream last night I had some issues streaming myself, but both the stream on The Lower Elements, and Tunmi's stream worked pretty well, aside from a few audio glitches. Be sure to check them out if you missed them live:

youtube.com/live/LRBFui4Qlik?s…

youtube.com/live/hgWIml9vzeU?s…


Final Hour - Our Zombies FPS

Final Hour is an audiogame inspired by Call of Duty Zombies made by some of our members.
YouTube
#finalhour @Eagle Eyed @The Programming Linguist

mastodon - Link to source

I'm very honoured that my interactive fiction game Xanthippe's Last Night with Socrates has won in three categories at the IFDB Awards, two for genre and one for programming language:

* Outstanding Historical Game of 2023
* Outstanding Romance Game of 2023
* Outstanding Ink Game of 2023.

ifdb.org/viewcomp?id=4g63bkqob…

#InteractiveFiction #IF #Inkle #Romance #Xanthippe #Socrates #GameAwards

The 2023 IFDB Awards - Details

IFDB is a game catalog and recommendation engine for Interactive Fiction, also known as Text Adventures. IFDB is a collaborative, wiki-style community project. Members can contribute game listings, reviews, recommendations, and more.
ifdb.org
#romance #interactivefiction #GameAwards #if #inkle #xanthippe #socrates

mastodon - Link to source
Kdo jsou lidé co organizují zítřejší protesty: visegradsky-jezdec.cz/traktory… (ve zkratce, lidi co dřou takovou bídu, že se loni neskutečně napakovali a co lezou Putinovi do prdele).

Traktory pro Moskvu - Visegradský jezdec 🏇

Situace se opakuje. Nespokojení lidé chtějí protestovat proti vládě, protestu se ale organizovaně chopí ruská pátá ...
Karel Paták (Visegradský jezdec 🏇)

mastodon - Link to source

Denuncian por agresión a una apoderada del PP por agredir a uno de Sumar en Vigo...el PP lo niega, claro...

"Los hechos ocurrieron alrededor de las 12:45 horas en el Colegio Electoral de Balaídos, distrito 4, cuando una apoderada del PP se encontraba "en el interior de una de las cabinas, manipulando las papeleras y ocultando las de los demás partidos"

epe.es/es/politica/20240218/de…


Denuncian la agresión a un apoderado de Sumar en Vigo y el PP lo niega

Un apoderado del PP en Vigo ha agredido a otro de Sumar, según ha denunciado este último partido ante la Policía.
El Periódico de España

mastodon - Link to source

Paper purporting to have fascinating results.
Paywalled. It's 2024 people! How is this still a thing! Can you downvote a website??

nature.com/articles/s41562-024…


Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth - Nature Human Behaviour

The authors document wide variation in information density and speed of communication across the world’s languages.
Nature
in reply to Lana Sinapayen

mastodon - Link to source

Lana Sinapayen

Shamefully, I have one paywalled Nature paper. We all agreed in advance that we would make it open access (I'm not 1st author). Come publication day, I notice that it's not open access. 1st author checks with editor. Editor says it's "too late" to make it open access now that it's been published, even if it was published paywalled by mistake. These people still live in 1924. (we put the paper on Arxiv.)

mastodon - Link to source

Apple has been fined €500 million by the EU for its rule preventing apps like Spotify from telling users they can purchase subscriptions outside the App Store to avoid Apple’s 30% fee.

This is Apple’s first EU fine. It’s probably not its last.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…


EU to Fine Apple About €500 Million Over Music Services, FT Says

The European Union is close to hitting Apple Inc. with its first ever antitrust fine as well as a ban on App Store rules that the bloc believes thwart competition, according to the Financial Times.
Aisha S Gani (Bloomberg)

mastodon - Link to source
👉 weeklyosm.eu/archives/17047 👈 Issue 708 of weeklyOSM is out. 🌏 涵蓋 #開放街圖 #osm 世界大小事的新一期 weeklyOSM 已經發佈 🚀 Lisez les dernières nouvelles de l'univers #openstreetmap 🗺️ Viele Neuigkeiten aus der #osm Welt 📰 新一期的OSM周刊已经发布 🌏 Se ha publicado un nuevo número del semanarioOSM 🌐 最新の週刊OSMが発行されました。⛩️ 주간OSM 최신호가 나왔습니다 💬 Тижневик OSM тепер доступний Українською 📲 @openstreetmap@a.gup.pe @openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
#openstreetmap #OSM #開放街圖 @openstreetmap group @OpenStreetMap community

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

Probiert mal das HeliBoard [1] (Android-Tastatur). Ist gerade in einer Alpha-Version erschienen. Durch das Nachladen einer externen Bibliothek [2] kann man eine Swipe-Funktion freischalten. Klappt super! Wird meine neue standard Tastatur.

[1] github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard

[2] github.com/erkserkserks/openbo…


GitHub - Helium314/HeliBoard: Customizable and privacy-conscious open-source keyboard

Customizable and privacy-conscious open-source keyboard - Helium314/HeliBoard
GitHub
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

IzzyOnDroid ✅

@Lapidarius Ah, Danke! Der Vergleich mit ASK interessiert mich definitiv (das habe ich auf einem meiner Geräte im Einsatz). Ein Vergleich mit Florisboard wäre auch interessant (hier mag ich besonders die Clipboard-Verwaltung; die funktioniert bei ASK nicht wirklich so toll und vergisst nach einem Boot immer alles).

mastodon - Link to source
Spent a while sitting on my sofa playing this wonderful #instrument. I really like my innato that I've talked about a few times here, but this huaca, another triple-chambered #ocarina, and although more difficult to play has a very soothing sound too. The sound ports on top give you a very 3D in-your-face sonic experience. #Flute
Most huacas (Quechua for “sanctuary”), like this one, are based on the work of Sharon Rowell during the 80s, and aren't "traditional". The name was given later.
The huaca sitting on my coffee table. Its three globular chambers, two equally-size ones at the front and a larger at the back are connected at a top via the Y-shaped configuration of air ducts radiating out from the mouthpiece. The chambers are also connected to each other by horizontal extensions at their widest part, and highlighting their triangular configuration. The mouthpiece has two slits; the front one for the two melody chambers and the back for the drone. The front chambers both have 3 finger and 1 thumb holes, and the drone chamber has two palm holes; one for either hand. The chambers have flat bases, allowing you to support the entire flute on your pinkies. In short, it's quite a lot to keep track of. The flute is decorated with clay of various natural colours. Because the shape is rather abstract, when I've thrown this photo into AI it has resulted in hilarious descriptions of it somehow thinking it's a dog toy for dispensing treats, a stand of some kind, a massager, or a funny statue of a cow. All EPIC fails, but just too funny!
#flute #instrument #ocarina
⇧