I juggle (learned because SUN Servers came with three sand-balls and in the #SunOS manual, there was a chapter on how to juggle while you were waiting for the OS to install) and so Brah invited me to Tuesday Juggling at Capitola Beach!
I completely forgot I worked on those. Not Many of them mind you (expensive little buggers), bur occasionally in Engineering CAD/CAE/CAM I'd trip over them, and I knew xNIX so IRIX got shoveled in my direction. Good little machines tho.
Arby’s Steak Nuggets failed to disappoint. The sauce they bundled is a bit heavy for me but cut well with their more vinegary “Arby’s Sauce” and a dash or three of Cholula.
Their Deep Fried Turkey Club was not bad, but I would have rather had more of those steak nuggets.
I am happy to announce this book that i wrote a chapter in. My chapter looks at the ethics of #accessibility #sustainability and #OpenSource so touches on many threads. It is amazing to have contributed a small part of this first work of accessibility ethics. routledge.com/Digital-Accessib…
Digital Accessibility Ethics is a practical guide with an urgent goal: to help end tech exclusion of 1.3 billion people across the world with disabilities.
This is pretty wild. Checkout.com got hacked by a group that claims to be Shiny Hunters again. Checkout said in blog post that it would not be extorted by criminals.
"We will not pay this ransom.
Instead, we are turning this attack into an investment in security for our entire industry. We will be donating the ransom amount to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Oxford Cyber Security Center to support their research in the fight against cybercrime."
Far too many victim firms just pay up, to get back to business as usual asap. Imagine if a fraction of those victims instead paid into a fund for research that actively disrupts these groups.
Our statement detailing an incident concerning a legacy system. We outline our commitment to transparency, accountability, and planned investment in cyber security research.
Mozilla is adding a new feature called the 'AI Window' to its Firefox browser, which will include an integrated AI assistant and chatbot. This new "AI Window" will provide users with a dedicated space to chat directly with the browser's AI assistant, offering real-time help and interaction while they browse. So yet another AI browser that will have full access to what you do on the internet 😏
🎙️ Joplin will be part of the Open Source Friday ! Laurent Cozic will join GitHub’s Open Source Friday podcast to present Joplin, give a demo, share our vision, and chat live with the community. 📅 14 Nov 2025, 18:00–19:00 UTC 🔗 Join live on Twitch: twitch.tv/GitHub
For people who just got dumped into Web WhatsApp, note that it too has keyboard shortcuts, and isn't entirely hopeless. You can arrow in the table of chats and within a chat while in focus mode, a la discord. You can press alt+r while focused on a message to reply to it I think. All the keyboard shortcuts are shown in settings → keyboard shortcuts. The main thing it lacks is really the convenience features of WhatsAppPlus, like moving to the first unread message and gestures to rapidly switch between list of chats, current chat, and the edit.
Let's for the moment say that generative AI is Absolute Evil. No wiggle room, it's just straight up bad for EVERY use case.
Can all you smart AI hating people out there come up with good tools to help fill the gap?
Like, if using AI to generate code is bad, can we make programming languages or paradigms that lower the bar to entry and make it possible for more people to be empowered to create their own programs?
I feel like there are smart people making some very good points all around, but I can't help but wonder if all this negative energy is being mis-directed.
I feel like more people USED to have that vision. Remember Hypercard? Or Visual BASIC?
Where have all the tools like this that enable and empower gone?
I admit I'm as prone to the negative energy as the next person. What about Python, though? Guido used to have "Computer Programming for Everybody" as an explicit goal of Python. That reminds me, I should check on the status of accessibility in Tk, since Tkinter is the official entry point for GUI programming in Python.
@Feoh What do you think more people creating their own programs would achieve, realistically?
I'm a programmer by training and by trade, and I didn't create the overwhelming majority of programs I use daily.
Let's take your premise around and reverse it: let's say that generative AIs are absolutely good. They don't draw from a corpus of stolen work nor draw hazardous amounts of electricity and water and produce correct programs. What good would it be for most people?
@Hypolite Petovan @Feoh The majority of the code I've written never sees the light of day because it was some niche utility I wrote for a weirdly specific task that nobody else is ever going to give a crap about (highly customised scripts and stuff that wouldn't even make sense outside of my own personal system).
Programming is a useful tool to have in your toolbox, but most people can (and do) also generally get along quite well without it.
@Jonathan Lamothe Indeed, hence my question to @Feoh, what's the big deal about random people programming that somehow generative AI could address? (It can't)
@hypolite @me So, I want to apologize for my extreme response.
I'll admit I'm a bit frustrated with:
My perception that people do not in fact respond to the questions I pose and instead just keep restating the same absolutist stances that my daily workflow seems to me to refute
My perception that many people seem very out of touch with what current models can and can't do.I don't ask anyone to favor AI, it may in fact be a net negative for humanity. I just perceive that people often seem to work from incomplete information.
Re-reading your post it seems I over-reacted and you weren't necessarily doing any of those things.
@Feoh @Jonathan Lamothe Thank you for this. I am frequently equally frustrated in conversations about AI, specifically generative AIs based on Large Language models because the people who make any sort of claims about what they can or could do also are people with the least understanding of how it works technically.
The truth is that this crop of AI is engineered to fool us humans, including about their capabilities. Because that's the target model trainers have set for them. And it turns out machine learning systems are uncannily good at reaching their set goals, regardless of any other consideration.
And so you have people who use AIs casually who are rightfully bewildered by their apparent capabilities, while experts in their respective fields who try to use AIs to enhance their workflow end up dropping them for a variety of reasons (inaccuracy, lack of underlying understanding of the subject matter, loss of ownership of output, etc...).
Does this mean a fooling machine can't produce an accurate answers? Absolutely not, but it will make figuring out the inevitable inaccurate answers harder because it's already been so good at fooling the people who trained the model.
Even without considering the ethics (or mostly the lack thereof) of this current crop of AI, it cannot answer any need that isn't about fooling people at scale.
@NVAccess Question: Is there, or could there be, a standardized system in NVDA for layered commands, potentially supporting their own rebinding? Or can it already be accomplished? Let's face it, a user with many add-ons is likely to run into sheer mazes of arcane keystrokes and conflicts galore trying to juggle all the commands they expose. Some kind of system that would allow add-ons to declare a layer gesture and scope their scripts to only fire into it, or especially useful, for the user to define such a mapping via input gestures, would help ease this a lot. Some add-ons do already have layering, NVDA extension global plug-in is one of the big ones. But I wonder if a standard mechanism or an officially published extra would drive more add-ons to adopt this?
And just last week I discovered the "Check Input Gesturs" add-on which I mentioned in In-Process which does report conflicts: nvaccess.org/post/in-process-1…
But in terms of a standard layer system, I'm not sure if we have a request or anything for that currently?
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Please refer to NVDA Group topic, NVDA and NVDA Shortcut Key Collision Avoidance - Does this exist?, for more information and the comm...
Für alle, die vielleicht verwirrt sind ob der scharfen Kritik an den Aussagen von #Streeck vor allem auch aus der behinderten Community: Man darf die Frage, ob es bei nem Hundertjährigen noch lohnt teure Medikamente zu verabreichen NICHT stellen. Das ist eine absolut unveräußerliche Grenze, die wir nicht überschreiten dürfen. Dahinter stecken Ideen wie: ab bzw. bis zu welcher Überlebenswahrscheinlichkeit darf/soll man helfen? Wie viel ist ein Menschenleben wert? Was ist noch "rentabel", was nicht mehr? Das geht gegen die grundlegende Menschenwürde. Es wiegt Menschenleben und Lebenszeit In Geld auf. Es stellt eine lächerliche, ausgedachte kapitalistische Logik von "was lohnt sich" über den Menschen selbst. Das ist entmenschlichend, das darf NIEMALS passieren. Weil es letztlich auch immer die Frage danach stellt, welches Leben lebenswert ist. Das ist Eugenik in Reinform.
Thinking about how it'd be possible to compress strings in the FreeBSD kernel. There are lots of strings that are rarely used, and also, they would compress very well. They are usually ASCII and have lots of similarities (e.g. starting with "%s :", or all the printf format specifications).
The difficulty is how to make it happen and have the decompression happen transparently with minimal overhead and impact.
huh, for some reason I thought r/Blind divested from Reddit and went to Lemmy or something. Or am I confusing that with #RedditDrama from a few years ago?
as you can tell I'm VERY active on Reddit since then, lol
Ah well, still pop on for certain specific topics but definitely not my go-to place anymore. Not even sure if it's Reddit's fault so much as having lower tolerance for human bullshit anymore. 🤷♂️
Installed linux-discord on FreeBSD, it pulled in a ton of repackaged RPMs from Rocky Linux 9, and like magic it just works and behaves like normal Discord
It did ask me to update by deb or tar.gz at startup and I picked the third option ("I'll figure it out" or something), and then it didn't start. Weird.
Launched again and it worked normally, installed its updates it downloads itself at startup or whatever. Even auto-logged me in by somehow finding my browser session (?)
@mint well I was running it in Firefox and the tab sleeps which is annoying sometimes but as a desktop app it's in the tray and I get desktop notifications
well originally it was smart to partition the drives in ZFS and shave off a few GBs from the end to be unused space because HDD vendors didn't have identically sized drives. An 8GB from Seagate wasn't exactly the same size as an 8GB from WD, etc. But that problem doesn't really exist right now and ZFS is now tolerant of it.
Por eso denunciamos ante la Audiencia Nacional el asalto a la Flotilla de la Libertad y la detención ilegal de sus tripulación, además de las torturas que padecieron y otros delitos.
Ich war gerade mit Cookie in der Tierklinik beim Augenarzt, weil sie beim letzten Mal ja mit dem rechten Auge nichts gesehen hat...
Die Tierklinik hat uns jetzt an die tierärztliche Hochschule in Hannover überwiesen. Rechtes Auge blind, oberflächlich ist kein Grund erkennbar. Jetzt Ultraschall, ggf. MRT und Elektroretinogramm... Ich will lieber nicht wissen, was das kostet 😵💫
Nachtrag: Und natürlich hoffe ich am meisten, dass meine Maus nichts Schlimmes hat 🥺❤️
Has anyone else noticed that YouTube has hidden the "skip to next video" button in a bunch of contexts? (in the mini player on desktop, in the big player for the first 30 seconds of the video?)
I'm so sick of updates to UI that clearly aren't about the user and instead are trying to get the user to consume content the way that the company wants.
Here's an excellent write-up summing up the state of #GameAccessibility in the last 5 years by Grant Stoner. To say it was a rollercoaster of emotions is an understatement. We had incredible innovation and progress in games like The Last of Us or Forza, but for all of those we also had many disappointments that either came tantalizingly close but weren't accessible to some groups of people like totally blind gamers, or just straight up didn't really offer any accessibility features but still got a lot of praise and awards. We also lost some very good people. The industry is also undergoing some difficult times with way too many layoffs. And yet, I'm optimistic we’ll still see some wonderful things in the future. If this year is anything to go by, even if there won't be as many accessible Tripple-A releases, we're also seeing a rise in accessibility mods becoming more frequent. Ultimately what sums up these last 5 years, and probably the future as well is the last paragraph Grant wrote: "
> How do you explain the past five years of accessibility? Both Xbox and PlayStation are fixtures within the disabled community. They uplift us, highlight our work, and give us opportunities to be better advocates. And in equal measure they frustrate us, casting us aside in perplexing moments of grief and frustration. If anything, these five years are a testament to disabled perseverance in an industry that still struggles to fully welcome us."
Well, they do have a point. And there have been some games that have shown there accessibility, like Sequence storm, a raceing game that has 60 missions in the storyline and like 46 new race tracks. But yeah. Seems like most games have came along way regarding accessibility.
Wrt what I posted yesterday, I downloaded the GNOME OS live ISO, started it in a vm, and pressed alt+super+S. Orca started. So far, so good. But now I have to get through gnome-initial-setup, and I have to select a time zone, and, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to get a selection to stick so that the Next button is no longer grayed out. Fml. Edit: I think I'm hitting gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-i…
Because of how the timezone selection page works now - the selection is confirmed on the map widget or by automatic selection (which obviously does not work), it...
@wx1g Not really. It looks like there's an open issue against gnome-initial-setup for it. Trying to use docker to do what I need, rather than using the ISO.
As it worked so well last time, may we ask you again? Some entries are still open, some new ones were added. And to help you find apps you might be interested in verifying, their names (or what they do) are/is now highlighted in bold letters.
Still walking the entire repo, app by app, so the list might grow a bit more. And every little hint you can give, is valuable and helping us. So thanks to all who did – plus in advance to those who will! 🤗
Dear #IzzyOnDroid community, we need your help for keeping our repo as useful as possible. No tech knowledge needed for this one, so anybody who's got an #Android device and some spare time can jump in here:
Are you using any of those apps, or would be willing to install one (or more) of them to see if they are still useful? Please then report there, or here to this #serviceToot – so we can get that issue solved 🙏
This is a spin-off from #10 where I'd like some input from the team, concerning how to handle the following unmaintained apps:
* [x] [`com.projects.musicplayer`](https://apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.projects.
@AccessOn I have just listened to the reading of the letter sent by the NFB to Vispero. I would like to highly congratulate Mr Riccobono, not only for communicating the serious concerns of blind people worldwide regarding Vispero, but also for what I consider to be one of the most excellent pieces of communication I have ever listened to. I am completely behind the NFB's stance which has been taken and I agree with every word.
Apologies #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon folks - The maintenance took quite a bit longer than I expected. The good news is that should be everything up and running now. I've got some other works to do before I leave to fix some remote management bits but I'm hoping that should now mean that both sites are going to come up nicely and play nice!
Yesterday (2025-11-11), the most recent major quarterly release of Android (Android 16 QPR1) was pushed to the Android Open Source Project after being delayed since 2025-09-03. We've completed our initial port of all our changes to it and are building an experimental release now.
feld
in reply to `Da Elf • • •`Da Elf
in reply to feld • • •@feld I Cannot remember the Boxen (Want to say it was an Enterprise250 or 450) for a limited time.
For the life of me I cannot find one online, and I figured *someone* would have a nostalgia set for sale on eBay or whatnot.
I'll keep trying.
`Da Elf
in reply to `Da Elf • • •@feld Ohhhhhh. *Face Palm*
It was a Silicon Graphics Indy!!!!
I completely forgot I worked on those. Not Many of them mind you (expensive little buggers), bur occasionally in Engineering CAD/CAE/CAM I'd trip over them, and I knew xNIX so IRIX got shoveled in my direction. Good little machines tho.
are.na/james-hicks/silicon-gra…
Silicon Graphics, Inc | Are.na
Are.nafeld
in reply to `Da Elf • • •