mastodon - Link to source

Barely inaugurated, REM employees protest at Deux-Montagnes station

ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/ba…

I was thinking the thing breaking down on the first day. Not a labour action.

(don't get me wrong, I really look forward to use it)


Barely inaugurated, REM employees protest at Deux-Montagnes station

Following the announcement of the inauguration of 14 new stations on the new Deux-Montagnes branch of the Montreal light-rail line (Réseau express métropolitain - REM), REM employees staged a small protest on Saturday against their working conditions…
The Canadian Press (CTVNews)

mastodon - Link to source
Seeing the amazing compactness of the original Infocom Z-machine interpreters puts the wastefulness of modern software in stark perspective. Both the Apple II and MS-DOS Infocom interpreters were about 12 KB of machine code (for the 6502 and 8086 respectively). True, the Apple II interpreter wasn't accessible with Textalker, since it was self-booting (the only way to squeeze it onto a 140 KB floppy alongside the game itself). I'm guessing the MS-DOS interpreter was accessible though.

Mike Gorse reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Elijah Massey

Also, the Z-Machine literally only had 64 KB of mutable RAM. Even in Z8 games which can be up to 512 KB, only 64 KB of that memory can be written to at runtime. It is very impressive how much functionality could be achieved with such limitations; the Z Machine even had a compressed character encoding to save space, which I think shows the extreme level of optimization that was necessary.

mastodon - Link to source
So I just stumbled on Accessi Frotz by Nathan Tech. An accessible Frotz interpreter that uses Accessible_Output2 to interface with your screen reader. Works great for playing all those old Z Machine text adventures. How did I not know this was a thing?! nathantech.net/products/softwa…

Accessi Frotz - Nathan Tech

View football matches accessibly with this program if you are a screen reader suer.
www.nathantech.net
in reply to Al Puzzuoli

mastodon - Link to source

Matt Campbell

The original Infocom Z-machine interpreters were amazingly compact. The Infocom interpreters for Apple II and MS-DOS were both about 12 KB of machine code. True, the Apple II interpreter didn't work with Textalker, since that interpreter was booted directly without using Apple DOS (the only way to squeeze it onto a 140 KB floppy along with the story). But, if I'm not mistaken, the MS-DOS interpreter did work with DOS screen readers.
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

mastodon - Link to source

Matt Campbell

@fastfinge Fair point. The ideal that I aspire to, that I haven't yet been able to meet in any real product I've shipped, is to minimize both code size and dependencies, so the application is small and also doesn't depend on much beyond what's already loaded into RAM on the host platform, so it starts fast.
@🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

James Scholes

@matt @fastfinge There are definitely some ridiculous modern software practices that are incredibly wasteful in terms of energy, resource utilisation, state sponsored surveillance, and the like.

then again, constantly maxing out your storage medium and memory capacity isn't a great recipe for innovation either. You said it yourself; they literally had to leave out the assistive technology because it wouldn't fit. A state of affairs that people would quite rightly find astonishing if it happened today (outside of embedded hardware where the resource constraints are serving to make the tech more exclusionary).

@Matt Campbell @🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

mastodon - Link to source
Ich war immer darauf bedacht, daß männliche Ego zu schmeicheln. Wenn nötig hab ich mich dafür verstellt, mich naiv gegeben oder unwissend. Das hab ich nicht bewusst gemacht. Es hatte sich einfach als meine Aufgabe angefühlt. Wenn sich ein Mann durch meine Existenz, Witz, Wissen oder Intelligenz in seinem Ego gekränkt sah, dann hatte ich was falsch gemacht.
In den letzten Jahren habe ich mit Therapeutinnen und Psychiater daran gearbeitet und konnte dieses Schema in diesem Jahr endlich ablegen
1/3

mastodon - Link to source
November 16 will be the 85th anniversary of the National Federation of the Blind. To spark thoughtful conversation about the future, we are releasing the book Walking Alone and Marching Together in podcast form. This book provides insights into the organized blind movement during its first 50 years. Check out the podcast starting on November 16 coming to you every week! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/…

Walking Alone and Marching Together Podcast

History Podcast · Updated Weekly · A history podcast of the National Federation of the Blind Explore the victories, setbacks, and defining moments of the National Federation of the Blind. Through these episodes, we hope to not only sh…
Apple Podcasts
in reply to Debian

mastodon - Link to source

Entité terrestre auto-critique

$ sudo apt upgrade
... reboot
$ uname -r
6.12.57+deb13-amd64
- okay
"no space left on /boot"
$ sudo apt remove linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64
-> installing linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64-unsigned 👀
??😶 ??
$ ls -l /vmlinuz
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 16 nov. 06:57 /vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-6.12.48+deb13-amd64
$ dpkg -l linux-image* | grep ^ii
ii linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64-unsigned 6.12.48-1 ...
ii linux-image-6.12.57+deb13-amd64 6.12.57-1 ... (signed)
ii linux-image-amd64 6.12.57-1 amd64 ...

needed to :
$ sudo apt remove linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64-unsigned
🤔 ??
#debian #TakeCare

#debian #takecare
This entry was edited (5 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/11555…

This sounds like plugging a service to an LLM is a way of doing away with UX people. Just hope that the word salad will somehow match what the service's (invariably badly written) human-readable descriptions of its API, because if you don't have to pay an UX and front-end team to ADD A BUTTON TO TURN THE LIGHTS OFF then it must be a win.

(I am not criticizing this person's experiments, which are fine, but the larger scheme of things.)

J. B. Crawford

2025-11-15 01:05:50

mastodon - Link to source

my husband made it so the home assistant voice assistant can use full-on ollama to interpret instructions. then he told it to turn the lights on. it's been explaining its thought process for over five minutes now and the lights are still off.

mastodon - Link to source
My friend @TheQuinbox has been working on an ebook reader for blind people called Paperback (github.com/trypsynth/paperback). So far it's all written in C++, using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Now Quin is working on making it a Rust/C++ hybrid, with the UI still in C++ using wx. As far as we know, the Rust GUI ecosystem isn't nearly ready to support a desktop app like this, with perfect screen reader accessibility and native-feeling keyboard behavior.

GitHub - trypsynth/paperback: An accessible, light-weight, cross-platform ebook and document reader.

An accessible, light-weight, cross-platform ebook and document reader. - trypsynth/paperback
GitHub
@Quin

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

Hotmail —> Yahoo —> Gmail —> ?????

Gmail has been my main email since like 2008. Clearly it’s time for that to change. Anyone have any email recommendations for this next life stage of the internet, something not poisoned by fascism, data theft, and AI? 🧐

#email #AI #infosec

#email #infosec #AI
This entry was edited (6 days ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Auf LinkedIn verteilt ein Sehender ein KI-Tool, mit dem man Braille-Schilder für den 3D-Drucker generieren kann.

Dazu hab ich eine Frage: Wie?

Kein LLM dieser Welt kann auch nur einfachste Dinge fehlerfrei in Braille-Basisschrift übersetzen.

Sehr wohl aber kann man Schriftpunktmuster einfach mappen. Wofür muss so Scheiß dann also aus einer KI rauspurzeln, wo niemand der das anwendet auch nur die Chance hat, das zu prüfen?

Ich hab’s so satt.

mastodon - Link to source

Swiss surveillance could become worse than US

If passed, chat, email & VPN providers from #Switzerland must:

🚨 Log IP addresses
🚨 Ask for ID upon sign up
🚨 Decrypt data upon request

Swiss Bundesrat is still discussing this draft bill, decision will likely be made in 2026.

Let's fight for #privacy! 👉 tuta.com/blog/switzerland-surv…

Title: Switzerland plans surveillance that is worse than US Broken shield with a Swiss flag on it

Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US | Tuta

Revision of Swiss surveillance law VÜPF would directly target VPN & encrypted chat and email providers based in Switzerland.
Tuta
#privacy #switzerland

hometown - Link to source

If I had a time machine I would go back in time just to screw with myself by telling young me the truth:

"Your TV will be connected to a computer that tells you lies"

"A college education will become worthless relative to its cost"

"The biggest dipshits in history will be running the whole country, including the Oval Office"

"You will go to Petsmart to buy weed for your dog"

⇧