mastodon - Link to source

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
#Accessibility #FediTips

mastodon - Link to source

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.

mastodon - Link to source

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

mastodon - Link to source

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

new kodak films

Eastman Kodak Company begins self-distributing Tri-X and Ektar; I hope that doesn’t mean pricier film!

Last year, we learned that the Kodak factory shifted its film distribution from outsourcing to Kodak Alaris to doing it in-house. Today, the company announced two new films that will be sold under a new packaging.
www.analog.cafe
#photography #filmphotography #believeinfilm #analogphotography

akkoma - Link to source

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

in reply to Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@clv1 Technically yes.
1.
Long:
ː (U+02D0)
→ you already support this
Example: iː, aː
2.
Half-long:
ˑ (U+02D1)
Example: eˑ
3.
Extra-short:
̆ (U+0306, combining breve)
Example: ă
So technically, ̆ is the “shorten” mark. eSpeak does not emit ̆
Most IPA transcriptions omit it entirely. Linguists usually encode “shortness” as:the absence of ː, or via phoneme choice (e.g. /ɪ/ vs /iː/)
@Cleverson

mastodon - Link to source

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…

#greenland #kakistocracy #davos
This entry was edited (1 day ago)

mastodon - Link to source
What's the most useless thing

  • 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)
12 voters. Poll end: 5 hours ago

mastodon - Link to source

(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)

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

mastodon - Link to source
Every time I install a new piece of infrastructure for my homelab as part of becoming more independent from Big Tech, I see a hint on the homepage of that new piece of infrastructure that mentions they received sponsorship from @nlnet almost as if NLNet has been silently preparing Europe for #DigitalSovereignty with Open Source projects ;) I like!
#digitalsovereignty @NLnet

reshared this

in reply to Joseph King

gotosocial - Link to source

Nolan Darilek

Pretty big. Their app is a PITA too--had to hand my phone to my partner mid-listen because my phone's cast connection dropped and I couldn't find the play button. They asked for a bunch of feedback on their app a while back, and I kinda hoped they'd fix the accessibility issues, but I didn't chime in because fixing issues of this scale isn't on your users IMO and I didn't want to do more unpaid consulting. Guess it's in prod now and we're stuck with it though, yay us.
in reply to Pitermach

mastodon - Link to source

Kieran L

@pitermach IT does, but not until the last section. I guess what I'm saying is, I get why the author has put it in the troubleshooting section, but to me, there's nothing really to troubleshoot with FileVault being enabled, and they've explained why. but maybe they should have put it in a disclaimer at the top. I'm coming from a standard user's perspective here who might not even know they've got FileVault enabled and have just stumbled across this article while browsing, do all the steps and get frustrated as to why it's not working. I don't even know if I still have an applevis account to comment haha.
@Pitermach

glitchsoc - Link to source

What do AI and agentic commerce mean for free software? Merchants can’t just choose to be invisible in search, and they can’t just choose to be non-interoperable with LLMs.

Saleor's Merchant Autonomy Manifesto:

> Own the Future, or Let Platforms Own You
saleor.io/blog/merchants-auton…

Own the Future, or Let Platforms Own You

Your control is your advantage. You should never surrender it. Discover the Merchant Autonomy Manifesto and why ownership, not platforms, defines the future of commerce.
Saleor Commerce
in reply to FLOSSbOxIN

mastodon - Link to source

IzzyOnDroid ✅

Had that (CSR) one time, too – but quite a while ago, don't even remember exactly anymore.

Yeah, thanks for the other hints – but I'm afraid my time won't permit me working on those cosmetics. My work on IzzyOnDroid keeps me busy enough – no idea how that will fit should I get a paid $dayjob again (unfortunately I need some money for living, and all the maintenance work is still unpaid – long way until IzzyOnDroid is self-sustaining…)

mastodon - Link to source

So it turns out that the largest AI datacenter in the world consumes about as much water per year as ~2.5 burger joins (including water consumed in chip production). I heavily overestimated datacenter water consumption (even though I knew most people still heavily overestimated datacenter water consumption, and I underestimated it relative to most people. I also heavily underestimated how much water goes into a single burger.

newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/…


From Tokens to Burgers – A Water Footprint Face-Off

A different perspective on the datacenter water debate, forget tokens/watt or tokens/dollar, it's about tokens/burger, how many In-N-Outs is equivalent to the world's largest datacenter
Nicolas Bontigui (SemiAnalysis)

mastodon - Link to source

There's really NO reason why a decent mid-range phone couldn't be someone's main desktop or laptop. The NexPhone is a mid-range rugged phone which connects to a monitor to be a Debian or Windows 11 PC! youtu.be/qfY5t6N8YxM

Phones are computers. I ramble on about this a lot in my videos. This phone is LITERALLY that!

#tech #technology #technews #android #linux #debian #windows #youtube #geek #gadgets #video


This Android Phone is ALSO a Linux AND Windows PC! NexPhone Hands On!

TEAM SGG PATREON https://www.patreon.com/SomeGadgetGuy NexPhone first look! This was the nerdiest gadget I found at CES 2026! I keep saying "your phone is a ...
YouTube
#android #linux #debian #technology #Windows #geek #youtube #video #tech #technews #gadgets

mastodon - Link to source
Stats time! 📊 Our "State of the #LibreOffice Project" for 2025 counts downloads, Git commits, Bugzilla submissions, translations Ask LibreOffice activity, and donations: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #openSource #freesoftware
World map showing downloads in different countries

State of the Project - Calendar Year 2025 - TDF Community Blog

Starting in January 2026, at the beginning of each quarter, i.e. in January, April, July and October, I will publish a slide deck with updated statistics on the LibreOffice project.
Italo Vignoli (The Document Foundation)
#FreeSoftware #foss #opensource #libreoffice
in reply to LibreOffice

mastodon - Link to source

Tariq

I wonder why the least wealthy countries aren't downloading LibreOffice?

Is it because the technology to run LO isn't suitable? (I know mobiles are common, but computers not so much).

Is it because "free" tools like Google Docs is preferred, because there is nothing to install and it works wherever a browser works?

Is it because for most people, life just doesn't include using a computer based office productivity suite?

Something else?

Apologies for my ignorance on this matter.

mastodon - Link to source

SO I saw a facebook notification, and decided let's read it, I don't really go on facebook that often, but it was @countrymetalhead commenting on a post he shared, and welp just because I want to see if the reaction here on masto's different, here's the original post, now, be aware, I'm not the original author, so keep that in mind. I'm just posting it to see what others think, and what reactions I get. Now, if your still reading, your content preramble is over. here we go. hot take starts.... welp, now. Hot take:
If you think a relationship means constant texting, daily reassurance, sharing locations, checking followers, and knowing where your partner is every second of the day… you’re not in love. You’re running surveillance.

Some of y’all don’t want a partner.
You want a security blanket with a phone.

A healthy relationship doesn’t require good morning paragraphs, hourly check-ins, and “prove you love me” speeches. It requires trust, independence, and a life outside of your partner.

If your mood is ruined because your partner didn’t text back fast enough, that’s not passion. That’s insecurity.

If you need access to their phone to feel safe, that’s not loyalty. That’s control.

If you think jealousy is cute, that’s not love. That’s immaturity.

Some of you are addicted to attention and call it affection.

And before you say “my partner likes it,” just know: people accept a lot when they’re afraid of being alone.

Love isn’t about possession.
It’s about partnership.

Now let’s see who feels personally attacked.

@Wes Derby
This entry was edited (1 day ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Remember, using a native HTML `<fieldset>` / `<legend>` gets you better results in SRs than its ARIA equivalent:
adrianroselli.com/2022/07/use-…

My post deals with the inverse of the others I shared — unstyling the native HTML so you don’t need the ARIA construct.


Use Legend and Fieldset

It’s 2022 and people are still afraid to use and . I understand the layout challenges can be frustrating, but swapping to an ARIA group role will result in a more inaccessible experience.
Adrian Roselli

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

RE: mindly.social/@Tamasg/11593385…

Totally agree.

Tamas G

2026-01-21 15:44:00

mastodon - Link to source

It's also funny that GPT uses terms like "Keep my fingers crossed" in its thinking. Do you really have fingers as an AI and why would you think that? One time it actually was thinking, "circumventing search restrictions." And the amount of times it says, "let's get this done right once and for all!" is really great, as though it were trying to be a frustrated person. All of these things give it fake realism, but we must not associate an AI thinking this way to it "being a human" - it only does so because we ourselves use these processes when thinking and it's just replicating what it knows.

⇧