Yesterday, I interviewed a tech guy who told me something too important for me to wait until the podcast comes out for you to hear it:
Many free AI detectors have especially high false positive rates because they make money selling software that "humanizes" writing. 1/2
I'm writing a technical blog post and want to use a UML sequence diagram to explain something.
Only trouble is, I have no idea how to make such a diagram accessible to a screen reader.
I know I could just write up alt-text to describe it, but at that point I feel like I should just use the text _instead_ of the diagram.
Maybe that's the answer, but I'm hoping there's a way to get a screen reader to communicate the diagram in some way?
Any ideas appreciated!
I updated my "How to survive FOSDEM" article.
@fosdem organizers updated map so I updated it as well. The change was simple: there is no ATM at ULB (for quite a while).
So I added an info about it. And some minor edit.
marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2019…
FOSDEM is 2 weeks conference in 2 days. Can be tough to survive.marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl
🇺🇸 We were asked for this in the past, and now it was done: our Liberapay account has been revived, find it at liberapay.com/IzzyOnDroid/
As @Liberapay has no option to upload a project avatar (or I haven't found it), and we're not using any of the hard-coded services, I hope you forgive us keeping my personal one in there for now. Should a change become possible, we'll of course update accordingly!
The IzzyOnDroid team maintains the repository for F/LOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) Android apps launched by Izzy in 2015/2016, which has since become quite well-known …Liberapay
Kuuntelen tosi vähän musiikkia paristakin syystä, mutta joskus lenkillä Vorssan Suvi-iltaan kasattu soittolista auttaa ryytyneenä jaksamaan. Listalla on 99 % uudempaa tradia ja bluegrassia eli lajeja, joita kestän ylipäätään kuunnella, mutta seassa on jokunen nostalgianumero ja raitoja, joiden bpm sopii omaan kadenssiin erityisen hyvin.
Tänään tipahti peräkkäin Les Misin Do You Hear the People Sing ja perään Elina Salo alkoi vetää Kolmea iloista rosvoa :’-D
RE: mastodon.social/@droidify/1159…
Very excited to see #Droidify implement the #IzzyOnDroid download statistics!
This means 2 out of the top 3 #FDroid clients now show download statistics for apps downloaded from IzzyOnDroid. Hopefully this convinces more repositories to adopt this!
The part I love most is the different directions Droidify and Neo Store took it. Droid-ify went for simple, just showing the total amount of downloads, while Neo Store went for detailed graph.
What's your preference? Simplicity or detail? :)
Droid-ify v0.6.8 HotfixFixed:
- Apk file integrity check failing
- Download stats data validation
- Performance in apps listFull changelog available here: github.com/Droid-ify/client/re…
Release Release v0.6.8 Hotfix · Droid-ify/client
Fixed: Apk file integrity check failing Download stats data validation Performance in apps list Full Changelog: v0.6.7...v0.6.8GitHub
IzzyOnDroid ✅ reshared this.
So I don't really see the issue to be honest. The only possible risk is if you disable Android's signature verification with XPosed modules (which would be a horrible idea) and happen to get the one signature that somehow would match in MD5. But both IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid already use an allowlist of signatures per app, so this would already be blocked serverside there.
Lacking index-v2 is not a security risk at all but would be nice for faster update checks.
@TheJnx Obtainium on the other hand is often used to get APKs directly from developers with no malware scan or anything. So if a dev gets their system infected by malware and because of that uploads a build with malware, you will just instantly get that and infect your device, there is no party in between to scan or rebuild the app from source.
Personally, I find "dev gets their system infected by malware" a much more likely scenario, which is why I don't understand Obtainium as "more secure".
@TheJnx@bonito.cafe @SylvieLorxu@chaos.social Well yes I agree that Droid-ify does not have Index V2 or diffing but I don't see how thats a security issue. And the 3 point of it "uses a outdated signature algorithm".LooKeR (Mastodon)
for that reason I will continue to say that either Github or Codeberg, any other source, as such is for more experienced people, Obtainium is obviously safe (as far as it goes), allows more than 10 sources from which to download apps, but of course, it all depends on using reliable sources, review the code, use an antivirus (although I doubt the quality of these), that the repository has been reported in that case, etc.
I must admit that I have not stopped using Izzyondroid, only for one app (since the versions there seem to me more stable) but of course, Izzyondroid seems to me that unlike F-Droid allows a wider catalog of apps, but of course, for everything I use Obtainium itself because it allows me to save all those apps and apks that could be scattered on my device
Changes in version 144.0.7559.90.0:
A full list of changes from the previous release (version 144.0.7559.76.1) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.
This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release. Vanadium isn't yet officially available for users outside GrapheneOS, although we plan to do that eventually. It won't be able to provide the WebView outside GrapheneOS and will have missing hardening and other features.
Privacy and security enhanced releases of Chromium for GrapheneOS. Vanadium provides the WebView and standard user-facing browser on GrapheneOS. It depends on hardening in other GrapheneOS reposito...GitHub
State of Accessibility on Linux, 2026:
Users: Wayland broke accessibility.
Wayland: Not our problem, talk to the compositor.
KDE & Gnome: Expose what we need for accessibility, plz?
Wayland: Security risk. No.
Factorio dev: This compromise?
Wayland: Ok, fine...
Also Wayland: Actually, no.
User: *researches how to grow new eyeballs* It'll be solved faster.
Droid-ify v0.6.8 Hotfix 
Fixed:
- Apk file integrity check failing
- Download stats data validation
- Performance in apps list
Full changelog available here: github.com/Droid-ify/client/re…
Fixed: Apk file integrity check failing Download stats data validation Performance in apps list Full Changelog: v0.6.7...v0.6.8GitHub
Sensitive content
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’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.
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)
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-…
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.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.
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.
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_…
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
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
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
André Polykanine
in reply to ragman • • •ragman
in reply to André Polykanine • • •@menelion PlantUML looks neat!
I'm currently using js-sequence-diagrams[1], which looks like it has similar syntax as PlantUML.
Putting the code/text representation of the diagram feels like it'd be helpful for a small diagram, but maybe too much to keep in ones head for a larger one?
Better than nothing I reckon though!
1) bramp.github.io/js-sequence-di…
js-sequence-diagrams by bramp
bramp.github.ioAndré Polykanine
in reply to ragman • • •Why am I saying this? Because it's not even better than nothing, it's quite enough for a technically or scientifically inclined person to decipher what you're saying. I'm not proficient in this at all (JS-Sequence-Diagrams looks also good, also there's Mermaid supported by GitHub, I think) but if I need or want it, I'll read the docs and cope with it. Or… drop you a message and ask for help 😊
Anyway, thank you so much. It's really heartwarming.
ragman
in reply to André Polykanine • • •@menelion Aww thank you André. ❤️ I'm touched, and not really sure how to respond!
I guess I'll just say that I want to live in the world where we all look out for each other's needs, and where we can ask each other for accommodations or help when we need to. Where we all get those warm breezes when we're cold :)
Anyway, thank you again for the kind words!
ragman
in reply to André Polykanine • • •@menelion On the PlantUML front, I found this paper describing how it was used in a computer science class to help a blind student learn the content:
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/354…
Some points I found interesting:
* the textual representation of the diagram was enough for, at least this one person, to be able to follow along in the course
(1/2)
André Polykanine
in reply to ragman • • •