Today marks 7 months of unemployment and I am very much down to the wire.
I am a full-stack & backend web developer, fluent in TypeScript, with experience building data-focused applications and both SQLite and Postrges databases.
I’m located in the northeast United States and have experience working and successfully collaborating with small, remote teams.
MAGA: Conquest: We nede Greenland to protect our national interests so we'll just take it. Progressives: Alliance-building and collaboration: We need Greenland to be on our side to help us meet our national goals, so we'll work closely with them in a mutually-beneficial relationship. The choice here is quite clear my friends.
So I've tried the brand-new blindness Windows apps #FastSM and #BlindRSS and I have to say that I'm highly impressed with both! If you haven't checked them out yet I highly recommend giving them a try. Both represent elegant yet simple solutions to Blue Sky, Mastodon and podcast and text RSS feeds. #accessibility
new, experimental build of SpeechPlayer. I would like those who are brave to test, for a new, more Eloquence-like sound. Shoutout does go out to @fastfinge for helping to get this idea going and colaborating on the repository. eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay… The big switch is that it is no longer a sawtooth wave. Instead, it now uses asymmetric cosine glottal-flow pulse (a pitch-synchronous "glottal pulse train"). So, glottal flow pulses, not continuous oscillator shapes like triangle/saw/square. This has allowed us to achieve a much smoother voice, with clearer consonants but the familiarity of the voice people know.
@ZBennoui@Tamasg Can you articulate what you dislike about it? I'm still not a fan the way I am of eloquence, but it's getting harder and harder for me to define why, so we can actually fix it.
@ZBennoui I wish I could say why, too. There's something ... forceful about the way it says everything, a harsher sound than eloquence. But my brain is just not coming up with the right technical terms.
@cachondo @ZBennoui yup. I think the Sawtooth version was harsher by a lot, but this is more on the actual "voice personality" that it expresses than like, the final shape of the wave. Now it really does sound a bit like Eloquence and DECTalk had a child, ha. But yeah, there's something in the voicing that's missing which could potentially raise the bass floor a bit from being as low, still keep the crisp-ends on consonants, but introduce a bit more smoothness. Funny to me that on the old version, I liked the Adam voice, on the new experimental, Benjamin to me does sound a lot closer to what I'd like it to be.
@cachondo @ZBennoui I struggled to understand it. Relatively sibilant, bassy, nasal, and forceful as you said. "Folks" sounded more like "follks", and "here" was cut off.
@jscholes@cachondo@Tamasg@ZBennoui So some of the issues you're identifying have to do with the espeak phonemizer, and the way phonemes are tuned. We have a lot of work to do there, too. But I feel like if we can get the sound of the voice correct, that will be a lot easier. For example, compare speech player and eloquence saying "eeeeeeeeee". Side by side, it's clear something is still not right with speech player. It needs to be...rounder and brighter? And...those are not useful terms because I'm still struggling to define exactly what I mean by them haha.
@jscholes @cachondo @ZBennoui I think phonemizer yes, but also language-specific phonetic rules that I and others tune, like how we got the word "start" to no longer sound disjointed and like "st-ah-rt" as it was in earlier builds. does nobody seriously give me any credit for improvements and people only want to complain on how it's drifting and sounding shittier? Honestly I get more of that feedback and each time it makes me want to just give up on this entire thing fully. If you really hate it, then, fix it yourself, don't put that honus all on me. Going away for the rest of the day. I'm super sad.
@cachondo @jscholes @ZBennoui Honestly it's hard to understand. It's like someone talking with something between their teeth and in their throat. Both. at once. I don't know how else to explain it, though.
@MariahL@cachondo@Tamasg@jscholes@ZBennoui I hear where you're coming from. It needs to be...rounder or wider or more relaxed or something. But I'm at the point where every change I make causes it to sound worse or introduces strange new issues.
The thread specifically asked people to try and articulate how they felt about the voice, so I did. You are publicly burning yourself out on this and other projects in a way that constantly makes me want to tell you to get some sleep and look after yourself, so maybe temporarily stepping away would be a good thing.
@jscholes@cachondo@Tamasg@ZBennoui The other thing that makes this super, super hard is that there are like nine different systems, and all of them need tuning. And it's impossible to ask people who haven't spent pretty much four days straight thinking exclusively about this for feedback on a particular system, because they all work together to make up the voice, and you can't know where any given issue comes from. There's the rules for going from text to IPA phonemes. Then the rules for determining the way IPA phonemes are actually voiced and fit together. And then there's the intonation table. And then there's the two systems that actually make the sound. Right now I'm mostly looking at the system that actually makes the sound, IE when you do "aaaaaaaaaaaaa" or "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee", because that's still not right. But because it's an entire voice, it's even hard for me to separate my own perceptions and fix anything.
The important thing to remember is that eloquence began development in 1982, by a team of about a dozen researchers. It wasn't in the state we know it until around 2002. We have existing research to build on, but no funding and fewer people, and no PHD level speech researchers. So actually doing this, even with the help of AI, is a 20-30 year project before we get close to eloquence levels. Because we have something that "works" and improves step by step, it's easy to lose sight of the size of the problem we're taking on, because it feels like we should be able to get there in a month or two. But that's not realistic.
@cachondo@Tamasg@jscholes@ZBennoui We also lack tools as blind people. For example, I wish I could visually examine the shape and spectrogram of sounds. A useful step here would be to get eloquence to generate a pure, single-note open "aaa" or "eee" tone, and understand the shape of the resulting sound wave. But there are just no accessible tools to do that. So instead we have to go by listening and guess work.
@jscholes @cachondo @ZBennoui I will say this though. If people had a chance to try that huge 700 MB version you built with Gruut as the phonemizer, I think they'd like some of the sounds a bit better. Not perfect by any means, not at all, but like, I can also see that Espeak phonemizer does not do a good job at inserting things like stress marks in the IPA before vowels, causing either disjointed or too rapid speech when moving from vowel-to-vowel transitions. So then we're adding a dozen vowel rules to "fight" ESpeak's phonemizer system. And that's not ideal either, because while we can tweak it, and as much as it's multilingual, it's too not suffisticated and even if my frontend has rules for things like those stress marks or word-joined markers, if the output itself isn't clean and detailed, we lose good continuety between glides, or when moving from vowel-to-consonant transitions a bit. They're so, so critical, and part of my frustration is this fork in the road feeling about all that, and in that sense the phoneme tuning is the easier part in some ways than the linguistics of it all. The blame isn't 100% ESpeak, but it's not 100% phoneme tuning either.
Yup. This all comes back to that problem of so many systems all needing tuning. I do think it would really help us to just focus on a single one. IE get this voice sounding correct with pure "aaaaaaaa" and "eeeeee" tones. No words, no pitch or intonation, nothing. Then hook that up to the rest of the systems. Then see where we land and tackle the next thing. Because thinking about the phonemizer and the IPA rules and the intonation system all at once is burning us out and distracting us from finishing the thing we have the most control over: IE the klatt synthesizer and the wave generator. Those are ours, entirely and completely. The other things are not, so those problems are harder.
@cachondo @jscholes @ZBennoui In any case, this is one more opportunity for us to build an Eloquence alternative. This will be vital not only on Windows systems, but on Linux and others in the future. Hence, I hope you don't give up. I won't give up working with Tamas to improve pt-br, my language.
@clv1@cachondo@Tamasg@jscholes@ZBennoui While the code is all cross-platform, and there's no reason it shouldn't work on Linux and mac, we're best to stick with Windows and NVDA exclusively until we get something we all love.
@cachondo @jscholes @ZBennoui As for depreciative comments, I recall similar episodes when I was learning to use Internet, some 25 years ago, so it has always existed. It's up to us to be psycologically prepared. I would suggest we focus only at the people we are really working for. For example: if someone doesn't like our work, them it means it's not for that person that we are working for.
It really does not mean that. If someone doesn't like your work, it often just means you haven't yet landed on a form they find pleasing or useful.
And that might be fine if, say, you're building a command line app and the only thing a given user would find acceptable is a graphical one. If you have no plans to build a graphical one, they're shit out of luck and you have to move on.
Other times, though, it does point to a real problem in the thing you're building that you should legitimately keep trying to solve. Dismissing everybody who expresses negativity outright only leads to an echo chamber.
@cachondo @ZBennoui This is all fair and, to me at least, interesting insight. But part of embarking upon such a huge project is dealing with feedback from people on what is ultimately seen a user-facing, homogenous blob.
Many such people won't understand and, if we're being honest, care about how the sausage is being made. Particularly if the changes between builds are too subtle for most of them to perceive.
Regardless, I'm glad this is being worked on and deeply appreciative of the effort.
@jscholes@cachondo@Tamasg@ZBennoui Yup, agreed. And also, people have different preferences. So we can and do get contradictory feedback. Sometimes even from the same person LOL. On top of it all, most people don't have the vocabulary to talk about this stuff. Heck, I don't even have it; I'm not sure the words exist in English. Brighter? Rounder? What do I mean! Do I mean the same thing that you mean? Impossible to tell.
@jscholes @cachondo @ZBennoui oh thanks. And I truly am sorry if I was a bit too harsh reacting to your feedback, that was never my intention. I've tuned works like "folks" and "hear" to sound way better now in the latest pack (it's only in the repo for now.) But yeah, that's the kind of feedback I ultimately do need because without it I have no baseline to work on. If I let AI tune my phonemes without direction it could easily mess them up, and I need that "other human ears" type experience to tune it myself manually sometimes by hand or ask AI to create formulas that approximate the sound and waveform for me so we tune it through that based on what feedback people give. Without a spectrogram that does that visual-based tuning for us by hand and gives us baselines of other voice's waveforms, it's the most efficient way we can work.
@cachondo @ZBennoui sadly today my brain and ears both just feel fried for more speech-player tuning. Ugh. Now I get that feeling, @fastfinge had it yesterday, today I'm really feeling that too. Haha. When your ear has to hear 30 differen build versions of the same DLL with sometimes the shittiest of compression and extreme clipping as you tune knobs, it really does grade on your hearing, ha. Never would have thought that kind of thing can only be done in small chunks too, at one point I had actual ringing in my ear for like 5 minutes after testing a bad combo of sound.
@cachondo Yeah that's kinda what I'm hearing as well. It reminds me a bit of Keynote, which is a synth I really dislike. There's just something about the way Eloquence reads that I really like, and I feel like it's not easily replicated, but I'm not sure why.
Then again, Alex on Mac OS has been my Constant companion for over 10 years now, and Eloquence is really the only formant synth I can listen to for long periods of time without getting a headache.
@fireborn I mean, it's meant to preserve the characteristics of the voice mostly, so that changes are incremental, but it does add a bit of smoothness - and the Benjamin voice finally sounds better. Going incrementally at these, this tuning was really just on the wave generator and not the speech itself that it interpolates. Consonants do sound a little sharper which is nice in it, but people are super sensitive to the smallest of sound changes, so I'd rather more people not notice much of a change or be happy with it still than go "oh no this is sounding like the ESpeak version!" which is what people hated about it in the firstplace.
Pondering the absurdity of living in a vast swath of frigid air. Heating a medium sized box of that air to livable temperature. Then cooling a small sized box of air inside the medium box back to cool temperatures, plus an even smaller box for frigid temperatures again.
Yeah. 1997 was a very interesting year for me. That's when I got online for the first time, at least on the modern at the time internet, had played with BBS's and stuff before that, when computing was actually exciting, radio wasn't stupid yet, the world stage wasn't quite so fucked up, amateur radio was more fun...
yeah I'd have to go back just to 2006, for the whole new internet of my own, that I could do stuff on confidently, and honestly I don't really really, wanna go back to 2006.
there certainly some desicions around then that I'd certainly do differently, an x would've never been a thing, well he'd've been a thing, but the things that made it develop wouldn't've, and yeah, I'd almost like to not have that.
I wasn't even born in 1997, but would have loved to have been because being in your early 20's nowadays kinda sucks honestly. And it would be cool to see the early days of the internet. I've always wished I could see what Myspace was like. That is, if it was even screen reader accessible.
Oh yeah, if you're annoyed that the models can't predict where the storm will go, you can thank Trump, Musk, and the Republican administration for cutting back weather monitoring for the past year.
And yeah, the models aren't going to be more accurate for a few years to come.
(Make sure to remind your red hatted neighbors that are complaining.)
Here we go. The same idiots that tell us they can't do anything about the CSAM generate formerly know as Twitter... where they still post are telling us they want to protect the children by enforcing a ban with age verification.
Federal officials draft plans to ban social media for children under 14 - The Globe and Mail
We are run by the worst people alive who keep importing the very worst of the world. Verification and these bans just put out information in the hands of sketchy companies who then get hacked. It is not a solution. mobilesyrup.com/2026/01/22/can…
Today, I installed my first WiFi 7 access point, a Ubiquiti U7 Pro. Though WiFi7 is mostly going to waste here, with the internet only being 200 Mbps symmetric, and not a lot of LAN transfers that require a ton of speed, in this house, I unfortunately can't run Ethernet to most things in the location I want them to be, without having the location of the SFP changed, which I am tempted to do. I was hoping to improve the situation a bit, but this seems to not be happening.
I've been using a U6 Mesh at the far end of the house from this access point to both act as a WiFi extender and Ethernet bridge, because I get better performance going WiFi to Ethernet than WiFi direct, especially in terms of jitter and latency, plus I am connecting a couple of devices that don't have their own WiFi to the network this way. I have a small 1Gbps PoE switch powering the access point and providing Ethernet ports for those devices.
Previously, I had been meshing the U6 Mesh with a U6 Light, which is only 2x2 on 5 gHz, and is limited to 80 mHz channel bandwidth. Ideally, I'd like to mesh over 6 gHz at 320 mHz, but without buying a second U7 Pro, I can't do that.
I was hoping to use 160 mHz for the link on 5 gHz, at the very least, which I have done successfully before on another Ubiquiti setup, but for whatever reason, the remote AP is stuck at 40 mHz, which is noticeably bottlenecking things, especially in the upstream direction. Channel bandwidth is controlled by the parent, which is set at 160 mHz, so why does it insist on hanging around at 40?
I HATE WIFI! I HATE IT SO MUCH!
I will probably upgrade the two U6 Pro's at home to U7 Pros when I get back, though, because they have 10g/2.5g/1g Ethernet, and I want to get stuff past the 1Gbps cap for local transfers at least. It's far too easy to saturate a 1Gbps connection these days, even over WiFi. WiFi7 can provide significantly more throughput than 1Gbps allows, even to a single client, so time to upgrade the infrastructure to support it.
Using iperf3 on my phone, I get 940 Mb/sec in both directions on either 5 or 6 gHz over the U7 Pro talking to an Ethernet-connected machine. The bottleneck, in this case, is actually the 1Gbps Ethernet on that machine, and the switch it's connected to. The actual wireless link rate of my phone is currently 2.4 Gbps in both directions, as I am only about 8 feet from the access point, so I should see significantly more throughput than that if not for the 1Gbps Ethernet bottleneck. And, as I understand it, the WiFi chip on iPhones is not actually capable of 320 mHz channel bandwidth, so I could be linking at 4.8 Gbps, in theory, using something else. None of this matters given the current network infrastructure here, really. I still hate WiFi, though.
Vaia carraxe me dan as publicacións tipo: + Titular: automatiza as probas de accesibilidade e blablablá + Texto: as ferramentas de AXE yatúsabes, probar nos lectores de pantalla é moito lío (se tes que facer entregas seguido), así que mira estas librerías para automatizar interaccións e aquí como configurar e probas de exemplo e buah como se integra en GitHub Action ou o que sexa + Aviso contra o final de que esas probas automáticas tampouco sustitúen as comprobacións en lectores de pantalla
This PR adds the GCC codegen backend, and the GCC (libgccjit) component upon which it depends, to build-manifest, and thus also to (nightly) Rustup. I added both components in a single PR, because ...
Hey guys,, a question. When using fast sm, if you open the conversation in a post, or open a time line you want closed, how do you close it? I'm using the visibl interface.
> You arrive at your polling place the same as every election since 2004 with the same precinct, same poll workers, and same ritual of civic participation, but this time the worker scans your driver’s license, frowns, types into the computer, then looks up with an apologetic expression that will replay in nightmares.
> “I’m sorry, but your documents don’t match. Your license says Martinez, but your birth certificate says Chen. I can’t give you a ballot.”
Which states have polling places that use computers? In Wisconsin we have a printout of the registered voters we expect will come to the polling place, that's it. There's no way to look up their birth name. I strongly doubt that the local government has it easily available
Snowmageddon 2026 is supposed to hit tomorrow evening. I've heard from co-workers that grocery stores are wiped out but I figured I’d at least try to get a grocery delivery in the morning. No go. Wal-Mart isn't even delivering right now. Oh well. I have enough food around here. I won’t starve. I was just hoping to get some fruit and veggies. Gotta love Oklahoma weather hysteria. At least I get an excuse to work from home for a few days.
Added fonts and dark/light mode settings, added difficulty levels, locked achievements are now hidden. The unlockable Oregon Trail route has some surprises. Adjustments to reaching the final checkpoint.
Seem to have found a bug, if you scare off an encounter, whatever the action was supposed to be after said encounter won't trigger. I believe this also happens with surrender, and may happen in other cases. Especially aggressive with traveling, you effectively lose your action points even if you effectively won the encounter by scaring them off. Unless this is intended
I also think this happens with negotiation, if that helps at all. Basically anything that isn't winning the fight through combat will bar you from whatever encounter you used your action points on.
Nods. Yeah I haven't tested every case, but I know for a fact that surrender, intimidate, and negotiate will all trigger. Not sure about fleeing, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did as well.
Big NV SpeechPlayer Update: I ended up fixing a bunch of long-standing low-level bugs that were responsible for pops, clicks, and general weirdness. The noise generator had DC bias, filters were carrying energy across utterances, frame data wasn’t fully initialized, and there was even a one-sample “zombie frame” when going from silence to speech. All of that is gone now. Even with fast speech, letter echo, or lots of interruptions, it stays clean. The other big thing is trills. Rolled R’s are now handled in the engine instead of through pack hacks like doubling letters. There are two pack-level settings now: one that controls how long the trill lasts, and one that smooths it. The actual flutter speed is fixed to something that matches how real trills behave, so pack authors don’t have to fight the engine anymore. Short values behave like taps, longer values give you a proper roll, and it’s consistent across languages. I tried pushing the engine toward a more “rounded” glottal pulse as well, but that changed the character too much for now, so I backed it out. The goal here was stability and correctness first, not a surprise timbre shift. Now that the engine isn’t fighting itself anymore, future tuning should be much easier and safer. Language updates: Polish, US English says words like "start", "neat" and "need" more correctly. Download: eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
@Tamasg Thanks; the issue of r+schwa is close to perfect. The only thing now is, it doesn't insert the schwa before ã. Any other vowel is OK, including õ. Please compare for example the sound of: bra, brã; tras, trans.
Interesting. Still sometimes gettings clicks over here. Mostly when just arrowing around the desktop. Still, I'm loving what you're doing with this. This synth is very nistalgic for me, and while I don't know if I could ever make it my primary, it's fun to use it every now and again.
Xbox showcase: We're carrying our accessibility features over from previous games. Not including blind drive assists. But rather, an enhancement to right-trigger driving called auto-drive. Disappointing. :(
@lerven I don't know. I hope, for the purposes of the campaign. But that means the map also has to be accessible, which it wasn't in FH5. Annah will only get you so far.
Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health" The onslaught includes LLMs finding bogus vulnerabilities and code that won't compile. arstechnica.com/security/2026/…
I'd love to just pretend I'm sick and stay home tomorrow, because at this point I'm internally broken again and just have to function cuz the system says so. But it wouldn't help and people wouldn't understand, so good night, fixing the 2,5 hours of sleep I got from yesterday.
I don't like talking about politics like this, but I am serious.
I am strongly considering shutting down Pomf because the US Department of Justice continues to manufacture outright lies against people who are innocent until proven guilty.
Running the service (despite my best efforts to mitigate risks well beyond what the law would require me to do up to and including full fledged cybersecurity research) exposes me to some level of legal or criminal threat to my livelihood. I knew this going in five and a half years ago, and the calculation at the time was acceptable because even if the feds came knocking at my door, I was confident the evidence would be in my favor and that a reasonable and functional court system would make the right decision. I was also confident that what happened to Les De Ridder almost eight years ago (archive.is/PJTzS) wouldn't happen here in the USA, because Europe was a communist shithole and we had rights over here.
Well, as the US continues to backslide into a fascist regime with a completely captured judicial branch that is utterly subservient to the executive branch, my evaluation of that risk level compared to my maximum tolerance of risk continues to inch closer and closer to parity, and when that risk exceeds it, I am out. If I am not convinced that I can adequately defend myself against potentially spurious claims and threats due to a corrupt and unequal justice system, then my next defense mechanism is to remove any and all ammunition from those who would try to harm me, and the largest weapons cache someone can bring to bear against me at this time is undoubtedly Pomf. I have never considered the government to be part of my overall threat model, but now I do, and I do not have the energy or resources to fight an entire government at this time despite it being morally the right thing to do.
If this does happen, there will be a reasonable and well defined sunset period, with a final archiving of all Pomf content to cold storage in hopes that in the distant future the risk comes down to a level in which I am comfortable bringing it all back online. I would never wipe Pomf - only make it unavailable at worst.
One last thing - if you think I am some big baby or think I have nothing to fear, consider this simple statement:
Qwen released a new Apache 2.0 licensed text-to-speech model, with full voice cloning abilities, and it's really effective - my notes from trying it out here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/…
I haven't been paying much attention to the state-of-the-art in speech generation models other than noting that they've got really good, so I can't speak for how notable this new …
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.
would probably been worth a try. As a researcher it's embarrassing if *any* report gets a signal below 1 (ok mistakes happen but in general...). But the average should definitely be above 1
better solution: just add humans. Require a sender channel/org/blob/whatever, block that source if it insists on sending slop. This machine vs machine bullshit is getting old.
@me that's not good enough. The human made reports have gone downhill significantly as well through 2025. I suspect that this is because in reality they too get lots of their "info" from AIs, but shield that from us.
I'm on very thin ice here Dev skill wise, but if the issue is obvious slop, easily detected by a human, then just add accountability. Just like AP instances: if it keeps sending slop, just block it. Then it becomes useless to send reports from that source. You don't have to earn trust, but you can lose trust.
how is this supposed to work ? Ai spammers can still identify as new researchers, so eventually they’ll have to remove that clause, which of course blocks legitimate new researchers from gaining any reputation…
Has anyone ever first try correctly entered the amount to send with Paypal, or similar such currency amount input fields? Wanted to send 2,50€ and suddenly had 2 thousand€ in that field. Da fuck?
Ever since authorship was formalized to make it possible to sell books for profit, the idea that ideas can be property and that art springs from individual genius has been challenged by avant-garde and folk traditions. 2/8
That essay discusses cases like the journal Situationist International, which published with the notice: “All texts may be freely reproduced, translated, and edited, even without crediting the original source.” 4/8
The same text also cites Woody Guthrie, who included this note in a 1930s songbook distributed to listeners who wanted the lyrics to his recordings: “This song is copyrighted… and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ours.” 5/8
Anti-copyright has been fully recuperated, and it feels like only a matter of time before a tech billionaire claims that ingesting copyrighted material into AI is détournement.
However, only when it is an input to production. 7/8
@haui well, what is described in what is to be done is why a unifying project is needed to build the capacities a oranization within the context of a mature movement would need to be ready when a revolutionary sitiution occurs.
Feeling empty, and it bothers me. I'll try to keep ranting low this time, sorry if it upsets anyone I know you haven't followed me for this shit. Probably I'm feeling that annoyed because of the lack of sleep I have. But I just want more time for myself. Anyway work was shit today. Tried to tell my instructor about the way I feel, e.g. no time motivation limited big change blah, and he was basically like, yeah that's just a part of it. Right right. This is very stupid, but once again I'm considering just breaking up and going to some kind of school for the blind. I dislike everything about schools for the blind in this country, but at least it would probably work, somehow.
I need a real social life. With people being near me who can just be, there. But it's not like I'd find that in the situation I am right now. I can't do this for another 3 years. Talked to a Goalball team member and she said the same (regarding the school 4 the blind). At this point I don't know anymore. None of the options will improve my life, they'll just lead to other problems. Whatever should probably start introducing CWs for that crap so people can skip it.
You can, of course, ignore any responses here, especially mine. I'm just a guy speaking from his own experience which, needless to say, is far different from yours and comes from English-speaking cultures. Having said that, we have a serious problem in schools for the blind, in North America at least, and I don't see that this is a particularly cultural thing, I suspect it's human. The people who work in that sort of school are of two types in my experience and in a good deal of discussion with others. The first has a deep desire to help people and, unfortunately, that often comes with a lack of humility. That is, many think they know best about everything. The second are people who can't get anything else which will pay them nearly as well. The last type are usually like that for a reason, and you probably don't want to interact with them in general. The first type may sound good, but they may make your life difficult. There is often, and this is not always, of course, a deep inability to accept the desires of others for their own lives as definitive. That is, if you want something, time in your case to do your own hobbies, and person X thinks you would be better off doing something else, you can expect serious arguments at best and attempts at compulsion at worst. I'm not saying such attempts will be successful, but I'm the type who wants a quiet life if I can get it. I have no interest in explaining the alphabet to someone so I can explain what I'm saying so that the person can find a way to disagree to keep up his idea of himself as all-knowing. Again, this may be different where you are but it's at least worth asking others about the environment before you do anything specific.
As usual, you have control of the block button in general and can ignore this post in particular. Having said that, the language you used tickled my memory and the memory I was thinking of just came up. I post it because it might interest you in considering the issues, and am only impertinent enough to do so because you posted to a public server. It was a memory of a book, by Wodehouse of all people, published in the very early 1900s. I pulled it up and found what was brought to mind by your post... "the work in the postage department was not intricate. There was nothing much to do except enter and stamp letters, and, at intervals, take them down to the post office at the end of the street. The nature of the work gave Mike plenty of time for reflection. His thoughts became gloomy again... There are some people who take naturally to a life of commerce. Mike was not of these. To him the restraint of the business was irksome... He gathered that he would not be free till five o'clock, and that on the following day he would come at ten and go at five, and the same every day, except Saturdays and Sundays, all the year round, with a ten days' holiday. The monotony of the prospect appalled him. He was not old enough to know what a narcotic is Habit, and that one can become attached to and interested in the most unpromising jobs." The reason I raise this is because it might be useful to consider how much of your difficulties are just the human condition in general, or at least the human condition at work, and how much is because of blindness, your workplace, your particular circumstances, and so on. Obviously, both the human condition at work and your own circumstances are changeable. Just as obviously, the first is far less changeable than the second. To put it differently, another workplace might be a change for number 2, but probably wouldn't be a change for number 1. It might be worth thinking about whether you can split out the issues and try to tackle the easier ones first. Sometimes this, of course, is impossible, but probing the situation for solutions never does any harm.
@techsinger Dude I appreciate every of your responses, I'm serious. The block button is for everything but this, and ignorance isn't my thing either lol, at least not long term.
I'm most grateful. Thanks for not taking offence, to interfere in someone else's business is hardly a reasonable thing to do, and I only posted because, as I said, you sent the message publicly. Even so, it was an impertinence and I appreciate your not taking it as some guy sticking his nose where it doesn't belong.
André Polykanine
in reply to Darrell Hilliker 👨🦯♾️📡 • • •