I just read about a blind person vibe-coding a new email client for Windows. Not linking because I don't want people to pile onto this person, who is a respected member of the blind community and long-time accessibility advocate, though not a professional programmer as far as I know. Instead, I […]

Question for blind people who use the Mantis Q40 or the Brailliant BI family of Braille displays that are apparently based on the same platform: Given that the devices have built-in applications, some of which use WiFi, and that these devices also support text-to-speech output one way or another […]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@ekuber/116585853572401757 One of the virtues of big open source projects is that little happens behind closed doors. However, since 99% of what they discuss just isn’t interesting to downstream end users, they forget that downstream end users *can* read this stuff and […]

Something just now made me think of this song by a Christian rock band: "Get Up" by Circleslide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5A7abVF33Q I think it's an encouraging message that works with or without believing in God. Oh sure, it's obvious what they meant by "believed" in the third verse […]

Wandering the #pyconus expo floor I was able to find a company that did not once use "AI" in its marketing materials and in a 15-minute conversation nobody said "agentic" even once. In the spirit of rewarding what we want to see in the world, check them out: https://phemeral.dev

In 1996, David S. Miller wrote a post about why Linux on SPARC performed so much better than Solaris. His message is easiest to find in the context of Bryan Cantrill's ill-considered response, for which Cantrill has apologized. Here I want to focus on Miller's message […]

RE: https://tau-ceti.space/@ics/116573694185698467 I think this is the strongest argument I've yet read for not using generative AI.

I love this field I just discovered in @freya's profile: DO-NOT-INTERACT: Butlerian Jihadists, people who believe there was a happier past without tech

It makes me angry, perhaps unreasonably so, that teachers are now resorting to mandating the use of handwriting on exams, at least in part in response to students using LLMs to cheat. I have enough usable vision that I *can* handwrite, but it was unusually tedious for me, and I was glad to be […]

"Packages that can't be rebuilt byte-for-byte are now blocked from entering Debian's testing branch." https://itsfoss.com/news/debian-makes-reproducible-builds-mandatory/

I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. On the one hand, I love Rust's approach to safety. Meaning type safety, memory safety, and protection against data races. It's possible, and common, to build safe abstractions atop a small amount of unsafe code. Even a kernel for an embedded OS can have […]

PDFium is best known as the PDF renderer in Chrome. But apparently it can also *generate* PDFs. I recently came across a PDF whose metadata says it was produced by PDFium. How does that actually happen in practice? Did someone print something to a PDF? This one's frustrating because the content […]

Wanted: Pingdom, but the checks are performed from residential connections on all the major ISPs, with the ISPs' domain blacklisting things enabled, and one gets alerted if a check repeatedly fails on any major ISP.

TIL: On Windows, in any Electron application window that hasn't explicitly disabled this, you can switch the window into full-screen mode by pressing F11. I did it by accident just now in Slack. I find this funny, I guess because it's probably an unintended side effect of being built on a web […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@botwiki/116555961642959580 I think the unpopularity of generative AI outside of the tech bubble is overstated. Take my brother Andrew, who's about as far outside of the tech bubble as a middle-class white American man can be. He willingly uses generative AI at work […]

Do any English-speaking blind people use the RHVoice TTS engine? I vaguely remember hearing bad things about it, or at least that it wasn't that great. But it's one of the few mature open-source TTS engines, and it's not eSpeak, so I guess some might prefer it for that reason alone.

Question for blind programmers: Do you think you can read or write code faster, when working in a language and library ecosystem you know well? And a follow-up question: If you use LLMs to generate code, do you feel that having to read more code, as opposed to writing the code yourself from […]

I'm curious about what hardware LambdaMOO (the original virtual world, not the software) was running on at its peak in the 90s, when lag was a real problem. I remember reading about some kind of high-end SPARC in the 90s, but have forgotten the details. @wrog @nosrednayduj Do either of you […]

A thread elsewhere on here got me reflecting on the fact that this year, I will have been online for 40 years. My first device was a 300/1200 baud modem, complete with the need to learn the Hayes command set. Connecting successfully to my first bulletin board system, the NZ Micro BBS run by […]

Is there such a thing as a USB power bank / portable charger that has some way of finding out its current battery level that's accessible to blind people?

hey if you're a python programmer and you're sick of everyone posting nothing but AI all the time do me a favor, check this out and give me some feedback, give me something to reply to that's just about python code and API design and an interesting problem space https://pypi.org/project/fritter/

Hey #webdev I need to recommend some web developers to a bunch of small business clients. I'd want the web developer to specialize in #accessibility across a wide array of industries. Can you put your resume links in the replies? #shopify knowledge is a bonus, especially if you designed your own […]

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@arclight/116528355759158884 I think this thread is onto something. I don't know what to do about it, besides writing new code in C or C++, which I don't want to do. You can use Python, Rust, or even Node with only distro package managers, if you're developing for a […]

And for an extra spicy take: I've got better shit to waste bytes and breath on than scolding marginalized people for doing what they have to do in order to get their work in front of other people and make a living. That includes things like: Publishing on Substack Having Twitter accounts Using […]

okay if we need to have a may the 4th take, I'll share my usual one: it's too bad they ran out of money and never made a sequel to The Last Jedi. a flawed movie in many respects but "Let the past die, kill it if you have to" is the lesson that Star Wars needs to learn more than anything else and […]

RE: https://mastodon.drkirkadams.com/@drkirkadams/116499441479778993 We've kind of been here before. In the late 2000s through the mid 2010s, there was much hype about APIs, and big players like Facebook and Twitter offered feature-rich APIs that let you write a full alternate client for the […]

I was early to this party, talking in 2018 about you, as one person, can only do one person's worth of contribution and you need to get used to that idea. Pretty sure it was in this fairly well-attended talk, even. And yet even I have trouble keeping it in mind. < […]

Question for Python folks: Has there been any serious effort to implement a thing where you import all your application's Python modules, then take some kind of snapshot of the heap, to enable faster application startup, like Emacs's dump/undump implementation? Could be useful for desktop apps […]

Black woman: Black people don’t feel comfortable on Mastodon and Bluesky!! Everyone else: here’s why you’re wrong and I know better than you! Honestly some of y’all sound like the ‘I have one minority friend and they say it’s okay for me to say X’ type of people

like the fact that LLMs "really can" do some parts of programming reads to me not as a demonstration of their economic utility but as a brutal indictment of our tools *for* programming. it feels productive to have these things emit mountains of boilerplate because *we constantly need mountains […]

RE: https://caneandable.social/@JonathanMosen/116458795249216829 As a developer, I can appreciate why Microsoft would want to be done with classic Outlook and transition to a new, cleaner rewrite. Classic Outlook has been a hulking monster of a desktop app for a long time. What's sad to me is […]

I want to be clear that this is pretty divorced from my own views of likely scenarios, even likely nightmare scenarios, so they're not getting this from me. If you're reading this and you're involved in LLM hype, I'd really like you to take a moment to pause and examine the fact that this is […]

RE: https://dair-community.social/@KimCrayton1/116453648656437902 One thing that brings me joy is singing. I like to sing karaoke (I memorize my songs). One time, though, I sucked the joy out of it by making it about achieving and doing something impressive. Over several weeks, I went through […]

Re: last boost (https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116450207554331558), the one nuance I'd add is that if an admin or moderator of your instance tells you that you're doing something that they don't want *on their instance*, then respect that. Otherwise, I agree.

You deserve to take up space on the Fediverse. There is a you-sized hole in our feeds and there is only one way to fill it. If some busybody tells you you're doing it wrong and that your posts aren't welcome, block the fuck out of them and keep going.

my scientific hero is “et. al.”, nobody gets as much done

RE: https://inuh.net/@evmar/116434038603586506 I wonder if this approach could be used to relatively efficiently get the ETI-Eloquence text-to-speech engine running on ARM64 Linux and Android. Not that the result would be legal to distribute, of course; the current owner of the engine (after […]

Is anyone else getting very slow or even hung connections when trying to pull packages from the Ubuntu apt repository now, or is it just me?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116387853263295590 One thing that really resonated with me in that video is the importance of *non-hyperbolic* criticism. I just saw someone refer to an LLM as a random word generator. Come on, we all know that's overly simplistic. We won't have any […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bcantrill/116393325512331807 I'm not sure I agree with the closing nod to the importance and power of LLMs. But I agree with the rest of this.

Just saw a post from an instructor who's clearly upset about how students are using LLMs to skip the hard parts of education. Not linking or boosting because I don't want people to pile on this person. I'm inclined to agree, until they end with: > Seriously, we need to go back to typewriter […]

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/116380176685450213 TIL that Slay the Spire II uses the Godot engine. Godot has accessibility support via AccessKit. So I wonder if the developers of Slay the Spire II have done any work on making that game accessible to blind players. The original […]

I wonder if anyone has done an audio description for this short-film version of Terry Bisson's science-fiction short story "They're Made out of Meat": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg This film has shown up on Hacker News a few times over the years. The original story is just the […]

Re: last boost (https://caneandable.social/@JessicaTegner/116357917490605343), for me, the bigger story is the initial release of AccessForge, a one-click installer for game accessibility mods. And it's written in Rust using wxDragon, a project to provide Rust bindings for wxWidgets. Good work […]

This latest post from Sean Goedecke, who IIUC works at Microsoft on GitHub Copilot, hardly strikes me as a ringing endorsement of LLM-based coding agents. https://www.seangoedecke.com/programming-with-ai-agents-as-theory-building/ He says he's only keeping about 10% of the agent output, he's […]

In the current discourse about using LLMs to generate code, there's a common trope about programmers being divided into pragmatists versus artists/craftspeople. Here's an interesting Hacker News thread from someone who considers themself in the pragmatist camp yet has issues with LLM-generated […]

*message in a bottle, tossed in the ocean - but that's a #mastodon specialty, right? I worked as a speech therapist for years, but stopped, and I am wondering if I can find anyone who might be interested in textbooks and/or tests? - English language (some in French) - I am in France, so I […]

Human rights chief warns against banning social media for kids https://archive.is/2026.03.24-204653/https://www.politico.eu/article/michael-oflaherty-human-rights-council-of-europe-children-social-media-ban/ Ban the harmful algorithms of Big Tech social media instead. #bigtech #socialmedia #eu […]

I’ve just finished the Access On that will be published on April 1, 50 years to the day that Apple was founded. And I’m really happy with it. We can celebrate all that Apple has done while also ensuring that their massive marketing machine doesn’t rewrite or obscure the history, which is that […]

Note to cis people: If you watch and support Harry Potter series, you are funding the anti-trans crusade that is killing people like me and stripping away our rights. Experts have warned that in the US and UK the steps toward genocide against trans people are accelerating. I ask: Do you care […]