I am having a terrible week.
But hey! I accidentally created a new pain/malaise scale. It's based on how many times I exclaim motherf🤬ker in an hour.
Wheeee! 😃
Lotta abled ppl in the replies here who should 100% shut the fuck up until they talk to some actual disabled ppl. Though in this case, I also have to admit that a lot of blind ppl are disturbingly enamored with this so-called AI shit, and that I remain in opposition to what seems to be the mainstream thinking about AI among western blind ppl. It’s very simple for me: something that will hasten climate collapse if comes into wide use is not a good option.
Aside from the environmental aspect of so-called AI, I’m also in opposition to the model of training so-called AI via theft of data and refinement of those models through exploitative labor in the Global South. Nothing about these tools is currently acceptable, not even for the purposes of accessibility.
@weirdwriter Yeah. I definitely think our outlooks are very similar here. I used to want to go into blind tech in some fashion but everything in the last decade has been a slide into the same shitty practices that mainstream tech is built on.
@jackf723@weirdwriter Yes, this would be better. That said, I think that given the lack of understanding from most people of what so-called AI is and what it's capabilities realistically are, this is overall going to normalize the use of any so-called AI tools, and those other tools have already been shown to be destructive and unethical. My comments on the mozilla post about it flooding the web with poor quality alt-text also stand.
@jackf723 Yeah. That would be good ideally. You've pointed out one barrier to it actually happening. I also think there is a behavioral barrier as well, as Hannah pointed out in her comments on mozilla's posts. Ppl feel pressured to include alt-text but don't particularly feel invested in making sure it's good, and that's because minimum standards for accessibility are honestly pretty crappy. Making good alt-text proliferate requires a base level value change. It's not simply a tech problem.
I have a hard time ever getting to a new album the same day it comes out, but the purple version of Viva Satellite by Todd Snider came out today and it's really good. I know Viva Satellite was his most unsuccessful record, and that his life was kind of a mess when he was writing and laying down most of those tracks, but I personally think it's a really good record.
He's been putting out these purple versions--essentially retrospectives where he plays the songs live and acoustic and tells stories about the making of the songs--of his entire catalogue for a while now. Not sure why he's been doing it but it kind of gives me this uneasy feeling like if I google it I'm gonna read that he has cancer or something, and I'm just going to start crying and never stop.
Wow. All the free downloads through his shop are CDQ wav files. Really gotta hand it to smaller artists for making sure they're releasing their stuff for download in high quality instead of mp3s.
This is a thread of #MutualAid requests that I’m helping to boost. Please scroll down to see the individual requests. Donations help most but boosts can also help and are always welcome and appreciated for any mutual aid requests I’m helping to boost. @mutualaid 👇🏻
@mutualaid Hey, all. Ellie needs help again this month raising funds for her mom’s meds. The goal is $1250. I don’t have an exact count of what’s been raised so far but it’s not much, maybe 1% of what’s needed. Please give what you can. Boosts requested as well.
@ttpphd Willie’s alive. Either 90 or 91 this year. I also knew Dawkins is still alive because he is an incredible piece of shit and I definitely would’ve remembered if he had died.
I've seen some responses about that NPR article along the lines of, "How can you change people's minds without conversation?"
Tbh I don't believe the author was trying to facilitate conversation. I thin she expected the article to be well-received and that her husband would be coerced into dropping some of his necessary covid precautions as a result. 1/
We are watching our family members, our friends, our community members become acutely sick and die. We are confronting our own mortality head-on every second of every day while others refuse to try to process their trauma from the shelter-in-place orders and instead choose to pretend we can still live like it's 2019, which puts everybody in ongoing danger. 4/3
The conversation we need to have is not about how those of us who are more vulnerable because of disability and/or chronic illness can loosen up and learn to take more risks for the psychological comfort of others. The conversation we need to have is how everyone can process the trauma of the pre-2020 world being gone so that we can get fucking serious about doing the things needed to live in the world as it is now. 5/3