Apparently the German government paid Microsoft 198 million Euro for software licenses in 2023 alone…and all I can think of is the good that such a large sum could do if instead it was donated to the Linux foundation and various other #FOSS projects. 😳
@amxmln The trouble is that if they stopped using Windows now, some of their employees would suffer a step backward in areas like accessibility while the hypothetical funded work on catching up is happening. I agree it would be a good idea to fund open source, but I don't see a way to do the transition without hurting productivity and usability in the meantime.
@amxmln In fact, the Sovereign Tech Fund, which I believe is affiliated with the German government, already provided a million in funding to the GNOME Foundation, and that is paying for my current accessibility work among several other things.
A friend really needs to avoid using their hands due to medical issues and can't type... what software should I recommend they use? Any great FOSS solutions these days?
@karen Unfortunately, the best solution I know is a proprietary package, though it does run on GNU/Linux (under X11, not yet Wayland): https://talonvoice.com/
🤔 as a long time command line geek I love TUIs, but i hate how horrible they are for #accessibility I hate making a tool and knowing "wow, this is gonna be completely, absolutely, and totally miserable for any blind person"
@masukomi Making TUIs actually accessible with screen readers is on my long wish list of things I want to do someday, building on my AccessKit project.
@masukomi But since nobody is likely to ever pay me to work on that project, I guess I might as well share my ideas about how I would do it, and see if somebody else takes it up instead.
Is there a #git feature I can enable to hit me on the head with a Looney Tunes-style mallet if I run git checkout -b and it doesn't successful create and and switch branch?
So I don't ignore the error and accidentally commit to master.
@ids1024 I just finished handling an incident that was caused by a coworker somehow committing a file with unresolved merge conflicts. So yeah, maybe we could use a feature like that for that case as well.
Omg #KDE is soooo good. If their design philosophy was a bit more #GNOME or Apple like, I would literally switch. But I love my Berlin Gnomies, so running both it is.
Btw, I started to rework the Gnome pattern on openSUSE Tumbleweed in my free time and really reference #Aeon :D
My main problem with KDE is QT, because it’s so Cpp heavy and hard to integrate with other languages, unlike GTK. Maybe #XFCE could be interesting for me, now that they have a Wayland story and I learned about XApps 😼
@aral@janvhs@dgchrt Please remove me from this thread. I think it would be appropriate to remove @sovtechfund as well. This argument has already been had. I'm already doing what I can, and so is STF. I, for one, don't want the noise of rehashing this argument.
@danilo I wonder if the action was against me or the server toot.cafe. Do you have a convenient way to check that?
I think I pissed some people off in a thread several months ago. I don't recall if any of those were on Hachyderm. I regret the position that I argued in that thread, and that I didn't know when to stop. I'm not sure what I did warranted moderator action, though.
As both incumbents and investors rush to do Everything With "AI," their singular focus ignores multiple areas that are ripe for building something new.
Here I argue that the rise of LLMs is converging with larger social issues that provoke demand for:
> It can give you enormous detail about its creator. You can learn things about their identity, economic circumstances, where in the world they live.
sounds to me like a big step backward from text. There are real people who have worthwhile things to say but have reasons to keep those things hidden, or at least keep them from biasing their audience against their actual message.
Spam is a problem. But I'm not ready to give up on text.