@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

miki

@miki@dragonscave.space

blind coder / comp-sci student, working in automatic speech recognition for CLARIN. Polish. Libertarian leaning. Feel free to get in touch.

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miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

Google PageRank is like SMTP OpenRelay.

A really nice idea that makes life easier on a small-ish network where most participants can be trusted, absolutely terrible on a network whose size approaches infinity and anybody can publish anything anonymously.

albertcardona, to Trains
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@albertcardona The unsaid part of this is that the cheap airlines are private (and hence efficient), while most train companies are either public or semi-public, and hence both expensive and inefficient. If you take a look at Polish train prices, which aren't that bad compared to other places, going by car instead becomes more affordable at 3 to 4 people, assuming normal tickets. This makes no sense, there's no way a car is more efficient than a train.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@cybertailor @albertcardona Do the cheap airlines get any of these? I was under the impression that most subsidies go to the expensive state-owned enterprises like Lufthansa, KLM, British Airways or Lot.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

It took Python over 30 years to make "exit" in the terminal actually exit instead of telling you what to do to exit.

I know why this works the way it works (the message is actually the string representation of the exit function, and making the string representation of "exit" quit the interpreter would be just as counterintuitive), but this ugly hack should have been fixed in like 0.2 for God's sake.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@Caoimhe They finally fixed it in 3.13, which is in Beta.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@Caoimhe @x0 These days, there's very little reason to actually use Python on Windows though. Even if that's what you're on, you probably should be using WSL for most things instead.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

There's a fundamental conflict of interest between accessibility experts and accessibility overlay vendors. If accessibility overlays ever get good enough to replace the experts, which, just to be clear, they haven't yet, they'll put the experts out of their jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if accessibility "experts" keep spreading FUD about overlays long past the point when they actually become useful. After all, making themselves sound irreplaceable might be the only viable strategy for them.

This is just something to ponder when hearing what experts say about AI in accessibility.

matt, to random

Context on my last boost (https://dragonscave.space/@jscholes/112406794436648906) for my followers who aren't plugged into the blind community: Sonos recently released an update to their mobile app that makes it way less usable with VoiceOver on iOS, and presumably TalkBack on Android as well. @jscholes has insightfully connected this to the genericization of UI development, and this post in particular: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@matt This doesn't work when developers use libraries like styled components, which don't rely on IDs and class names at all. There may be ids and class names, but they're an internal implementation detail and have no guarantee of stability.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@matt I'm getting more and more convinced that slapping an AI-based accessibility overlay is eventually going to be the solution, and it's going to happen basically before anything else. We wont turn around the screen-reading world in 5 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if we got working overlays by then.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

aand the new business model for social media is officially here:

Europe made ads unviable, now it's selling your content to AI companies.

Considering that the alternative is basically "fuck the poor, we'll just charge our users", we should cheer this on.

cablespaghetti, to random
@cablespaghetti@southampton.social avatar

How does one own a Mac Pro and not know that it’s called a Mac Pro?🤔

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@cablespaghetti I'd guess it's either stolen, comes from a dead relative etc.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@cablespaghetti I got a Rockstar (an actually good Lightning plus MiniJack dongle in one) for about $15 off Allegro (Polish eBay / Amazon). The original price was four times that. I did some digging on where it come from, aand the seller was a "pawn shop" that specialized in taking over warehouses of bankrupt companies, and then selling the contents quickly.

Gaptangle, to random

Went exploring down the empty corridors of old TT servers just because you never know what random you haven't seen in a century you'll find, sadly all of ours are still empty, but we deleted or lost a ton of them over the years.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@simon @Gaptangle This is so true. I feel like any place that's actually public will quickly degenerate into a cesspool of spam. By that, I don't just mean jerks and people I disagree with, I mean an actually unlistenable mic, loud music, sending nonsensical messages. If the best case scenario is a predator that extremely aggressively flirts with women, it's not a great place to be.

I feel like Clubhouse got the right balance between fighting spam and actually allowing you to meet new people, back when that was still a thing.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

Fun fact.

Unlike every other programming language, Bash's range syntax actually deals with 0-padded numbers properly:

`echo {0001..0999} does what you expect it to do.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

The fundamental problem with the concept of alt text is that it's language specific, while pictures are not.

There are plenty of social media accounts that post pictures and videos that are universally funny, beautiful or interesting, regardless of the language you speak.

This is one more reason why fixing accessibility problems by inventing better technology for ourselves is a better approach than fixing accessibility by advocating for it. Even if you teach every single content creator on the planet to write alt descriptions and write them well, which is a monumental task in itself, this still won't solve the problem for the creators that have a multilingual audience. If you teach an AI to write good alt descriptions for those pictures, the problem will be solved for everyone.

To be clear, we're not quite at that point yet, as good as GPT Vision now is, it still doesn't beat a skilled human describer, but I think we'll get there quite soon.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@TheQuinbox This is why I emphasized the "skilled human describer" part. Most describers are not skilled, and this includes many extremely intelligent and well-intentioned people who I otherwise very much respect.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@TheQuinbox My biggest issue is text, specifically foreign-language text. It really likes to hallucinate something plausible, close but not quite right when that is encountered.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@TheQuinbox My biggest issue is text, specifically foreign-language text. It really likes to hallucinate something plausible, close but not quite right when that is encountered.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@weirdwriter More than one, yes, all of them, no.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@weirdwriter Sure and that's one way to do it I guess. Easier to do for static alt text than audio description, which we really need better standards for.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

X being the first major social media platform to stop gaslighting their users about block button effectiveness isn't what I expected to hear today, but yet here we are.

vick21, to accessibility
@vick21@mastodon.social avatar

I believe this is the first of its kind implementation on the web, i.e. first-letter navigation, so kudos to the Drive team! :) https://unmute.community/@payown/112369398805758817

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@bermudianbrit @jscholes @vick21 Is there anything better accessibility-wise, particularly for realtime collaboration?

Genuine question, my experiences with MS Office + NVDA were quite traumatic, apparently JAWS is somewhat better. Mac stuff (I use both iWorks and Microsoft) isn't much better either.

miki, to random
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

There's "AI" in "braille"

simon, to random

In case you think you're having a bad accessibility day today, or you wonder how much things like the ADA actually matter, @hmaealdeza is currently locked out of the #1 payment app in the Philippines because they introduced a non-optional face verification, and randomly decided to log her out. The app asks you to take a selfie, but now requires you also look at the camera and blink at the right time.

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@simon @hmaealdeza Also KYC/AML sucks. If there is one kind legislation blind people should be much more vocal about, it's KYC/AML bullshit.

yassie_j, to random
@yassie_j@labyrinth.zone avatar

Huh, Twitter has now changed it so that people you have blocked can now see your replies

And soon will change it so that blocked users can see public posts

Uh… Does this not defeat the point of blocking?

miki,
@miki@dragonscave.space avatar

@yassie_j This was always possible by opening a private window. I'm quite surprised that they finally got enough sense to stop gaslighting their users about this.

The actual point of blocking is preventing you from seeing content from people you find disagreeable and/or triggering. IMO any kind of mechanism that lets somebody see that they've been blocked just defeats the purpose.

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