We were promised that if we ended the practice of software authors providing code to their users, and instead let Apple and Google decide what code we were allowed to run, all the evils of software would go away:
https://boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-thi.html
In reality, apps are some of the dirtiest code we use. Muslim call-to-prayer apps harvest their users' data and sell it to ICE and other domestic spy agencies:
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When my EFF colleague Alexis Hancock signed her baby up for daycare, she was told that she had to download a childcare management app - to monitor and specify "feedings, diaper changes, pictures, activities, and which guardian picked-up/dropped-off the child."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/daycare-apps-are-dangerously-insecure
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GitHub Copilot
Copyright treats robots and people differently. You can't just analogize Copilot to human actors. Copilot might feel like a dirty consent violation, but copyright law is probably ok with it. Read James Grimmelman for more: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright-for-literate-robots/
More importantly, the law stuff is a red-herring. We over-fixate on licenses in the FOSS world. The real issue is that devs trust GitHub with their code and now Copilot gets sprung on them. The harm isn't copyright, it's informed consent.
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
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I don't mean any ill will to experts, but I hate hearing that companies teamed up with "accessibility experts." Like listen to the actual fucking users! You don't need everything filtered through often non-disabled experts. It just kinda gets on my nerves. #a11y
From Twitter: Your annual reminder that #react-select is not accessible to screen reader users and does not follow the ARIA specification for custom controls.
This library is the reason for many #a11y blocker issues on the web. It affects us all.
https://github.com/JedWatson/react-select/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+Accessibility
@nyquildotorg @devinprater
The difference is not in the letters and not even in the words, but in the pauses, the loving whispering, the snarky comment, the anguished scream.
These things aren't encoded in the text. You have to guess them from context. Also since they aren't encoded, there is no right or wrong reading. But there are significant differences, depending on who reads.
Survival under US capitalism
The ruling class are openly talking about trying to engineer a 5% or more rate of unemployment in the United States.
Finding a new job, if that's something anyone has been thinking about, is an activity that is about to get a lot harder. Like probably in the next month or two.
Just putting that out there in case it helps someone.
They tried REALLY hard to make this options screen accessible and not confusing, and WOW is it inaccessible and confusing.
We're stuck with it not because it's a standard, but because that's what the big software uses.
Mastodon takes a very fast and loose interpretation of the spec, and is outright non-conformant in many ways. You can't implement AP without doing what Mastodon does, unless you don't want to talk to most of the fediverse.
By the Blind, For the Blind
This article is really interesting!
"Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221000592
So, we calculate the amount of service on people we serve or projects in "units" of 15 minutes. So, if we spent an hour, that'd be (I'm pretty sure) 4 units of service. So I went on OpenAI, and the Q A bot, and asked how many 15 minute intervals is in 1 hour and 15 minutes. It responded with 9. I could really get some use out of this.
There's a company selling a tiny little board called a Resut Fixer or something like that, you plug it in between the driver board and the computer and it's supposed to stop these resets. It works by being a tiny little switching power supply that gets its 5v from the 12v line.
Sounds like a great idea if the 12v line wasn't EXACTLY as old and knackered as the 5v line. The caps are literally right next to each other, they get the same heat and the same wear. The bridges share a heatsink!
So you plug in your reset fixer board (which costs something stupid like seventy bucks) and your game doesn't reset and all's well for a month or two and then your 12v line starts Feeling It, and the symptoms can be maddeningly intermittent. Switches no longer have the juice to punch through their coatings of grime, displays start acting up, optos get finicky, the game acts weird if you turn the sound up - don't buy these little boards, they don't fix owt, they just move the problem around.
I'm a person who is blind, who enjoys eating, relaxing. reading, learning about Linux from the safety of other operating systems, and chatting. As I do talk about kinks that I have, this account should be considered NSFW. You are definitely not required to follow me, and if you do not, or choose to unfollow, I will not mind.