completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those. keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
I'd love Firefox to surface stuff from my browser history from four years ago that I never visit anymore. If I thought it was cool back then, maybe reminding me of it could be useful. Doesn't even require anything to leave my device to do easy, neat stuff like that.
Maybe the catchy way to sum that up is: "Big tech wants us to be more like everyone else. We need to create tech that helps us be more like ourselves." I'd like to see apps that better use and surface my own private data to help me discover myself.
So as I went for a walk this morning, I was musing on my switch to Kagi, and hosting my own bookmark manager, and Mastodon, and so-on. One of the key things that make these services better, I think, is that they rely on intentional user signals. Three quarters of the websites I visit are totally unimportant. Most of the YouTube videos I view turned out to be neutral to bad, and I don't want to keep seeing more of them. Half the products I look at I have no intention of purchasing. But big tech slurps up all this low quality data and throws it into a big data soup. However: garbage in, garbage out, right? I think hyper-personalization isn't the exclusive domain of big tech. In fact, without big data, I think we can do it better. Because we're relying on explicit decisions that users made, with the intention of effecting their experience. So it's less data, but the quality is a hundred times higher. For example, I would love a fediverse client that can determine the posts that are most similar to posts I previously boosted, and let me choose to sort those to the top. I follow a few hundred active posters, and there's no way I can keep up with all of you. I know I'm missing super cool stuff. But to surface the cool stuff, we don't need big tech and data from millions of users. We just need to make better use of the personal data we already have about ourselves.
@evilcookies98 I suspect this will get better once the intents API for Siri is released, and apps start using it. Then they can indicate what the actual notification text is, and what's less important information (like the associated fediverse account).
@cachondo@jscholes And of course now, at least in Canada, Amazon has decided that if a product has no Canadian reviews, instead of showing the US or UK reviews in English, it's sometimes going to show Spanish reviews badly machine-translated! Why? "It was retarded, but has a good taste." That really helps me know if I should get the shirt or not. Okay, I'm done ranting.
@jscholes@cachondo This is especially good when you're looking at Bibles. Amazon randomly combines different translations in the same language, different translations in different languages, and different formats (audio, ebook, hardcover, etc.). And then you get the people who give the random specific edition of a bible you're looking at 5 stars because they really like Jesus, balanced by the people who give it 1 star because they really hate Jesus.
@cachondo@jscholes And of course one or two reviewers actually bought thingies. But they're convinced their thingy is a thingamabob, so they've just reviewed the wrong product entirely.
@cachondo@jscholes My favourite is when you're looking at a blue thingamabob made by the dingle company, but Amazon has merged it's reviews with the reviews for a yellow whatsit manufactured by the dongle corporation. And you're never sure if the review is talking about the thingamabob or the whatsit, because they're similar items with slightly different features.
@jscholes@cachondo I bought this fastfinge from Amazon and it's nothing like the picture! It's cheap and plastic, and it showed up late. Also, it has a strange smell. I will return it. 1 star!
Being in Discord servers for games is also a trip. "everyone murdered by demons", Apple AI tells me. That's sure a notification to wake up to. I didn't think 2025 had gotten quite that bad already!
Apple AI does a really bad job summarizing notifications from Mona, the fediverse app I use on IOS. It summarized the multiple notifications from my last thread as "Happy customers are using fastfinge". Well, ummm, okay. I'm glad my followers are happy customers and all, but I'm a little worried about how you guys are using me.
@alexhall I use it for pulling data out of graphs or CSV files and answering questions about it. At least on Windows, there's still no good sonification tools for random online graphs. But AI does good enough if you just give it an image. And when it goes wrong, at least for graphs, it's usually completely obvious.
@alexhall I did the $25 a month plan because I was previously paying for Chat GPT, so why not cancel that and have everything on one bill. Plus Kagi gives GPT4o, as well as a ton of other models for when OpenAI starts censoring too hard.
@jscholes@kagihq You can also do it by pressing the domain info link beside a search result that you don't like. Just select the block radio button and hit escape to close the dialogue. The only real issue is that answers from the assistant aren't read out automatically in real time as they come in. I filled an issue for that if you want to upvote: kagifeedback.org/d/5996-announce-new-results-from-assistant-using-aria-live
If you're a #blind user, you should really consider #Kagi for web search. Especially if you pay for chat GPT pro, you can subscribe to Kagi instead for cheaper and get more features. But even if you don't want AI, the search page is #accessible, fast, and light-weight. And unlike other big tech companies (Microsoft and Google) Kagi still offers a cheaper plan with no AI if you don't want it. Also, because they downrank websites with ads, the more accessible results tend to be at the top. Kagi also lets you block domains from your results. So I got rid of inaccessible stuff like instagram and pinterest, and downranked YouTube, because those results aren't usually #screenreader accessible. While I don't agree with many of the opinions of the @kagihq founder (especially his decision to do business with Yandex for image search), I still feel like using Kagi is more ethical than dealing with Google or Bing, and that these are reasonable differences of opinion that reasonable people can have, not just another clownishly evil tech company. I also find the idea that if you're a paying customer, that somehow guarantees the business will treat you better, really strange. I pay a lot to my ISP and they still treat me like dirt! Kagi will almost certainly sell out at some point. But for the moment, it's where it's at for search: www.kagi.com
