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
Even completely headless, command line #linux doesn't prioritize #accessibility in any way. Today I had to reinstall an entire #debian system from scratch because a drive listed in my /etc/fstab died. That makes #systemd boot into emergency mode, where you get no SSH, no network, no sound, and no screen reader. There is no quick way to force it to try and boot even though drive 7 of 11 has died, and it could absolutely bring up SSH and the network to let me fix it if it wanted to, just like sysvinit used to do. You can't even force systemd to add SSH and the network to emergency mode because of circular dependencies. nofail will only continue the boot if the drive doesn't exist, but if the filesystem has issues...emergency mode for you. In short: if your drive dies on Linux, fuck you. Be able to see, or reinstall your entire system, because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs.
So I read a lot both for personal enjoyment, and for work. If you want to see a real time feed of what I'm reading, you can find that here: tinygem.org/fastfinge/
IOS Shortcuts are the worst. Just spent like three hours debugging one. I now know far more than I ever wanted to about how shortcuts work, and all of the VoiceOver bugs in the shortcuts app, and the various bugs with posting form data to an API from a shortcut.
To be fair, sometimes I do fall asleep with a YouTube video on, and then thanks to autoplay I wake up hours later to a man named Ian yelling at me about lunchables. So God only knows what my sleep self has been watching.
Either that or Grognak The Destroyer and Putput are obscure sex kinks and I’ve just unintentionally revealed some deep, dark secret to all of the fediverse.
Uh, should I be worried that the first thing YouTube recommends under the topics to explore thing is “Groknak the destroyer”? Who or what is Grognak the destroyer? Is it coming for me? All the other topics are things like “putput”, “offline TV”, “offensive board games”, “live chess tournaments”, you know…perfectly normal things to watch on YouTube. I assume Grognak the destroyer and putput are the demons Apple AI was warning me about a couple days ago.
I always forget just how small and compressible text is. The entire database for this instance is less than 5 gigs in size, with about four million posts. And that includes overhead for the indexes, views, log files, etc. The big drain on any instances is the media. I proxy remote media, but don't cache it, so the only crap I have to store is my own. Same for rblind.com; it's also only a few gigs. Slightly more, because we cache some thumbnails, and a Lemmy post is generally much longer than a microblogging post.
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.
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