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
Does anyone else feel the urge, when you want something strange from AI, to explain and justify why you want it? Like it might judge me for wanting this answer or something.
@polx I dunno, the script takes two command line parameters. You think I would have at least added a print statement for myself if I call it with none. Or at least reminded myself what order they go in. But nope! Had to just read the code again.
I contain multitudes. A year ago, I wrote a quick script, "just in case" I ever needed to do the same task again. This year, I need the script I wrote. But did I document it in any way? No, of course not! It just amuses me that I went to the trouble of writing myself a script, and keeping it safe, but not to the trouble of documenting how the script works. Conflicting urges, I guess.
If, like me, you're still confused: her name is Tina, she comes from China, and she has many auto parts. I intended to post these back to back, but the alt text just takes me that long! LOL
I...what? This woman has...many auto parts in her warehouse, apparently. And engines. At first I thought this was some kind of racist joke! But the internet tells me that Auto Parts Tina is the charismatic face of Guangzhou Xinwangda Automotive Parts Co., Ltd., which has been in business since 2006. I uploaded the audio here so you don't have to click on a YouTube link unless you want to. But if you do, you can find her channel, with dozens of shorts where she sings about auto parts, here: www.youtube.com/channel/UC2SE3wYIgJUQA-pvww7oFrQ
@wronglang@menelion@dragonscave.space@matt@nolan@zersiax Even something as simple as reading logs, establishing what normal values are, then collating and describing periods of time where values go outside of normal could help. Just knowing quickly that at the exact time this one endpoint is called disc io goes way up and database response time goes way down but cpu and ram stay within there normal ranges could help a blind human pinpoint where to start looking.
@wronglang@menelion@dragonscave.space@matt@nolan@zersiax You’re correct as far as that goes. But audibly representing large amounts of graphical data is still an unresolved research problem. If there was one true proven solution to that part of it, I’d already be pushing hard for the tools to implement it. Whereas AI skips the problem entirely (when it’s not just making things up) by pinpointing and describing the small slices around the problem exactly (“Whenever anyone hits endpoint X, database Y freezes for X time because storage array W is overloaded”).
@matt@nick Ah, got it. I misread you as suggesting yet another accessible programming language. I think the problem with Quorum falls less out of it being accessible, and more out of it being an “educational” language. Educational languages either never escape into the real world to help students do anything useful (scratch, logo) or they do escape into the real world and set everyone back for years (basic).
@wronglang@menelion@dragonscave.space@matt@nolan@zersiax Yes. But this smells like a problem that requires AI to solve. Or every program ever to write better logs. As it is, how do I accessibly reconcile my web server logs, my database logs, and my storage activity, so I can track all the symptoms of an issue? Sighted people get graphs with colored lines from stuff like grifana or whatever. Blind people get four log dumps in four different formats, without even colored lines to help us, and told to just listen to every line read out.
@matt@nick Please no! If BGT and quorum haven’t taught everyone that designing an accessible programming language is a dead end, we are beyond hope. I would far rather blind people vibe code everything and at least get second hand exposure to mainstream tools, and maybe learn something that could help them get a job, than write BGT by hand.
@nolan@zersiax@menelion@dragonscave.space@matt Yes, seconding log files. AI read 68 megs of logs and helped me fix a database performance issue in half an hour, that I’d previously been debugging on and off for two years. If only I could have read the pretty graphs, the issue would have been immediately obvious.
@matt@menelion@dragonscave.space It’s not about the language itself for me. It’s about how inaccessible the tools surrounding it are. Debugging is still awkward and terrible. Designing forms still sucks. Profiling is a pita. We can’t test on the iOS or Android simulator last I checked. We have nothing as clean and easy as unity. All tutorials and cookbooks are incomprehensible YouTube videos, LLM slop, ad covered, or all three. AI allows me to use one interface, with one modality, to do the hard bits.
Subject from an email that just landed in my inbox: "All of the sweaty, moist wetness your ears can handle". What? No! Why? It's like a marketer spent months crafting a subject line to make people press delete as quickly as possible. For the curious, it's from a website called dlsite, some sort of Japanese games storefront where I purchased the simulation audiogame Dreamy Train. They also sell...I have no idea, because I didn't open that email to try and figure out what the heck they were trying to advertise with that subject line. Headphones? Pornography? Headphones for listening to pornography? Some sort of juice for cleaning earwax? The world's worst headband?
