The thing is that this kind of thing works for people who don’t know better. I have spoken to dudes who like the abstract notion of Musk being a gamer, probably because it wasn’t apparent to them that his Path of Exile account was so obviously boosted. Similarly, a script-kiddie can seem like a skilled programmer to people who have little knowledge of programming

I’ve watched/played/read things I wouldn’t have discovered if there hadn’t been masses of people crying “woke” about them; there was a period where it was a really useful recommendation engine, because they’d be especially pissy if high quality stuff was woke. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work as well anymore, because “woke” is increasingly meaningless

I possibly disagree — I’m a part time wheelchair user (as well as other disability related devices/aids) and I’m always fascinated by how dynamic and relative the concept of “accessibility” is, even if we’re only considering the perspective of one person. For example, for me, using my wheelchair often means trading one kind of pain for another, and depending on specific circumstances, that might not be worth it. Being disabled often forces you to get creative in hacking together many different solutions, balancing the tradeoffs such that the “cost” of using one tool is accounted for by the benefits of another. I wish I could recall some specific examples to share with you, but I have seen friends be incredibly inventive in using regular items in a context that makes them into accessibility devices, if that makes sense.

This is all to say that expensive hardware, learning curves, unpleasant tradeoffs like friction of wearing — all of these things are core to my experience of most accessibility devices I’ve ever used. For any prospective accessibility device, the key question is “given the various costs and inconveniences, are the benefits of this thing worth it?”. Even without knowing much about this specific device, I would wager that for some disabled people, it absolutely would be net helpful.

That being said, you raise a good point, in that “accessibility” is often used as marketing hype, and in its worst form, this looks like disabled people’s experiences being exploited to develop and sell a product that doesn’t actually care about being accessible, so long as it has the appearance of such for investors. I’m not saying that’s what this product is doing, but certainly I am primed to be wary of stuff like this.

Even besides the exploitative instances that I allude to, you’re right to draw attention to existing products on the market. It’s possible that some disabled people struggle to make use of devices that would be “good enough” for most (and maybe these people are who this new device is aimed at helping), but with accessibility stuff, it’s far too easy for well-meaning people to jump to making new gadgets or tools, instead of meaningfully examining why the existing “good enough” solutions are inaccessible for some. A specific example that’s coming to mind is someone I met who had a super high tech prosthetic limb that was so hilariously impractical compared to her existing options that this new one literally never got used. She said that it’s a shame that such an expensive bit of kit is made functionally useless by much more basic designs, but she’s learned that excited engineers are rarely receptive to being told about the practical problems with their new devices.

TL;DR: i think your instinct to be cautious about invoking accessibility is wise, though my own caution comes from a different context

Edit: I watched the video and I feel less dubious of this device after learning that this particular project arose following an email from someone who was mute and would find something like this useful. It helps that CharaChorder’s chording keyboards are established (albeit super niche) products, and this project is less about a fancy new device, and more like “chording keyboards like ours allows for faster typing than any other method, with training. Maybe this means it could be an effective text-to-speech input method. Let’s find out”.

For many, I imagine it’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back

Containerized software is huge in the sciences for reproducible research. Or at least it will/should be (speaking as someone adjacent to bioinformatics and genomics)

Incredible. I don’t know enough Prolog to be able to follow it very well, but this is truly what the internet was made for

I don’t think duplicate link protection is what I mean, unless I’m misunderstanding how that feature works. I.e. if I had bookmarks “example.com/a” , “example.com/b”, these are duplicates even though they’re at the same site. But if I visit the page “example.com/c” and I went to go bookmark it, I would like to be able to see a thing that says '"from this site, you have also bookmarked: “example.com/a” , “example.com/b”.

I don’t imagine this is possible. I was probably going to make something to give me that functionality at some point, because I haven’t seen anyone having the same problem as me.

I have a question which may turn out to be a feature request

The question: How easy would it be to use Linkwarden to check whether I have already bookmarked something from the site I’m currently on? To clarify why I’m asking this, I have been generally trying to be more mindful in what media I consume, which means the things I enjoy reading are fragmented pieces that I may stumble upon through word of mouth.

For example, I read post ‘a’ on blog ‘A’ and I enjoy it so much that I bookmark it (‘Aa’) so I can find it for later sharing. Many months later, I am linked to post ‘b’ on site ‘A’, but I don’t remember whether I have been to this site before, and knowing that I had previously enjoyed post Aa may prompt me to actually read post Ab (or properly set aside for later)

Native Firefox bookmarks don’t do this, I know that much. It’s something I’ve been meaning to figure out how to solve, because one of the delightful, if somewhat overwhelming parts about floating on the ‘small web’, is the trust that builds up gradually after seeing sometime put out consistently good coverage

My understanding is that it’s not necessarily porn addiction that causes this, but a particular style of masturbation that some people refer to as “death grip”. Source: a friend of mine who used to masturbate every night before bed to sleep better, but this began causing issues with his partner due to ED. He eventually solved it by using a different grip while masturbating.

In short, if you feel like you’ve come away from this conversation with things to reflect on, then that’s great and I’m glad about that. However, “porn addiction”, as a term, describes a whole bundle of stuff that is still pretty poorly understood, because it can be hard to discern between symptoms and causes

“Fight me if you want, I’m sick in bed and have time.”

I’m also sick and in bed, and this is such an appealing offer of a sparring match, but alas, I’ve never used Gnome

Your explanation is good and thorough.

I always struggle to know when to use the square brackets. The straightforward answer is to just quote directly where possible. But especially in interviews, someone’s answer may be jumbly, so the most honourable thing to do may be to use square brackets to make it easier for the reader to understand the speaker’s point, but you’re not being misleading.

For example, maybe this interviewee said something like “in the future, it — we might come to see that game development, and games overall, will end up turning out to be player-driven”, which could be straightforwardly shortened to what we see in the screenshot: “in the future, it [will be] player driven”. Square brackets, in the hands of a skilled journalist, can be used to manipulate a narrative through selectively quoting people, but they can also represent a speaker’s point far more authentically and cogently than the literal words.

"in the future, it will be player-driven

Yeah, maintenance is undervalued.

> Things are going well

“What are we paying you for?”

> Things are breaking

"What are we paying you for?

I love and hate in equal measure the hubris with which one regards a “simple” problem that turns out to be very difficult. I love it because it usually ends up being productive eventually. I hate it because it’s hard to emerge from the rabbit hole once you’ve committed to it.

“Ask a person and they’ll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.”

Or if it’s something that they don’t directly know, they’ll know who will know. There’s a knowledge accountability chain that evolves out of pragmatic necessity and AI simply can’t replace that

I used to know someone who worked on Assassin’s Creed 3 (and probably other games, but idk). They told me about how surreal and disheartening it was to work somewhere so bafflingly huge. The part of the game they worked on was small and insignificant, but they were the kind of person to take pride in small things done well, and as such, they were pleased with what they had made. It was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but this was something that they had made, and they didn’t mind being a small cog.

That is, until the game released and they got to see the rest of the game. They were immensely disappointed to see that clearly many components of the game didn’t have nearly the same amount of care put into them, and furthermore, coordination between different teams/systems was poorly executed. The game wasn’t bad (imo), but it was fairly meh, and it certainly felt undeserving of the effort my friend put into it.

They ended up checking out somewhat from their work after that, because they became disillusioned with the idea of being a small cog in a big machine — part of what allowed them to do such good work was that they immersed themselves in what they and their immediate team were working on, but that approach only works if you can trust that the rest of the project is well managed and resourced.

I fell out of contact with that friend, but I often think about them, and how effectively they captured the dismay they felt to realise that in a big machine like Ubisoft, it’s probably naive to care about your work. One of their colleagues had the thing they made not even feature in the game — it was cut, fairly last minute (and they didn’t even find out until release). This story was striking because it highlights how, even in soulless AAA games, churned out by corporate behemoths, there are people who do genuinely care about their work (until the company grinds that care into dust as they wring their workers dry). It’s quite tragic, actually.

I agree that season 1 is far more engaging but imo, that’s mainly because the level of intrigue that I felt at the beginning of the story was insane — they were great at keeping that intrigue rolling in an interesting way. But that kind of mystery can only last so long, because it grows weaker as the audience learns more about the characters and world.

I think there was a part of me that felt disappointed by season 2 simply by the fact it couldn’t give me what I felt during season 1, and actually, I wouldn’t want that — the final episodes of a series shouldn’t have the same kind of tension of the beginning of the story.

Overall, I’d say that season 1 is excellent (in particular, there were some visually impressive and stylish sequenced that I loved) — Riveting" was the word OP used. Season 2 is also decent. I don’t recall it feeling rushed, and it does end decently.

I agree with you about the core of the problem, but the reason the monopoly is the thing being focussed on is because that’s the legal basis against Google that we have right now (speaking as someone who enthusiastically followed the proceedings).

The crucial bit now that Google has been deemed an illegal monopolist is how this gets resolved, because of the possible remedies to this situation, some are better for user privacy, and some are worse. This is an opportunity to do some real good here on that front.

Unfortunately, as I understand it, actually getting to a solution will take time, because of how Google will try to haggle down whatever remedy is suggested. This seems likely to be easier to do under a Trump administration.

It’s not about dispelling any ulterior motive. The idea of anti-monopoly enforcement actions is that if the “business ecosystem” is good and healthy, then other companies who don’t own Chrome will be able to compete with whoever owns Chrome, giving the consumer choice that people who like the free market say will reduce consumer exploitation. (If you can’t tell from my tone, I am dubious, at best, of this logic)

If I wanted an autistically over-literal answer, I’d either ask myself (or come to Lemmy)

Stochastic parrots is an excellent phrase.