blindgeek

Well, sharing someone's deeply personal post on here could be seen as unkind or inappropriate. I get the sentiment; I can agree with it to a point. If someone else wrote a similar thing on their blog, I wouldn't submit it here without asking. But I also think frank, honest, and open discussion of this sort of thing is a net good, which is why I published my post, and why I don't mind it being here.

Inappropriate / unkind, perhaps. I did make at least one solid friend over it. She saw the post on here, emailed me, and I ended up talking for over an hour with an understanding person who has lots in common with me and gave me some things to think about. I could have done without the email from someone else who said that "people in Gaza are suffering worse than you and they aren't doing what you're doing, so get mental help."

The absurdist humor of my impending demise making the front page of hackernews and being debated by the denizens thereof is not lost on me.

Well, as much as I'd love to tie one on today, my drinking days are over. I'll probably smoke a bit of weed though. That, and chill with my loved ones.

As someone who has been shocked by the ICD, lying on the floor seems like a bad place for it, since the floor is a hard surface. You're gonna jolt and spaz and scream. According to my GF, the screams are quite terrifying. One of the orderlies or admissions people (I cannot remember which) at the ER laughed once when it happened to me. I don't think he was being a douche; more likely it was the whole unintentionally laughing at inappropriate times thing that happens to a lot of us, including me. Once the shocking started, the first thing I would do is lie back in my recliner in case there were more. Surprisingly, I don't think I've ever been shocked while vertical. It's always been in the chair, bed at home, hospital bed, or stretcher. I have no explanation for that; maybe a medical nerd knows if there are reasons why you're less likely to be shocked while vertical, or if I've just managed to beat the odds on that one.

I am the OP. Surprised to see this at the top of HN.

and getting all your semi-public records and social media activity immediately scraped by shady companies and sold to anybody who expresses any interest.

Public content on the Internet should be scrapable. That's what public means.

The fact that my reddit posts were publicly available never bothered me. Even if they were going to be used to train some LMM. What does bother me is reddit locking up my posts and making exclusive deals with Google to train Google's LMM.

Preventing scraping isn't good for the average user; it is good for the company that wants to take content created by said user, lock it up, and sell it to their buddies.

And their thoroughly unhelpful reply:

"Hi there, sorry to hear you're having difficulties!

We have an alternative authentication scheme that you may prefer: https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility

You can sign up here: https://dashboard.hcaptcha.com/signup?type=accessibility

This lets you avoid the challenge altogether after registration.

It is designed for users with any kind of difficulty solving the challenges.

Thanks for reaching out, and hope this makes your experience better."

And the very angry email that I (probably unwisely) just dashed off to support@hcaptcha.com:

"So I've been trying to sign in repeatedly to set the accessibility cookie since last night. Every time I click the submit button, I get the useless error message "an error has occurred, please try again".

My friend, who shares my roof and my static IP, got banned from hcaptcha's accessibility service last year for being too smart to be blind. And I suspect you all have banned our IP and not just his account.

For the record, my static IP address is (redacted).

See https://michaels.world/2023/11/i-was-banned-from-the-hcaptch... for his story. I have been broadcasting this to websites frequented by technically capable people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171164 https://lobste.rs/s/qbkd0u/i_was_banned_from_hcaptcha_access...

Please let your bosses know that I plan to pursue legal action against hCaptcha and/or amplify the truth to destroy its reputation in the public square. I will also be reaching out to websites who utilize hCaptcha, letting them know that the captcha provider they employ is refusing to provide reasonable accomodations to blind people.

Whether it be with the force of law or the force of satyagraha, your bosses are going to get a message and we will win.

Here's the thing. We're talking about people who are the accessibility team for hCaptcha. They should at least have a figleaf of an understanding of life for blind people.

The other problem we have is that online companies tend to be accountable to no one. Short of law suits, my friend who got banned from hCaptcha for "not being blind" has no recourse, because nobody is accountable.

Yes, hashcash.

But the WEI proposals were never about protecting from bad actors with device farms. They were always about guaranteeing that a certain ad company who also makes browsers can always push ads to users, thus maximizing value for shareholders. Protecting from device farms was just the bait.

It's notable that the majority of the people who would be "included" by the change to "more inclusive" language aren't offended in the first place. The sentence "I am watching TV" literally offended no blind person, evah. It is only sighted do-gooders who have the spoons to be offended by nothingburgers on our behalf. We're too busy dealing with stuff like, ... I dunno, landlords who refuse to rent to us because all they have is second story units and we might fall down the stairs. Yes this actually happened to me in 2000 or so, and I don't have enough faith in human intelligence to believe that it isn't happening today. We're too busy being oppressed by captchas and websites made by frontend devs who seem to care more about chasing JavaScript framework du jour than they care about accessibility. We're busy struggling against a built physical environment which has been designed for cars and not people. The supposedly non-inclusive language of "I watched TV" or "I looked at my browser's JS console" aren't even on our radar.

I coined the term "Sapir-Whorf Stalinists" a few weeks ago to describe the sort of people who think that monkeying with language will magically make things better for marginalized groups.

Here's Lee Atwater talking about the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me. For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner. Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way. Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest of sighted culture. And then once in a great while, we get condescended to for it. There's a really good example of this in the second season episode of DS9, The Alternate.

``` ODO It was a dilemma for me. I'd never seen anything like these creatures either.

     MORA
   "Seen" isn't really an appropriate 
   description.  He had no eyes per 
   se...

     ODO
   I was only trying to describe it in 
   simple terms...

     MORA
    (ignoring that)
   He had never perceived anything like 
   us before... go on...

I can pretty much guarantee that every blind person has had a condescending, patronizing douche canoe like Mora in their life at least once.

The author was essentially too smart to be blind.

It took me a while to realize that the SC people were talking about in this thread was the Python Steering Committee. I thought it stood for Star Chamber.

Someone brought up the topic of JS and screenreaders upthread. Screenreaders can work fine with JS. The pain points are:

1. Use of JS to reimplement standard HTML widgets. This has broken my screenreader more times than I care to remember. 2. All of this user-irrelevant garbage, like the dialogs, the social media buttons, and so forth.

I remember a few years back trying to pay my electric bill. Yes, I was using a JS-capable browser. I couldn't actually pay my bill, but there were plenty of "follow us on Facebook" and similar. Like seriously, folks, I just wanna send you money. Really, this should even be something I could do without JS.

Another example: we do online shopping at https://www.fredmeyer.com. Their website is absolutely terrible, with all of the busyness, some of it user hostile. Seriously folks, I just want to give you money for product, not follow you on facebook.

Some sites get it really, really right. I play chess on lichess.org. That site requires JavaScript. And I don't see any way that it could possibly be avoided. But it works beautifully with my screenreader. It's snappy too, even under Firefox on a Raspberry Pi. I used to be a hard core "screw JS" guy. I've softened my stance, because I know it can be used correctly and to great effect.

The TL;DR is more like: cell carriers and phone manufacturers have more incestuous entanglement than the Habsburg dynasty.

My friend group and I have been playing with LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208451. We tend to hang out in multi-user voice chat sometimes, and I've speculated that it would be interesting to hook an LLM to ASR and TTS and bring it into our voice chat. Yeah, naive, and to be honest, I'm not even sure where to start. Have you tried bringing your conversational LLM into a multi-person conversation?

As a rule, I tend to nope out on signing up for anything at all. I do have a Lyft account and of course the bank account both of those entities have a legitimate reason for contacting me so I don’t mind them having my phone number, but it’s really terrible how we’ve normalized giving phone numbers away. It has become so normalized that I’m on a nerd site trying to explain why I feel so strongly about giving away my personal data. Also nota beni, PII is a liability, not an asset.

I've been online in some form or other since 1993. Back in 1993, everything was basically accessible by default, because it was plain text.

No, there has not been an improvement, and in fact, things have gotten worse in a lot of ways. Most of that is due to SPAs, and people who decide to use JavaScript when HTML widgets would suffice.

I'm also involved with a text mode web browser project, [edbrowse](https://edbrowse.org/). Ten years ago, it was feasible to use edbrowse for a great deal of online activity. For instance, I used it to make purchases from Amazon and other online stores. I could log into Paypal and send money with it.

Then, in the mid 2010s or so, SPAs started becoming a thing and edbrowse broke on more and more sites. At this point, in 2024, I can't even use it to read READMEs on Github.

And yes, I have accessibility trouble when using mainstream browsers too, all the time.

To be completely honest, I don't really know what I'm doing. The IRC bot I wrote isn't complicated at all; it basically just acts as a bridge between IRC and a program that has an HTTP API. FWIW I've never written an IRC bot before, so this is "baby's first bot". I also wrote it in Go, even though I'm not a Go programmer. Probably all of that shines through in the code.

The real magic happens in [ollama](https://ollama.ai/), which lets you run LMMs locally.

I'm blind, but I wouldn't know. I haven't used bard or gpt or any of that, and I don't plan on doing so. I thought about playing with GPT back in early 2023, when the hype really started picking up. But when I realized that they wanted my phone number, I noped out.

Yes, the image interrogation is exactly the point. This all started out when my friend said that it would be cool to be able to chat on IRC with an LLM running on his own hardware. And then we were like, oh hey, we can get this thing to describe images for us if we use an LMM.

The next thing we want to do is obtain some glasses with cameras and wi-fi and send images to ollama from them for real-time description. The benefits are obvious, especially for mobility purposes.

Another metaphor would be a screenshot of bash, or a screenshot of cat, or a screenshot of the original /bin/ed. Next they'll be wanting someone to stream a session of /bin/cat on youtube. Yes, this program was developed with blind people in mind. Plenty of sighted people have found uses for it, and that's lovely. For blind people, there's really no equivalent to the screenshot. Maybe a typescript. Maybe a few minutes of audio from a TTS. Of course, the latter would be useless to a deaf-blind person. But our best bet is reading some docu and taking it for a spin. It is not too much to ask of sighted people to step out of their comfort zones for a little while. Your world is highly suboptimal for me. Care to step into mine for a bit? Not having access to cheap visual imagery is in fact no cross to bear.

When I was in school, I used to get textbooks on cassette tape from Recording for the Blind and Dislexic, RFBD. They came in these big boxes full of tapes. I occasionally used those boxes to hide random stuff. Long story short: I might have accidentally left a marijuana pipe in one of them. It was a good brass pipe. If I did, I hope it gave someone lots of joy.

It is really telling that the people who complain most bitterly about fiat currency fall into a few different camps, most of which want to destroy any kind of government social safety net. On the one hand we have the right-libertarians / "anarcho"-capitalists promoting bitcoin etc. On the other hand, elements of the wacko/fringe right in the US have been attacking "fiat" currency and Keynesian economics for decades, loudly calling for a return to the gold standard. By wacko right, I mean organizations like the John Birch Society, Liberty Lobby, and similar, and ideological descendants thereof.

These seemingly disparate camps -- fringe right and "anarcho"-capitalist -- share a fundamentally anti-democratic philosophy. For example, one of the seminal texts of "anarcho"-capitalism is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's _Democracy: the God that Failed_. If you look through my posting history, you'll find a quote from Tim May, an "anarcho"-capitalist and leader of the cypherpunk movement, wherein his anti-democratic sensibilities are on full display.

I'll end with a quote:

Begin quote. More than that; we can tell them that they will search the pages of history in vain to find a single instance where the common people of any land have ever declared themselves in favor of the gold standard. They can find where the holders of fixed investments have declared for a gold standard, but not where the masses have. End quote, from William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech.

I'm totally in favor of a cryptocurrency ban; we will not be crucified on a cross of bitcoin.

I hated CDs. Too big to be carried in a pocket. Read-only, until CD-R came out. Single use, until CD-RW came out. Required careful handling, to avoid getting fingerprints on the read-side etc. In some ways not unlike vinyl, in its proneness to damage. Lastly, I had terrible luck with CD players and CD drives; they'd wear out after a couple years of heavy use.

For me, CD was a step backward, lacking the robustness and convenience of cassette.

As a medium of information exchange between computers, I can make a similar comparison between the CD and the 3.5-inch floppy. Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.

If you need proof that cryptocurrencies are evil, here's Tim May, one of the idiological grand-pappies of bitcoin writing about one possible use for cryptocurrency in the Cyphernomicon:

    begin quote

    end quote

For a year of middle school and a couple years in high school, I went to a "distinguished" secular private prep school in Oklahoma City. I think there were 60 to 80 students per grade, with small class sizes, much smaller than public schools. And let me tell you, there was plenty of bullying there. It was endemic.

One of my regrets is that I didn't just drop out of high school at 15 and get my GED. I took the ACT test twice, once at 15 and once at 18, and there wasn't really a difference in my score. I suppose the one real difference is that the second time, I had fewer fucks to give, and a buddy smoked a joint with me before I took the test.

The only institutions in life that I know of where you are forced to attend and prohibited from leaving on your own recognizance are school, prison, and a mental health facility to which one is involuntarily committed. Perhaps nursing homes are another.

That said, I have a lot of respect for the teaching profession. I had some truly incredible teachers.

"It's in the top 20 or so of world currencies, and it's still in its infancy (thus volatility etc)."

My question, then, is how do we go about drowning Baby Bitcoin in the metaphorical bathtub?