I know I’m not the target audience for this but I’m a couple stiff drinks in and reading this at a bar so the large text is greatly appreciated.
literally a perfect example of some UX accessibility theory. insert “drunk as hell” in the appropriate place
I love how on firefox you can ctrl+scrollwheel to make text larger or smaller and it persists on that site. (awful is at 140% for me)
for the viewers at home who may not know about this feature, it’s also usable via keyboard: ctrl+/- (except for macos where it’s cmd+/-)
and yeah it’s handy as hell. also took a quick look earlier, the iOS Fx version actually seems to have this natively? I was kinda surprised. iOS Fx is usually nerfed as hell.
On an old tablet I used Opera because it had a nifty function where you could zoom in and it made the text larger and enforced line breaks so that the text still fit the shown space.
I know Opera is horrible in many respects, but I kept that tablet for reading in the evening. Being able to zoom in and still just scroll down was very useful when tired.
Anyone happen to know any similar add ons for Firefox?
I use reader mode for that a lot myself, but not sure if that’s sufficient for you?
I’m kind of jealous of how readable and usable Robert’s site is compared with a typical React SPA with a tiny enforced font size and awful color contrast and jank everywhere — like the Lemmy frontend, for example
this is an excellent post! I really like the examples you’ve given of how to actively resist the discriminatory systems enabled by LLMs, alongside personal examples of how those systems have negatively impacted Blind and marginalized folks. it’s very rare to get this kind of perspective on LLMs and generative AI, and it’s very much appreciated.
this quote towards the end of the post stood out in particular:
(I’m not sure how the quote will be represented by the flawed ActivityPub bridge from Lemmy to Mastodon and then from Mastodon to a screen reader, so I’ll note that the quote starts here:)
To the bafflement of tech people everywhere, books will still be popular even though they work on imaginations and not code. Even though tech people will still not understand books, I, along with others, will still be here providing art because it’s our way of speaking to the world. What’s even better is that people will continue to appreciate and enjoy art instead of morning the shattering of LLM servers because, well, people are people and people like art. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you should learn to art and people instead of code.
(end quote)
this says so much about the extreme lack of imagination we’ve seen among LLM and generative AI boosters; there’s a fundamental flaw in the way they conceptualize and engage with creative work. we’ve seen again and again how those AI boosters will try to appropriate the style and trappings of especially science fiction while demonstrating barely a surface-level understanding of the work — see also our recent posts on awful.systems about how poorly some rather loud voices hyping AI understand Iain M Banks’ Culture novels
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absolutely!
I do have a question from the Mastodon side of the Fediverse. Is there a cleaner way I can share links to Lemmy communities?
I’ll do a little bit of experimentation tonight on our test instance and see if there’s a cleaner way to do link-only posts from mastodon! this’ll kill two birds with one stone for me — I needed to run some federation tests as part of an infrastructure upgrade I’m looking to deploy to our main instance. unfortunately, the federation between Lemmy and Mastodon is very limited and janky in a lot of ways so there might not be a cleaner way to do it, but the thread you created looks good on our end.
also, I can’t speak to how the experience for Blind users would be in any of the Lemmy apps or its web frontend, but if any of them end up being a more convenient way to interact with our posts, we can definitely get you set up with an account on our instance if desired.
If you want my Javascript prompt injection I made, DM me because I don’t wanna give LLM developers easy ways to put up input and output guardrails against my prompt injection.
definitely! I will reach out on Mastodon when I get the chance; I don’t remember if Lemmy even attempts to federate DMs between us and Mastodon, but I don’t trust it to do it well if it does.
(I can’t usefully contribute to much of this thread right now 'cuz still reading the post, likely finishing tomorrow, yaaaaay computer yaks…)
I’m not sure how the quote will be represented by the flawed ActivityPub bridge from Lemmy to Mastodon
opened it myself (mastodon.social localized view), quoteblock seems to have survived
which semi-sorta makes sense from the code I saw in the lemmy post-handling AP code the … “other” day (oh christ that was over a month ago -_-)
Do you have a link to that Iain M. Banks post?
His work made me extremely optimistic about the future at a time where I really needed it, and is what got me to enroll in an AI-centered study course (thank fuck I dropped out and enrolled in something else).
I have so many feelings on this.
we’ve got a few Banks fans on our instance so it’s an ongoing conversation, but the most recent posts are here
I enjoy Banks a lot and firmly believe he’d be here sneering with us if that were physically possible; it’s tragic that the rationalists and a number of AI fans have leaned into subverting the meaning of his work.
Awesome, thanks!
And yeah, for sure. If anything, those people want to be the GFCF from Surface Detail, not the Culture; they just want the shiny toys.
@weirdwriter @techtakes thanks for sharing your thoughts, I learned a lot. I’m always saddened by the blind AI advocates singing the praises of the latest benevolent dictator; not because I judge them for wanting/needing to use big techs products to get on in a world that doesn’t care to include them, but because big tech does not actually care, it’s only looking for addicts and human shields. Google and Microsoft both recently quit their climate targets due to their AI use - they don’t care.
