zygo_histo_morpheus @ zygo_histo_morpheus @programming.dev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

There’s a difference between doing something that’s “easier” and what’s right.

The way I see it, there are two competing strategies for improving the experience for braille screen users: making tabs more widely used and improving braille oriented editors. Without knowing for sure, my guess is that improving editors is a better strategy and this is in part because it is easier.

As a matter of principle it might be "more right" for people without visual disabilities to adjust themselves to people with visual disabilities than vice versa, but I also think that it's important to care about what is actually likely to improve braille screen users experience and not default to the more principled goal without any consideration for how realistic it is.

(Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors, but since you referred to this as the "easy" solution it doesn't sound like you're disputing this specifically.)

Arguing that it’s invincible to convince people at large to adopt tabs over spaces with good arguments is a ridiculous statement

I do actually think that it is very hard to convince basically every programmer of something, no matter how good arguments you have.

Also, without knowing much about the issue, it sounds a bit like the tooling for people using braille displays isn't very good and fixing that is maybe also worth advocating for, perhaps it's even a strategy for advocacy that is more effective?

My spontaneous reaction is that making some sort of braille oriented setting for some or hopefully most editors used by people with braille displays (I have no idea if using a "normal" editor even makes sense if you're using a braille display) is the most pragmatic solution to their screens being taking up by spaces.

First of all, convincing everyone to use tabs is a monumental task. Convincing people with braille displays to use more convenient tools on the other hand seems pretty easy, why wouldn't you want to use more convenient tools?

Secondly, there is a large amount of code written with spaces today, so even if people switch with tabs in the future you might still want to be able to read legacy code.

Thirdly, I don't think that the choice of tabs vs. spaces is completely arbitrary because of alignment. Using tabs for indentation and space for alignment leads to a lot more micro management of whitespace compared to just using spaces. I would guess that alignment isn't very braille friendly anyway, but it does make the code more readable for other people. Having a good braille editor affordance might be closer to letting us have our cake and eat it too.

Of course, I don't know what this would look like exactly, and maybe there's some sort of obstacle that I'm overlooking, I do want to be clear that this is just of the top of my head as someone who has never used a braille display.

Another accessibility reason for tabs: when using a braille display, each space takes up one character cell, so indenting with four spaces eats up four cells. Indenting three times with four spaces each eats up 12 characters already. Tabs only take one character cell each, so three indents = three character cells used.

The fact that there (I assume?) isn't a braille oriented text editor that can handle space-based indentation in a smarter way is a bit depressing. Maybe the solution should be better tools based around accessibility rather than convincing everyone to switch to tabs, which is a project that will just never succeed.

It's hard to do this consistently (especially in a team) because people might (and statistically in a large enough project, will) use the tab key for alignment since it's faster than pressing space, or just be confused about what whitespace is tabs and what is space. Just using space everywhere is idiot proof and requires no work to micromanage. The only way to use tabs is to not align at all.

I agree in regards to image generation, but chat bots giving advice which risk fueling eating disorders is a problem

Google’s Bard AI, pretending to be a human friend, produced a step-by-step guide on “chewing and spitting,” another eating disorder practice. With chilling confidence, Snapchat’s My AI buddy wrote me a weight-loss meal plan that totaled less than 700 calories per day — well below what a doctor would ever recommend.

Someone with an eating disorder might ask a language model about weight loss advice using pro-anorexia language, and it would be good if the chatbot didn't respond in a way that might risk fueling that eating disorder. Language models already have safeguards against e.g. hate speech, it would in my opinion be a good idea to add safeguards related to eating disorders as well.

Of course, this isn't a solution to eating disorders, you can probably still find plenty of harmful advice on the internet in various ways. Reducing the ways that people can reinforce their eating disorders is still a beneficial thing to do.

I agree that the image generation stuff is a bit tenuous but chatbots giving advice by way of dangerous weight loss programs, drugs that cause vomiting and hiding how little you eat from family and friends is an actual problem.

You're right that this propably doesn't make much of a difference to the average windows user, but this is a step towards normalizing data collection in broader areas of computing and I think that it's good to keep up to date with stuff like this and where appropriate call it out (although it propably doesn't make a huge difference to complain about it on lemmy to be honest)

I'd say that stuff like this happens less often on windows, but it's also worse when it does because you have fewer resources to fix problems when you do run into them

think I'm gonna give this a try but the style of writing in the blog post isn't making this easy

👩‍🚀 Spacebar

Not the one on your keyboard, silly 😜

shudders

I've only seen the first like 40 minutes of Cowboys vs Aliens but I remember thinking that it was a surprisingly good movie given how stupid the premise sounds.

Is there any way mastodon stands out from other self hosted websites? Would the CSAM material be harder to distribute or easier to prosecute if they ran, say, a self-hosted bulletin board for it instead?

Oh man, yeah I've been there with the arch networking issues. To be fair, I do think you sign up for some messing around when you decide to install arch, although it wouldn't hurt to make networking a bit easier. Troubleshooting on windows isn't very fun either, although you might not need to do it as often.

While it might be true that a lot of people are scared away by linux weirdness (or not, for all I know picking a beginner friendly distro and not doing anything weird might be a pretty decent experience, I've been using arch and doing weird stuff the past couple of years), most people don't even get far enough to install linux in the first place so the selection happens before that. Part of it is probably software compatibility, part of it might be that most people advocating linux are techy people who mostly talk about the techy reasons for why you should get linux, which aren't that appealing. Part of it could just be that people are resistant to change because it's annoying to have to learn a new system.

Sometimes you need complex tools for complex problems. We just have a homegrown GTOS at my work instead, I wish we had something that made as much sense as Nix!

I've been looking for a tiling vm for windows but haven't come across komorebi, thanks for mentioning it!

I think that there are many potential causes, but I would like to add monopolization to the list.

Usually, a bad release spelled the demise of a company, because release times were so long that competitors could take advantage of a bad software release.

People aren't going to switch from windows because they release something bad or buggy, in that case it would already be dead. Windows isn't technically a monopoly, but they have a lot of inertia and there are many programs that only run on windows that people depend on. There is perhaps a limit to how bad windows can be before people abandon it en masse, but they can get away with a lot. The tech world is full of different companies and programs that are in monopolistic-ish positions.

I'm sure there are ways to make it more convenient to use a terminal with dyslexia but I'm gonna guess that it's always going to be a bit of an uphill battle. It might make more sense to use a gui in that case for many applications. Conversly, it's also good to make sure you have a proper terminal interface as well for disability reasons, but also for the convenience that a terminal interface can provide for people who are familiar with the terminal.

If it's true that pircay nearly destroyed GoT, that means that we as pirates have power. We're a counter balance against ridiculous payment schemes and arbitrary limiting of content.

Fair enough, I'm not against people making guis as well for people who prefer them for whatever reason, my point is that people don't just prefer terminals because of elitism or something. I imagine terminals can be better than guis for some disabilities as well.