Fellow blind person here, adding my own anecdote. I click and echolocate. I have two different kinds of clicks. A soft click for very immediate surrounding which I can do rapidly if I need to, and a loud click for figuring out large spaces which I don't use very often for relatively obvious reasons. They're quite helpful for me and especially in new unfamiliar spaces it's almost a reflex that happens on its own unless I consciously try to stop it for social reasons. Just to add another datapoint. What works for one might not work for another, so there's a lot of trial and error involved in figuring out what works and what doesn't. This can be very frustrating sometimes but sympathy will go a long way.
Something I wanted to add, maybe this thread in particular isn't the best place for this but in general, I'm very lucky that my parents did not prevent me from doing things that others may have. For example, I climbed trees, rode a bike, and generally tried to do all of the things my sighted peers were doing. Naturally there were accidents, but not preventing me from doing those things, not preventing me from learning my limits, learning my balance and physical control, getting hurt and getting back up, I believe were absolutely vital to making me the person I am today. I imagine as a parent this can be very stressful or worrying, but I honestly do not believe I would be as independent now if I wasn't allowed to do those things back then. So unless it is absolutely certain that this is something that they will not be able to do at all, maybe consider letting them try it. It will absolutely help confidence, self worth and skills for later independence that are very, very, very badly needed and very easily missed.
I'm not a parent however, so of course take this with a grain of salt. My experience may be slightly biased here.
What age did you start learning to echolocate and how long did it take?
I alluded to it in my other post, but I fully agree with your sentiment around independence and figuring out your own boundaries. Even if I'm all but guaranteed a bit of pain along the way.
Your lucky! I never got to climb trees until I was in my late 20s because apparently it was something, for some reason, I just couldn't do. Skydiving though was cool! I'm not kidding.
I had the opportunity to pet a cheetah last year, and I think that is one of those things that will stay with me for the rest of my life even if I never get another chance. The cheek rubs, the purrs, just like my cats would do. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Yes, I went straight to the cheetah page too. They're awesome! I never much thought about them until that day, but now it's a fascination.
I'm glad that it doesn't. A lot of us use these voices as an accessibility tool in our screen readers. They need to perform well and be understandable at very high rate, and they need to be very responsive. ESpeak is one of the most responsive speech synths out there, so for a screen reader this means key press to speech output is extremely low. Adding AI would just make this a lot slower and unpredictable, and unusable for daily work, at least right now.
This is anecdotal, but part of what makes a synth work well at high speech rates is predictability. I know how a speech synth is going to say something exactly. This let's me put more focus on the thing I'm doing rather than trying to decipher what the synth is saying. Neural TTS always has differences in how they say a thing, and at times, those differences can be large enough to trip me up. Then I'm focusing on the speech again and not what I'm doing. But ESpeak is very predictable, so I can let my brain do the pattern matching and focus actively on something else.
I used to bring up accessibility concerns quite a lot on HN. I have stopped however, because it is always the same story.
It doesn't seem to matter how nice I am about it, or how accommodating I am towards people just hacking. I never want to stop people's creative spirit. Ever. But I'm one of those people who uses a screen reader. If your app does not work with them, it will not work for me. The amount of weirdly hostile responses I get really puts me off commenting here, so I just don't do it anymore. That doesn't make the issue go away, but it also just does not help.
This isn't entirely unique to HN. It is very easy to dismiss accessibility concerns if you're not affected by them, or don't have anyone close that is. I try not to take it personally, but when many people chime in with comments like it's OK that you can't use this app, you're a minority, your burdens aren't anybody elses, and don't listen to them and go make a cool thing without regard, (not an exaggeration it's all in my comment history) it's a bit hard not to be put off by it.
If I was able to change one or two minds with my little comments, then I'm very happy about that because maybe it means I get to use your next cool app too. I'm just not going to look for it here, and if I find an accessibility flaw, HN will definitely not be where I comment about it. I've gotten some genuinely good responses too. Some of you also tried to defend my point of view. Like Sam. And I'm very grateful for that. Sadly it's the same fight every single time, and I'm a little bit exhausted by it.
Like I can do `npm create vue` and I get a relatively nice and functioning Vue setup with most of the config already done. I agree it's a lot of boilerplate and random shenanigans, but also the apps we make for the web are more than they were. And you can absolutely write JS without all the tools, even with ESModules. But we don't do that much because turns out those tools actually do something. Do they do it in the cleanest way? No. Things could always be better. But they do it.
It does to some extent, and it's much better than it was a few years ago. In Vite's case, it'll create a nice template project with your framework of choice, optionally TypeScript, a linter, and I think also unit tests.
You still need to do additional configuration for your linter, and in my case (I did this last weekend) a lot of configuration for styled-component and twin.macro.
Even though it's easy to create projects, it does nothing for maintaining them. Updating all of these dependencies _can_ be painful. eslint rules are not very easy to configure, there are a lot of helpful rulesets out there which ideally would be bundled with the library they pertain to. For example, it would be nice if eslint saw I was using React and automatically applied recommended React rules, and the same for other libraries.
I haven't gone blind, but I have been blind since birth. I think especially in the realm of technology, there's very little I can't do. I write code for my dayjob, I write different code for fun, and even do some audio engineering and music production.
I can also ride bikes. I have to know the area well of course, and be prepared for the inevitable accident, but I had a ton of fun doing it as a kid. Also climbing trees or participating in airsoft or laser tag matches.
I've also been able to drive a car. My family thought it would be cool to give me two practical driving lessons as a birthday present. So they called up a driving instructor and just asked. And it happened. Not on the street of course, but on a pretty big and open paved field that they generally use for their first motorcycle lessons.
I also travel. By myself. I have to do some prep work and I do have to ask for assistance a lot, but it's absolutely possible. Especially nowadays where we have phones that can do so much, from image recognition to GPS to video calls.
Naturally there are a lot of limitations. I can't just go out and explore a new place. Or if I have to travel somewhere for work and stay at a hotel I've never been at, getting around can be anxiety inducing and stressful. And of course I miss out on a lot of beautiful things. Like I can only imagine what nature looks like in all it's different forms. I can hear it, but I can't see it.
There's a lot more I could go into, but I just wanted to comment and give another little piece of anecdata. Of course, I imagine going blind later in life is a lot more terrifying than what I'm experiencing. Just like how I dread losing another one of my senses. I have no idea what I would do if I lost my hearing, even though I know there are deaf blind folks that do amazing things. We just do the best we can with what we have. And sometimes that turns out to be quite a lot of things.
Answering as a severly sight impaired but not fully blind person. But yes - of course! I'd throw it back at you - do you experience sexual attraction purely by looks alone? I seriously doubt it (and would be concerned if you did!). How a person sounds, smells, feels, behaves etc. all come into it. If your partner playfully blindfolds you, you wouldn't suddenly stop enjoying the experience.
Sure. And I think it's based on a bunch of factors coming together, voice being one of them. I don't know how it works if you have sight left, but I can't imagine that attraction is the same for everyone there as well. It's probably a lot more nuanced than that.
I have a hard time deciding where in this thread to drop this link, but maybe here is a good spot. Andreas has a video about this topic, and I believe it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAZvTFoSIFU
I'm sorry but I believe I'm missing something here. How does this solve any of the problems that people commonly have with decentralized, federated social networks?
* You're still either hosting your own, or at the whim of whomever hosts your repository. Mastodon.social or GitHub.
* Hosting your own Git is not particularly easier than hosting your own GoTo Social or Akkoma.
* What if you end up with either a big following, or a big follower list? Aren't you going to be rate limited by GitHub?
* Is signing up for GitHub easier than signing up for mastodon.social, especially if Mastodon et al already have good mobile clients?
* What about moderation?
* What about media?
And I mean... Isn't Git federated by nature? Multiple machines store multiple copies of the data. That's defederation isn't it?
But OK, let's put the federated social networks we do have aside for a moment.
The site says: Every user stores their application state in a git repo they own and control.
But you don't do that if you're on GitHub, right? Not really, anyway. What is the benefit from doing this over git? What if I want to delete something? What is the overhead of the git protocol?
If it's just a toy, then that's totally cool with me. But it says that Microsoft Research is involved. I'm a bit confused. What is this?
Git makes it easy to make copies, but its nature of having one designated "origin" remote per repository that serves as upstream source of truth (on platforms like github also across forks) makes it not really federated/decentralized the way Mastodon et al. are.
And I don't reaaally see how this tool solves that problem. Or any of the other problems you mentioned.
But that said, Mastodon/ActivityPub don't really feel like mature solutions yet. It's incredibly opaque how instances interact, and self-hosting is an exercise in frustration as you try to figure out why A sees your reactions but B does not and you can get notifications for C's reactions but not A's, but B's replies and not… I gave up after a while. It's more opaque than even email self-hosting, at least exim and postfix have fairly verbose error logging.
To be more precise, git clone adds the origin cloned from as a remote named "origin", unless you override this with a configuration setting or the -o option.
But git gives you nothing to handle more complicated topologies, all remotes you interact with have to result in a linear history with everything on all other remotes… unless you feel like doing a manual merge every time you update your social media feed. Making that work automagically needs another layer on top of git, none of which seems documented here.
> Git makes it easy to make copies, but its nature of having one designated "origin" remote per repository that serves as upstream source of truth (on platforms like github also across forks) makes it not really federated/decentralized the way Mastodon et al. are.
That makes sense. Each Activitypub server might also be considered the source of truth for any given post, but since you're usually going to fetch them from your own instance that your account lives on you're not getting it directly from there unless you specifically do it yourself.
> But that said, Mastodon/ActivityPub don't really feel like mature solutions yet.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think this is partly because Activitypub is both quite opinionated, but also gives you quite some wiggle room with how you implement different functionality, like defederation. And of course the most well known software in that space is effectively what all others have to follow.
Git is probably a more stable protocol, but then again ActivityPub is served over HTTP, which is also pretty stable. I believe the same issues would befall this as well, since Git, to me, doesn't seem to be the biggest factor in this, and more the append-only nature of it. I've never been a big fan of append-only social networks.
I've been running a Mastodon server for a couple of years now and have had relatively few federation issues, luckily. But I do agree that trudging through the logs and figuring out what's going on is not exactly ideal, not to mention debugging other issues like if something went wrong during the key exchange with your server and a remote one, or if you accidentally lose your key and suddenly can't talk to any other instance since they won't trust your old domain with the new key. But you might run into similar issues with this, right?
Edit: If it came across as downplaying the project or it's author then that wasn't my intention at all. These were just some thoughts that immediately popped into my head when I saw this. They may well have thought through answers to my not thought through questions, and I certainly don't mean to pretend like I know better.
Kinda does look like round peg square hole situation.
"Federated network" could be modeled by a stream of posts (comments, tweets, whatever else) that are either a start ("root") of conversation or reply to one or more previous post(s), so it does form a graph. Then a bunch of "indexes" like "each post with this tag", usually ordered via some kind of filter (time, how popular the twat posting it is, removing any offensive or NSFW ones etc).
But there is really nothing to merge and not much else common to git aside from sitting on its store and protocol
If you want decentralized without hosting your own servers, you can store data on a public blockchain. Each interaction pays a small amount of gas that grants them hosting indefinitely. Protocols are a progression from platforms since they can be ownerless. Blockchains enable protocols by acting as a general purpose database.
RSS really feels where the whole distributed thing peaked. I can subscribe to who I want where I want and if I want to see some new stuff either follow "what people I follow link to in their blogs" or get RSS channel of some topical federator.
All it missed was similiar distributed way to conversate instead of just reading and maybe leaving a comment on a blog
That site really doesn't play well with screen readers. When I clicked the link for the first time I was severely confused. I had to come back here to read that I had to scroll, and when I did, sometimes some new text showed up, and other times it didn't.
This is just an observation. I understand that some people love making lovely things, and that sometimes those things are at odds with being accessible to some people. But this is a real world example where I cannot access a restaurant website, even if the restaurant hasn't opened yet. So even now I'm still confused as to what's actually going on there.
Here's the few lines of actual information on the page: "Nice of you to drop by. I’ll be opening my doors in the fall of 2022 at Tryggvagata 11, in Reykjavik, Iceland. I also have a small, cozy in-house Cinema. A place for small groups to enjoy movies viewings or music performances."
There's a image of the dining area of the restaurant at the top of the page once you scroll enough. It's daylight, and it seems to be lit from the windows to the right. It's very white/beige. The room reminds me of the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek: TNG. There's a part in the center with pink-padded bench seats placed around an area full of plants. These tables have wooden chairs with soft-looking pink seats like the rest of the tables around the room. There's a nook thing at the back center with a shelf of pink cups against a frosted glass backing with a light behind it and a cluster of old-fashioned light bulbs with huge, bright filaments. The bulbs hang from white rods.
Something I wanted to add, maybe this thread in particular isn't the best place for this but in general, I'm very lucky that my parents did not prevent me from doing things that others may have. For example, I climbed trees, rode a bike, and generally tried to do all of the things my sighted peers were doing. Naturally there were accidents, but not preventing me from doing those things, not preventing me from learning my limits, learning my balance and physical control, getting hurt and getting back up, I believe were absolutely vital to making me the person I am today. I imagine as a parent this can be very stressful or worrying, but I honestly do not believe I would be as independent now if I wasn't allowed to do those things back then. So unless it is absolutely certain that this is something that they will not be able to do at all, maybe consider letting them try it. It will absolutely help confidence, self worth and skills for later independence that are very, very, very badly needed and very easily missed. I'm not a parent however, so of course take this with a grain of salt. My experience may be slightly biased here.