Notices by fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 05-Dec-2025 05:34:22 JST 
fastfinge
@silver_huskey I think even that's going to become less clear as more and more big corporate websites start requiring age verification. Just because your account needs some sort of manual approval is already not really triggering people to think "There's a human in charge somewhere". They're just thinking "Probably some exploited and underpaid contractor in another country has to verify my identity somehow." -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Dec-2025 13:32:21 JST
fastfinge
@Fragglemuppet They talk more about politics than technical stuff. And yeah, it sort of is, but it's much less visible on mobile. Also: remember Myspace Tom? Just because some username and profile photo is shown to you, that doesn't mean they're someone you can interact with. At least not on the big corporate social media. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Dec-2025 13:26:05 JST
fastfinge
Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on #mastodon for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they were having, and they were on a smaller server (not naming it for anonymity), so I suggested contacting their server admin about the problem. I was surprised when they answered "Dude nobody at big companies reads those reports. It just all goes to AI or whatever." It took some actual convincing to get them to believe that the server they're on does, in fact, have a living breathing human admin who can be talked to.
Anyway, folks, support your #fediverse server admins and moderators. With money, where you can. They're almost certainly getting messages from users who think that reporting things to an admin here is exactly like reporting stuff to Facebook or Google. IE: screaming at a giant faceless entity who's never going to care or do anything about whatever your problem is. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Dec-2025 10:35:08 JST
fastfinge
@Rosalyn At least in my high school friend group, poppers was just another word for whippets. But it's possible this is a Canadian thing, or that my friends were morons. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Nov-2025 22:16:40 JST
fastfinge
I must be old. I really don't understand emoji reactions. If I say "I'm on the bus and will be there in half an hour" to the group message, why do five people need to react with the bus emoji? A thumbs up or a heart or a smile I get. It communicates some sort of information. You like it, or you're happy, or whatever. But all reacting "bus" communicates is that...the word bus was in the original message, and you recognized it! Yes! Good for you! You recognized the word bus! Do you want a cookie or something? -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Nov-2025 18:47:38 JST
fastfinge
@RachelThornSub So as an actual blind user who uses AI regularly...no, not really. If you include AI generated alt-text, the odds are you're not checking it for accuracy. But I might not know that, so I assume the alt-text is more accurate than it is. If you don't use any alt-text at all, I'll use my own AI tools built-in to my screen reader to generate it myself if I care, and I know exactly how accurate or trustworthy those tools may or may not be. This has a few advantages:
1. I'm not just shoving images into Chat GPT or some other enormous LLM. I tend to start with deepseek-ocr, a 3b (3 billion parameter) model. If that turns out not to be useful because the image isn't text, I move up to one of the 90b llama models. For comparison, chat GPT and Google's LLM's are all 3 trillion parameters or larger. A model specializing in describing images can run on a single video card in a consumer PC. There is no reason to use a giant data center for this task.
2. The AI alt text is only generated if a blind person encounters your image, and cares enough about it to bother. If you're generating AI alt text yourself, and not bothering to check or edit it at all, you're just wasting resources on something that nobody may even read.
3. I have prompts that I've fiddled with over time to get me the most accurate AI descriptions these things can generate. If you're just throwing images at chat GPT, what it's writing is probably not accurate anyway.
If you as a creator are providing alt text, you're making the implicit promise that it's accurate, and that it attempts to communicate what you meant by posting the image. If you cannot, or don't want to, make that promise to your blind readers, don't bother just using AI. We can use AI ourselves, thanks. Though it's worth noting that if you're an artist and don't want your image tossed into the AI machine by a blind reader, you'd better be providing alt text. Because if you didn't, and I need or want to understand the image, into the AI it goes. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Nov-2025 09:24:00 JST
fastfinge
TIL: when you use adguard or another privacy protecting DNS, spellcheck in all Microsoft apps gets significantly worse. Apparently the "good" spellchecker requires some service it was blocking, and the fallback is terrible. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Oct-2025 23:08:04 JST
fastfinge
@jonathan859 @Fragglemuppet @simon That and people who decide to just call you a nickname without asking. Does that annoy you, too, Johnny? -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Oct-2025 07:16:09 JST
fastfinge
@simon @Fragglemuppet People can mess up even the most common of names. Speaking from personal experience as someone who's been called Sampson, Simon, Samantha, and in one notably bazaar email, Smamuleel. In that last case, I assume...the...backspace key wasn't...working...or...something? You can see they tried, but...I don't even know! -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 27-Jun-2025 09:18:28 JST
fastfinge
So there's a meme where you give kids the first half of a proverb, and ask how they think it ends. My friend's Four year old has apparently never heard the proverb "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
She guessed it goes: "In the land of the blind...
Netflix is cheaper."
It made me chuckle.
#blind #joke #funny #humour -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Thursday, 29-May-2025 11:03:00 JST
fastfinge
@gocu54 Make sure he's formatting it as FAT32 not NTFS or XFAT or something. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 13-May-2025 09:40:46 JST
fastfinge
Update: without any outreach, advocacy, or prompting on my part, I received an email from one of the #Jami developers letting me know that they're aware of the #accessibility issues with the desktop application and are working on fixing them. I have updated my original post with the text of the email: stuff.interfree.ca/2025/05/08/jami.html #a11y -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 09-May-2025 06:38:26 JST
fastfinge
@feld @pixelate @clv0 @delta I think the RIAA and MPAA would disagree. The large multinationals are, at this point, unfortunately both bigger and better resourced than governments. And if our only plan to decentralize is "let good people (TM) run the servers for you or learn selfhosting", we're just never going to get anywhere. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 09-May-2025 06:26:43 JST
fastfinge
@feld @pixelate @clv0 @delta It seems to work in practice though: trackerless torrents, ipfs, etc. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 09-May-2025 04:48:20 JST
fastfinge
Jami could be a skype replacement if only accessibility was cross-platform: Jami is a fully peer to peer chat application that supports text and video, but is only #accessible on mobile: stuff.interfree.ca/2025/05/08/jami.html -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 09-May-2025 04:48:17 JST
fastfinge
@clv0 @pixelate @delta So delta needs a central server, and everything goes through that. Jami doesn't. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Friday, 09-May-2025 04:48:14 JST
fastfinge
@delta @clv0 @pixelate I’m pretty uncomfortable with how delta still sends all messages via a central server, and how it makes email protocols do things they were never intended to do. History shows this always leads to suboptimal designs. Technology like dht is well set up to allow for messaging without any gatekeepers or middlemen. Never the less, thanks for caring about accessibility! Blind folks need to be able to use what our friends use, whatever that turns out to be. -
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Thursday, 20-Mar-2025 03:06:45 JST
fastfinge
How come when a bird sits on my roof and makes its mating calls, everyone says it’s beautiful. But when I sit on my roof and yell “sex! Sex! Anyone? Sex?” everyone says they’re going to call the cops.
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 08:21:20 JST
fastfinge
@Fragglemuppet @simon Because not being a trans person, I am still able to read and enjoy Harry Potter and its related fanfics and works. However, I don't give the author any money, and I put a content warning on any Harry Potter related post I make, because I recognize that this aspect of my personality is harmful and unsafe for others. So the best way for me to be a person who's safe to be around is to put a warning on Harry Potter related posts.
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fastfinge (fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 08:18:20 JST
fastfinge
@Fragglemuppet @simon Even then, though, the basic premise of the work is infected with the opinions of the person who authored it. Yes, it's possible to be transformational and remove those views, or for them not to come into it. However, JKR is a clear and present danger. I'll stop putting content warnings when:
1. She's dead, and can thus do no more harm.
2. If I'm linking a fic written by a trans author with trans characters.
Death of the author as a literary theory kind of requires that the author, you know, die. Especially in the case of JKR, where she still exerts control over the Harry Potter world, still makes money off of it, and spends that money in ways that support her views. When she's gone, none of those things will apply, and I would agree that at that point, a content warning is no longer a requirement.
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