Mastodawn

@fireborn OMG this is like, almost so hillariously bad you'd almost laugh. Except you can't laugh because it's not actually funny at all.

Pretty glad my next phone is the iphone 17e.

@xogium Right? I hope tomorrow is better. Maybe I just got incredibly unlucky.

@fireborn Maybe... But this being samsung, I honestly doubt it.

Your post makes me incredibly glad I never, ever went to samsung. That, plus all the failure over the years I kept reading about including the loss of speech over bluetooth during phone calls and the broken explore by touch if you had the display hidden.

@xogium Oh yeah, I had the broken explore by touch problem, but that was my fault for enabling without doing updates when I knew the bug existed.

@fireborn Sure but what I mean is, someone who doesn't know... Like a beginner? Just... Good god.

@fireborn Honestly the worst I've ever had with my iphone SE 3rd gen in nearly 5 years of usage is, it froze on me. Only twice. Twice, in almost 5 years. Thati s nothing compared to the worst I've seen from other manufacturers.

Was it scary? Sure was. The home button was still reacting but nothing else was going on, no tts, no sound, no haptics from VO. I had to force reboot it. But it never happened again.

I wouldn't trust android to not keep crashing like that if it did. That being said I believe VO also has no fallback if the system can't talk, exactly like talkback. I might be wrong though?

@xogium VO doesn't have a fallback as such, but you can add different voices from other engines to your voice rotor which you can navigate to in most cases.

D.Hamlin.Music Mar 3

@xogium @fireborn Yeah this is why the general rule is just stick with Pixel if you are a blind android user, never run across any more issues than I had when I still could see.

Jonathan Mar 4

@dhamlinmusic @xogium @fireborn Yup, this. Was about to say, I wonder if the Pixel fold would've given you similar issues.

@jonathan859 @dhamlinmusic @xogium aI couldn't say if it would or not with any degree of certainty. A lot of this seems to be failures on Samsung's part, but that wouldn't change the fundimental state of things, that a foldable is still a foldable

D.Hamlin.Music Mar 3

@fireborn @xogium Have Samsung fixed the issue where you'll just be bricked if you enable screen curtain

@dhamlinmusic @xogium Yes, appears so. I have screen dimmed right now and it's not doing anything stupid.

D.Hamlin.Music Mar 3

@fireborn @xogium Ok cause even by Samsung standards that was an impressive issue.

Joshua Mar 4

@dhamlinmusic @fireborn @xogium yep

Quin Mar 3

@fireborn Out of curiosity, What LLM helped you compose this? Editing to be clear that I'm not against AI writing at all, but this is pretty obvious and I'm curious on your tools.

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 3

@TheQuinbox @fireborn Claude. definitely Claude, though I can't tell what version

@TheQuinbox I used Claude 4.6 to grammer check and typo check, mostly because I was wviting on my phone. I did notice it stripped out my seperators, which I'm not thrilled about and clearly didn't proof read hard enough.

@fireborn @TheQuinbox huh. the whole flow feels very Claude, but that might just be convergence between your writing style and Claude's

@freya @TheQuinbox I was so incredibly pissed off at all these purely fundimental issues that I was experiencing. I was also tought, long before the advent of AI, that if you want to make a point and really make it understood, you lead with any possible counters or deflections.

I used to be far worse at appearing like an LLM, overuse of bold, ithealic, and blockquotes.

interesting observations though; maybe I should change up how I write to make people less wary of engaging with it.

@fireborn @TheQuinbox oh I'm not at all wary of engaging with it, mind, just observing.

@freya @TheQuinbox one nbof that things that people seem to forget is that AI is trained on a lot of journalistic writing, so anyone who has an appreciation for those styles and rhythms gets compaired to AI. I personally take it as a complement

@fireborn @TheQuinbox that's very true! also your post about the death of the power user has fucking crystalised something I've been trying to say for a longass time

@freya @TheQuinbox I think a lot of us have.

It came off the back of a training call where I had to explain the concept of a file system to a teacher trying to share a file with a student.

@fireborn @TheQuinbox this reminds me of the time I had to explain to Haily how a serial port worked and how no, that RJ-45 on your cisco switch is not, in fact, ethernet

@freya @TheQuinbox That's a slightly more understandable mistake than "what is a folder and why would I want that?

@fireborn @TheQuinbox I mean yes it is, but I feel like they both fall under the category of holy shit, that's basic

@fireborn @TheQuinbox and your article about the little plastic android phone inspired the idea I'm trying to get off the ground for a modern nokia e63. not for weird trendy digital minimalism shit, but for making a device that *exists* to *communicate*

@freya @TheQuinbox I think what I most enjoyed about the Jelly Star is it could be used for more than "just communicate" when needed and didn't fight me on it.

It wasn't ideal, but could be done, and that was the point.

@fireborn @TheQuinbox the device I pl;an on making is bascially a blackberry

Devin Prater :blind:Mar 4

@fireborn @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox @freya So I can just write like ChatGPT and become as popular and cool as you are instantly? :)

@pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox @freya Hmm. I'm trying to work out if there is an accusation or sarcasm here or what.

@fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox ngl I can't tell either

@fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox also, random question: do you think I should look into crowdfunding an old pixel to try grapheneOS? Has android fixed the weird talkback lag issues?

@freya @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox It has not. scrolling is as unreliable as it has always been.

Gesture and tap delay has been improved though.

GrapheneOS also does not include a tts engine out of the box of any sort, they say it is coming soon.

@fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox huh, I never had much of a problem with scrolling, do a momentumised flick and tap when you get to the right point. y'know what has massive delays? fucking blackberry 10 screenreader. that shit is slooooow

@freya @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox The flick to item and then activate navigation method is still rather slow, but you can at least perform a flick right without feeling like it's fighting you.

@fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox hmm. so it still sorta feels like you;re fighting through sludge? what the fuck why is it like that, do you know, architecturally? is it just because it's using broadcast receivers and intents and stuff instead of having the screenreader just shove its face into the app or whatever like how voiceover does it? or does voiceover not do that

@freya @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox I really can't tell you, considering CSR doesn't have this problem at all, so it can't be an Android limitation. They also did manage to make it better somewhat, so i'd maybe hazard a guess that it has to do with waiting on timeouts or something, or the virtual screen buffer if one exists.

maia // magmaus3 Mar 4

@freya @fireborn @pixelate @TheQuinbox @GamingWithEars afaik graphene doesn't ship with a tts by default, which makes talkback unusable (until installed, which may be difficult without sight)

@maia @fireborn @pixelate @TheQuinbox @GamingWithEars yeah but apparently they have their own now, I just need to wait for it to get integrated into stock images

maia // magmaus3 Mar 4

@freya @fireborn @pixelate @TheQuinbox @GamingWithEars ah, thought it wasn't ready yet

@maia @fireborn @pixelate @TheQuinbox @GamingWithEars they've got it up on github afaik but it hasn't yet been integrated

Joshua Mar 4

@freya @fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox nope, it's still slow, it doesn't bother me, some people get really bothered by it witch i don't really understand, i'm just happy talkback focus is stable for the most part and doesn't jump or get stuck like voiceover

@J3317 @fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox talkback? stable? you what, mate?

Devin Prater :blind:Mar 4

@freya @J3317 @fireborn @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox It bothers me less now that I have Termux and such working at least well enough for me, and Emacs and all that. But I feel like TalkBack is snappier on Samsung phones than Pixels. Also TalkBack's image descriptions are nice icing that I miss the taste of when I pull out the iPhone.

@pixelate @freya @J3317 @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox purely from my experience and claiming no objective testing at all, I think you're probably right.

I do have to clarify, though, that I'm referring to using the latest version of Google TalkBack (from the Playstore) in both cases. SAMSUNG TalkBack doesn't have the new reduce delay settings, so is objectively worse.

Joshua Mar 4

@freya @fireborn @pixelate @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox i'm just saying what my experience is

Devin Prater :blind:Mar 4

@fireborn @GamingWithEars @TheQuinbox @freya Oh no, I wish I could write like you. Your articles on Linux accessibility have made much more of a splash than my ramblings ever could. :)

Simon Jaeger Mar 4

@fireborn @freya @TheQuinbox I also find myself writing so much like an LLM that I've been asked if something I wrote 100% by hand, without so much as a grammar suggestion from Claude, was written by AI. The person who asked me was my supervisor for several years before that, and we have a good working relationship. I just ... write like an AI, apparently. I also just really enjoy the way Claude writes when you give it a bit of creative freedom, and i'm sure that if I were to put up a blog now, people would suspect me of using Claude far more than I actually would.
All this to say, write however you like; use whatever you use. i'm fairly sure the ideas are still your own. And if i'm wrong about that, I'm honestly just more impressed with Claude.
"It failed with such consistency, such total and unbroken commitment to not working, that at some point it stopped feeling like a bug and started feeling like a philosophy." ... is such a relatable and well-crafted line that I feel like I'm not going to be able to avoid writing something similar to it at some point in the future, because so much of modern tech feels exactly like that.

@simon @fireborn @TheQuinbox honestly well put. and I fucking knjow the vibe, where the failure modes stop being for a reason and start feeling like they were designed, intentionally,l to fail

Simon Jaeger Mar 4

@freya @fireborn @TheQuinbox I've also had issues restoring one phone to another with Google backup, so I'm just convinced this entire thing is broken.
I feel very vindicated in spending way too much money on a OnePlus phone instead of getting the latest Samsung, so there's that.
I suspect the TTS issue was Vocalizer; I'm curious if I'm wrong. That's happened to me across multiple phones. I am sure it's CodeFactory's fault. Talkback can tell if an engine fails to load; it can't ell if the engine is just casually throwing away the strings because it has nothing to speak them through.

@simon @fireborn @TheQuinbox it was almost definitely vocaliser lol

@freya @simon @TheQuinbox it wasn't actually, it was acapella.

Quin Mar 4

@simon @freya @fireborn The worst part about code factorie's registration system isn't that they tell you that your license status has expired through TTS. It's that they *replace*! The entire message with it. They don't append or even prepend it, it just, gets, replaced. Fuck every bit of that user-hostility

@TheQuinbox @simon @fireborn ngl I'd love to see the blackberry tts engine ported to android, it's really nice to listen to

@TheQuinbox @simon @freya the new eloquence at least just prepends it. I did test this when my DNS solution decided to block the registration server.

Timothy Wynn Mar 5

@fireborn Yes, but it also doesn't read the entire string, just the first X characters. @TheQuinbox @simon @freya

aaron Mar 5

@twynn @TheQuinbox @simon @freya Yup, but that is at least better than swallowing the entire string.

Timothy Wynn Mar 5

@fireborn Agreed that less worse is better than most worse implementation for sure. @TheQuinbox @simon @freya