Jake Gross

@datajake1999@dragonscave.space
384 Followers
35 Following
13.3K Posts
I am totally blind, and I am interested in archiving rare software such as old screen readers and speech synthesizers. I am also an audio and mythology nerd.
I woke up to a comment so smug, so perfectly soaked in gatekeeping and faux-righteous posturing, it earned its own blog post.
You want freedom? You want GNU/Linux to mean something?
Then maybe start by not telling disabled users to go fuck themselves with a smile.
This commenter thought they were defending "software freedom." What they were really doing was kicking people out of the room. Dismissing accessibility. Mocking effort. Pretending that cruelty is some kind of rite of passage. They quoted Stallman like it was scripture, ignored real-world experience like it was noise, and wrapped it all in condescension dressed as virtue.
I’ve spent over a decade in this ecosystem. Writing patches. Rebuilding broken stacks. Helping blind users boot systems upstream doesn’t even test. I didn’t "just install Arch and whine about the terminal." I lived in it. I survived it. I held it together when maintainers disappeared and no one else gave a damn.
But apparently, because I didn’t call it GNU/Linux™ and because I dared to talk about how this OS chews people up and spits them out, I’m lazy. I’m weak. I should "get a dog."
So I wrote a response. Line by line. No mercy. No euphemisms.
This isn’t just about one comment. This is about every time someone’s been told they don’t belong because they couldn’t learn fast enough, code well enough, or survive long enough. It’s about everyone who was pushed out while the gatekeepers patted themselves on the back for "preserving the spirit of free software."
You want a free system? Start by making it livable. Because freedom that demands you crawl bleeding through a broken bootloader isn’t freedom. It’s abandonment dressed in ideology.
And if this kind of gatekeeping is your idea of community?
You can keep it.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/you-dont-own-the-word-freedom-a-full-burn-response-to-the-gnulinux-comment-that-tried-to-gatekeep-me-off-my-own-machine/
#Linux #GNU #FOSS #Accessibility #BlindTech #FreeSoftware #Gatekeeping #DisabilityInTech #OpenSource #Orca #ScreenReaders #ArchLinux #BurnItDown #blogpost
You Don’t Own the Word “Freedom”: A Full-Burn Response to the GNU/Linux Comment That Tried to Gatekeep Me Off My Own Machine — fireborn

Software Automatic Mouth: Mark Barton — interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AFdgr-V4bQ
Software Automatic Mouth: Mark Barton — interview

YouTube
@esoteric_programmer Timidity was a MIDI player that was originally written for Unix in the late 90s, and It was available as a plugin for the GSPlayer media Player for Windows CE in the early 2000s. Fortunately the source code for GSPlayer and it's plugins survived on the wayback machine, and I adapted the Timidity code into a C library that can be used in a variety of applications. This library is the backbone of my Timidity VSTi project, and it was really easy to build a Timidity CLAP plugin using the library I created.
I spent yesterday working on a CLAP wrapper around my library adaptation of Timidity 0.2i. For those who don't know, CLAP is a relatively modern audio plugin format that is simultaneously well designed and liberally licensed. To elaborate, it is a C interface at it's core, and is distributed under the MIT license. This is a huge breakthrough, as this means it can be used with many programming languages, and is legal to use in a wide variety of environments.
I found the plugin template in the main CLAP repository easy to follow, so I got a functioning Timidity CLAP plugin in no time.
As the plugin has no automatable parameters or GUI at this time, I haven't made a public release. However, I got bored and rendered a black MIDI through the plugin, using Reaper as a host. I added the stock compressor after the plugin's output to help prevent clipping.
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXWCHiNmIWo
Lossless download: https://datajake.braillescreen.net/misc_audio/Timidity%20CLAP%20demo%20-%20Tetris%20Theme%20A%20V4%20%28fixed%29.flac
Timidity CLAP demo Tetris Theme A V4 fixed

YouTube
"each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine"
Edit: I got those screenshots from imgur. It might be from Xitter, with the account deleted or maybe threads with the account not visible without login? 🤷
2nd Edit: @edgeofeurope found this https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1809325125159825649.html
#school #AI #KI #meme #misinformation #desinformation

If you ever think English is not a weird language just remember that read and lead rhyme and read and lead rhyme.

But read and lead don't rhyme, and neither do read and lead.

All the organs of the body were having a meeting, trying to decide who should be in charge.
"I should be in charge," said the brain, "because I run all the body's systems. Without me, nothing would happen."
"I should be in charge," said the blood, "because I circulate oxygen all over. Without me, you'd all waste away."
"I should be in charge," said the stomach, "because I process food and give all of you energy."
"I should be in charge," said the legs, "because I carry the body wherever it needs to go.""I should be in charge," said the eyes, "because I allow the body to see where it goes."
"I should be in charge," said the rectum, "because I’m responsible for waste removal."
All the other body parts laughed at the rectum and insulted him. In a huff, he shut down tight.
Within a few days, the brain had a terrible headache, the stomach was bloated, the legs got wobbly, the eyes got watery, and the blood became toxic.
They all finally decided that the rectum should be the boss.

Moral of the story: Even though the others do all the hard work, the ass hole is usually the one in charge.

Imagine not having to worry about what OS you use because of accessibility so much that you can literally refuse to run stock Android for privacy reasons. Day in the life of a sighted nerd, a pipedream for blind ones.

NVDA 2025.1.2 has been released: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2025-1-2/

This release fixes a crash when opening certain Microsoft Word versions before version 16.0.18226.

Also, a reminder that if you have downgraded from 2025.x to earlier versions, your profile may become corrupted. This can cause your profile to be reset to factory defaults when you update again, but NVDA should work correctly after that.

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #NewVersion #Update

Dario recently forced me to create an account to continue using a blood sugar monitor I already own (😡), so of course I gave my name as "Fuck Off."

This turns out to have been an amazing decision, because they inject your name into their marketing emails. 😂

×

Dario recently forced me to create an account to continue using a blood sugar monitor I already own (😡), so of course I gave my name as "Fuck Off."

This turns out to have been an amazing decision, because they inject your name into their marketing emails. 😂

Someone should run a Little Bobby Tables experiment on Dario's account database. 🤔

https://xkcd.com/327/

Exploits of a Mom

xkcd

Except they probably shouldn’t, because those accounts potentially have a lot of users' important medical data associated.

Though you'd hope they'd keep the user data and marketing databases separate, and only associate user-provided names with the latter…

@jwisser Hope carrying a lot of weight here.
@jwisser One would also hope that they didn't pull a BioTelCare and allow people to associate test doctors to actual patient accounts like they did to me. Granted, I barely used their shitty device, but that was the shit cherry on top of the shit cake.
@jwisser I love the they’ve decided fuck is your first name. It flows so well.
@tewha I stared at this email for a full minute trying to figure out whether an employee had gone rogue or a joke title had made it into production before I figured out what had happened. 😂
Researchers say AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

Whisper is a popular transcription tool powered by artificial intelligence, but it has a major flaw. It makes things up that were never said. Whisper was created by OpenAI. It's being used in many industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos. OpenAI has promoted Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy." But more than a dozen computer scientists and software developers tell The Associated Press that isn’t always the case and that it's prone to making up chunks of text and even entire sentences. An OpenAI spokesperson says the company studies how to reduce that and updates its models incorporating feedback received.

AP News

@jwisser @tewha if they start using your name to entice others to use their product/service...

Fuck is using Dario, shouldn't you?

😂

@SRDas @jwisser @tewha in that case we need to create an account called "nobody"
@jwisser great news, fuck! is such a good opener to a marketing email
@pebonius RIGHT?
@jwisser it feels like they literally just found out the great news themselves and immediately wrote you before they had time to think

@jwisser I wish I'd thought of it first. I use a different one but yes they too spam me with email ads, which I have read in case it's an alert I should read, or a recall of defective products, etc.

Oh well the trials of a diabetic life. I guess it's still better than when I had to boil my syringe and needles every week for 20 minutes of rolling boil. And only urine tests were available to monitor how you were doing.
So I tolerate their behaviour grudgingly!

@jwisser 'That's Mr Off, for you.'

@jwisser

That's even better than the EICAR string, as a name.

Love it

@jwisser this would work well for political email lists too. Subject line: "Well, Fuck, I hate to say it but we need 10 more donors by tonight"
@jwisser OK, I’m dead from laughter over here
@jwisser i thought i started that with my Kardia, which refuses to set up the software without an email, but never checks or uses it.
@jwisser I once gave my name as "His Highness, Code Guru" to some offer or another and got junk mail addressed that way for years. You may be in for more surprises.
@steter @jwisser husband did something similar -- Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow

@jwisser

They use it for testimonials, please?

@jwisser Did something similar. Makes me laughing every time.
@jwisser on the plus side, they're not using an english-language profanity filter on people's names
@jwisser I laughed and laughed. How awesome
@jwisser fuck, made my day xD

@jwisser

The next step is to charge a subscription fee. I would have said the next step is selling your information, but the undoubtedly already did that.

@jwisser Back in the days, I can't remember which war it was, those devices showed what they measured. Directly on the device. Without smartphone, bluetooth, mobile data plan or WiFi.

I wonder how we've been able to survive these harsh times.

@jwisser We should change our names to Fuck Off.

#mynameisfuckoff

@jwisser

That laughted a fart out of me, and now everybody at work is staring.

@jwisser
"Up the fuck shut, they must."
—Yoda
@jwisser ooh I've done this exact same thing
@jwisser Being a bit over-familiar, aren't they? Tell 'em, that's Mr Off to you.

@jwisser
I do daily checks in the morning and just enter the value into a spreadsheet or on a sheet of paper for later entry

Cloud free, no accounts, completely under my control, it even works when the internet connection is down.

@jwisser It's rather culturally-insentive of them to assume that 'Fuck' is your given name, and not your family name!
@jwisser
It's an unexpectedly common name.
@jwisser Genius move here! 😹

@jwisser please get a testimonial published in their marketing, quoting your enjoyment of their service :D

but are they more likely to
a) lead with "valued customer Fuck Off says..."
or
b) end with "and I'd happily pay more", Fuck Off.

??

@jwisser
I bought a Dario when they first came out and then found they only worked on a limited number of Android phones for reasons that they couldn't tell me. I didn't bother pursuing it but it didn't make me confident.
@jwisser
Dear Fuck, thanks for the big laugh

@jwisser cc: @stronglang

Oh my God this was the laugh I needed today. Literally crying

@jwisser This is hilarious!! I needed a good laugh. On a serious note, you may want to add their bad behavior to the consumer rights wiki:

https://consumerrights.wiki/Consumer_Rights_Wiki:How_to_help

this is exactly the kind of BS they are trying to document and ultimately change!

Consumer Rights Wiki:How to help - Consumer Rights Wiki