Mastodawn

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

Jake Gross 17h ago

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

Software Automatic Mouth: Mark Barton — interview

YouTube

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Jake Gross 1d ago

@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.

Jake Gross 2d ago

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

Jake Gross 2d ago

b-rain 2d ago

"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

Jake Gross 2d ago

Natasha Jay 2d ago

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.

Jake Gross 2d ago

Jokes 2d ago

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.

Jake Gross 2d ago

Quin 2d ago

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.

Jake Gross 2d ago

NV Access 3d ago

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

Jake Gross 2d ago

Jonas Wisser Oct 28, 2024

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. 😂

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Bolt 2d ago

@b_rain This also ties into how the way we design things influences how people percieve them.

Before ChatGPT, there was "OpenAI Playground," a paragraph-sized box where you would type words, and the GPT-2 model would respond or *continue* the prompt, highlighted in green.

Then ChatGPT came along, but it was formatted as a chat. Less an authoritative source, more a conversational tool.

Now the ChatGPT home page is formatted like a search engine. A tagline, search bar, and suggested prompts.

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MBybee 2d ago

@boltx @b_rain This stuff is why I have a subscription to encyclopedia brittanica.

There's too much AI slop, and it's begun to spread.

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joël 2d ago

@boltx @b_rain you probably know that but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I learned that under the hood, they have to write "user:" before your prompt and "agent:" after it, before the interface hands it to the LLM, otherwise it would just continue writing your prompt.

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Bolt 2d ago

@jollysea Technically the models can vary a bit in how they handle that (e.g. they could be using an XML format with <user> and <llm> for example) but yeah, that's the structure essentially all conversational LLMs have to follow.

In the end, LLMs are just word prediction machines. They predict the most likely next word based on the prior context, and that's it. If nothing delineated between the original prompt and the LLM's response, it would naturally just continue the prompt.

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Bolt 2d ago

@jollysea That was actually one of the most fun parts about the original interface. If you wanted it to continue some code, just paste in your code and it'll add on to it. Have a random idea for a poem? Write the first line, and it'll write a poem that continues from that starting line in a more cohesive manner.

Now any time you ask an LLM to do something, it won't just do the thing you wanted, it'll throw in a few paragraphs of extra text/pleasantries/re-iteration you didn't ask for.

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ein unbehaarter affe 1d ago

@boltx @jollysea @LordCaramac but also it was hard to project another mind into that interface so they had to change it for marketing reasons 🤷

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Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC 1d ago

@lechimp @boltx @jollysea GPT2 was a lot of fun, but for some reason, I find GPT3 and later versions rather boring.

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Bolt 1d ago

@LordCaramac I'd assume that has something to do with how GPT2 was a lot more loosely fine-tuned than GPT3 and subsequent models.

GPT2 was more of an attempt at simply mimicking text, rather than mimicking text *in an explicitly conversational, upbeat, helpful tone designed to produce mass-market acceptable language*

Like how GPT2 would usually just do the thing you asked for, whereas GPT3 and others now all start with "Certainly! Here's a..." or something similar.

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Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC 1d ago

@boltx GPT2 was often quite unhinged and produced text that was quite surreal and like a weird hallucination or the ramblings of a madman. I liked it.

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Proxfox Virtual Environment 🦊2d ago

@jollysea @boltx @b_rain yeah. OAI and friends are desperately trying to add as much abstraction & as much features on top of LLMs to hide the fact they're just the predictive text on your phone but overgrown.

its just that the training data always had a specific 'token' to delineate user input and expected output so the LLM behaves like a chat bot

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Martijn Vos 18h ago

Teach kids (and adults) to check sources. Where does chatGPT get this info? Learning to check sources is a useful skill in manu situations. Note that Wikipedia lists its sources. ChatGPT makes them up.

Also teach them that ChatGPT is the ultimate bullshitter. It's designed to always produce an answer, regardless of whether it's true or false. It has no concept of truth. It just makes stuff up based on the content it's trained on, which means it's sometimes correct, but mostly by accident. It can also be very wrong.

No matter what you use it for, always, always double check the output of these LLMs. Because it's just as likely to be bullshit as true.