I’m here, just knackered. Life’s been busy. I volunteer twice a week at the local animal rescue shelter. I love being able to give them the love and attention they otherwise wouldn’t have. If I didn’t have two pups at home I’d adopt the sweetest little toy poodle with the floppiest, softest ears. I hope he goes to a good home at least. He has the sweetest temperament and is very snuggly.
Gemma
@gemmagem
- 4 Followers
- 9 Following
- 38 Posts
I’m not very good at writing these. I live in the UK with my younger sister and our two dogs Penny and Reba. I am #Bisexual #Neurodivergent and a serious #Bookworm. I lost my vision due to a traumatic brain injury in 2022. i’m slowly relearning how to do the things I used to love before my life was so radically changed. Trans rights are human rights. I proudly support the #BIPOC and other marginalized communities.
Xauri'EL ZwaanIt is my firm belief that everyone wants to do valuable work and nobody is so lazy that they don't want to work at all. Not being able to work is a disability, even if the cause is a mental problem or an addiction and not something like "doesn't have legs"
Andre LouisWhat's your name?
DistroKid.
What do you do?
Supposedly allow people to log into their portal using an iPhone.
What do you do in practice?
Stop VoiceOver users logging in because I'm a dick.
How do you do that?
By having a custom login form which is only visible to VoiceOver if the user enables screen recognition.
What does that make you?
An absolute fucking dick-stand of the highest order.
Why did you do this?
Because custom controls probably look super-cute and cool and fancy as fuck and our developers had nothing better to do. Not like coding me into an actual, you know, usable app would have been helpful to customers or anything.
What do you think I think about this?
That I should go die in a digital fire of epic proportions and stop being a bag of bullshit and chips?
Yes. What else?
That I should apologise with my arse in the air to all VoiceOver users for my utter fucking incompetence and never, ever do it again?
Will you do so?
Nah, course not. My developers aren't smart enough to fix what they broke, even if you did email them and tell them how idiotic they are.
Great...
The Witchy Bitchesif you have a #ServiceDog who presses an emergency button to summon help as one of its trained tasks, I'd be interested in hearing from you. I'm looking at different systems right now but my main roadblock is I don't have, nor am I interested in getting, a landline or other phone other than my cellphone. This device I'm currently looking at seems to have a Bluetooth adapter for a cellphone but I'd love to hear from anyone else who has trained this task. Thanks! https://www.assistivetechnologyservices.com/ServiceAnimalAlertSystem.html?srsltid=AfmBOopqHlyYJzs6ByOXojWCUW_7Ie46fXZrGCIO8eoTdimc6KayV1-K
This is why I really don’t feel that AI is the answer that everyone seems to think it is. It can be a very useful tool. That’s about it. It has helped me and lots of different ways since my vision loss but I have definitely noticed some Inconsistencies that I believe should be worked through before AI starts to run the world. https://procrastodon.net/@simon/115389489996672104
Simon Jaeger (@[email protected])
I need to reinstall Windows on my Surface tablet, and I wanted to see if I could use AI to get into the boot menu and change the boot order to try USB first. I have a Chat GPT subscription, so I used voice mode with the video camera on, gave it some information about what I was doing, and let it be my eyes for a while. I was delighted when the assistant actually knew how to get into the boot menu. It told me I could navigate the menu with my volume keys and select an option with the power key, much like navigating an Android phone’s recovery menu. I had to remind it I was totally blind a couple of times, but eventually, it helped me select USB as the first boot device and choose the “Exit and Restart” option. This was quite a few steps, and I was genuinely impressed at how easily I was able to fix this problem without interacting with a real person. I eagerly waited for the Windows installer to come up. It never did. So I used OCR on the screen, and discovered that not a single thing chat GPT claimed had happened … had actually happened. It didn’t hallucinate just one thing. It hallucinated an entire multi-step interaction with the firmware of my tablet. It basically experienced a break from reality for about two minutes and started describing what it thought should happen, with no regard for what was actually happening. Last week, the same app helped me learn the control panel of my heated mattress pad. It does work sometimes. But today, it led me on the wildest goose chase I’ve ever been on. I was actually trying to boot from the SD card, and as it turns out, that’s not even an option in the boot menu. But I made the mistake of teling Chat GPT exactly what I was trying to do, so it had all the material it needed to hallucinate a complex interaction convincingly. Never let yourself forget the all important “A” in “AI”. That intelligence is not artificial as in “synthetic”, it’s artificial as in “pretend”. No LLM has the slightest idea of what it’s doing or saying. The companies that create these models have the all-important task of trying to make their intelligence more convincing than every other company. That means they work most of the time, but the rest of the time, they will confidently lie. And that lie might be a missing digit, or it might be a whole entire interaction with a device. I called Aira and got it sorted. I actually had to touch the arrows on the touchscreen to rearrange the boot order. Yes, I had a keyboard connected. No, there is no documented way to rearrange boot devices on a surface using the keyboard. Yes, everythyng about this is moronic. But, it’s done, and once I get Windows on my USB device, I’m pretty sure it will boot because an actual human told me so. I can’t even begin to enumerate the possible clusterfucks that could arise from AI weaving such complex webs of lies. Do not use this shit for anything mission-critical. Ever. Even if it told the truth the last 99 times. Eventually, it will lie. When it does, you’ll have no idea.
Simon JaegerFable, the leading accessibility platform that connects organisations to people with disabilities for research, testing, and training, today announced the expansion of its accessibility testing community to the United Kingdom. The expansion will help European enterprises and UK organisations serving EU customers comply with the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which took effect in June 2025.
https://makeitfable.com/press-release/testing-community-expands-to-uk/
https://makeitfable.com/press-release/testing-community-expands-to-uk/
When I #dream, I’m no longer #blind. It’s lovely for a moment, my world is full of colour and the details I miss so much are there for me to enjoy. When I wake up, it’s a bit disorienting as I’ve got to remember “Oh, right, Gem, you can’t see anymore.” Is it different for other #blind folks? #TBI #blindness #visionloss #dreaming #dreamingblind
#altText An orange and white cat is lying on a circular woven chair with a gray cushion. The cat is looking out through the vertical bars of a balcony railing and has its mouth open as if meowing or vocalizing. Beyond the balcony, there is a large green grassy field and some trees in the background, giving an open and peaceful outdoor atmosphere. https://mas.corq.co/@rogue_corq/115373355980191826
rogue_corq (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Big Louie with the casual patio scrunge. https://pay.reddit.com/r/scrungycats/comments/1o6jh73/big_louie_with_the_casual_patio_scrunge/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #scrungycats #caturday
I need a new…sticky rolling pin? To remove dog hair from my jumper. I know that’s not the right name but #tbiproblems
I wanted to check out the show “The Walking Dead”. For some inexplicable reason, only seasons 1 and 11 have been described. Why Describe the first and the 11th seasons but nothing in between? #blindproblems #blindpeopleproblems #theWalkingDead