My time on the Accessibility team at Apple was a great highlight in my career! These folks are doing amazing work! Don't miss this opportunity to join them!

[Note: I am not the hiring manager and cannot answer questions about the specific role.]

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200661027-3401/software-engineer-accessibility?team=SFTWR

I’m still processing what’s going on in tech at the moment. I used to feel at home in that world. It used to feel incredibly creative and positive. Now it’s increasingly full of bugs, dark addicting patterns and AI slop.

I’m not sure how to change that. We need to provide a better vision for the future than what’s currently pushed by most tech companies. They have a lot of power and (e.g.) many politicians listen to them. That’s why different narratives are important.

https://2ality.com

everybody:

apple: hey, i can't charge from this cable

everybody:  

darrylmorley: i made an app to help https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable

everybody: 

🟧 anyway I'm fucking exhausted but to re-summarise for people who might want to share again:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3959

our policy now fully bans LLMs from having any "creative control" over the project. it carves out a "trivial usage" exception for things like accessibility and to not litigate shit like copilot autocomplete, even though we personally think it's a shit technology that should not be used

disclosure now exists as a means to openly invite LLM users to tell on themselves, effectively. more diplomatically, it exists to justify and hold accountable people who might have used an LLM to collect data or some shit to make sure they only did it for that shit and didn't let it write any code or prose. if people don't disclose anything and an LLM was obviously involved, the result is to assume that it was involved too much and close the PR.

there's plenty to be criticised about this praxis, but it feels like the best way to ensure that people don't get exhausted trying to litigate whether LLMs were used and instead just ask people to be honest. hopefully absolutely canning most of the usage of LLMs will mean people just stop using them except for real accessibility concerns when there's no alternative.

was extremely frustrated with jyn, the only other serious policy proposer, for effectively throwing us under the bus and citing a fucked-up fashy quote we vented about in an entire blog post: https://txt.ltdk.xyz/testing-the-limits-of-kindness/

(to be clear, jyn has since apologised and was just tired and trying to deal with the situation. everyone involved has just been exhausted trying to do stuff and it means everyone's at each other's throats.)

TC, the other technical policy proposer, should not be taken seriously. he knows what he's doing and I hate him for it, and his policy is not a serious one. it's why I'm excluding him from the discussion here.

I just want people to understand just how absolutely one-sided this argument is despite it draining all of our energy. basically the entire project minus a handful of people agrees that LLMs are trash and should be banned entirely, but that handful of people are some of the ones with the most influence and so things are substantially more difficult. it means that despite all the private remarks that thank us for our policy work most of the private discussions feel like incredibly one-sided dogpiles on us being rude for even daring to call one guy's opinion slightly fascist by accident.

if you wanna help with the discussion, I encourage you to comment on our RFC or show support directly. just don't just show up and make a mess, please, because all you're doing is playing into the handful of hands that are making work hard for the rest of us.

🟧 oh yeah, happy 3-month anniversary of not giving a fuck about accessibility

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/37881#issuecomment-4467139726