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  I'm reading posts from blind #NFB26 convention attendees who say they love using Waymo self-driving cars. They talk about how empowering it is to be in the car by themself without a human driver. And I wonder, isn't anyone else worried about being dropped off in the wrong place? Are my orientation and mobility skills uniquely bad?

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  There's an LLM called Apertus (https://apertus-ai.org/) that has not just open weights, but open training data and a fully published training process. It's developed by public institutions in Switzerland. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good? I might play with it; I have hardware that should be capable of running a quantized version of the 70B-parameter model.

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  @tristan@hachyderm.io @prism@infosec.exchange I'm sympathetic to the people who truly believe that others continuing to use, say, generative AI, are contributing to its harms. If you truly believe something is causing harm, why wouldn't you do all you can to try to stop it, including persuading others?

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  Question for people who vibe-code full apps, especially blind people, as I believe that covers most of my followers who do this: What would it take for you to be comfortable coding directly in a programming language without an LLM? A high-level programming language with better tutorials and quickstart templates than are currently available, particularly for writing real apps? Or do you believe that having an LLM generate the code is the only way you could practically do what you do?

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  The variety of weird states that a general-purpose computer can get into is truly out of control. My Windows PC occasionally gets into a state where opening Slack with Windows+5 (I have Slack pinned to the 5th slot on my taskbar) plays a Windows ding sound as Slack is opening, but only if I press that keystroke while an Edge browser window is focused. How does that happen? I don't know; I just reboot. But that shouldn't be necessary.

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  I wish there were a way of text messaging where someone could send a message to a group but the replies would go only to the sender, not to the group. I'm glad to get my mother's announcements that she sends to multiple family members, but not everyone else's reactions.

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  This is a challenge to everyone who says that generative AI is unethical, that it's an indictment of the software industry, etc. What are we going to do about the fact that at least one group, blind people, is now effectively using LLM-based coding agents to vibe-code solutions to accessibility problems? Maybe that *is* an indictment of how the software industry neglects accessibility and the needs of blind people. And of the complexity of "real programming". What will we do about...

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  RE: https://caneandable.social/@EdenLinnea/116879333978518110 I broadly agree with the sentiment. But, I think there's something wrong with the fact that people think it's just normal that computers make mistakes. Aside from occasional hardware failure, a computer reliably does exactly what the running program tells it to do. So, a computer running a properly verified program shouldn't make mistakes. I think it's a problem that people just accepted that computers make mistakes,...

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  RE: https://mas.to/@zekjur/116684759615780829 What I take from the linked post by Andrew Tridgell, author and maintainer of rsync, is that anger about generative AI should be directed at the people who are making it and pushing it on the world, not at individual maintainers who have given us so very much over the decades and are just trying to do what they think is right in response to what the former group have done and are doing.

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  Here's an idea: someone should produce a series of ebooks that teach how to use GNOME and popular applications (e.g. Firefox and LibreOffice) with Orca, in a systematic way with activities for each concept or task, then use the proceeds from sales of those ebooks to help fund development of Orca and the free desktop accessibility stack in general, as NV Access has done with NVDA and their training ebooks. I think there would be a market for that.

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  It makes me angry, perhaps unreasonably so, that teachers are now resorting to mandating the use of handwriting on exams, at least in part in response to students using LLMs to cheat. I have enough usable vision that I *can* handwrite, but it was unusually tedious for me, and I was glad to be mostly done with it when I got a laptop. I thought the days of students like me having to handwrite, and fully blind students having to do something different from their sighted peers, were over. 1/?

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  @nolan@toot.cafe Here's what I don't get. You talk about being able to produce 10x the code using an agent. But in an earlier Lobsters thread (https://lobste.rs/c/bnujxj), you said that it's actually a modest improvement. Maybe it feels more dramatic than it is because, as you said in that same post, you're swimming in the culture.

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  Question for blind programmers: Do you think you can read or write code faster, when working in a language and library ecosystem you know well? And a follow-up question: If you use LLMs to generate code, do you feel that having to read more code, as opposed to writing the code yourself from memory, is a net productivity loss?

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  Is there such a thing as a USB power bank / portable charger that has some way of finding out its current battery level that's accessible to blind people?

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  RE: https://mastodon.drkirkadams.com/@drkirkadams/116499441479778993 We've kind of been here before. In the late 2000s through the mid 2010s, there was much hype about APIs, and big players like Facebook and Twitter offered feature-rich APIs that let you write a full alternate client for the service. And there were such clients specifically for blind people. Then the companies closed those APIs down. Some companies are opening up their services to AI agents, through MCP and/or command-l...

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  RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/116380176685450213 TIL that Slay the Spire II uses the Godot engine. Godot has accessibility support via AccessKit. So I wonder if the developers of Slay the Spire II have done any work on making that game accessible to blind players. The original Slay the Spire was made accessible via a third-party mod called Say the Spire.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@bcantrill/116393325512331807 I'm not sure I agree with the closing nod to the importance and power of LLMs. But I agree with the rest of this.

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  There's an article currently on Hacker News about Microsoft's lack of a coherent GUI strategy over the decades. https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/ The article said that WPF was good technology. I couldn't let that go unchallenged. I remember the bad performance that my brother suffered running a WPF app in 2010-2011 on an average 2008 laptop, because WPF's bet on GPU acceleration turned out to remain...