"A month before Covid hit, my husband died. I was on my own in my house in Los Angeles for a year with just my dogs for company. Patrick was one of the very few people who invited me over for lunch, socially distanced in his garden. It had occurred to him that I was grieving and on my own – and he did something about that. It’s a mark of who he is."
I can't go into details, but some clod using Claude just casually stole, mangled, and destroyed a resource for the disabled community that a small group of volunteers spent years building.
I wish every AI pusher and LLM junkie a very bad day.
'The obvious response to political violence is stronger security. Protecting politicians, monitoring credible threats, and intervening when people move towards violence are clearly necessary. But enforcement deals largely with the threat once it has developed. Prevention requires us to think about why some people become profoundly alienated from government in the first place.
Our research points towards an approach known as procedural justice. “Procedurally just” governance is about how governments exercise their authority. It means treating citizens with respect, making decisions fairly and without bias to prevent benefiting one special-interest group over another, being transparent about motives for legislation or new government processes. It also means giving people meaningful opportunities to have their voices heard.
Importantly, our study found that when people perceived government as more procedurally just they reported lower levels of anger and were less likely to perceive the government as illegitimate.
... When authorities confront political extremism or violence, the temptation can be to clamp down harshly on would be troublemakers or enact more laws. Yet if people already believe government is corrupt and illegitimate, interactions and decisions they perceive as procedurally unjust can backfire and reinforce that worldview.'
"You might have imagined politicians and the media would be all over it. Instead, this great social crisis is met with silence or worse. Some outlets, despite the overwhelming weight of evidence, have mocked or trivialised these conditions."
"We’re very good at rescue. But our institutions and funding arrangements are overwhelmingly organised around responding after illness has developed. Providers are paid for episodes of treatment. Performance is measured by consultations, scans, admissions and procedures. Far less attention is paid to whether people remain healthy, illness is prevented, or whether treatment leaves patients feeling and functioning better."
https://thepoint.com.au/opinions/260729-australia-has-an-illness-system-not-a-health-system
"While many in the blind community use LLMs unapologetically and proudly, I know people who do not enjoy using these disability dongles but they continue to use these large language models out of sheer, grinding necessity. I know blind peers who code software through an LLM because ableist developers refuse to code structural accessibility into their applications. I know blind individuals who strap corporate hardware to their skulls to decode their environments independently. I know Deaf individuals who rely on machine learning to translate the kinetic poetry of ASL into a spoken frequency. I know neurodivergent folks who use algorithms to navigate the exhausting labyrinth of corporate communication.
The tech industry treats this disabled survival as free marketing. They frame themselves as saviors while exploiting the marginalized community they actively helped to disenfranchise. These systems are massive, energy-draining disability dongles. They are a shoddy bandage applied to a canyon that capitalism dug in the first place."
Great post by @WeirdWriter
https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/a-thermodynamic-failure-of-the-soul/
This worst part is not the little mistakes, e.g. the wrong condition written on a form. Doctors make those mistakes too, and even though the LLM makes more of them, they're easily corrected.
The bigger issue is the focus problem. The LLM doesn't know what's important.
I'm currently seeing a doctor for a course of treatment. We check in monthly to see how the treatment is going, tweak my other meds, and talk about any issues that come up.
Because he is a normal human person, he starts every consult by asking me how I am and what's happening in my life. At our last consultation, I mentioned some life stress.
The LLM wrote in my consult notes that I was consulting him for the life stress. It doesn't even mention the condition I'm being treated for. Now that's in my notes, and when the doctor goes to review them (or if another clinic needs to look at them), they'll get completely the wrong idea about the consultation. The very serious medical condition is de-emphasised, and the inconsequential chatter is given pride of place.
I'm basically in the position of having to write my own consult notes for every consultation, and give a list of corrections to the doctor. It's another laborious task that makes medical care inaccessible.
Having a chronic illness brings a thousand small administrative tasks. One of the most frustrating new ones is having to go through every doctor's note, letter, pathology form, and consultation report and correct the little bits of fiction that their LLM note-taking app has added in.
I don't need this extra task! My illness is already a full-time job.
what's with all these hyperspecific names for the full moon? i'm going to start making up moon names too
this month is the wombat butt moon because the moon looks like a giant wombat butt. next month is the leaf sheep moon because leaf sheep are cool
‘Perhaps no one learned so painfully that to be loved and to be wanted are not the same thing.
“Of the cruelties directed at this young woman, even by the public that loved her,” wrote Trilling, “it seems to me that the most biting . . . was the mockery of her wish to be educated, or thought educated.” “Actress must have no mouth,” Monroe famously wrote in her notebook. Her job, her role, her function was to be a screen, white and luminous, for other people’s desires, other people’s ideas. It was not to have her own.’
"Hard choices need to be made," says Health Minister Mark Butler as the government cuts 160,000 places from the NDIS.
Hard choices:
- But not about the wasteful and corrupt private providers the government forces NDIS recipients to use;
- Not about the Australian billionaires who pay so little tax the ATO pays them millions of dollars in "refunds";
- Not about our sovereign mineral wealth. We collect more tax from smokers than we do from natural gas companies in Australia.
No, when they say "hard choices", they always mean disabled people.
No time to look at the news, I'm busy with important things
"As for the stuff in your computer that pretends to correct your punctuation or grammar, disable it. These programs are on a pitifully low level of competence; they’ll chop your sentences short and stupidify your writing. Competence is up to you."
— Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft
One of Mary Oliver's most famous lines is "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
I see it quoted all the time out of context, usually on insipid inspo posts about living life to the fullest.
Every so often, I like to go back and re-read the poem it's from, The Summer Day. The meaning of a line can change quite a bit when you read it in context.
I also want to note that tech companies are trying to use us as a meat shield. They're throwing AI into everything under the guise of "accessibility". Meta tried to roll out its smart glasses facial recognition feature to blind people first, to disguise the fact it was mass surveillance. There are so many examples.
Give us somewhere else to go. It's more important than ever right now. Accessible open source software is a tool of freedom and resistance.
As an enthusiast for open source software who is also disabled, I get frustrated at how inaccessible a lot of open source software is. When there are accessibility options, they're usually bolted-on additions that don't work very well. Disabled users are forced into ad-hoc compromises that are laborious to install and labyrinthine to operate. The frustration often drives us back to corporate software. OSS is high friction and low benefit for many disabled users.
Open source developers would gain a lot from integrating accessible design into their products from the ground up (like TTS! My kingdom for fully integrated neural TTS on my browser and operating system). Accessibility features don't just help disabled people. More than half of all people using a phone use accessibility features. Do you really want to exclude half your users?
Accessibility also requires you to think about things like simplicity of design and ease of access for all your users. It can provide redundancy for errors (for example: alt text can be helpful when an image doesn't load, captions can provide a backup if their audio drops out, alternate input methods can allow people to continue using an app if they have keyboard or mouse issues). It can improve design (example: clearer instructions, easier to read text, simple consistent navigation). In short: it makes your software better.
Making the world more accessible for one group improves access for all: this is a basic principle of universal design. Stop excluding us and start making us the core of what you do — you will be a better developer for it.
#opensource #disability #universaldesign #softwaredevelopment
Happy lunar new year everyone
