@cachondo @matt @jscholes @FreakyFwoof I completely disagree with this assertion. Even as a power user, I still use specialized devices like book players and notetakers because they let me just be fast. Efficiency matters. Blaming the BrailleNote because a kid who can't type hates trying to learn Logic Pro on a Mac is completely backwards. Logic is a massive cognitive load. If she's retreating to the notetaker, it’s because it’s the only tool she’s actually been taught to use efficiently. The breakdown is the lack of a properly paced transition curriculum, not the existence of the specialized hardware. I used a BrailleNote pretty much for all school work up until high school, but my TVI was still teaching me how to type on a qwerty keyboard, how to use System Access and Window Eyes, etc. And now I'm a 20-year-old software engineer.

Hey, there's a lot of bots pretending to be Gazans seeking donations. Be careful before you boost or repost.

It's got me feeling that the personal computer software industry has been moving way too fast and too recklessly for basically its whole history. Like we ought to start over and design things much more carefully and deliberately, using all manner of static typing, static analysis, and any other applicable tools to constrain the states that our systems can get into. Not gonna happen, I know.

Just had a random bug in Windows, NVDA, or both. It was something like: when a window closed, either focus didn't actually return to the previous window in the Z-order, or NVDA didn't recognize that that had happened. It was particularly annoying when trying to use NVDA Find in the browser. Rebooting cleared it up. But why do we accept that the state space of our computer systems is so complex that sometimes, unpredictably, we have to reboot to clear things up?

@matt

Objective-C provides late binding and dynamic typing with AOT compilation. 15 years ago, I wrote a compiler that implemented a Smalltalk dialect on the same object model. It had three execution modes!

• An AST interpreter.
• A JIT, which worked method at a time (so was fairly fast if you just edited a method and recompiled).
• A ‘just too late’ compiler that, when a process exited, did an AOT compilation of all of the code and dumped it in a .so, so the next time the program started it got all of the last run’s code with a single dlopen call.

Startup times were on the order of 200ms on a 1.2GHz Celeron M.

This still gave a Smalltalk-like programming environment: you could open a class browser, replace methods, add instance variables to classes, and so on. While you were editing, things ran a bit slower (though I broke the JIT for a couple of months and used the AST interpreter without noticing) but they worked and were then fast the next run of the program.

The goal was to integrate it with CoreObject, the persistent object store for Étoilé. With that, it would have been trivial to restart the program without losing state, so we could have done the same thing that Sudden Termination does on macOS: when none of the windows for a program are active, quietly restart it so that you pick up new object layout and so on.

I mostly gave up the approach because, without something like CHERI, it’s hard to give end-user-programming environments access to C libraries without giving them myriad ways of crashing themselves. So I had to go and build CHERI before I could come back to solving the fun problem.

To improve upon VB, we need an easy way to build an app as a self-contained artifact including any number of libraries, without requiring the app developer to manually manage the bundling of such libraries, and especially without requiring such libraries to be globally installed and registered (I have a horror story about that, from trying to redistribute a VB6-based thing and all of its ActiveX dependencies 24 years ago). Both Rust and Go absolutely nail this part.

I wonder though if great perceived performance requires full AOT compilation to native code, which IIUC basically requires static typing to be meaningful.

Rust is probably not a good candidate for a would-be future VB; for all of the language's high-level abstractions, it has a famously steep learning curve that requires attention to low-level details (borrowing, lifetimes). So I guess we need something garbage-collected, or reference-counted like Swift.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116849130637551025

I wonder how these requirements for a future VB constrain language design. To me, "Impressive compared to the abilities of the hardware it ran on" implies great perceived performance, including startup time. I think this requires something better than Python's current slow module imports on startup, or the famously long startup times of the JVM and .NET (absent GraalVM Native Image or the new-ish .NET AOT compilation). Maybe modern JavaScript bundling gets us there.

Reminder: the sudden nostalgia for VB (and Flash) is not because VB was good, it’s because VB was:

• Better than most other things available at the time for rapid application development.
• Impressive compared to the abilities of the hardware it ran on.
• Better than most things that came after it for low-effort software development.

We don’t need resurrected VB or Flash, we need something that takes advantage of the power of modern computers to deliver something that has the same ease of use of these tools.

All "privacy oriented" commercial VPNs are honeypots.

You can't change my mind on that.

Mullvad VPN has heavy marketing in Washington DC (their ads are plastered all across the metro stops frequented by government workers and foreign diplomats) for example.

The whole "you need to hide something? here we'll hide it for you! Everyone that wants to hide something should put is all in this one consolidated place!"

But they totally won't look at it.

They swear.

No logs, bro. I promise. I can look, but I won't. I could log, but I won't.

So while Mullvad the company is showing their ass, asking what other VPN to hop to begs the question: Why are you using a commercial VPN?

If it's to change your IP address to bypass porn restrictions in fundamentalist theocratic states, then cool. That's a solid use case.

If it's for a nebulous reason like "for privacy" or "for security". Then you might want to see if that tool actually meets your specific threat modeling.

#VPN #mullvad #mullvadVPN

Once more, for the people who missed my previous rants on the topic: It's okay to adopt the stance that age verification is a bad idea.

You don't need to weaken your position by saying it might be okay if they eventually used Zero-Knowledge Proofs or pseudonymous systems.

First, such schemes aren't suitable for this domain even at a theoretical level. If you think they might then you don't understand the problem.

Second, even if ZKP was an applicable solution, it would still prevent undocumented people from accessing the internet like those that various governments choose to recognize as human.

Third, one goal of a functioning society ought to be producing responsible adults, and treating them as complete children until they suddenly turn 18 is not a reasonable way to accomplish that.

Government-mandated age verification for the internet is bad public policy, and it's 100% okay to say as much.

#AgeVerification #surveillance

RE: https://mastodon.social/@munificent/116817145781772078

The anecdote in this article about developers moving onto a new company just so they could keep working with Flutter is so weird to me. And for Flutter, of all things. My understanding is that, especially when it comes to accessibility, Flutter is not great on any platform and is terrible on web and desktop. Shouldn't our loyalty be to our users? Shouldn't we be willing to hop between tools to do what's best for our users?

It always makes me sad when people seem to feel the need to apologize for or justify their enjoyment of media that’s not particularly deep and literary.

No one should feel bad for doing a thing that brings them joy, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone. Read the pulp. Watch the whimsical show. Listen to the silly podcast. Joy is essential and good in its own right, it doesn’t need to be justified or earned.

Your mental model of the external world will NEVER match the real level of complexity.

It's not a personal failing: just a reality.

The best we can do is to pool knowledge & look for hidden assumptions & gaps in our understanding.

The higher our level of privilege, the more likely we are to have *major* gaps in our understanding of other people.

I'm very interested in systemic solutions to problems. Blaming an individual when they make a mistake *feels* reasonable. When a significant percentage of people make the same mistake (70%, 2%, it doesn't matter as long as it is measurable, predictable and has a negative impact), then it's *not* a persons fault.
We know how to tackle those kind of problems: we change the environment to minimize the likelihood of mistakes. Traffic and pedestrian safety is an example of a well explored space where we know what works. Bollards, narrower streets, slower speeds, raised pedestrian crossings, providing good alternatives to driving to reduce traffic...
Similar in industrial spaces: clear signaling, segregate heavy machinery from human limbs, clear and practiced process to get out of dodge when things go poorly...
It's always about looking for solutions to eliminate mistakes, and when they can't be eliminated, minimize the blast radius.
This is why I like #Rust: it's a language and tooling that applies the industrial approach of "if two people make this mistake, figure out how to mitigate it".
We can't "individual responsibility" our way out of systemic problems.
I want more software with bollards.

If a publisher has chosen to make an ebook available only on DRM-encumbered platforms, then which of those platforms, whether desktop or mobile, is least bad for a blind person reading via text-to-speech?

@JonathanMosen What was the "great little mechanical keyboard" you mentioned in your BrailleNote Evolve review? I want one.

@matt I have a career because there was fun tech to use when I was a child. These days the primary thing kids are learning about on boring iPads are boring accessibility barriers and boring workarounds.

I suppose it prepares them realistically for a life of unending disappointment. But it's hardly empowering.

petitions are so funny to me because all they do is hand the government a curated signed database of dissenters and oppositionists.

if you genuinely believe that your government is fascist and/or bent on destroying a minority and its supporters, why on gods green earth would you hand them a comprehensive list of that minority's names and addresses

@alexhall @matt@toot.cafe @matt@mastodon.social That was the Eureka A4 with its Basic interpreter, and its DOS emulator for me. Programming was so easy, and so joyful back then.