Of course I have biases, but the bias does not reflect in my thesis (which is the opposite of what you realize). In particular, just because I find the bakers to be bigots does not mean I expect them to lose in court. I still actually believe the bigoted bakers rightfully won the case (thus, this does not prove your point, which is that you think there should have been no court case). The court case was not about whether they are bigots. It’s about whether an artist should be forced to produce art that favorably expresses people/ideas they hate against their 1st amendment rights also amid their right to choose who to do business with.

So the court was right to rule in favor of the bakers. But your claim that there should not have been a court case at all remains unsupported. The case had merit. The rights of people in a protected group (sexual orientation) were discriminated against and so they were rightfully given a forum to have their legitimate complaint heard.

IMO, it’s a fucked up extreme bias that brings you to consider the case frivolous, as if one side of the debate did not have enough merit to even warrant a court case.

They were still fined a lot of money

No they weren’t. Read the first line of your own referenced article. The fine was dropped. And the original payment came from other people’s crowd-funded donations toward the case anyway, which was returned.

Also, precedence matters and court ranking matters. Lower courts in certain regions can have all kinds of bizarre judgments but higher courts take precedence. The Oregon Court of Appeals is not representative of the US. The US Supreme Court is. The Bank of America case would be in a federal court as many states are involved.

And spent a considerable amount of time and energy defending themselves for no damn reason

So you not only misunderstood the outcome, but you object to rights of one party being tried against rights of another party in court? Bizarre to have sympathy for bigots being dragged through the court system, despite getting off the hook.

The Oregon Court of Appeals is a lower court than the US Supreme Court. The Bank of America case is federal.

Love the irony and hypocrisy. What self-respecting conservative promotes regulation, particularly that would take control away from a business on who they do business with?

There’s also quite a bit of hypocrisy from a privacy standpoint. It’s the conservatives to don’t value privacy and take the “if you have nothing to hide…” line of reasoning. When a giant corporation voluntarily shares sensitive information about customers, it’s always the right-leaning corporations who do that; ALEC members.

Funnily enough, I boycott Bank of America for supporting conservative values (private prisons, xenophobia, fossil fuel investment, privacy-disrespect):

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

while the conservatives want to cancel Bank of America for essentially for being conservative. Apparently it’s not conservative enough for BofA to apply conservative values uniformly, as opposed to giving conservative individuals preferential treatment.

How bizarre. I boycott #JPMorgan/Chase in part because they heavily invest in fossil fuels (among countless other evils):

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

And according to your linked article, the state of Texas is boycotting JPMorgan/Chase for not investing in fossil fuel. How confusing. Maybe the state of Texas should read the Banking on Climate Chaos paper.

The supreme court makes no exceptions for gay wedding cakes:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado-gay-marriage-cake-supreme-court/index.html

Are those heuristics low bandwidth or is audio involved?

I disable images because of bandwidth consumption. So I’m wondering if it makes sense to install a screen reader in my case.

Indeed. We need more activism. More patients refusing to disclose their email addresses and insisting on paper correspondence. This pressures clinics and hospitals looking to save money to ask why email is rejected, and from there have some incentive to fix it. That incentive won’t exist if everyone is a pushover. IMO we ideally need ~15% or so people to practice this way of activism. But note as well just one activist can make a dent… an office having to do things differently from their normal workflow for just one person does not go unnoticed.

BTW, refusal to disclose an email address to gmail and outlook users is my general mode of operation – not just with medicine. Public services and utility companies are also forced to reach me via snail mail (because either their website blocks Tor, or their email is MS/Google).

Do what you Gotta do to keep your information private

Indeed but to be clear, there are two motivations for my insistance that the doc buy a stamp and use the post:

1. keeping my data out of MS hands to mitigate them exploiting me directly, by e.g. selling the medical data to insurance companies.

2. Forcing the doc’s office to go through some burden and expense for poorly choosing their email service provider.

Great story. Well, I didn’t actually read Jackson’s whole story (I’m lazy), but just the gist of it that his doorbell failed b/c his Amazon acct got into a bad state says enough. My lazy ass only skimmed through your page as well, as in my case it’s preachin’ to the choir.

But I agree calling IoT appliances “smart” is revolting and I reject it. And I think the problem with the early catch phrase (“Internet of Shit”) is that it’s too hyperbolic to hook on to the moderates who really need to give some thought to this. So I quite like the idea of calling them “dependent”, as the terminology might take hold where it needs to.

BTW, you should not link to #medium.com. Your audience does not appreciate the #enshitifcation of that site, but would rather have scribe.rip URLs.

I’ve been out of the loop on games for a while but ReactOS may be worth a look.

The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But…

And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,

Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.

That all sounds accurate enough to me… but thought I should comment on this:

However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.

It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing – which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).

Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)

Linux won’t be viable for blind people unless major distros have full time accessibility folks, and refuse to accept inaccessible packages and patches.

Sure, but you need to read what I quoted. I purely addressed the flawed claim that better code comes from those paid to write it. The opposite is true. It’s unclear to what extent that bias has influenced @noahcarver@rblind.com’s thesis. Though I have no notable issues with anything else @noahcarver@rblind.com wrote (much of which is beyond my expertise w.r.t accessibility).

And to be clear, “better code” strictly refers to quality, not accessibility. Accessibility is a design factor.

But that code you write at home is probably not accessible.

That’s right. But then neither is the commercial code I worked on. That would be outside of my domain. I do backends for the most part. The rare UI work I did was for a tiny user base of internal developers within the org and accessibility was not part of the requirements. I worked on a UI for external users briefly but again no requirements for accessibility (which would be very unlikely for that particular product).

In any case, this sidetrack is irrelevant to what you replied to. It’s important to correct bogus claims that being paid to write code is conducive to quality. Some right-wingers I know never miss the opportunity to use the phrase “good enough for government work” because they want to push the mentality that capitalism promotes superior quality. It’s a widespread misconception that needs correction whenever it manifests.

Paying someone to write accessible code should theoretically work on both free software and non-free software. AFAICT the reason non-free software would accommodate blind users is that the market share is large enough to justify the profit-driven bottom line and those users are forced to pay for it (as all users are). In the FOSS domain, payments (“bounties”) are optional. Has this been tried? If not, then you’re relying on blind FOSS developers to suit their own needs in a way that benefits all blind users.

and that someone who is paid to write accessible software is generally going to produce and maintain better code.

In my day job I’m paid to write code. Then I go home write code I was not paid for. My best work is done without pay.

Commercial software development

When I have to satisfy an employer, they don’t want quality code. They want fast code. They want band-aid fixes. The corporate structure is very short-sighted. I was once back-roomed by a manager and lectured for “gold plating”. That means I was producing code that was higher quality than what management perceives as the economic sweet spot. I was also caught once fixing bugs as I spotted them when I happened to have a piece of code checked out in Clearcase. I was told I was “cheating the company out of profits” because they prefer if the bug goes through a documentation procedure so the customer can ultimately be made to pay separately for the bug fix. Nevermind the fact that my time was already compensated by the customer anyway - but they can get more money if there’s a bigger paper trail involving more staff. So when you say you get what you pay for, that’s what you pay for – busy work (aka working hard not smart). They also want “consistent quality”. So if one module is higher quality than another, there is pressure to lower the quality of the better module because improving the style or design pattern of the lower quality piece is “gold plating”. When I make full use of the language constructs (as intended by the language designers), I am often forced by an employer to use more basic constructs. Employers are worried that junior engineers or early senior engineers who might have to maintain my code will encounter language constructs that are less common and it will slow them down to have to look up the syntax they encounter. Employers under-estimate the value of developers learning on the job. So I am often forced avoid using the more advanced constructs to accommodate some subset of perceived lowest common denominator. E.g. if I were to use an array in bash, an employer might object because some bash maintainers may not be familiar with an array.

Non-commercial software development

Free software developers have zero schedule pressure. They are not forced to haphazardly rush some sloppy work into an integration in order to meet some deadline that was promised to a customer by a manager who was pressured to give an overly optimistic timeline. #FOSS devs are free to gold plate all they want. And because it’s a labor of love and not labor for a paycheck, FOSS devs naturally take more pride in their work. I’m often not proud of the commercial software I was forced to write by a corporation fixated on the bottom line. When I’m consistently pressured to write poor quality code for a profit-driven project, I hit a breaking point and leave the company. I’ve left 3 employers for this reason.

Commercial software from a user PoV

Whenever I encounter a bug in commercial software, there is almost never a publicly accessible bug tracker and it’s rare that the vendor has the slightest interest in passing along my bug report to the devs. The devs are unreachable by design (cost). I’m just one user so my UX is unimportant. Obviously when I cannot even communicate a bug to a commercial vendor, I am wholly at the mercy of their testers eventually rediscovering the bug I found, which is unlikely when there are complex circumstances.

Non-commercial software from a user PoV

Almost every FOSS app has a bug tracker, forum, or IRC channel where bugs can be reported and treated. I once wrote a feature request whereby the unpaid FOSS developer implemented my feature request and sent me a patch the same day I reported it. It was the best service I ever encountered and certainly impossible in the COTS software world for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire.

I find the reactions on the sub you cross-posted this to to be exactly what you would expect from the average person, honestly.

Yes, apparently so. I selected privacy@links.hackliberty.org because it’s on an instance that’s conducive to privacy. But because it’s federated with Cloudflare instances, there’s a flood of uninformed/non-serious normies from CF instances following that community instead of just watching privacy@lemmy.world.

This inspired an enhancement request for #Lemmy and #Kbin.

In my view, many people aren’t prepared to firmly hold their position regarding technology use, especially if it means sacrificing convenience for privacy. However, my opinion is that you can maintain connections with such individuals in real life; and in general if they’re not willing to take the effort to engage with you in the way that you prefer, then perhaps they’re just not worth your time in my opinion.

Indeed. If someone cannot be bothered to create an account on protonmail or install an e2ee app, or the like, then their bond to me is too weak to justify anyway.

But to be clear, the case at hand involves people who are distant & mostly out of touch, phone numbers have changed, so the real life connections have died off and there’s only email. Many of them should figure I would object to Google/MS but I never sent out a msg giving my requirements (as that move in itself requires a Google & MS dependency). They are probably on FB as well but I certainly am not. Ideally there would be a decentralized platform perhaps specifically for the purpose of people reconnecting.

Yes, but to be clear my test may or may not be valid in terms of what a blind person would experience. Unlike a blind person I do not use a screen reader. I merely disabled images and saw no visual indicator of an audio option. I would expect blind people to disable images as well because they would only slow them down for no benefit. But someone else said that they bypassed the CAPTCHA completely due to having a screen reader.

Specifically in the case of Protonmail? That was part of my question. I saw no audio CAPTCHA option.

Thanks for the tip!

Although it’s a tricky decision because if the server can detect that you use a screen reader, then your browser fingerprint uniqueness would increase quite a bit.

Indeed it saves bandwidth – which is particularly important for those with a limited connection. I like it as well because so many images actually downgrade the UX anyway.

It’s a better carbon footprint to nix images but then we get punished for it by anti-bot websites. Bots also neglect to fetch images so I get hit with false positives for robots more frequently.

(Not sure if mentions work on Lemmy… mentioning @aibler@lemmy.world for good measure)