Tootfinder

For 5 years now I've been learning about web accessibility and reviewing websites. But I'm not a native screen reader user, and my mobile app experience is lacking.
This month I learned about "Accessibility Actions" or "actions available" for VoiceOver and TalkBack. I shoulda known about it for years-- it makes navigation by swiping potentially much quicker.
Would you be willing to share your thoughts and experiences with this feature?

Medium writer Paolo Perrone curates a short list of interesting algorithms, the rationale behind them, along with graphs and diagrams to boot.
Algorithms that made this short list:
Wave Function Collapse
The Diffusion Model
Simulated Annealing
Sleep Sort
BOGO Sort
BOID
SHOR’s
Marching Cubes
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and,
Boyer Moore
"The 10 Weirdest, Most Brilliant Algorithms Ever Devised and What They Actually Do&…

10 Weirdest Algorithms That Changed Tech Forever | Data Science Collective
Discover 10 unusual algorithms that defied logic, broke rules, and transformed the way we think about technology and problem-solving.

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Posted @withregram • @thegayliberal This is heartbreaking, justice must be served. As soon as an update is available, I will make a video to let you guys know. CW: trans woman violently arrested by Austin Police Department. https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1ESwC1Fk3E/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Quanta Magazine authors Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz strike up a conversation with Ellie Pavlick (Research Scientist at Google Deep Mind) about the differences and similarities between the way people understand language, what NLP algorithms do, and the fact that such conversations more often than not shed light into more than Linguistics' computational side.
"Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?"

Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans? | Quanta Magazine
AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into both AI and the human mind.

I guess there's no real need to explain why I'm doing this, but there's always someone who was lucky enough to be living in the jungle for a while (or something like that), disconnected from everything.
Hypothetical jungle person: I envy you.
Summary: I'm tired of big corporations stealing everything they can to train their #LLMs, and I'm also tired of companies like #Microsoft being active collaborators of the Trump regime.

Two years ago at #CSUN I learned about what became my favorite browser extension, BeeLine Reader. I've been a subscriber ever since.
It's easy to set up on desktop, but has been some struggle to get working on Android. But this week I discovered it works with Microsoft's Edge Canary mobile browser, which has experimental support for extensions. Instructions are here:

I looked into buying a solar charged battery bank. This product category is completely dominated by no-name 3rd party sellers. 🚩
Charge time is key. No listing had even a rough estimate for solar charge time. 🚩
An example unit claims max solar power 1.13 w, with enough battery power to charge an iPhone 14 Pro twice. Working from that, you'd need ~25 hours of full sun to fully charge. I'd roughly estimate that means at least 3 days in summer. Not quite worthless, but close…

#Mexico forbids killing bulls and subjecting them to the most extreme forms of torture.
#Spain is, sadly, still far behind... but I suspect that Mexico's precedent will help, not just as a good example, but also because it will severely decrease the income of many of those bullfighters (toreros).
Toreros usually travel through many countries to participate in these bloody spectacles and make a living out of it. Removing Mexico from their list will be a big thing, so it is likely that many of them will have to do something else with their lives.

Don't forget! In vulnerability-lookup, you can quickly identify sighted vulnerabilities that are not yet published or are scheduled for publication soon (highlighted in yellow in the screenshot).
This example is interesting, a pre-publication on GitHub Gist before the official CVE release.
https://

CVE-2024-42844 public reference
CVE-2024-42844 public reference. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Really brilliant post !
https://alex.party/posts/2025-05-05-the-future-of-web-development-is-ai-get-on-or-get-left-behind/

This was it all along and I didn't find it...
sometimes search engines need to make themselves easier to find!
But I'm glad...
I'm glad that I finally found it...after losing it like 2-3 weeks ago!
https://www.tootfinder.ch/

Just occurred to me that, while #TypeScript transition to a #Golang based typechecker and compiler is going to be quite good for development agility... this move could force other actors such as #Deno to rethink how they operate.
Types striping will be as easy as today, perhaps even easier, but if I recall correctly, Deno was offering typechecking as well, keeping this feature might become much more expensive in the future.

USC professor Allison Marsh writes this delightful short article for IEEE Spectrum about Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert's British counterparts in Cambridge and how, in their case, a document (the Lighthill Report) precipitated cuts in British AI research funding in ways similar to how funding was temporarily cut in the U.S. following MIT's publishing of Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" in 1969.
"Freddy the Robot Was the Fall Guy for British AI"

Freddy the Robot Was the Fall Guy for British AI

Its creator lost a power struggle that led to an AI winter in the 1970s

Wow, what a weird rabbit-hole I just ended up down.
So, the “Spread Mastodon" page (tutorial?) recommends a cool-sounding browser extension as an alternative to all those constantly-dead 'fedifinder' / Twitter-person-looker-upper-tools: the ‘Whosum Social Assistant' browser extension.
Sounds cool! Sounds like the correct solution to this problem!

It's the fact that you can tell from a mile away that it's even less defensible than a photoshop, it was a hackjob done in a fucking word processor, it's all so blatant and lazy that I can't not conclude that anyone who still champions this guy have a rotting bowl of porridge for a brain.

Make it so that you can decide if ie. only followed users or followers(and amount of time followed rules) can reply in comments to all posts or make it to specific ones.
This in a fight against reply guys!
#ReplyGuys #MastodonFeatureRequest

No dark mode for SSMS?
SQL Shades to the rescue!
Free version adds plain dark mode to the IDE (fine by me.) Paid version supports additional themes.
This solution is cleaner than the rather hacky approach of modifying ssms.pkgundef to restore a half-finished dark theme commented out by SSMS developers apparently at the last moment.
"Finally, a real dark mode for SQL Server Management Studio!"

Finally, a real dark mode for SQL Server Management Studio!
Free add-in bringing a complete dark theme to SSMS.

We need the fediverse because we all hate the
Sign In To View This Video.
#fediverse #SignInToView

Surely I'm not the only one who hears this in my head anytime someone mentions the AI product "Claude."
#AI #LLM #Claude

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

If you can't live your dream, at least you can dream your dream.
Then make your house there. Maybe put some stuff in there, explore the world, get back to your house...oh wait, is this Terraria?
Ok now back to you reality in the studio, the weather is alright or stormy?
#dream #reality

I'm 37 years old and I finally finished a #JRPG game for the first time in my life ( #SeaOfStars ).
I like them a lot, but I often get bored of the grinding, or I have to leave it for some time and when I come back I don't remember what I was doing.
Why I managed to finish it this time? Because I had more important, stressing and boring things to do instead, and my brain demanded procrastination. #ADHD

Hello there.
I, or maybe we, intend this to serve both as a diary and a reference.
We are a jack of many trades. As such, it is hard to squeeze into 1.5k symbols, and it is by no means comprehensive. Still, sometimes labels are helpful.
Here is about IT, interconnections between technologies (Fullstack, Data Science... sometimes even AI and ethics of it). Politics, because our life is inevitably tied to it (especially with

WTF #LLM #LLMs #AI #UK #UKPolitics

Yesterday I got for myself the #book "The Ecology of Freedom" (a Spanish translation, I quite liked this particular edition ).
#books

Tar Hollow State Park
Taken 8 May 2024
#ThickTrunkTuesday #FallenTree #Ohio #StatePark

**[Цей і наступні пости викладаються тут для архівних цілей, майже в тому вигляді, який вони мали в оригіналі]**
Не знаю, на скільки мене вистачить, але тримайте.
Дрезден Кодак - "Темна Наука (https://dresdencodak.com/2010/06/03/dark-science-01/)"…

Dark Science #01 - The Collected Works of Shakespeare: the Movie - Dresden Codak
So this is page one of a new series that will be going on in Dresden Codak! Page 2 will be up next week.

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

Found this: #serverless tools and their consequences.
We're going to see many more of these in the comming years thanks to #vibecoding .
#BigTech companies love these synergies between #CloudComputing, #generativeAI businesses and occasional incompetence (NOTE: not saying that all these horror stories are tied to incompetence, many times is due to malice on the services provider side).

I have a relatively new #ASUS ProArt13 laptop where I still have a #Microsoft #Windows installation so I can keep upgrading its firmware (I planned removing it once I have a stable #Linux distro with kernel >= 6.14).
I'm surprised by how unstable it is. Just leaving it doing nothing for more than 10 minutes is enough to trigger a #BlueScreenOfDeath (I can reproduce the issue). If I keep doing stuff, it does not crash.
At this point I'm not sure if it's Microsoft's fault or ASUS'... but I suspect the blame falls on Windows side (nothing like that happens on my Linux installation).
#Windows11