Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

It's 2026 and you wonder what your friends are up to. You tell the app on your phone to go and get everyone's most recent news. Jim's phone takes a sec to load because his wifi is crap in the garden, and Alex's phone takes a sec to load because their wifi is crap in the workshop, but nobody times out.

You don't worry when your friends time out. You're not one of those Worrying People who panic when they open the app and their friend's phone fails to respond to the ping, you figure they're just, y'know, in the garden or going through a tunnel or something.

Jim is of course posting hole. You comment "Nice hole Jim," and that comment goes straight from your phone to Jim's. Your phone saves a copy as well because it deliberately doesn't know the difference between a four-paragraph furnace repair guide and "Nice hole Jim" and it makes a local backup of anything you type, in case Jim drops his phone down the hole and doesn't notice until he's planted a tree on top of it. Everyone still teases him about that, and he jokes along with them because it was pretty funny. The tree has its own account now.

You scroll through today's posts, mostly goodmornings and fantastical lies about all the stuff your friends are gonna get done today. All these posts were downloaded from people's phones when you opened the app a minute ago. You reach the end of today's posts (the first one of course was Jenna and her early-bird nonsense) and that's it, nothing more to see, you're up to date on what your friends are up to. You're not ready to go back to Actually Doing Something With Your Life so you move your thumb over the Yesterday button, but before you can tap, a mitherbox pops up to tell you that Alex is posting shaft.

Your thumbs do a happy dance and "Nice shaft Alex" is sent directly from your phone to theirs, without needing the permission of any weird billionaires sitting in between, a connection as direct as a phone call, not that you're thinking about that, you're thinking about Alex's shaft. Apparently they've been polishing their shaft all morning and they're almost ready to give it some lube and stick it in. That car's gonna be Gorgeous when they finally finish it.

Anyway that's it now, you're all caught up. You didn't see any ads (why would you? All this is stored on your friends' phones' SD cards and sent over their wifi, they're the ones paying the 0.0001p to respond to your phone's "What's new" request) and everything was shown in chronological order (there are alternative apps that mess with your timeline ordering but nobody uses those because they're shit) and you've read the whole day and you're done. You put your phone away and start getting dressed.

As your coffee brews you check your friends app again and Jen the birdwatcher wants to show everyone her tits

the longer you spend using software that does not make deliberate efforts to run your inner peace through a wood chipper in order to monetize it

the more jarring it is using something that does

Apparently Meta is afraid of Pixelfed. Clearly, @dansup is doing something right. Can't imagine a bigger compliment.

"CONFIRMED: Facebook has *banned* anyone from linking to Pixelfed. #metablockingpixelfed"

h/t @ajsadauskas

Maybe tech media should pick this up. Seems like a good story!

January 12, 2025- “The hygiene hypothesis is being eroded

Infections at a young age correlate with severe infections later in life, few infections in youth correlate with less infections in adulthood

Where was the “strengthening of kids immune system” from infections?” - AJ Leonardi, MBBS, PhD (01/06/25) - https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/antimicrobial-stewardship/early-life-infection-burden-continues-throughout-childhood-new-data

The enshittification of AI has lead to the choice of AI used by VLC to be groaned at. I even saw a post cross my feed of someone looking for a replacement for VLC.

VLC is working on on-device realtime captioning. This has nothing to do with generating images or video using AI. This has nothing to do with LLMs.

This is not generative AI.

While it would be preferred to use human generated captions for better accuracy, this is not always possible. This means a lot of video media is inaccessible to those with hearing impairment.

What VLC is doing is something that will contribute to accessibility in a big way.

AI transcription is still not perfect. It has its problems. But this is one of those things that we should be hoping to advance.

I'm not looking to replace humans in creating captions. I think we're very far from ever being able to do this correctly without humans. But as I said, there's a ton of video content that simply do not have captions available, human generated or not.

So long as they're not trying to manipulate the transcription using GenAI means, this is the wrong one to demonize.

#AI #Transcription #VLC #HearingImpaired #Deaf #Accessibility

"...the rise of singlehood among young people is not a result of women not wanting marriage or children—but rather women finding the bargain on offer not particularly attractive."
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-crisis-of-gender-relations/

#Autism #DoubleEmpathy #Masking #Neurotype #Neurodiversity #Neurodivergent #AuDHD #AutisticCommunication #Autistic #ActuallyAutistic

my name is `adduser`
and my brother's `useradd`
one of us is good
and one of us is bad!

which of us is which?
there is no way to know
we change names sometimes
to keep you on your toes!

hey there friend's brain, please be nice to our friend

glad someone wrote an article that covers how almost half of covid transmission may be asymptomatic, why being covid cautious is a social justice issue, and the loss and loneliness that comes with being covid cautious: https://boulderweekly.com/news/covid-safe-colorado/

#CovidIsNotOver

people in skirts regardless of their gender

boost if agree like if yes