Post #4248843
2026-07-30 13:34 UTC
@zersiax@cupoftea.social @menelion@dragonscave.space @matt@toot.cafe So much this, and everything out there is piles and piles of complexity which I guess I could learn about if it was actually something I needed regularly but as a one-off it's more a waste of time than anything. I just integrated Android's Activity Recognition API into another project which, from what I remember of my research years back, involves lots of Google Play Services-specific RPC incantations for setting up the connection. Once that's done, I'm not going to need that knowledge again, and while the time I spent learning things for a one-off task is arguably not wasted, it's time I can never get back. That plus the brokenness of everything are probably my biggest struggles, and I can't imagine being new to this and eventually hitting those.
Also, the speed at which Claude takes 2 multi-megabyte log files and constructs abstract shell pipelines to extract just what it needs is dizzying. That's something I gather sighted folks have always been able to do way more quickly by skimming a usually ANSI-color-coded log. Even if its logic and process makes perfect sense to me, I'm not capable of slinging enough awk and sed to point at a log and identify all app-specific activity around crashes or RPC failures between this and that timestamp.
All that is to say, as someone who also knows how to do this, it feels like a larger hill to climb for blind folks because we never really had great accessible tooling for ourselves in the first place. Expecting someone to learn development and eventually grapple with a huge pile of logs or some multi-billion-dollar megacorp's bespoke pile of shit to do a thing feels like a larger ask than ever before.
That said, I don't know where this leaves us. I don't know if it's just a matter of providing one set of specific language tooling, though. Also not a particularly big fan of the solution being bellowing at my tooling several times a day because it wrote War and Peace in the doc comments again...
Replies (1)
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@prism@infosec.exchange 2026-07-30 17:45
@nolan@gts.thewordnerd.info @zersiax@cupoftea.social @menelion@dragonscave.space @matt@toot.cafe I feel this too. The big hurtle in Date Everything was getting autowalk to work, which involved computing a map from the offline geometry and a thing to move the camera to point the right way. That's a bunch of math, vertices, working out how to drive the camera vectres, reading those locations for objects, and on and on and on. Beyond the complexity of all that work, none of that knowledge actually interests me, it's just something I need to get the thing working. Hooking the screenerader is way more interesting and reusable for what I'm doing.