RE: @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social
I absolutely love Bandcamp, and if they are destroyed by corporate interests I will be heartbroken. I buy all my music there. I really hopee they can remain an oasis in the desert, but the alarm bells are ringing.
In the midst of a long wrestle with persistent sickness, I've retreated into comfort TV. My viewing of original Star Trek was mostly with my father or uncle, as a kid, on TV, where the Australian syndicator had no respect whatever for the intended order of episodes.
Watching them as broadcast has been a bit surprising. The first few have been mostly set aboard ship, with only short scenes on the planet of the week. They also all share a similar plot. Some alien influence makes humans behave weirdly, and the crew have to work out how to restore normality, in a hurry because some additional problem is going to destroy the ship or kill crew members. There are few visible aliens to speak of, which is not at all how we think of the show.
One of the main ways they show alien influence, unfortunately, is through men behaving disrespectfully toward women. Yeoman Rand has a particularly terrible time, making it super credible that she'd disappear not far into the first season, hopefully for some well-deserved rest and recovery. I look forward to the series maturing past this trend.
A lot of Spock's backstory comes out quicker than I expected. His emotionless facade is broken a few episodes in by an alien virus that leaves him sobbing with guilt about how he treated his Mum. He is also a love interest for multiple characters. Really helps me see how Trek inspired fanfic culture.
I'm ccurious to see how else my memories of Trek differ from reality, and how it grows into the show I think I know.
RE: @dangillmor@mastodon.social
I think this is more relevant to most of you than you'd think. The tractor market is a small one where a few companies can get a lot of power. Another example is wheelchairs, and they do everything they can to make user repair and part replacement difficult for us. I'm very pleased to see a growing resistance against this, and I think users of assistive technology should watch closely.
Babylon 5 creator explains why the promise of AI script writing hasn’t yet been delivered, and may never be. https://open.substack.com/pub/jmichaelstraczynski/p/silence-where-a-story-might-have?r=1oipw&utm_medium=ios
RE: @JamesWidman@mastodon.social
As a blind person, I can believe this would be true. I have heaps of advantages as a straight white male but I have frequently found that people are unwilling to argue with me because they think it's inappropriate. I've learned to recognise that when I see it and immediately suspect that there's a real opinion I can't access hiding underneath whatever they're saying. I know in the case of LLMs there's probably no real opinion, but I still am reflexively turned off by how hard AI tries to validate me.
When I heard news of gunshots at the White House press dinner, I quickly turned on BBC World Service to see if they had anyone in the room. The 2nd report was from blind journalist Gary O'Donoghue, who had also provided award-winning coverage in the moments after the Trump assassination attempt in 2024.
The presenter asked O'donoghue to "describe what he'd witnessed", a precise and respectful question. In his response, he outlined only those things he could verify personally, what he'd heard, what people had said to him, almost nothing someone else had described or explained. The information he gave was as complete and useful as that provided by the other, clearly sighted journalist.
I quit my journalism degree half way through. It was very difficult at that time to gather stories the way my fellow students did, walking the streets and spending days at the courthouse. I sometimes used other approaches, relying more on the internet and my connections, but I resented the distance that arose between myself and my peers because of our different methods. I was annoyed that the way I worked felt much less thrilling and romantic than how everyone else worked. I heard how much was required of early-career reporters, and feared it would be hard to compete. And if I could get into the industry, would I be restricted to specific roles, or unable to do the menial jobs that earn you rewarding positions later on?
O'Donoghue, who started in an even tougher era, must have been much more determined than I was. Ultimately I'm very happy where I've wound up. But I wonder if I would have done anything differently had I known of someone who was proving my fears wrong. He might not call it thrilling, but Gary certainly has been right in the middle of breaking news stories in the way I'd concluded wasn't possible for me.
Most listeners would have had no idea Gary was blind, but for young people now, thinking about their choices,, he sets an important example. My doubts outweighed my ambitions, and even the encouragement of my lecturers. Hearing coverage like this could have tipped the scales another way.
A year since I first got my Meta Glasses, they remain a reliable conversation starter, and a somewhat unreliable accessibility tool.
That is, at least, if you consider their main value as being integrated AI. While it has improved somewhat since I first got them, Meta's LLM is well behind the pack, and has been not only unhelpful but also at times actively sassy. Recently it told me an LP was called "Title of Record". After repeated requests to read a document, it eventually said "it's easier to go paperless". Sure, mate.
Even so, I have no regrets about buying them, and use them all the time. As a wheelchair user, having a camera on my head, freeing up both hands for wheels and cane, is invaluable. A real, human co-pilot has helped me out of many scrapes which would have otherwise been far more difficult to work through.
My glasses have allowed me, for the first time, to film watchable video. I've always been hopeless at getting my intended subject in frame from my phone, but I know whether or not I'm looking at something. When house hunting recently on my brother's behalf, I filmed walkthroughs of each property which reliably caught the details he needed to see. Through better trained AI-based Audio Description apps, I can even independently check what I've captured.
It's a shame that Meta AI is so bad, and needlessly handicapped, in Australia at least, by the unavailability of video streaming AI. But every new technology comes alive in the hands of users in ways that weren't anticipated. I credit Meta for recognising, however belatedly, that blind and vision impaired people are part of the audience, and making the glasses a platform that allows other developers to unlock more of their potential. But even if they never improved, the uses I already have for them make them a worthy addition to my personal toolkit.
So was the hype real? Did some of us adopt too early? I think the answers are complicated, and I'm interested in what others have found after using the glasses for a while. Where do they work well, where do they not live up to expectations, and what unexpected use cases have you found?
