Life is Tetris @tetrislife@social.cleverlibre.org

@bikeshed

A corollary for the "freedom" offered in the picture is the common "individualist" in each car thinks of all the others as both "fools for being caught" and "in their way" at the same time.

@timClicks motor vehicles are especially dangerous because we expect almost everyone to drive them.

People have been conditioned to believe that cycling is dangerous, instead of believing that motor vehicles are dangerous. The 20th century was a weird time.

I really, really want to love #ponylang. Actor-based programming? Compiler-tracked isolation? Expressive type system? Solidly written tutorial? Check, check, and check!

But the stdlib documentation is such garbage I can't possibly figure how to fit pieces together to do anything. It's super frustrating.

@anildash @gausby simple. vim. Emacs. Elixir. Julia. Win win

@anildash That's generally how it goes with most businesses. The only company that people truly get outraged at when it acts like a big company is Google, and I just wonder if that's a generational attachment to an ideal that never existed.

@Smrki @michael @anildash heh, thanks. The question is: what's the real 'cost' to those time/energy-poor people, and to the broader society? I'm pretty sure it's more than I'd be willing to pay.

In roughly the past half-decade, Microsoft went from nowhere to overwhelming dominance of text editors with VSCode, ownership of majority of code hosting (and open source dev) with GitHub, ownership of the dependency stack used by most devs with npm, control over the most popular single language with TypeScript, and is trying to position copilot and ChatGPT as inevitable parts of the future dev process. Nothing negative for the ecosystem will come of this, as the last half century teaches us.

Lichen, my ultra-minimal web CMS based on #gemtext, is now rebuilt as #Forth CGI scripts!
- No more PHP
- Simpler server config
- Works as static site generator if you desire

https://lichen.sensorstation.co/

@jbigham I'm curious about how hard it would be to teach screenreaders to read TeX, or perhaps make a tool that takes in TeX and spits out some semantic tagged stream. (Or maybe this is just the TeX -> HTML that already exists.)

And I feel like it should be possible to include TeX in PDFs as an embed of some sort... I know it's a hack, but I just wonder if it's a faster road to accessibility.

@jbigham The solution is to use the PubMed approach, encode documents in XML and then compile to PDF or an accessible format at the user's request. (Personally I think it's crying shame that EPUB can't handle all of this natively.)

@jbigham agreed on the thesis, but calling bullshit on "most scientists write their papers in Latex"

I would be hard pressed to believe that most CS or physicists do, much less scientists more broadly.

@tenet @simulo @jbigham SVG would work to an extent, but it would still give screenreaders a hard time. I do like to think about these things from a systems perspective, telling scientists and mathematicians to do it differently isn't very useful, without understanding why they currently do things the way they do them, and I think not having the ability to actually convey the information you want to convey due to different machines displaying things very differently is one of the bigger reasons here, with the tools that were invented quite some time ago to make science communication more semantic largely having failed (which opens a new set of questions as to why they failed, and why semantic web initiatives are largely dead these days).

we have chosen to put most of our research into documents in PDF format.

PDFs are a huge pain to make accessible.

most scientists write their papers in Latex, overleaf, etc., which cannot produce accessible PDFs.

to make such PDFs accessible, one uses Adobe Acrobat, which is expensive and proprietary.

increasingly, we post our PDFs to arXiv, which ~forbids accessible PDFs b/c they can't be compiled from source.

~none of our science is accessible.

artifacts (and file formats) have politics.