@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

glyph

@glyph@mastodon.social

he/him

You probably heard about me because I am the founder of the Twisted python networking engine open source project. But I’m also the author and maintainer of several other smaller projects, a writer and public speaker about software and the things software affects (i.e.: everything), and a productivity nerd due to my ADHD. I also post a lot about politics; I’d personally prefer to be apolitical but unfortunately the global rising tide of revanchist fascism is kind of dangerous to ignore.

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foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I did a regex search in sublime text SO HARD that it caused my keyboard AND mouse to disconnect

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@foone @sampj I am dying to know what diagnostics lead to the purchase of this switch rather than the replacement of some other component

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Is there a name for the cognitive bias or even a trope where you feel like human infrastructure—buildings, books, roads, microchips, plastics—are a sort of homogenous naturally-occurring goo that replenishes itself rather than being the product of human labor? A lot of urban fantasy & horror SF draws on this: libraries that go on forever, “the backrooms”, impractically vast digital networks in cyberpunk, epiphenomenal mystical roads in Kentucky Route Zero…

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

I get a little wistful at retrocomputing aesthetics, but the nostalgia is mostly melancholy and not exciting. When I think about the future of cool, weird software stuff, Textual and Rich are great examples of empowering, cross-platform weird and nerdy tools that are nevertheless powerful and futuristic
https://mastodon.social/@willmcgugan/110430900132509356

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@feoh I didn't mean to say that they were — quite the opposite! I meant to say that they are leveraging underutilized elements of our tech stack, empowering users to make cool stuff, in a way that is not part of the blob of flat beige aesthetics and problematic business models of so much of software right now.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@feoh There's a lot of ambient dissatisfaction with "tech", and our current dystopia / grim meathook future in general. and that leads to a lot of nostalgia. But if you want to get something cool and new, cool and actual new things are happening, you don't have to move towards the past!

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt Oh no.

It seems like Textual could possibly be part of the solution here, though. As opposed to many other janky TUI hacks, the structure is all actually there under the hood, and could potentially be exposed to screen readers. Is there a channel for communication that could be used to do that?

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt The ML solution has its downsides, but given that it's closer to doing what eyes are doing, it will fill gaps that inevitably develop.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt Possibly the solution for textual itself will be to just get out of the terminal, once the web frontend exists? It's not entirely clear to me whether the plan is for that bit to be open source, but if it's the only route to accessibility, I really hope so

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt so, I was just riffing on my general impressions of Textual's architecture, but searching the repo's issues immediately reveals that they're at least thinking about it, and in much the same way I assumed https://github.com/Textualize/textual/issues/2425#issuecomment-1529010340

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt in the meanwhile, my immediate thought is to make any CLI tool that I write using textual also have all of its interactions exposed as more plain-text output that can be read linearly. how would that work, as an experience? I have very little intuitive sense of what using a screen reader is actually like

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt i.e. if I'm going to put a master/detail view with a list on the left and some stuff on the right in a textual UI, the CLI would be like --list-stuff that spits out descriptions and IDs and --stuff-info=id

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt Thanks. This is good info to keep in mind.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt Does the terminal need to be the thing to expose the accessibility info, though? Like, do screen readers themselves have any kind of API that applications can use to augment stuff, or do they require the UI to present graphical elements that map 1:1 to accessibility data?

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt actually nevermind, the problem is obvious, I was just thinking exclusively of the running-locally case. Of course if you're running a textual app in a context where the TUI is giving you value (i.e.: ssh'd into a host behind a bastion) it needs to come through the character stream or it's useless

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html has some examples, but they make it sound like their technique will get broken by any interposing software

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt I was about to say something about passing it through, but… tmux does its own windowing, you’d need it to participate in this protocol. i wonder if that might even be a good place to start

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt @feoh there are other advantages. It works as a persistent process; for example you can run a TUI in tmux on a server, detach from it and come back, with a tiny fraction of the resources required for, say, VNC.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt @feoh it’s also easy to incorporate as a component into an otherwise text based console application without worrying about portability

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt I don’t have a great point of reference for what a good TUI would sound like, but thank you, this was really fascinating to listen to

malwaretech, to random

deleted_by_author

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    glyph,
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    @malwaretech incredibly relatable content here. Really hope you can get some good rest after the excitement.

    Annalee, to random
    @Annalee@wandering.shop avatar

    The reason sith lightsabers sound different and throw off more sparks is inferior engineering caused by lack of knowledge sharing because sith believe competition breeds strength while Jedi share knowledge and encourage collaboration. This is not dissimilar to software engineering; in this essay I will

    glyph,
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    @Annalee it's too bad they stopped making movies after the 8th one, really would have loved to see where that story went

    glyph, to random
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    I've written before about how it's a bit silly to expect self-improving AI to be able to self-improve without limit, but mostly abstractly. If you want to think about just how much embodied, physical presence an AI would need in order to have "runaway" increases in its intelligence, consider the amount of human work and the number of possible failure modes for this one component of a chip fab:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfU20SAR21A

    glyph,
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    @jessejiryudavis like even if the AI shut down every transit system somehow with its dragonball Z level super hacking abilities so you cannot personally physically get there to heroically save the world with a set of garden shears, there's like… a person in that DC already. and there's probably a home depot within walking distance

    glyph,
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    @jessejiryudavis the scenario is only scary in a very fuzzy prestige-tv-drama level of detail though. Who gives this AI control? Why did they build it? What are its optimization goals? When you start drilling into the fine details—even assuming runaway self-improvement is possible, which it very much isn’t—it becomes clear what the actually scary thing is, and it’s “unilateral unaccountable control of massive multinational corporations by sociopathic plutocrats”. Which is a different problem.

    simon, (edited ) to random
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    I really like memory spy by @b0rk - here's an example that helped emphasize for me that IPv4 addresses really do fit in 4 bytes (I mean the clue is in the name, but still, this was a really neat demo)

    CORRECTION: @matt points out that IPv4 is a version number, and the fact that it can be stored in 4 bytes is actually a complete coincidence

    https://memory-spy.wizardzines.com/game.html#example=converting%20an%20IP%20address%20from%20a%20string

    glyph,
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    @epw @simon @matt @b0rk It's kind of true!

    hynek, to random
    @hynek@mastodon.social avatar

    “A worthwhile waste of time.”

    I've been a subscriber to Ahoy's YouTube channel forever, but this video lingered in my to-watch list.

    wtf even is a “Four-Byte Burger”? But if you know me, the #Amiga was incredibly influential to my computering. I've used a tuned A500 until 1997 FFS.

    I have no memory of the original art, but the process of reconstruction, the booting of Workbench 1.3 & 3.1… the DPaint cameo, the Commodore 1084…

    This video is a piece of art on its own.

    https://youtu.be/i4EFkspO5p4

    glyph,
    @glyph@mastodon.social avatar

    @hynek I assumed we were going to jump into Pillow here to do some statistical analysis, not Photoshop to actually onionskin the whole thing by hand. You're right though, this is impressive.

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