My profession photo taken several years ago. I'm wearing a light sweater there, I'm slightly smiling.

André Polykanine

@menelion@caneandable.social · Joined ⁨Aug⁩ ⁨2026⁩

A married and happy geek from Strasbourg, France.
Backend software engineer and accessibility specialist with 20 years of experience.
I live with my wife and our two cats, and I believe cats are the cutest, yet the most independent companions.
Pagan, worshiper of Scandinavian gods.
This account is multilingual, posts may contain strong language.
No alt text, no boost.
AI is our assistant, not our replacement, not our enemy.
Pro-European, pro-American, leaning to the right.
Opinions are my own.

Website
oire.org/
GitHub
github.com/Menelion
Spoken languages
English, Français, Українська, Русский, Deutsch
68Posts
1Following1Followers

André Polykanine boosted

Robin Evans 🙏@Robinzz3@aus.social

I’M LIBERATED BY IT 💎

I’m only just beginning to understand how important the #Disability discussion underneath #AI actually is.

I have been abused for using AI. I have lost a dear friendship over it. I have been told, in various ways, what I should use instead.

Yet many of the alternatives people have suggested, from modern dictation to speech tools, already use AI themselves. AI is increasingly woven into ordinary technology, whether we call it AI or not.

And still, I choose AI Support, #AIS.

Not because I couldn’t survive without it. I could. I lived with the slower rhythm of my disability for decades before this technology appeared.

But with AIS, I feel liberated.

I can speak, I can write, and I can think things through. I can participate without the physical effort of typing, constantly determining how much of myself I get to express before exhaustion takes over.

That matters to me.

People are entirely free to criticise AI. They can refuse to use it themselves. They can raise every legitimate concern about what this technology is doing.

But I am the person with a disability in this life.

I get to choose the tools that help me live it.

@3goodthings
@DigitalCoup
@meditation
@economics_that_works

#Accessibility #AssistiveTechnology #DisabilityRights #Agency #Communication #Voice #Inclusion #Technology #Fediverse #Mastodon

An older man with long grey hair and a white beard sits on a rocky hillside wearing headphones, a laptop open on his lap. He looks across a vast landscape toward a brilliant golden sunset over distant mountains and water. The scene feels spacious, peaceful and quietly liberating.
ALT

André Polykanine boosted

Wulfy—Speaker to the machines@n_dimension@infosec.exchange

Replying to @⁨Robinzz3@aus.social⁩

@Robinzz3 @3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek

I have called out the #ableism of the pure ubermensh before.
To protestations "It's not!!!"

#Ai has many problems, but like any technology, it has many benefits.
One of which, and it will become more apparent as time passed, is #assistedliving

In my lived experience, my cognitive power are fading.
I am getting dumber. I know this.
In 20 years time, if I live that long, I will struggle to make a coherent sentence.
I've seen my future in my oldies.
AI allows me to create work that I was not able to create since my 30s-40s.
And it is creative work, because you guide the machine as you guide a lathe or a chisel.

I can no longer pull a 3 day long crunch session fueled by coffee and ambition.
I can no longer master a new framework or tool, because it takes me a very long time and is very hard.

The young(er) Butlerian jihadists lack empathy and world experience.
Not everyone is driving a cognitive Maseratti.
Some of us are driving mopeds (or face other challenges as OP does)

"Thou shal not use AI, and if you do, that makes you an evil broligarch fanboi",
Is an ableist, unemphatic, elitist take, that is more telling on them, than it is on you.

Especially in the days of #openweight and #sovereign models.

#aislop #aiforgood #ethicalai

André Polykanine boosted

Robin Evans 🙏@Robinzz3@aus.social

Replying to @⁨menelion@caneandable.social⁩

@menelion

Thank you, André. I appreciate the reassurance.

I think the bit that matters most to me is simply this: people can disagree strongly without turning each other into enemies.

I don’t expect the Fediverse, or anywhere else, to be perfectly welcoming. I just value the people who can say, “I see this differently,” without deciding that the person on the other side is therefore contemptible.

That makes a huge difference.

André Polykanine@menelion@caneandable.social

the presentation thing from #LibreOffice was not accessible at all when I asked, and more than that, I received a marvelous answer: "Why do you need presentations if you're blind?"

Elena Brescacin@elettrona@poliversity.it

Given that I found an app to create slides in MarkDown: is there an open source solution, accessible to blind, to show those slides in a presentation (conference, office, etc.?
Better if it's self-hostable, but otherwise, decentralized anyways.

No idea if LibreOffice is still accessible, if it has a presentation tool - OnlyOffice is excluded, accessibility isn't optimized at all despite they speak about it. Already had a call with them but no news came since long.

#a11y #accessibility #askFedi #blind #FediHelp #markdown #opensource #selfhosting

André Polykanine@menelion@caneandable.social

Replying to @⁨Robinzz3@aus.social⁩

@Robinzz3 That's what I'm constantly talking about. Fediverse is said to be a super mega fluffy welcoming sweet place, but only for a group of people with certain political and world views. As soon as you disagree, you are called a fascist, a nazi (never mind, they don't know what those words mean, just a way of insulting by saying "You don't agree with us, so you're evil"), and whatever else. One of the sanest (is that a word? From "sane"?) communities here is the blind people exiled from Twitter because Musk banned third-party clients. We are not angels either of course, and among us there are lots of different people with different views, but at least our being here is not political, it's a necessity (much like your use of AI — and mine, sometimes, too, although I'm pro-AI). Anyway, sorry for such a long post, just wanted to say hello and to reassure you a bit. Stay strong!

André Polykanine boosted

Robin Evans 🙏@Robinzz3@aus.social

I WILL NOT BE BULLIED 💎

I received a vicious reply today because I use AI. It wasn't a disagreement. Nor a criticism. It was a full-frontal personal attack! And I’ll admit it affected me more than I expected.

I USE AI MAINLY BECAUSE I'M PARALYSED.

Typing is physically difficult for me. I have the use of only one hand. So, tapping out a post or email with one finger is exhausting. Voice and AI help me turn my own thoughts into usable writing in a normal amount of time.

THAT SHOULD NOT REQUIRE A DEFENCE.

You can dislike AI. You can distrust it. You can argue about copyright concerns, energy and water use, labour, culture, or anything else that concerns you. I will listen to you and answer you.

But attacking people simply for using AI is not principled.

IT'S BULLYING.

And disabled people should not have to produce a medical justification every time they use a technology that makes their life easier.

AI is a tool. How it is used matters. Who gets harmed matters. Context matters. What does not help is turning “AI user” into a moral accusation and deciding that cruelty is suddenly acceptable.

I’m quite happy to discuss the technology with anyone.

HOWEVER, I WILL NOT BE BULLIED FOR USING IT.

I didn't need to do anything about the attack. Before I could even decide how to respond, both the post and the person disappeared from my notifications.

@3goodthings
@DigitalCoup
@meditation
@economics_that_works
@startrek

#AI #Accessibility #Disability #AssistiveTechnology #Fediverse #Bullying #PWD #Tool

André Polykanine boosted

Michael Babcock@payown@dragonscave.space

So I need to get a new audio interface. The problem with the focus right vocaster is there’s no way to disable monitoring from the headphone jack. I used a pre- Sonos last month and there was a blend knob that you could turn off the monitoring from the headphones. I need this feature because right now I’m running from the headphones into a channel on a mixing board and then using the alternate send on the mixing board to send microphones and Zoom to my in-house speakers. with the vocaster, you get the monitoring from the existing microphones which ultimately gives me feedback at some point. Thoughts? Otherwise I think I’ll just pick up a pre-Sonos.

André Polykanine boosted

Quin@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

I've just released Paperback 0.9.1! Comparatively a small release when looking at 0.9.0, but it comes with some very nice fixes. Changelog:

  • Bookmark and note sounds now play on macOS.
  • DAISY books now play their audio on macOS, rather than opening and tracking their timeline in silence.
  • Fixed curly quotes, em dashes and similar characters vanishing from RTF documents, running the surrounding words together as they went.
  • Fixed RTF pictures leaking their raw data into the document as garbled text.
  • Fixed the Recent Documents submenu keeping stale entries until something else happened to rebuild it.
  • Keyboard accelerators are back in every translation, so Russian's menus have keyboard access again.
  • Large CHM documents now open up to seven times faster.
  • Opened documents are now registered with Windows, so they show up in the taskbar jump list and the Start menu's recent list.
  • Options has been renamed to Settings, matching the mobile apps and, on macOS, the platform convention.
  • Paperback now remembers its window position, size, and maximized state between runs.
  • Plural forms are now translated, so messages that count things read properly in languages that need more than one form.
  • Selecting a DAISY book's ncc.html now opens the complete audio book instead of just its text.
  • The Customize Keyboard Shortcuts dialog's action names can now be translated.
  • The document title now comes first in the title bar, so open books can be told apart in the taskbar and Alt+Tab.
  • The update dialog is now translated.Download for Windows and macOS at paperback.dev/downloads/Enjoy!
André Polykanine@menelion@caneandable.social
edited

Replying to @⁨i@liilliil.ru⁩

@i Ссылки? Их есть у меня. Собственно, кюй, точнее, много кюев:
youtube.com/watch?v=mbHCMnEsOVA
Песня раз:
youtube.com/watch?v=8RZCYhvK_CQ
Песня два:
youtube.com/watch?v=G4k0UtNhxho
Песня три:
youtube.com/watch?v=EzGZ76YjPKQ
Песни, кстати, с очень глубоким смыслом, даже если гуглом перевести (в комментариях всегда находится добрая душа, которая выкладывает слова).
И повторюсь, я понятия не имею, как объяснить, что мне в этом нравится и почему так заходит, но факт.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbHCMnEsOVA
YouTubeТОП-25 күй / Ең үздік күйлер / Күйлер топтамасы #1 / Лучшие кюи – QARA PAYIMby Qazaq Grammar