André Polykanine

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

Just heard a preview of Harry Potter full cast edition on Audible, thinking of getting it. It would be nice if something alike was produced in French also.

@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

@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.

So, the #Debian developers discussed the use of AI in Debian for two months. Then voted for two weeks. And the vote came with the 'Responsible Use' as the result.

And there are MANY people that literally say that majority of Debian devs are stupid because of this result.

Are you insane???

#AI

Hello Mastodon ! Avec mes camarades, on recherche des choristes pour agrandir notre ensemble de jazz vocal à capella ! Répétition un jeudi soir sur 2 à villeurbanne, on chante Feeling good, New York New York, Moi vouloir être chat, Mister Sandman, Time after time, etc. 🎶
Plus d'infos sur demande !
#villeurbanne #lyon #musique #jazzvocal

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?"

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

My teenage daughter can't decide whether she wants to be a hairdresser or a short story writer...
I guess she'll have to flip a coin....
Heads or Tales.

@nick @payown Do you know any blind people that have tried Focusrite scarlett 4th gen? I picked up an audient a year or so before Focusrite became accessible but have always been interested in comparing them. Just don't have the money or need to buy a second one.

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.

When creating a new #GitHub organization, they populate it with default labels. Very recently they added #Accessibility as one of them. So, anybody who creates an organization, has accessibility as default label for their issues in all repositories. Nice job, GitHub, I appreciate!

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 https://paperback.dev/downloads/Enjoy!

Nigerian Bishops decry ‘trail of terror’ after latest attacks

“An attack on any place of worship constitutes an attack on our collective humanity,” the bishops of Nigeria said.

🔗 https://cruxnow.com/church-in-africa/2026/08/nigerian-bishops-decry-trail-of-terror-after-latest-attacks/

#Catholic #Crux #Bishop #Christian

@menelion There are other Kazakh instruments that might be interesting too; kobyz, sybyzgy, etc. I always encourage people to explore, and that doesn’t have to result in falling in love with a given musical tradition or instrument. If it does, awesome! The exploring and learning is the key thing. I also often tell people: “8 billion people on this planet, but 261 billion tastes in music. It shifts with time and the weather, or something.”

Listen, folks…
If you're trying to convince people that there are alternatives to #Debian #Linux that aren't using AI, you're probably not going to get far by suggesting distributions that literally have no installer and expect you to install Linux by hand from an empty drive, or that haven't put out updated images in eight months, or that don't seem to explain anywhere on their website or in their documentation what their commitments are in terms of patching security vulnerabilities.

sometimes I think how this planet is big and multilayered. Accidentally (as with nearly all my musical discoveries) I've recently started to discover #Kazakh #Music. It's that very case when you have deep feelings resonating inside you but you can't really explain it, although you have enough knowledge in musical theory. Like, the main Kazakh instrument is a dombra/dombyra, which is a two-stringed lute.
What can you get from just two strings tuned in fourth or fifth?
Actually, lots of stuff. But when you try to put it into words, it becomes tasteless and colorless.
Kazakhs have a traditional form of musical art called küy, it's basically instrumental pieces for dombra, most often improvized, expressing the musician's feelings or impressions of an event, meeting or changes in his/her life.
anyway, if you want to have a very interesting listening experience you've possibly never had, try googling for Kazakh traditional songs and music. Maybe it won't resonate with you as it did with me, but it's still interesting.
#Kazakhstan #Ethnomusicology #Folk #Traditional

It's so great that bird.makeup exists! #BirdMakeup

Starting September 14, we're permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place.

Given that I have time to myself this bank holiday weekend, I decided I would have a try at using the ChatGPT Windows app to control my computer. This has obvious advantages, for example if a particular application is not accessible in part.

I started out with some basic tasks in Outlook.
I asked it to find the latest message from Alison and tell me what she wants.
I then gave some brief notes I wanted to say to her and asked it to draft a friendly reply, replying to the message in Outlook, but do not send it.
It did those things. I could see the text in the reply area and I was able to send it without alteration.

I then gave it instructions like:
Find messages with ‘invoice’ in the subject received this month.
Review the unread messages in this folder and tell me which appear to require action.
Write the following message to Sarah and leave it open for me to check.
It managed to do all of that.

Now, three things.
1. I have the Computer Use skill enabled.
2. We need far more Windows notifications because often, you don't know that a task is complete. There are some, but not enough.
3. It does take quite some time to carry out a task depending of course on the complexity. It's rather like working with some Assistants which I have done in the past. I often think, do you know what, I could have done this a lot faster. But as a basic experiment perhaps to deal with more adventurous tasks it was a promising start.