Yes and no, applying for accommodations is as fun and easy as pulling out your own teeth with a rubber chicken.

It took months to get the paperwork organised and the conversations started around accommodations I needed for my disability, I realised halfway through I had to simplify what I was asking for and just deal with some less than accessible issues because the process of applying for disability accommodations was not accessible and I was getting rejected for simple requests like “can I reserve a seat in the front row because I can’t get up the stairs, and I can’t get there early because I need to take the service elevator to get to the lecture hall, so I’m always waiting on the security guard”

My teachers knew I had a physical disability and had mobility accommodations, some of them knew that the condition I had also caused a degree of sensory disability, but I had nothing formal on the paperwork about my hearing and vision loss because I was able to self manage with my existing tools.

I didn’t need my teachers to do anything differently so I didn’t see the point in delaying my education and putting myself through the bureaucratic stress of applying for visual accommodations when I didn’t need them to be provided to me from the university itself.

Obviously if I’d gotten a result of “you cheated” I’d immediately get that paperwork in to prove I didn’t cheat, my voice over reader just gave me the ChatGPT instructions and I didn’t realise it wasn’t part of the assignment… But that could take 3-4 months to finalise the accommodation process once I become aware that there is a genuine need to have that paperwork in place.

He’s also not a racist!

And if my yeasty poison goes bad, I’ll just pour it over some poisonous leaves, I love salad.

Don’t forget to season it with minerals you chipped off a rock in a dried out lake bed.

This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

So do cars driven by humans.

Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.

This is a common misconception with “charity shops” in the UK and “opportunity (op) shops” in Australia.

The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.

But the “charity” is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the “profit” from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.

The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you’re disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.

But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore

I managed to go all of 22-28 never once being carded for anything.

When I hit 30 I started getting carded for things I’d never been carded for before, even the milk bar I’d bought smokes at for 10 years, same guy and his son running it, suddenly started carding me.

That’s how I learned the ID that I’d been carrying around for 10-11 years since getting my photo ID in highschool was functionally useless, because hardly anywhere would accept it as legal ID despite it being legal ID.

I had to keep the website for the government list of ID boolmarkef so I could show doubtful cashiers that my ID was indeed federally accepted, legal and valid ID.

I went to try and get a different type of ID last year which is how it found out that despite being born in my country to a citizen of my country, and having my birth recorded and receiving my birth certificate. Somehow I’m not actually a citizen of my own country and I can’t get a passport…so I’m trying to navigate that system but that’s extra fun and confusing because I have neurodevelopmental issues and no one to help me understand what I need to to do.

I just want to be able to buy alcohol as a person in their 30s, without having to jump through impossible hoops to prove that I’m not not 17.

I’ve got smile lines and the beginnings of crows feet, I am weathered! Why am it getting carded now

Pretty sure I still catch myself smiling over the girl in highschool 18 years ago that said she was jealous because I had really long and pretty eyelashes.

Wow, that kind of blows my mind to think about, cleaning is often the longest part of preparing and eating food for me. I hate doing it and I will choose what I’m cooking and how to cook it based on the dishes in prepared food to wash up.

My partner once asked why the carrots I cook are always chipped in a rustic style …because I’m not dirtying a chipping board for a carrot, I fruit ninja that shit.

But I’ve come to find the cleaning up therapeutic, it makes me feel like the process is over, it’s a sense of completion and a job well done.

That said, it’s only therapeutics when it’s my dishes, and I’ve got a clean kitchen. If I’m working around, or expected to deal with someone else’s dishes, I’m having a protein shake for dinner, because I will lose my temper at inanimate object trying to cook in someone else’s mess or having to do 2-3 loads of dishes so I can eat 1 meal.

It helps that I’d had several previous surgeries, so I’d had practice at keeping my cool. Plus my surgeon was in discussion with me for months with multiple consultations to really understand the issue, I don’t think I could have possibly been in safer hands.

Regional Australia. I know they’re common in new builds, but not the kind of landlord special flips I’ve lived in obviously 😂.

Well either it’s 1 in 10,0000 in my country, or the department of health, my surgeon and GP are all missing a zero… which isn’t more likely because there’s no way our risk would be that much higher than the UK, and the NHS public health resources is 100,000.

Well then it’s definitely a deal breaker 😂

(Are dishwashers that common in the states? I’ve lived in 16 houses and never had one, when friends get them installed it’s a celebration, they’re dishwasher owning kind of people now, fancy)

Depending on what you’re treating, 50% sounds pretty good.

I remember when I went for my last surgery and I was signing all the consent forms, my doctor was emphasising the 17% chance of this known lifelong complication, and the increased 4% chance of general anaesthesia fatality (compared to 1 in 10,000 for general public).

My mum was freaking out because when she had the same surgery she’d been seen much earlier in the disease process, she wasn’t expecting such a “high” risk of complications in my care.

But all I was hearing is that there’s an over 80% chance it will be a success. Considering how limited and painful my life was by the thing we were treating, it was all no brainier, I liked those odds. Plus my condition is diagnosed 1 in 100,000 people, so how much data could my surgeon really have on the rate of risk, the sample size would be laughable.

Still the best decision of my life, my surgeon rolled his skilled dice, I had zero complications (other than slow wound healing but we expected and prepared for that). I threw my crutches in the trash 2 years later, and ran for the first time in my life at 27 years old after being told at 6 years old that I’d be a full time wheelchair user by 30.

Unfortunately the models are have trained on biased data.

I’ve run some of my own photos through various “lens” style description generators as an experiment and knowing the full context of the image makes the generated description more hilarious.

Sometimes the model tries to extrapolate context, for example it will randomly decide to describe an older woman as a “mother” if there is also a child in the photo. Even if a human eye could tell you from context it’s more likely a teacher and a student, but there’s a lot a human can do that a bot can’t, including having common sense to use appropriate language when describing people.

Image descriptions will always be flawed because the focus of the image is always filtered through the description writer. It’s impossible to remove all bias. For example, because of who I am as a person, it would never occur to me to even look at someone’s eyes in a portrait, let alone write what colour they are in the image description. But for someone else, eyes may be super important to them, they always notice eyes, even subconsciously, so they make sure to note the eyes in their description.

I guess my question would be, why do you need the picture as a visual aid, is the accompanying body text confusing without that visual aid? and if so, by having no alt text, you accept that you will leave VI people confused and only sighted people will have the clarification needed.

If your including a picture of a table with nothing on it, there’s a reason, so yes, that alt text is perfectly reasonable.

Personally I wish there was a way to enable two types of alt text on images, for long and quick context.

Because I understand your concern about unnecessary detail, if I’m in a rush “a table with nothing on it” will do for quicker context, but there are times when it’s appropriate to go much deeper, “a picture of a hard wood rustic coffee table, taken from a high angle, natural sunlight, there are no objects on the table.”

I think so, but I don’t have the mental energy at the moment to sit down and figure out if the AI detection software is accessible either. I know some of my colleagues use programs to check student work for LLM plagerism, but I don’t assign work that can be done via an LLM so I haven’t looked into that, and that’s different from the AI images.

I mean, yes, but a 3.5mm to usb-c adapter is like $10, so that’s still not really an excuse.

Most people use wireless headphones these days, and usb-c headphones are getting more common. (I’m hearing impaired, all headphones sound the same to me, but maybe an audiophile will tell me why usbc headphones suck compared to 3.5mm)

When I bought my new pixel I went to the gym that afternoon and immediately realised I couldn’t use my headphones because I hadn’t been mindful of my missing headphone jack. Worked out in silence, and bought an adapter on the way home for my headphones. Problem solved.

There’s tons of quiet things you can do on your phone if you’re bored and don’t have headphones.

The only people who are allowed to have their phones on full volume plasting noises without headphones are visually impaired people, because otherwise they’d need to put their headphones in just to check what time it is on their phone.

As a visually impaired person on the internet. YES! welcome to our world!

You’re lucky enough to get an image description that helpfully describes the image.

That description rarely tells you if it’s AI generated, that’s if the description writer even knows themselves.

Everyone in the comments saying “look at the hands, that’s AI generated”, and I’m sitting here thinking, I just have to trust the discussion, because that image, just like every other image I’ve ever seen, is hard to fully decipher visually, let alone look for evidence of AI.

Heck I still find myself thinking this on a subconscious level. I can’t let go of the sense that we should be able to discuss things in good faith and make change through civil discourse.

I have to remind myself that history does not support my blind faith in the goodness of humanity like this.

Even people who have less than two seconds ago proven they are arguing in bad faith, my gut reaction is to give them another chance to come to the discussion properly.

It’s like pathological naivety, and yes, it’s just as harmful as the original bad faith argument when all it’s doing is echoing the bad faith argument.

I have been booted from many communities for asking what I thought was a genuine question. And at first been left wondering why a community would ban someone for asking questions and trying to learn. I’ve experienced this my entire life and only recently began to understand that it’s not some personal slight against my curiosity and ignorance. It’s a necessary safety measure for that community.

I’m just an idiot, questioning an asshole, but from everyone else’s perspective there’s two dumb assholes over here.

Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.