Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren’t overly technical or arcane. Some examples:

• Use ARIA roles where appropriate
• Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background colours. Should at least meet the WCAG level AA which is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, but ideally meet AAA which is a 7:1 ratio for body text and a 4.5:1 ratio for headings.
• Ensure you use <label> tags to label for all your <input>s, alt attributes on all images, title attributes where appropriate (e.g. on <table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.

If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an “Accessibility” tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don’t meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.

It’s a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it’s becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.

I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.

It’s probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It’s one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.

This is a really well written article. It’s unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.

I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.

Accessibility should be something that’s built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It’s unfortunate.

Edit: I forgot to mention that accessibility is going to be mandated for some types of sites and apps in the EU thanks to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect later this year, which should help somewhat. Won’t really help with Linux itself though.

It turns out that burning carcinogens in your living area isn’t the greatest idea. Who would have thought??

Gas is expensive in California too though.

I installed solar panels on my house. Given how expensive electricity is in California, I estimated it’d only take me around 5-6 years to break even, and that number keeps going down as they increase electricity prices higher and higher. Electricity prices doubled from 2022 to 2024.

Electricity is significantly cheaper in areas that have municipal electricity, ran by the city itself. In PG&E’s area, it’s 62 cents per kWh during summer peak. On the other hand, I used to live in Palo Alto where electricity is around 18 cents per kWh, flat rate (no peak and off-peak rates).

Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.

They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.

A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.

It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:

1. If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
2. If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client’s system.

We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)

Running ai locally is the same energy as playing a 3d AAA game for the same time

I wonder if they’re factoring in the energy usage to train the model. That’s what consumes most of the power.

So its not being charged for everyone, only those not running on Azure (which is a huge number of folks). However, Microsoft giving preferential terms to MS software running in Azure

They probably bundle it into the cost for Azure customers. That’s really not Azure-specific; any server provider could offer complementary hotpatching if they bundle it into their Windows licensing cost.

Did you read the article? It’s specifically about hotpatching (patching the kernel without rebooting). You usually need to pay for hotpatching on Linux too, for example using a provider like ksplice or KernelCare, etc.

Even if it passed, that’s not going to stop Trump from doing what he wants.

I hope that goes well for them. It’s hard and extremely expensive, which is why there’s so few good search engines and half of them just use Bing’s API.

Do you have a source for that? I think it’s nowhere near 95% of sites given there’s several major providers that aren’t AWS or Cloudflare (eg Hetzner, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Wordpress.com, and a bunch more)

Definitely true. I’ll have to try it out. Is Ecosia better than DuckDuckGo or Kagi?

Google was best in the 2000s, but things were different back then. They were still a young company trying to improve the world, SEO spam wasn’t really a thing yet, there were far fewer websites, and most online discussions were archived and searchable (compared to today where there’s platforms like Discord that aren’t indexable in search engines at all).

I use it for document summarization and it works well. I use Paperless-ngx to manage documents, and have paperless-ai configured to instantly set the title and tags using Gemini as soon as a new document is added.

I chose Gemini over OpenAI since Google’s privacy policy is better. I’m using the paid version, and Google says data from paid users will never be used to train the model. Unfortunately I don’t have good enough hardware to run a local model.

It’s been common ever since magnet links were created, since you can post a magnet link anywhere (even in a plain text file) rather than having to upload a .torrent file somewhere like in the old days.

This is available in the UI too - there’s a tab labeled “Web”. Sometimes it’s hiding under “More”.

Adding it to the search provider URL is a good idea though.

Ecosia still uses American services though - they use Google, Bing, Yahoo and Wikipedia for search results.

I’m talking specifically about companies that post a loss every quarter, like Backblaze does. Backblaze’s net profit in Q4 2024 was -$14.38 million. Their net profit is going up year over year, but it’s still negative.

Even if the report is inaccurate, Backblaze has never been profitable, which isn’t great. Investors want to see a return on their investment. They’ll keep pushing Backblaze to become profitable, likely eventually resulting in enshittification of some sort. We’ll see if things have changed when they publish their Q1 2025 results on May 7.

One of the harsh realities in Silicon Valley is there’s a lot of companies that produce great products but end up failing after going public, either because they couldn’t find a good product market fit, or because they couldn’t figure out how to make their idea profitable.

:(

At least I live in an area where the most likely disaster is an earthquake that destroys the entire area, and I’m not sure how useful weather alerts would be in that case.