Have we really come to the point in society where people are incapable of understanding cause and effect? Apparently so.

Ah, I wasn’t going to ask. So thanks for answering. :-)

Really? Then why does puke smell so awful? Is it all just stomach acid making it stink like that?

Of course there is. If you dump a bucket of water on your head, you intend to get wet. There is absolutely nothing else that could possibly happen. If you intend to block machines from reading your content, machines will be unable to read your content. Screen readers are machines. There is absolutely nothing else that could possibly happen.

It is possible, at some future date, that a less invasive method (nanotechnology? Lasers? who cares.) could be invented for cases like your mother’s. It is not possible, at any future date, for a technology to block AI but not block screen readers. Because it can no more exist than you can have water that isn’t wet.

A treatment without those side effects could be invented. That’s why they’re side effects. A way to block AI that doesn’t also block screen readers is impossible to even invent. That’s why it’s not a side effect. It is impossible to do one without doing the other.

The point when it goes from food to vomit, yeah. I’m not sure when it goes from puke to poop, though. Maybe that happens in the intestines?

If you have decided not to allow machines to read your content, you have decided not to allow screen readers to read your content. The decision cannot be expressed any other way. So blocking screen readers is part of your expressed intention. Because expressing it any other way is impossible.

Of course it’s intentional. Either machines can read your content, or they cannot. Those are your choices. Choosing “only the machines I agree with” is not something any design can support, and anything claiming to offer that is a liar, just like the studios that promise unbreakable DRM and the governments that promise encryption backdoors only they can use. If you try it, you’re explicitly saying that accessibility is not something you care about. Amusingly, DRM has the same issue: it, too, frequently locks out screen readers. AI blocking is just another form of DRM, when you get right down to it: it’s just another system that wants to require people to only use content in the ways the publisher agrees with. And as soon as you carve out a door for screen readers, AI scrapers can walk right through that door as well. You cannot build any gate that an AI scraper cannot pass, that a screen reader can. Because they’re both machines consuming your content.

Umm no? Have you never vomited? I’m not sure I’d call that “food”. I guess, maybe, it’s still food after you’ve finished chewing it; you could spit it out into your hand instead of swallowing, and someone else could choke it down. But it stops being food long before it hits the intestines. At some point when it starts mixing with stomach acid, probably.

Because a screen reader is a machine reading the content. AI is a machine reading the content. You can’t block one without blocking the other, anymore than you can invent DRM that actually works, or encryption that has a backdoor only the quote unquote good guys can use. It’s implicit in the design.

I’m surprised nobody hasn’t already posted the inevitable: “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

And this is why anything that tries to block AI scraping will always, in every case, block screen readers. It’s not a side effect. It’s a natural outcome of the design.

So glad you’re showing me the path where your code is stored, and the name and username to access the postgresql database. As a user, this does me no good at all. As an attacker, this is the first step I need to hack into the system.

No. I currently support and maintain multiple accessibility repos. That’s my area of expertise, so the place most of my opensource time should go. Any server admin could release the system they created for removing old Lemmy posts. Far fewer can write accessibility tools and addons. So I spend my donated time where I can get the most impact for what I put in.

This is a problem with Lemmy on the admin side. I set up retention, and any post here is automatically deleted if it’s more than a year old and nobody has interacted with it. But I had to write a lot of custom scripting to handle that, and it still screws up: I was somehow counting profile photos as posts, deciding they got no interaction, then deleting everyone’s profile photos. I fixed it, of course, but that isn’t something admins should have to handle from scratch, by hand, on every server. No instance owner can afford to store everything, forever, for free, for users. Especially in this market where memory and hard drives are soon going to cost as much as my house. This instance is funded entirely by me, at about $200 per month, located in a Canadian data center. But $200 is a hard cap; I need to find ways to ensure we stay within that monthly amount, or try and raise money from a collection of my fellow blind users, who likely have nothing to spare. This isn’t a beg post, just trying to give you insight into the realities of instance hosting. Right now Lemmy expects that all admins are okay with media and database storage that expands for ever and ever, infinitely. Most of us are not. Meaning that if we’re technical enough, we can write our own custom solutions to handle it. Or if we’re not, our only recourse is banning users to force Lemmy to delete whatever’s filling the disc.

I’m a well federated instance, so I guess I could make a contract to sell all the data I get to an AI provider, and that would allow me to afford to store everything forever. But I’m not willing to do that, and I suspect if I tried every other instance would defederate us anyway.

Interestingly, on my instance LiveThreadBot’s edits were way behind. I’m an admin, so I could check our incoming queue and see them building up. We’re on quite a large server (quad-core, 64 gigs of ram, etc) in a data center with excellent connectivity. So if we were having that problem, I assume a lot of instances were. For sports a backlog of five or six edits that your instance hasn’t processed yet just won’t work.

Edit: autocorrect

Another problem might be lack of algorithm. No, hear me out! Sure, the Algorithms on big social media lock us all in our little bubbles. But even there, I often have a moment of “Why on earth is that in my recommended?” I personally don’t care about e-sports, so I had absolutely no idea it was even happening anywhere on fedi, and would be unlikely to find out unless I went looking. I wonder how many sports enjoyers are on Lemmy, all assuming “Lemmy isn’t a sports place”, so they never look for sports content, and thus never find any? I enjoy a couple twitch streamers and some VTubers, so occasionally youtube goes “yolo” and throws some kind of e-sports thing my way. I never click it, but I am vaguely aware that DOTA2 is an esports thing that exists and people care about it, and sometimes a big event or tournament or something happens, and I could follow it on YouTube or Twitch if I wanted to. But because Lemmy has no algorithm and I would never subscribe to an e-sports sub myself, I’ll just never encounter it here.

PS: I’m not old and out of touch. I’m completely blind and out of touch with esports because it intersects in zero ways with anything I can perceive, participate in, or care about. LOL

Second comment to add an unrelated thought. As big tech platforms crack down harder and harder, the fediverse could easily gain popularity by becoming the home of sports piracy. Just an instance you could visit to find the latest working stream for any given game would attract a lot of folks, I would think. It’s just a matter of finding a group willing to take on that amount of risk. However, I’m not sure this gains the fediverse the reputation or audience we want.

I think it’s just not having critical mass. I’m still stuck on Reddit for MLB stuff, because they have:

• gameday threads with box scores that update in realtime
• active conversation under each gameday thread

The fediverse just doesn’t have that. Another issue is that inter-server federation slows things down. People are generally refreshing during the commercial breaks, and they want to see everyone’s takes and reactions on that last bad call right now, not in five minutes. In five minutes, the game has moved on. I wonder if building a cool sports app around matrix/xmpp would work better? The play by play feed could update instantly, conversations could be threaded around the plays, etc. It would also be easier to develop some kind of betting bot. Not for real money, of course, but a lot of my friends announce positions and we just track everyone’s win/lose rate in our local circle.

To the folks saying it’s a demographics issue, not a tooling one: if that was the case, how come the fediverse has attracted a grand total of zero e-sports people? These are tech folks, often more closely aligned with our values than nascar guys for example, but the fediverse hasn’t attracted a single one. That’s what makes me think the problem is that it’s harder to have conversations around real-time data and events on the fediverse.