iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 3h

This is a thoughtful article from someone that I used to work with while I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft (he doesn't seem to be on the fediverse): ben.stolovitz.com/posts/consider-th… Yes, comparisons between the current AI moment and the Industrial […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 4h

This is not me. Despite all of the bad things that have happened through and to the web, and especially the corporate walled gardens, I try to focus on the good, the way that the web connects people who need that connection, and how we can continue to do more good with this technology.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 4h

One thing that sucks about asynchronous online discussions is that a situation like this can happen: 1. Alex makes an assertion. 2. Barb argues against the assertion a few hours later. 3. 10 hours later, Alex hasn't responded. I don't know if Alex has just quietly accepted that Barb was right […]

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Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 (cringe EU-brained military girl) @freya.highenergymagic.net.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

I am increasingly of the opinion that the leftist concept of "fashware" or "contaminated" software is kind of dumb. a fascist made a decent bit of software? great! Steal it, give him nothing, use it. Otherwise the only ones who have the software are the fascists. same with the "woops this got […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

This evening at karaoke, someone sang the country song "Set 'Em Up Joe" by Vern Gosdin, which references another country artist, Ernest Tubb, as "E.T." in the chorus. Afterward, the DJ joked that younger people who don't know about Ernest Tubb (as I didn't) might say "I didn't know E.T. could […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Thought-provoking article about LLM-assisted programming from Communications of the ACM: "AI Didn’t Make Programming Easier. It Just Made It Differently Difficult" cacm.acm.org/opinion/ai-didnt-make-… If the title is literally true […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

I'm happy to learn that version 9.1 of the Tk GUI toolkit finally has some level of accessibility with screen readers. www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/9.1… I should figure out the quickest way to get a test application running on Windows so I can try this out.

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Tcl/Tk 9.1

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Glyph @glyph.im · 29/09/2026

The "real" solution to the Trolley Problem is not utilitarian. By the time you are actually *in* the Trolley Problem situation, you've already failed. You should have learned about slipping the switch. You should have figured out a way to prevent people from getting tied to the tracks. You […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

RE: aoir.social/@aram/117350563045834456 Interesting article (not by the author of the toot) about how popular current top-charting hit songs actually are. Re: "I’ve never seen another real human being listening to 'Choosin’ Texas'", I admit I don't have statistically significant data […]

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Andre Louis @freakyfwoof.universeodon.com.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Just read a thread where every *single* post had images... And every *single* post had alt-text. Aah, you didn't expect that bit did you? Nope. About 20 posts in total. Everything tagged. It was beautiful to behold.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

RE: adsei.org/2026/09/24/accessible-and… This is a great article about how in-person events thoughtlessly exclude disabled people. To answer the "What did I miss?" question and tie it back to some questions asked in the article: Does the event depend on all attendees […]

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Robert Kingett @weirdwriter.caneandable.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Hey blind people, can you rethink your hate of audiobooks now? Is Listening to a Book “Cheating”? (Spoiler: Your Brain Doesn’t Think So) action.everylibrary.org/is_listenin… #Blind #Blindness #Ableism

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

There's an LLM called Apertus (apertus-ai.org) that has not just open weights, but open training data and a fully published training process. It's developed by public institutions in Switzerland. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good? I might play with it; I have hardware that should be […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Hot take: Complaining about some tasteless or even harmful thing that someone did with generative AI, then proclaiming "No AI!", doesn't make any more sense then complaining about spam, or any of the other bad things that the Internet enables, and then proclaiming, "No Internet!". We should […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

This Hacker News comment by @miki is a good summary of how blind people are benefitting from coding agents, and why he thinks agents are working better for the projects that blind people are doing than for some other projects. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497981…

news.ycombinator.com

It really depends on the industry. The blind community is benefiting enormously ... | Hacker News

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

RE: infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/11… On this topic, does OAuth have a good reason for having both a short-lived access token and a refresh token? My guess is that in some large-scale systems, the access token might not be just an opaque blob pointing to a database […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

RE: allovertheplace.ca/@mcourcel/117316… Better yet, if you pass the --remote-control option to the claude command, then you can do the actual session in your web browser. In case you prefer your screen reader's browse mode over reviewing a terminal window.

allovertheplace.ca

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Robert Kingett @weirdwriter.caneandable.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

I just now realized why there are table of contents at the beginning of some blog posts. Sighted folk don’t have a way to jump to the first heading level 3 on the page, nor do they have the capability of bringing up a list of headings on the page and then jumping to a chosen heading the way we […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Hey English/composition teachers, instead of teaching your students to write their papers in MLA style, or whatever they do now or outside the US, teach them to write accessible documents, that don't require an unreliable process to remediate afterward.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Some of the takes here on fedi are just unhinged. Someone I follow recently boosted a post that said "fuck the Rust Foundation", because the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6), which apparently allows "the worst organizations on the planet" to be members. I can't bring myself to agree with such a […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

With so much wrong in the world, whenever we come across something that's just wholesomely funny or otherwise entertaining and edifying, we should boost it.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

RE: procrastodon.net/@simon/11722511142… Ouch, boot time on the Victor Reader Stream went from about 10 seconds to a minute between the second and third generations. That does make it look as if the VR Stream team lost some of its systems programming talent, or is laboring under […]

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James Scholes @jscholes.dragonscave.space.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

@matt Autonomy and equity over independence and equality.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Great article: "The future of independence is interdependence" onlys.ky/independence-is-interdepen… It argues that independence is a fantasy, and one that all of us increasingly can't afford. My takeaway is that the truly important thing is autonomy, meaning control over our lives […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

RE: mastodon.social/@mcc/11721915361254… I'm conflicted. I know how empowering the current generation of LLM-based coding agents feel to many in the blind community (my community), especially people who aren't professional programmers. And I've gotten enjoyment out of my own […]

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abadidea @0xabad1dea.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

"another sandbox escape" "sandbox escape or you didn't really box the sand to begin with?" "... they were restricted to contacting specific domain names but had write access to their own /etc/hosts"

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miki @miki.dragonscave.space.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

@matt I view LLMs like I view radio. They're clearly something people want. They need access to a very wide catalog of copyrighted works to be maximally useful. They're a distinct use for these works, even more so than radio is. They require access to so many works that individual licensing […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

I think the fact that generative models, especially modern LLMs with reasoning and tool calling (agents), can clearly do useful things, plus the fact that these models are trained on basically the sum of all digitized human creative work, is possibly the most persuasive argument we have so far […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

My desktop PC is dead, or at least has a broken power supply, so I'm back on my old Windows 10 laptop while I wait for the company that built my desktop to tell me how they want to handle this problem. The laptop does feel old and slow, which is sad for something that, by historical standards […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

RE: social.coop/@adamgreenfield/1171782… I'm sure this is true for social justice in general. But technology does contribute significantly liberation and progress for disabled people.

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Robert Kingett @weirdwriter.caneandable.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

In a world of J. K. Rowling’s, be a #DollyParton I couldn’t care less she said she was not political. Her actions spoke louder than any verbal declaration. She would pay for trans individuals to get their surgery and more.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Is Apple's App Store Connect down for anyone else, specifically when trying to load the main Distribution page for an app?

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Jonathan Mosen @jonathanmosen.caneandable.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Few performers have ever been quite as instantly recognisable as Dolly Parton. There was the voice, of course. There were the songs — an extraordinary catalogue spanning country, pop, gospel and bluegrass. There was the wit, the warmth, the larger-than-life image and that remarkable ability to […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

RE: mastodon.online/@danirabbit/1171582… Re: "good engineers ask questions", it has taken me a while to internalize this. My idea of what it meant to be a good engineer came in part from a story that I heard when I was 18 in the late 90s, about the company that developed the […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

I'm releasing my first serious fully agentically coded project. Call it vibe-coding or slop if you want; it's true that I haven't yet reviewed the code, and I mostly let Claude write the documentation. But I'm being transparent about LLM usage, including a full Claude Code transcript. The […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

RE: allovertheplace.ca/@RareBird15/1171… I especially want to call attention to this reason for using an LLM and not reviewing all of the code it generates: > I can’t read all of my own code. I learned some Python, but I had to stop, because I can’t hold multiple parts of […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

Regardless of the usefulness of LLMs and the ethics of using them, I'm looking forward to the AI bubble being over. So many companies are positioning themselves as being the solution to this or that for AI, or the agentic era, or whatever, regardless of what they actually do. It reminds me of […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

It seems like the non-web end-user software industry, outside of Apple, has broadly given up on using a shared runtime provided by the platform for the higher layers of the UI stack. Windows: Microsoft is now pushing the Windows App SDK, which includes but is bigger than WinUI 3. Android […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Anti-generative-AI folks lose credibility when they say things like "no one wants it" and "it makes everything worse when it arrives". At most, maybe people *shouldn't* want generative AI in its current form. But lots of people do want it, and for now, it's making life better for some people […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

Android tells me my system is 7 days out of date. Can we possibly create software that's robust enough and finished enough that we don't need such a fast update treadmill? </rant>

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

@ChanceyFleet @Marconius I wonder if either of you have looked at the PDF content stream language as a human-writable vector graphics language, as an alternative to SVG. It's way more succinct than SVG, and with current Rust libraries, it probably wouldn't be hard to code (or vibe-code) tools […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

Hot take: @simon's famous "pelican riding a bicycle" LLM benchmark should now ask for PDF content stream output rather than SVG. (There should be a small tool to convert that raw page content stream into a full PDF document, and possibly to SVG output too via the hayro-svg crate.) As well as […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

Interesting article about the focus of LLM training shifting from built-in knowledge to reasoning and tool use: w4g1.dev/blog/models-are-getting-du… I wonder if that trend can continue to the point where training a future generative model doesn't rely at all on mass data […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

As I think about the pressure to do more and more, faster and faster, that drives many of us to use generative AI at work, I'm reminded of a verse from a Christian pop song that I heard on the radio and learned to sing in my church's youth choir in the 90s, "Beat of a Different Heart" by Paul […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

We've got to come up with something better than attaching screenshots of web pages to social media posts. Even with alt text, it's lossy compared to the original hypertext.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

I love Rust, but the syntax isn't perfect. Today's minor annoyance: In some places (function return values) an arrow is written with a hyphen (-), and in others (pattern matching) it's written with an equal sign (=). I just used an arrow with a hyphen by mistake when doing pattern matching. Hey […]

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tante @tante.tldr.nettime.org.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

ShieldFont is a cute hack, but we must not sacrifice accessibility (think Screen Readers) in order to defend "AI" scrapers. We need to defend humans and that includes people needing accessibility support. (Original title: The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font) […]

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