iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Campbell

@matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy

44 followers 2 following 857 posts

Software developer, formerly at Microsoft, now co-developer of the AccessKit open-source project (accesskit.dev) and cofounder of Pneuma Solutions ( […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ toot.cafe/@matt, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

Posts Replies Media

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 8h

@WeirdWriter I gather it's much harder for sites that are running WordPress or some other dynamic-language CMS rather than a pre-built static site.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

@miki I would think that disabled children in particular are especially prone to bullying everywhere.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

@miki On the other hand, that could lead to a child getting stuck with the same bully all the way through school, right?

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

More context on this: The BrailleSense U2 is a portable PDA with Braille display and keyboard, a note-taker as we call that class of device. It was released in 2014. It has a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 processor, 256 MB of RAM, and 512 MB of NAND flash storage plus SD card. The original software is Windows […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Like ignoring the news, that may be a luxury I can only afford due to privilege. It seems callous to just ignore bad things that are going on, but then, why weigh myself down with things I can't do anything about, when there are problems I *can* solve by developing more software? Then again, it […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

An obvious application of this statement, particularly in the context of the original quote (see start of thread), is that to have a more positive attitude, which ought to lead to getting more work done, I should avoid reading negative stuff, about AI in particular.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

"You are what you read." It's short; it's catchy. I wonder how true it actually is.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Thinking about this comment about an article on current developer attitudes: lobste.rs/c/sgvybl responding to the article's statement "I suspect that everybody’s suffering. Some are just better at pretending." > You can only believe this is true if you spend all your time in communities […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Question for blind people who routinely read Braille, especially books and other long documents, which I do not: Are there benefits to reading Braille that was manually transcribed by a skilled human transcriber rather than machine-translated? Or is good Braille translation truly mechanical […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

@simon Re: your latest post where you tried having Claude compose music, you should hear what some people are doing with singing speech synthesizers and Claude. mastodon.stickbear.me/@Orinks/11738… I'm not sure how much human audio production was still required for this one.

mastodon.stickbear.me

Josh (@Orinks@mastodon.stickbear.me)

Attached: 1 audio Night all. I leave you with the following. What do you get when you give Claude the full power of the new Singing Studio? It completely directed its own sketch show around popular television themes. it called it Phonemes Flying Circus. I remember the days of typing the Phoneme codes into notepad to get this shit to sing one note when I was a kid. Now we can prompt whole shows.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

@glyph Because, as I learned years later, the rule is that focus can be taken from the process that owns the current focused window by a process that was *directly* started by that process. So yeah, the app's executable should just run the app directly, in the original process.

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

@glyph I had a kind of related problem on Windows back in 2002. The first real desktop app that I shipped, primarily developed by a team that was there before me, was in Java. To give the app its own executable, icon, etc., I wrote a little launcher in C that, instead of embedding the JVM, just […]

Original post on toot.cafe

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

@glyph I think I don't have the context to understand what you're getting at here. Yes, how we treat each other is more important than pumping out more software for its own sake. And I appreciate that in the current moment, it's easy to feel that there's already too much bad software, and it […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Reposted by Matt Campbell

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 (cringe EU-brained military girl) @freya.highenergymagic.net.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

@pixelate So you know how I said I was gonna do a Linux port to the Braille Sense U2? [ 0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0 [ 0.000000] Linux version 6.12.111-cip32-rt21-u2-storage1 (freya@carbon) (arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc (Debian 14.2.0-19) 14.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.44) […]

social.highenergymagic.net

Original post on social.highenergymagic.net

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

Pseudo-boosting a post I just read on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/sunshowers.io/post… Quoting it in full because it's short: > a lot of people on both the pro and anti-ai-for-coding sides have low standards. no, if you're not paying attention it's probably slop; no, we […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

@glyph Now, if it matters, the UI of FastSMRW was partly derived from a style of social media client UI that was pioneered by a much earlier Twitter client in Python, starting in 2010 (or maybe 2009, I forget now). A handful of apps have been iterating on that genre of social media client since […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

@glyph Most of the commits by far are from one developer, Mason, who, as I understand it, had hobbyist programming experience, largely in Python, before the rise of coding agents. A friend who is in frequent contact with Mason told me that Mason does not know C++. There have been a handful of […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

@glyph OK, I have those usage numbers for FastSMRW. I sampled a total of 6000 posts, 2000 each from three instances (CaneAndAble.social, DragonsCave.space, Tweesecake.social). 1007 of those posts were from FastSMRW, and those 1007 posts came from 56 posters out of 245 total. FastSMRW is the #2 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

@glyph The most successful single vibe-coded app that I know of is FastSMRW (github.com/masonasons/FastSMRW), a Mastodon and Bluesky client for blind people. C++ core, platform-specific front-ends. Yes, a vibe-coded app in C++ concerns me. I've never used it. "RW" because it was […]

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

@glyph You're right about the starting assumption of a scalar called "code quality". As for how many people are using vibe-coded apps, I'm hearing a lot about people *making* vibe-coded apps, especially blind people, but I couldn't give you numbers on how many are *using* them.

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

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 · 04/10/2026

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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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Matt Campbell @matt.toot.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2026

@WeirdWriter For what it's worth, I do use generative AI, but if my use of it causes direct harm, e.g. if I let a defect ship in my software, then I'll take ownership of it.

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Reposted by Matt Campbell

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 […]

social.highenergymagic.net

Original post on social.highenergymagic.net

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

What I found, according to the Wikipedia article about the movie (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extr…), is that E.T. was voiced by Pat Welsh. She smoked two packs of cigarettes a day to give her voice the right sound, she spent 9.5 hours recording her part, she was paid all […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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

As a member of the old guard, for whom the traditional skill of recall does come relatively easy, I know how this looks; I know it looks like I'm just gatekeeping, defending my status and my position. I know that that's something I need to be careful to avoid. Still, this article presents the […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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

About the field opening up as the quote says, I have a thread full of people saying that this has been true for them. toot.cafe/@matt/117009003368961276 But if the last part of the article quote is true, then are we just setting ourselves up to produce more software that may appear to […]

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

If judgment is harder to develop than recall ever was, and judgment becomes more critical, then is that an improvement at all?

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

For me, the following is the (abridged) money quote: > First, the field will open. Many who once would have bounced off the sheer cognitive overhead of memorizing libraries, syntax variations, or error-handling idioms will now find a workable entry path. [...] However, this accessibility comes […]

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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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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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Reposted by Matt Campbell

Robert Kingett @weirdwriter.caneandable.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Mastodon should especially read WHY SHAMING PEOPLE ABOUT AI SLOP ISN’T ENOUGH TO STOP BIG AI www.anildash.com/2026/08/21/ai-slop… #Mastodon #Fediverse

Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Reposted by Matt Campbell

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 […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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

@glyph I guess it explains why I thought eugenics made sense (and therefore that I maybe shouldn't have existed) when, having rejected religion as a source of morality some 15 years ago, I latched onto utilitarianism.

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

@FreakyFwoof On AI specifically, Anil Dash explains the shaming, while disapproving of it, in this article: "WHY SHAMING PEOPLE ABOUT AI SLOP ISN’T ENOUGH TO STOP BIG AI" www.anildash.com/2026/08/21/ai-slop… > For people who (understandably) have moral or ethical objections to […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

Reposted by Matt Campbell

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.

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

According to the Apertus 1.0 technical report (arxiv.org/html/2509.14233v2 - note that the technical report for the latest model version, 1.5, isn't yet available), explicit goals of the project include training only on permissively licensed data, respecting robots.txt, and suppressing […]

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

Oh cool, we can immediately chat with the smaller, 8B-parameter version of Apertus here: publicai.co Of course, that doesn't answer the question of whether the model is useful for agent-based tasks.

Public AI Inference Utility

A nonprofit, open-source service to make public and sovereign AI models more accessible.

Reposted by Matt Campbell

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

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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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

@FreakyFwoof Yes, that one.

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

@FreakyFwoof Well I was subtooting something that had just come onto my timeline, so we may both be looking at the same original post.

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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 […]

Original post on toot.cafe

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

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

@miki @prism @tristan It's easy to automatically be against the new thing because it's bad in some ways and we're afraid the harms will outweigh the good, so we just want the new thing to go away. It's harder to think through the pros and cons and arrive at a coherent position that's not either […]

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

@miki @prism @tristan I can think of an analogy to computers themselves. When computers were new, people might have reasonably argued that all of the machines that we need should be feasible to manufacture locally in any town with the right craftspeople, and should be simple enough that those […]

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