Rumperuu

A look at how mental disorders, and those who have them, are currently underserved in tech. accessibility discussions, and how these relate to the current proposals for the WCAG 3.0.

I'd appreciate critical feedback or suggestions, as I intend to submit my comments to the Task Force behind the WCAG 3.0 once I'm happy with them.

I finally got around to replacing my personal hosted WordPress site with a VPS, allowing me to get started with self-hosting apps (which is something I'd been planning to do for years).

I currently have a Hugo blog, repo hosting with Gitea, a self-developed travel microblog/tracker. I'm thinking about playing around with Mastodon and Matrix at some point, or perhaps Solid.

The last thing I really want is a cataloguing tool for tracking books I read/films + TV I watch/games I play/music I listen to. This would replace the various social cataloguing sites I currently use (Goodreads, Letterboxd, Followmy.tv, Grouvee and Last.fm, respectively).

I've not been able to find a suitable pre-existing tool though. Bookwyrm looked interesting with its ActivityPub social features, but AFAICT it's limited to books only. I also looked into Koillection which was much more flexible, but doesn't seem to have any import ability for my pre-existing data.

Does anyone know of anything that might suit my purposes? I would like if it could automatically download cover art and I am ambivalent towards social features. I could bash together something simple myself but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

All intellectual activity is based around the representation of ideas through imperfect media. My personally-preferred medium is writing and one's writing, as with all other skills, improves with repetition. Bouncing ideas around in one's head is all well and good, but it can get tiring. Taking the time to express those thoughts in a medium of choice allows one to exorcise them from the mind. Exposing them, as I do here, to a potential audience (and the attendant risk of criticism) ensures that any such idea will have been thoroughly analysed, and any potential illogicalities headed off in advance. By consolidating disparate thoughts through writing, I improve my understanding of them and my ability to discuss them in person. Other benefits, like being able to point people towards certain pieces for my thoughts on certain topics, are only bonuses—ultimately, writing is my deadlifting.

And, to perhaps make the point more pithily, that is a quote from a blog post I wrote four years ago and which better expresses my thoughts than anything I could have come up with just now.

Reminds me of this dialogue from Gödel, Escher Bach: https://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Hofstadter....

I still use WhatsApp on my BB Classic daily. The native app died years ago so it's an emulated Android version, and for a long time I was capped at whichever the last version that supported Android 4.3 was. Mid-2020 I started getting notifications saying I would have to update the app at the end of the month or it would stop working, so I thought my luck had finally run out, but when the day came it gave me the option of updating the app, which somehow worked.

Very interesting—I certainly wouldn't have expected the antithesis of Mein Kampf and Revolt Against the Modern World to be Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. Honourable mentions include the Bible (NIV) and The C Programming Language.

In the UK, businesses can claim tax relief for R&D [0] - there may be something similar in the US.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/corporation-tax-research-and-dev...

I was surprised to find reading a book called Intelligence in an Insecure World[0] that the general consensus amongst intelligence studies scholars is apparently that there's no empirical evidence for the effectiveness of intelligence work and there probably never will be (although I read the book some time ago so I might be misremembering it).

[0] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Intelligence+in+An+Insecure+Worl...

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Related: Report on Guantánamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees Through Analysis of Department of Defense Data (2006), p 14.

https://scholarship.shu.edu/shlr/vol41/iss4/2/

When cases against all the other unlawful stuff reach them, presumably.

If your issue is that an online handle may sound strange or silly (e.g., ‘Count Dankula’), how would you handle someone whose legal name sounds strange or silly (e.g., ‘Moon Unit Zappa’ or ‘X AE A-XII’)?

If your issue is that an online handle is not someone's legal name, how would you handle someone who goes by a certain form of their legal name (e.g., using their middle name rather than their first name)? How would you handle someone whose name includes a title (e.g., ‘Cpl Bloggs’ or ‘Ambassador Taylor’)?

Everyone has a number of labels used to identify them, and the appropriateness of each is dependent on the situation being used. In the context of an article about the online community surrounding someone's online blog, which they publish under a certain name, it is entirely appropriate to use the relevant name. The only way that that person's legal name would be relevant to the article would be if it was reporting on their conduct outside of that community as well, which this article does not appear to have been doing.

I submitted a support ticket on Jun 20, and received a reply this morning:

‘Hello,

Thank you for reaching out. Please be informed that we've already discontinued RSS Feed on Reuters.com. If you require the service, we suggest that you contact our Sales Team on the link provided below:

https://agency.reuters.com/en/contact-us.html

Kind regards,

The Reuters.com Team’

Re: the ‘democratisation of surveillance’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Regarding your fourth line about pairing officers with volunteers, this happens in (some/all?) UK constabularies, for example: https://www.lancashire.police.uk/ridealong

On a related note, we also have volunteer Independent Monitoring Boards for prisons: https://www.gov.uk/volunteer-to-check-standards-in-prison

And voluntary magistrates' courts which try all cases first (although they pass serious ones on to the Crown Court): https://www.gov.uk/become-magistrate

And Patient Participation Groups for all GP practices: https://www.napp.org.uk/ppgintro.html

I don't know if any of these are also the case in the US, and the UK definitely has problems of its own, but it does seem to be leaps and bounds ahead in terms of citizen oversight and institutional transparency.

YouTube series Some More News briefly addressed this study in their episode "Perhaps Ben Shapiro Shouldn't Be Taken Seriously By Anyone About Anything".[0]

Brookings also followed this up with a report entitled "Following the success sequence? Success is more likely if you’re white."[1]

Note that I don't mean to make any claims as to OP's political outlook or motives in sharing this article.

[0] https://youtu.be/aDMjgOYOcDw?t=594

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/following-the-success-seq...

I've always been interested in this paper, which suggests that the idea of flashbacks as a symptom of PTSD coincides may be culturally-influenced and coincide with developments in cinema.

Tangentially related, I think this is now the only war article on Wikipedia featuring non-human combatants since the admins have reverted the Emu War one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Yes to the chocks, although it's worth noting that in a crush situation you should aim to remove the crushing object within 15 minutes. Any later than that and you risk killing the casualty through crush syndrome.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome

I was under the impression that .sucks domains cost about $10 for an individual but thousands for a corporation (as an anti-corporate endeavour). I can't find anything on this though, so perhaps I imagined it.

Do you remember the title of the book?

Personal computing and hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson reflects on his life's work and the ways computer history could have turned out very differently.

From the video desc.:

‘What I want known about my ideals and work over the years. How a very bad career plan led to discoveries, hopes and adventures. In some ways this is an alternative history of personal computing and world hypertext.’

Try following a news agency—I like Reuters. They gather news reports and then sell them on to newspapers/broadcasters/etc. who add their spin and choose which details to focus on or ignore, so it's a bit like buying your food fresh from the farm.

Reminds me of the Czechoslovakian Velorex, which had three wheels, a motorcycle engine and a leather body[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velorex

Sounds almost like the Ben Franklin effect,[0] which I don't think I've ever heard of being used in a game outside of this example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect

True, which is why it needs to start with people choosing to be called ‘it’. It's yet to happen, but I'll do my bit if/when I'm ever asked for my preferred pronouns.

Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).

For my money the best thing that ever happened to English was abandoning grammatical gender/noun classes centuries ago - no more masculine, feminine or neuter, everything is ‘the’ or ‘a’.[0]

Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring to a man or a woman (or ship, or country, etc.), and those few contexts where it is relevant should be easy enough to glean from other information.

If you think that could never work, I'd point out that Mandarin managed without gender-specific pronouns until contact with Europeans, and even now they are only distinguishable in written form.[1]

Alternatively, there's Stallman's proposal for ‘person’, ‘per’ and ‘pers’.[2] I'm doubtful of any proposal that involves creating new words (see ‘xe’, Spivak pronouns, etc. ), but everything else Stallman says seems to come to pass so maybe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns

[2] https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

One of the co-authors (Mark Levine) delivered a talk on his research on ‘groups and identities in security research’, which touched a bit on the the CCTV work discussed here (amongst other things). https://bengoldsworthy.net/2018/12/security-lancaster-semina...

Semi-relevant anecdote: Back in my first year of university (in the UK), I remember coming back from the Christmas break to find my Chinese flatmate, disheveled. Turns out he had spent the holiday in the library reading up on Tiananmen Square and the like and was very eager to share with me his astonishing discoveries. He was surprised when I told him that people outside of China know about all that stuff. I can't imagine how confused it all must've made him feel, especially since he returned to China after his studies.