Wow, and I thought the guys that broke into and pissed all in the halls of our high school were going wild.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but I know years back iPhones were preferred by a lot of blind people just in terms of accessibility. Digging through accessibility settings, it looks like you can use Voice Control to tell it to open Lemmy, and VoiceOver to read all the text on the screen without touching it. I don’t know about the example you added to your OP, adding phrases it would need to interpret seems more like a Siri thing (which I don’t use), so I don’t know how well that plays with Voice Control.

I wouldn’t rush out to buy anything unless some Android people confirm it’s not doable. Apple does have people that know the software working at their stores, so they could tell you specifics for sure. And check that I’m not totally wrong, lol.

Someone who knows more about how to/if you can do this on Android will have to answer the specifics for that; I know on iOS you can use custom voice control actions (along with default voice control phone navigation mode) to do more or less what you’re describing. I’m surprised if Android has no accessibility features that work similarly.

Sorry if I’m overlooking something obvious here, but you’re basically asking about accessibility features, right? Whatever settings and features blind users use should let you navigate without looking at it. I realize that’s overly vague but I only know how to get to accessibility features on iOS, sorry!

Although I will say you probably would need to get used to listening to text at a very high speed to use it at the speed you read.

Great argument for and example of how the US government isn’t taxing wealth nearly enough, if we have homeless people and billionaires funding sci fi fantasies for their own amusement in the same country.

Wow, that article was basically a cut and paste of the DOJ release, neither of which said why he was only charged with four counts if he’s done it over 300 times. Thanks, NBC! 🙄

More MLK quotes!

Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.

But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

-The Other America

And this was over The Long, Hot Summer of 1967 where neighborhoods literally got burned to the ground in riots and dozens of people were killed. Shooting your mouth off in response to someone being a bigot is a piddling offense by comparison.

Like, I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s being on your best behavior. But neither is saying some bigoted shit to someone that causes them to pop off in return. Two people can be doing wrong things, and one can even be more at fault!

In that case the instance you’re on is basically the block list, right? That’s good, especially if most instances are really dedicated to stamping out that kind of thing. But if/when Mastodon gets big, it becomes a problem of scale.

In practical terms it’s kind of unrealistic to expect T&S to deal with people because they have garbage takes; most of their day is going to be dealing with the usual internet nightmare sludge, which is where I think block lists become a real utility on the user end of things. In addition to the advantage of just making the blocked users shout into the void when 90% of the site wants nothing to do with their ass, which I can tell you from observation makes them extremely mad.

On Bluesky anyone who really hates TPOT can make a block list that anyone can subscribe to and you never have to think of it again. You can also easily flag accounts to include on the list.

If TPOT moved en masse to Mastodon, across many different instances, how would someone achieve the same thing? My understanding is they don’t have any similar feature. As long as “just block them all individually or hope they all move to one shitty instance you can block” is the solution, it’s going to fail to attract people.

So the drugs were part of self care, is what I’m hearing 👀

Correct. Doomerism is at best capitulating in advance.

There are very clearly some people that are accelerationist. I guess it’s possible they think they won’t have to fight, which makes being an accelerationist even shittier.

Also, if it’s wasn’t about you then it wasn’t about you.

I’m not talking about targeted harassment specifically, I mean dozens of accounts leaving bigoted remarks on any post about queer subjects that gets traction (more than a few thousand likes). Melon certainly made the problem worse on Twitter, but there’s a reason prior to that they had an entire department dedicated to dealing with that shit: plenty of people see no problem with it, and it makes social media a nightmare for queer people.

If you don’t have a strong trust and safety team, then you need blocking tools that do the heavy lifting. And having to block 50k bigots manually is why I left Twitter. As long as Mastodon doesn’t have anything that can compete with block lists, it’s going to struggle to attract people who need those features.

If you haven’t watched the dishwasher one, drop everything and go do it now!

Plato: [frantically] with flat nails, WITH FLAT NAILS!

I don’t know what about that comment signaled to you that I’d be okay with my family members that live in a red state dying because RFK fucked with vaccines, but I’m not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Where you live is a location, not an ideology.

Mask your biohazard self if you’re not getting vaccinated for the next 4 years, thanks.

In practice what it probably means is removing all the modern preservatives and added vitamins/minerals. Who’s excited to get goiter and pellagra?!

Doing that would also mean a return to traditional preservatives: salt and sugar. Because we don’t have enough of that in the American diet already.

If anything that makes it more important. We already know how essentially all the Democrats are going to vote. A couple of Republican defections is all it takes to hold the Senate.

The key here is they don’t have to defect on everything. Turning every Republican senator into a never Trumper isn’t happening. But making some of them defect some of the time is a lot more feasible, and requires constant pressure.