I attempted to learn Mandarin in 2019, at first with Duolingo with an aim to find more robust resources along the way. I had to stop because I couldn’t distinguish among the characters. I’ve looked for resources for learning Mandarin in braille but can’t find any.

I really enjoyed what I did learn though. It’s such a laconic language, and I’ve nabbed some grammar here and there for one of my conlangs.

A bot I am not

flesh and blood I have got.

A repost this may be

but not one by me.

It can be hard. I have yet to see an elegant way to navigate threaded chains of comments. It’s like “UltimateGamer386 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> [actual content]”. On Reddit, at least Old Reddit, the upvote and downvote controles were the only buttons and were located immediately before the actual comment, so you could go from button to button, then press down arrow to read the comment.

I have enough vision to navigate to some degree, at least on a desktop. For laptop or phone it has to be a screen reader. I really should be reading braille more.

I was just thinking the other day that a dedicated semantic tag for user replies like <comment> or <reply> or <post> would be nice, and they could be nested.

I actually didn’t know you could block users on Lemmy until now. I’ve been blocking all the big communities so my main page isn’t clogged with stuff I’m not interested in.

I was born blind.

It’s an unfortunate dilemma. To sustain an active niche you need a huge user base like Reddit. But if you have a huge user base costs start piling up and the temptation to lessen the experience to pay the bills (or appease shareholders) grows.

The issue with the fediverse is that its members are highly self-selecting. If you’re an average Joe looking to join an online community, it’s going to be Reddit, not Lemmy, Twitter, not Mastodon, or Facebook, not whatever the fedi equivalent is. So the likelihood of amassing enough average Joes who just want to look at funny pictures of orangutans or talk about video games with anyone regardless where they fall on the political spectrum is small.

And I always thought that was the point of these little niches. Alice the gun nut likes vintage 80s computers, and Bob who wants to seize the means of production also likes vintage 80s computers, so Alice and Bob have fun together talking about vintage 80s computers despite their differences. The problems arise when Alice goes into the vintage 80s computers community and tries to make everything about guns.

I admin an instructional data center at a community college.

That is incorrect. Certainly at least not a bare hand. I’ve heard of people catching it midair with a bagged hand but that was when the dog was having an accident IIRC.

Trump is sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Biden was sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Obama was sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Dubya was sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Clinton was sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Bush 1 was sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Reagan was sending us to Hell in a hand basket.

Forgive me if I’m a little numb to it all.

It’s not even always that I disagree with what people on here say, I’ve been a 3rd party/independent voter most of my adult life, hardly a Trump fan, but if I post about where to find good fajitas in Dallas I don’t want to hear a manifesto. A fanatic is someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject, and a lot of lemmings fit that bill as evidenced by this very thread.

Can’t speak to other ways AI is used, but I consume most written media using text to speech and have done so my entire life. I’ve seen speech synthesis evolve from the mid 90s to now and I know what came before then. I know when a voice is not natural. Even AI voices that seem perfect at first will have little tells if you listen long enough, like missing or misplaced emphasis, odd pauses, and confusing the pronunciations of identically spelled words.

This may not be true forever but for now at least it’s obvious to me.

Very few blind people have no vision at all, and many, including myself, have sufficient vision to see what’s on the TP. Otherwise, the friction as you wipe is a decent indicator, and if you’re not sure you can just make a few more passes.

People desperate to live on their own terms may think it’s very much worth the effort. The pilgrims, buckle-headed weirdoes they were, probably thought as much when they boarded the Mayflower.

Don’t know why “clanker” didn’t occur to me when writing the OP

Abominable Intelligence