blindgeek

"There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use."

Why would I want to engage in trustless transactions in the first place? All desirable social relationships are based on trust and always have been. I think a need for trustless transactions implies that one or more parties is not trustworthy, so why would I want to transact with them?

I have some green sensibilities, but I'm more of a Post-scarcity Socialist. Backing a currency with a scarce resource serves no purpose other than to keep us serfs "down on the manor" so to speak. Standards of living didn't start rising significantly until fiat money really took off. Societies and governments give currency value; it has little to no inherent value on its own.

But the primary philosophy behind bitcoin is right-libertarian / Ayn Rand / a return to the 19th century with futuristic technology.

Go look up the Cyphernomicon for instance, where you'll find Tim May cheerleading for cryptocurrency-powered darknet murder marts. Here's a choice sample quote:

    begin quote

16.10.4. Will I be sad if anonymous methods allow untraceable markets for assassinations? It depends. In many cases, people deserve death--those who have escaped justice, those who have broken solemn commitments, etc. Gun grabbing politicians, for example should be killed out of hand. Anonymous rodent removal services will be a tool of liberty. The BATF agents who murdered Randy Weaver's wife and son should be shot. If the courts won't do it, a market for hits will do it. - (Imagine for a moment an "anonymous fund" to collect the money for such a hit. Interesting possibilities.) - "Crypto Star Chambers," or what might be called "digilantes," may be formed on-line, and untraceably, to mete out justice to those let off on technicalities. Not altogether a bad thing.

    end quote

Attacking vulnerabilities in the bitcoin network seems like a great idea. At this point, so does anything that might take it down. It's a technology that deserves to be eliminated.

This is exciting. Wonder what it would take to add replying and posting? It is read-only.

By all means, you should check it out.

I live independently in a household with two other blind people. We use Be My Eyes alongside object recognition / OCR apps like Seeing AI. The two types of app compliment one another quite nicely.

I'm introverted myself, but I feel a lot less anxious ringing up an anonymous stranger and asking them for a few minutes of assistance than I do about imposing on sighted friends / family. I took some lessons about not being an imposition or a burden to heart very early in life.

For fiercely self-reliant blind people, the smartphone is a gift from the gods.

Trump was also great advertising for Twitter, just like he was great for the news media. I'd argue that Big Media, Inc. is deeply complicit in the rise of Donald Trump. He was the goose that laid the golden egg. Additionally, the media mergers of the 80s and 90s gave us right-wing talk radio on the AM band, sewing the spores of hate from which the vile toadstool of Trumpism bloomed.

Big Tech, Inc., with its algorithms that promote radical right-wing content, also seems suspect.

To me the solution to all of these problems is to break up conglomerates and monopolies. Let's have more decentralization and more "small is beautiful" tech, like the chat system presented here. Let a million flowers blossom, smothering the aforementioned toadstool. (Wandering off to look at installing Cabal).

As a blind person, I dearly miss the textual Internet as it was. The original Internet -- the textual one -- was perfectly accessible. The extra markup added to HTML to help screen readers was added because the web stack had gotten too complex, not because it was too simple.

It's possible, though I doubt it. I don't have enough evidence -- anecdotal or otherwise -- with which to draw a conclusion.

I'm totally blind (lacking even light perception), with optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH). Relevant link: https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/blog/living-onh-adult-shares...

Relevant quotation from aforementioned link:

"Many children with ONH have difficulty processing sensory information through some or all of their senses--referred to as sensory processing disorder. They may show sensory defensiveness and delays in learning fine and gross motor skills, which can make reading braille and learning basic daily living skills, like dressing, grooming and personal hygiene, difficult or impossible without additional supports."

I find audio captchas infuriating at times, because I struggle to separate the words from the noise, though they have really improved over the last 3 or 4 years. I remember one night during 2012 or 2013, wasting 2 or 3 hours of my life, just listening to audio captchas. All I wanted was to delete my Facebook account and my girlfriend's Facebook account.

A few years back, Facebook and others were banning People with the name Isis. Anyone with more than two brain cells who had spent some time studying the humanities would not have made that mistake. I'd think that people who write code and design algorithms would at least be aware of the concept of overloading, too.

To answer another question from the post:

"But do I want to do this? Asking mailing lists admins to trust me again, with a new domain after the previous debacle, is a bit too much, isn't it?"

I'm a list admin for a mailing list available on gmane. Granted, it doesn't get much traffic. As a list admin, I feel that Lars -- via gmane -- is providing an invaluable service for my list. At least for me, it's not too much to ask, though I'm a sample size of one.

I appreciate being able to use Gmane to read and contribute to so many mailing lists, all from the comfort of my favorite newsreader (gnus). Rather than having many sporadically-followed lists delivered via email, I can access them over NNTP, saving disk space etc. I'd miss it if it were gone.

I have lots of warm and fuzzy feelings toward Matrix, but my take is that XMPP solved my basic problem over 15 years ago. The problem being: I want to talk to Alice, Bob, Mary, Jane, Fred, and Joe without having to install ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger. Or should I say Facebook, Whatsapp, and Signal? I don't know what Matrix buys me over XMPP, but at this point, I don't care. I'll gladly drink the Matrix kool-aid, as long as it solves my problem and somehow ends up being the clear winner among federated protocols.

I don't think XMPP "lost" because it was bad technology. AFAIK the big players are still using it in various places under the hood. It lost because big players want to build "ecosystems".

Of course. Nothing in life is guaranteed. I'm sure the Buddha would tell me that "there ain't no such thing as permanent". Nevertheless, I've had my domain name longer than I've had my current phone number. I'm far more likely to put up a fight for that name than I would be to fight for the current string of digits that represents me in the phone system. Maybe the whole concept of user-owned identifiers is a myth, or a Platonic ideal. At least in my case, my phone number is pretty far from the Platonic ideal.

Snipped out of context from: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

"However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers."

Does he really believe that phone numbers are user-owned? My phone carrier owns my number. If I'm lucky, I might be able to take it to a new carrier. It's far more likely that I'd drop the number in favor of one in the area code in which I actually live, however.

I own my own domain, and I self-host my own email. I'm not likely to change it for geographical reasons. It has a much stronger tie to me than some string of digits used by an analog voice network from the last century.

The other user cost of switching between centralized services is network effects. If you want to switch from ICQ to AIM, you need to get all your friends to join you.

My biggest problem with messaging applications as a whole is that I need so many of them. I have a few contacts who are reachable with Signal, a few more who are reachable on Hangouts or whatever Google is calling its latest thing, and a few more who are reachable with Skype. That's three programs, to communicate with three different subsets of people. I'm sure if I used Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, I'd have two more subsets of people who are only reachable through those.

XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out in the early 2000s. But then all the big tech companies who build "ecosystems" decided to push their own applications, all incompatible with one another. So here we are again with this proliferation of programs that really only do one thing: communication. It's like the 90s / early 2000s with the proliferation of instant messengers: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and on and on and on. The players are different, but the game is still the same. I suspect that twenty years from now, when the players have all changed yet again, there will still be one reliable method of reaching me: IRC.

If the Googles and Whatsapps and Facebooks of the world had been around in the early 90s, you'd have one email client from Facebook for mailing Joe and Fred, an email client from Google for mailing Mary and Jane, and an email client from Whatsapp for mailing Alice and Bob. Thankfully, email became entrenched before that could happen.

I want messaging to be like email, where I use one and exactly one program to communicate with all of my contacts, regardless of what server they use. People say that federation is more complicated than centralization. I'm sure that's true for developers, but in fact, federation can be vastly simplifying for an end user. I'm a fundamentally lazy person. Having to learn all these different messaging tools is frankly a waste of my time. All I want is a federated protocol and an open system, be it Matrix, XMPP, or something else.

As a final aside, you know what else that bugs me? The word "ecosystem". I worked for a big tech company for a while, and the only people I ever heard use that word were people out to build a walled garden.

"Even boosters now seem to implicitly accept the assumption (accurate or not) that the internet is the root of multiple woes, from increasing political polarization to the mass diffusion of misinformation."

I certainly don't accept that the Internet is the root of increasing political polarization. It's nothing new. Ever heard of the Nika Riots? Polarization is a story as old as time, Internet or no Internet.

On the other hand, top-down culture is breaking down on account of the Internet. How many people watch the CBS Evening News anymore? There was, in the minds of American "thought leaders", a sort of cultural consensus. It doesn't exist anymore, never mind that it was probably always more myth than reality. The facade is being shattered, and a lot of folks are running scared, blaming the newest technology for their woes.

There are ways out of the crises we face, but neither blaming the Internet for our problems nor treating it as a panacea is one of them.

When I was studying math, a lot of times, I got to take tests at home. Prof would email me a copy of the test in LaTeX (they used it anyway), and I'd mail my answers back in LaTeX or PDF. Worked well for us. I'd just slip out the door on test days, walk the three blocks to my apartment, type up my answers, and mail them back.

In one case, one of my profs actually wrote his own textbook. It was for an intro to theorem proving / symbolic logic class. He also used LaTeX. While everyone else got a printout of the course text, I got a copy of the source code that I could read with a screenreader.

As often as I've seen people get shell-escaping wrong, escaping rules probably aren't well-understood, regardless of how well-defined they are. Bourne shell's quoting rules are byzantine at best. There are ways to reliably and securely quote for the Bourne shell, but the best solution is not to pass untrusted input to the shell. Unrelated to the shell, I've seen people -- including myself -- fail at dot-stuffing. Experience has taught me to avoid hand-rolled escaping when I can; escaping is definitely a code smell.

I do have a very good memory, but I cannot really visualize. I've never had any sight. I'm so bad at visualization that I'm baffled by the concept of a picture. How do people manage to cram three dimensions of reality into two? It must be very lossy. Anyway I do have a knack for understanding how all the pieces fit together and keeping it in my head.

I use emacs with emacspeak for programming and a good many other things. For pure terminal interaction outside of emacs I use a console-based screen reader called Speakup. For graphical applications, I use a screenreader called Orca. I don't use a whole lot of graphical applications, but I need Firefox for most of the "modern" web. I've also used Chrome with Chromevox over the years.

Honestly I prefer text-mode browsers when I can use them, but that ship has mostly sailed. I've been involved with the development of edbrowse; the author is a friend of mine.

So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on Linux. So I'm doubly a niche user.

The web (and web apps) are all about providing an experience. I don't want an experience, I want a reliable tool.

I think what really killed Usenet in the US was Andrew Cuomo's crusade against it. During the period from 1993 to 2008, I had Usenet from most of the ISPs I used. The ISPs started pulling the plug in 2008 or 2009. I was using text groups up until then.

These days, I've found a free provider for my text group access, of which there are several.

I'd love to be able to use more public transit. After all, I'm blind, in case the username didn't give away my secret. However, my city does not offer bus service on nights and weekends, and frequently places that I wish to go are not even served by the bus system, even though they are definitely within my city.

I try to walk to as many places as I possibly can. For the rest, if I'm going somewhere during the day and it is reachable by bus, I do that. Otherwise, I'm stuck taking a cab. In reality, what this means is that I try to limit the things I do outside of my home. That's kind of easy for an agoraphobic anti-consumerist nerd. But still, I'm grateful for online shopping when I need it.

As an aside, the ideal city for a blind person in the United States is Portland Oregon. I don't live too far from there, and I visit it occasionally. The Max is beautiful. Portland has obviously made a huge effort to provide great mass transit, and from what I saw, it was very heavily used.

Have you looked at scsh (AKA the Scheme shell)? How does your work compare with it? It seems like your goals are similar, except that you're working in Lua.