For me the difference between now and Syria is when Syria started, I'd see one or two stories a day in the AP when I checked the news. I didn't frequent HN so can't speak to if it was constantly on the news. I realize a lot of the reason were getting the info is because this is a war in Europe instead of Asia or Africa. I've had to use pihole to block several sites on a schedule to keep me from doomscrolling, maybe I need to increase my blocked time?
I'd love info on how people experienced World War II without TV as well as Vietnam and the first Gulf war when we had tv but before 24/7 news coverage on the internet and social media.
We've had nuclear weapons for less than 100 years which is nothing in history. Based on that the Roman Empire never should have fallen. If it made it 100 years, why not 150000 instead of 400ish?
IN my experience pull requests were not a thing in Subversion. We would attach patch files to Jira for code reviews. Git allowed for much easier workflow with merging branches instead of directly applying patches to trunk. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that we used Bitbucket for Git hosting and a plain Subversion server with no extra features to help with code reviews.
"around three days in the office is what they want from employees." This article is pretty employer focused. What to the employees want? According to the article Salesforce has employees working in the office one to three days a week . What percent of those are one day and what percent of those are three days?
This looks interesting and I'm glad to see that people are not viewing SCM as a solved issue. While I don't think I'd use this on professional projects yet I'm interested at looking at this for personal projects since I can use the Git back-end and continue to use Github to host my code. I feel like Git has become such a DeFacto standard that nothing is going to replace it any time soon. I've been programming for long enough to remember feeling the same way about SVN though so I assume something will eventually supplant Git.
What would a basic home Wi-Fi network with two access points, a router, and a switch look like? I attempted to figure this out since I wanted to set up a network with multiple VLANs to separate work machines, IOT devices, and trusted devices once I started working remote. I couldn't figure it out so just bought Ubiquity gear. They were the sweet spot for configurability with out spending weeks learning how to configure network equipment as far as I could tell.
As someone who's totally blind don't switch to Emacspeak. It may have been worth fighting with in the late 90's or early 2000s' before Web 2.0 and when accessibility for major software programs was generally poorer but now your much better off using NVDA as a screen reader, Edge or Chrome as a browser, WSL2 for all your command-line Linux needs and VS Code as an IDE. Other people use Mac's but I wasn't impressed last time I tried several years ago so won't speak to how good or bad they are now. Either way the tooling I just listed has people actively working on accessibility and will have more support resources and active communities.
As someone who's totally blind now that WSL2 exists I'm done fighting with Linux accessibility. WSL2 with the VSCode integration gives me a good GUI IDE and I can use the command-line for anything else I need.
Speaking as someone who was born blind Braille may not be worth using if you went blind later in life. I was forced to use it heavily until about 10 or 11 in spite of the fact that I wanted to use text to speech since it's quicker. It was totally worth it since it gave me a basic literacy foundation that enables me to type out sentences like these and be able to spell well enough that less then 1/5 of everything I type has to be corrected with Spellcheck. I have an 18-year-old braille display I got in school when I started programming more. It still works but I only use it once a month if that. I do everything with text to speech. The only time it was really useful was when I was doing assembly programming and had to look at hex values in a debugger. If you go blind later in life it may be pretty easy to avoid learning anything but enough braille to read signs for room numbers and bathrooms and do just fine.
I was born blind, so this is just my experience interacting with others who lost their vision later in life. It's likely your friend will want to focus more on counseling and therapy to adjust to the fact that they will be totally blind in a short time. Instead of figuring out if Voiceover on Mac OSX or NVDA with Windows and WSL is better they should get the help they need to figure out how to do all the daily things they used to. How are they going to be able to cross streets, go out to a restaurant or bar on their own and navigate around, etc. How will they match clothes, cook without being able to see the stove or microwave, etc. All these things are possible although with the lack of info on your friend's location I have no idea what government or private support there will be for this kind of rehabilitation service.
NVDA with WSL2 and VSCode is what I use for development, Mac OSX and XCode was a garbage fire last time I tried it four years ago. Some of that may have been the fact that I was not nearly as comfortable with Voiceover but Apple made no effort I could see to interact with the accessibility community at that time. My understanding is that iOS development is more accessible with Swift UI but I"m not spending $1000+ for a secondary computer to try it out.
Have children, when they get old enough, they will yell "No phones in school" while there playing with you. THis probably means I shouldn't spend as much time on my phone either.
The only news I pay for is The Economist. I like the fact that there's a short daily summary of news and a weekly addition. While I realize articles are released daily, I like the fact that I can read the weekly addition over the weekend and know I'm caught up until the next addition is released. I find other news sources that don't have a prominent weekly section cause me to constantly check for news stories and wind-up reading stuff I don't actually care about because it's there.
I would have made it a point to work out on a regular basis. I participated in sports in high school. Although I was not good enough to compete in college I could have continued to lift weights. It took me a good five years after graduation to begin lifting again and then Covid hit limiting my ability to lift until I bought a set of free weights and a power rack.
As a Voiceover user this is disappointing. If the law changes to allow third party app stores or side loading this is the app that would convince me to go down that road.
Maybe there's going to be new AI specific hardware on new Mainframe processors or AI accelerators in the future that will require z/OS 2.5 to run but they are not ready to announce the hardware? I think buzzwords is more likely though.
If your solution is to assume everyone else will get the vaccine accept for blind people because the websites are inaccessible when are you going to pass laws mandating the vaccine? With out these laws we may never reach true heard immunity and blind people will never be as safe as people who were able to get the vaccine. I realize this is a strawman argument since were at the point where blind people should be able to get help from other sources besides websites now that the initial rush for vaccination has died down. I feel comfortable arguing this point though because assuming that society in general will always do the right thing so it's ok to exclude certain segments from being able to be proactive in helping them selves is crap. As someone who's totally blind I had no way of knowing if people were socially distancing, wearing masks, etc. I am incredibly fortunate that I had strong family support through the pandemic, I don't want to think about how difficult this would have been for me if I didn't.
I'm a totally blind software developer. I used two sites to sign up for a vaccine.
The first site was a covid vaccine specific website. I was unable to use it with my screen reader. I can't remember the exact issue but it was something to do with a popup my screen reader could not interact with to select a date. Luckily I had family who were able to fill out the form for me with in a couple hours of opening availability. I was fortunate that my family were not in frontline jobs and could be at a computer when I needed them to be.
The second site was a mobile health clinic that was targeting disabled and at risk individuals. That worked fine because there goal was to get vaccines in arms and not worry about the technology. They used signup genius which had no accessibility issues for me.
I understand that accessibility is not always easy. I don't expect Xbox Live cloud to somehow magically make first person shooter games accessible. There's no reason in 2021 that a site that does nothing but have you fill out a basic form with the ability to select a date and time should be unusable with screen readers.
That seems reasonable to me if you require heavy integration test coverage. I work on several applications. The ones that are message driven and don't require a database have test suites that run in a couple minutes. The one that has a large database component takes about 30 minutes to run the tests. This is because we actually run the tests against a real database which requires migrations, data loading, etc.
I think the initial language doesn't matter all that much as long as you can get interest in programming and have some structure to break you of any bad habits after you first start. I taught my self to program with GW Basic and goto statements in the early 2000's. At that point it was already a horribly antiquated technology but it ran on my braille notetaker so the learning curve to get started was super low. With in a year or two of getting started I was in a C++ class using normal computers which broke me of all the bad habits I had taught myself.
As a totally blind back-end developer I'm sure I'd be one of those people. If I'm doing accessibility testing for development tools my thoughts are probably worth while. If I'm doing accessibility testing for a bank my thoughts are probably less valuable. Unless it's horribly broken I'm tech savvy enough to usually get by. I don't expect all blind people to have 20 years of programming experience and the general technical aptitude that comes along with that.
Can we just stop using Twitter to post hot takes with no context? There's a big difference between a two-person team made up of white men and a 100-person engineering team made up of 98 men 95 of whom are white.
What's the benefit of Liquibase over Flyway? I've been using Flyway and find it pretty nice. I enjoy being able to write migration as properly named sql scripts and not dealing with XML.
I'm not concerned about the server. If the performance were good and Microsoft's built in Narrator screen reader worked well with vscode I could use an arm computer for all my hobby programming now. I don't know how well Narrator works with vscode but unfortunately as far as I can tell NVDA is not being ported to arm. Yet another example of the lack of software. I'd consider getting a cheep Windows ARM laptop to investigate porting it but it looks like everything is over $500.
Does anyone know if there custom OS has a screen reader? I'm totally blind and this is priced at the point where I'd like to play with it assuming it's usable for me.