This, if anything it might clarify a few confusing exchanges we’ve had in the past, and it will certainly help me be a better friend in the the future.

If I already know you, I know you, I’m choosing to be friends with you because of how you treat me and how you treat others when we hang out together. If I had any problems with that, I wouldn’t be friends long enough to hear you tell me about your NPD diagnosis.

Now that said, I’ve had friends tell me about a diagnosis and it shouldn’t change anything, but now that the diagnosis is out in the open they want it to change things and I can’t offer that to the friendship, such as compromising on my own boundaries (eg: I had a friend who after explaining their condition asked me to provide tone indicators for everything I say, but I have alexithymia so that was really difficult for me to do and I couldn’t adjust my behaviour to meet the new expectations of the friendship, so we faded out of each other’s lives, they told people I stopped being friends with them because of their anxiety disorder… No it’s because I couldn’t meet the changed expectations of the friendship, describing my emotions every minute is hard for me and I choose not to be friends with people who require me to do that for their comfort)

Brisbane? Their metro is literally a bus 😂 the council are so proud of it too.

Our public transport in Vic leaves much to be desired but at least we have a well developed tram system that reduces the number of tyres in the collective fleet.

We did just outlaw e-scooters which was necessary because the infrastructure and community education wasn’t there and it was dangerous. But long term e-scooters do serve a place in a less car reliant community. Bike infrastructure investment is decades behind what it needs to be.

Much like everywhere, the oversized nature of “yank tanks” seems to be a large factor in every single thing wrong with cars and car infrastructure these days.

Smaller, lighter cars don’t wear through their tyres as fast 🤷

Yes and no, applying for accommodations is as fun and easy as pulling out your own teeth with a rubber chicken.

It took months to get the paperwork organised and the conversations started around accommodations I needed for my disability, I realised halfway through I had to simplify what I was asking for and just deal with some less than accessible issues because the process of applying for disability accommodations was not accessible and I was getting rejected for simple requests like “can I reserve a seat in the front row because I can’t get up the stairs, and I can’t get there early because I need to take the service elevator to get to the lecture hall, so I’m always waiting on the security guard”

My teachers knew I had a physical disability and had mobility accommodations, some of them knew that the condition I had also caused a degree of sensory disability, but I had nothing formal on the paperwork about my hearing and vision loss because I was able to self manage with my existing tools.

I didn’t need my teachers to do anything differently so I didn’t see the point in delaying my education and putting myself through the bureaucratic stress of applying for visual accommodations when I didn’t need them to be provided to me from the university itself.

Obviously if I’d gotten a result of “you cheated” I’d immediately get that paperwork in to prove I didn’t cheat, my voice over reader just gave me the ChatGPT instructions and I didn’t realise it wasn’t part of the assignment… But that could take 3-4 months to finalise the accommodation process once I become aware that there is a genuine need to have that paperwork in place.

He’s also not a racist!

And if my yeasty poison goes bad, I’ll just pour it over some poisonous leaves, I love salad.

Don’t forget to season it with minerals you chipped off a rock in a dried out lake bed.

This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

So do cars driven by humans.

Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.

I managed to go all of 22-28 never once being carded for anything.

When I hit 30 I started getting carded for things I’d never been carded for before, even the milk bar I’d bought smokes at for 10 years, same guy and his son running it, suddenly started carding me.

That’s how I learned the ID that I’d been carrying around for 10-11 years since getting my photo ID in highschool was functionally useless, because hardly anywhere would accept it as legal ID despite it being legal ID.

I had to keep the website for the government list of ID boolmarkef so I could show doubtful cashiers that my ID was indeed federally accepted, legal and valid ID.

I went to try and get a different type of ID last year which is how it found out that despite being born in my country to a citizen of my country, and having my birth recorded and receiving my birth certificate. Somehow I’m not actually a citizen of my own country and I can’t get a passport…so I’m trying to navigate that system but that’s extra fun and confusing because I have neurodevelopmental issues and no one to help me understand what I need to to do.

I just want to be able to buy alcohol as a person in their 30s, without having to jump through impossible hoops to prove that I’m not not 17.

I’ve got smile lines and the beginnings of crows feet, I am weathered! Why am it getting carded now

It helps that I’d had several previous surgeries, so I’d had practice at keeping my cool. Plus my surgeon was in discussion with me for months with multiple consultations to really understand the issue, I don’t think I could have possibly been in safer hands.

Well either it’s 1 in 10,0000 in my country, or the department of health, my surgeon and GP are all missing a zero… which isn’t more likely because there’s no way our risk would be that much higher than the UK, and the NHS public health resources is 100,000.

Hence why star wars is a chosen one, hero’s quest, prophetised fantasy. Not a Sci fi.

When you and your kin are all prophetised to do important shit, there is no coincidence. it’s all part of a bigger divine plan of fate. Or it’s the midi-chlorians or something I dunno, I slept through the prequels.

Depending on what you’re treating, 50% sounds pretty good.

I remember when I went for my last surgery and I was signing all the consent forms, my doctor was emphasising the 17% chance of this known lifelong complication, and the increased 4% chance of general anaesthesia fatality (compared to 1 in 10,000 for general public).

My mum was freaking out because when she had the same surgery she’d been seen much earlier in the disease process, she wasn’t expecting such a “high” risk of complications in my care.

But all I was hearing is that there’s an over 80% chance it will be a success. Considering how limited and painful my life was by the thing we were treating, it was all no brainier, I liked those odds. Plus my condition is diagnosed 1 in 100,000 people, so how much data could my surgeon really have on the rate of risk, the sample size would be laughable.

Still the best decision of my life, my surgeon rolled his skilled dice, I had zero complications (other than slow wound healing but we expected and prepared for that). I threw my crutches in the trash 2 years later, and ran for the first time in my life at 27 years old after being told at 6 years old that I’d be a full time wheelchair user by 30.

Unfortunately the models are have trained on biased data.

I’ve run some of my own photos through various “lens” style description generators as an experiment and knowing the full context of the image makes the generated description more hilarious.

Sometimes the model tries to extrapolate context, for example it will randomly decide to describe an older woman as a “mother” if there is also a child in the photo. Even if a human eye could tell you from context it’s more likely a teacher and a student, but there’s a lot a human can do that a bot can’t, including having common sense to use appropriate language when describing people.

Image descriptions will always be flawed because the focus of the image is always filtered through the description writer. It’s impossible to remove all bias. For example, because of who I am as a person, it would never occur to me to even look at someone’s eyes in a portrait, let alone write what colour they are in the image description. But for someone else, eyes may be super important to them, they always notice eyes, even subconsciously, so they make sure to note the eyes in their description.

I guess my question would be, why do you need the picture as a visual aid, is the accompanying body text confusing without that visual aid? and if so, by having no alt text, you accept that you will leave VI people confused and only sighted people will have the clarification needed.

If your including a picture of a table with nothing on it, there’s a reason, so yes, that alt text is perfectly reasonable.

Personally I wish there was a way to enable two types of alt text on images, for long and quick context.

Because I understand your concern about unnecessary detail, if I’m in a rush “a table with nothing on it” will do for quicker context, but there are times when it’s appropriate to go much deeper, “a picture of a hard wood rustic coffee table, taken from a high angle, natural sunlight, there are no objects on the table.”

I think so, but I don’t have the mental energy at the moment to sit down and figure out if the AI detection software is accessible either. I know some of my colleagues use programs to check student work for LLM plagerism, but I don’t assign work that can be done via an LLM so I haven’t looked into that, and that’s different from the AI images.

As a visually impaired person on the internet. YES! welcome to our world!

You’re lucky enough to get an image description that helpfully describes the image.

That description rarely tells you if it’s AI generated, that’s if the description writer even knows themselves.

Everyone in the comments saying “look at the hands, that’s AI generated”, and I’m sitting here thinking, I just have to trust the discussion, because that image, just like every other image I’ve ever seen, is hard to fully decipher visually, let alone look for evidence of AI.

Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.

It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.

I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.

I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.

They so often did though, how many massive fires broke out in London before the great fire finally convinced them to stop building overlapping thatched rooves.

Even during The Plague of Justinian scholars wrote about what was essentially ancient social distancing practices, 2000 years ago later we still can’t do it properly.

How many times did they have to put up with rat plagues and stinking open cess pits, followed by a big town clean up, and then nothing change in infrastructure or waste management practices, only to do the whole clean up again …until the Great Stink got to close enough to the windows of parliament that those in power decided maybe they should address the root problem instead of applying bandaids every few years.

(I don’t have a history degree so I’m pulling these details out of the memory depths of my dusty documentary viewings, and I’m probably wrong.)

In Australia Google maps has issues with routing cyclists on 80km busy truck transit roads that have no bike lanes, footpaths or shoulders. You’ll regularly get stuck behind lost uber eats cyclists whose map took them through a motor vehicle only underpass.

The other day google maps decided to reroute me from a quiet, wide street with no bike lane that was otherwise perfectly safe, and tried to send me through a nightsoil alley, down a heritage stock run that was paved with cobblestones and crossed over a storm drain 4 times in a zig zag.

Yeah, “safer” because there’s no cars I guess, but not suitable for bikes at all.

The way alot, aswell and noone are combining is expected given how many other words we don’t bat an eye at went the same way. “another” is the perfect example, it’s just “an other” combined.

It’s sort of the reverse of what happened to words like apron and newt.

The division and bracketing of phrases changes over time.

“An apron” is the modern usage of the word “napron”, and a newt was originally called an eute. The grammatical need for “a” and/or “an” resulted in the root word being rebracketed and changed.