Not blind, and can't speak to how popular or useful they are, but there are products meant to be used like that [0]. I can't find the link but I've also seen this done with paintings, where someone creates essentially a sculpture based on a painting, and then they can 3D print it so a blind person could "see" something like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night.
A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created his system to replace an older one where they would teach people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was never meant to be used for something like a picture.
I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models they use.
Sometimes I draw UML-like diagrams when I join a project (and when the project is big enough in such a way my mind melts if I try to keep track of everything), I wonder if there are equivalent representations of such things.
Linear text is perfect to me for documentation, teaching/learning etc...
But also, systems seems to be better digested under the shape of spatial representations (I met a lot of CS persons that fantasized over the possibility of displaying all the files of your codebase in a VR-like environment augmented with visual cues (UML) and I must admit that I would find this unnecessary but comfortable -- and I can imagine applications of this in other domains; imagine a teacher arranging the whole of Kant philosophy as a spatial-visual system referencing positions, comments, etc..). Eyes are cool because you can focus on something while knowing that some available information is there around the zone you are focusing; in a sense, so is the hand, locally, but I imagine (I dont know) it would require some super-human level of braille reading to be able to jump back and forth reading on different fingers, so that's again a probably stupid question to ask to the blind crowd of hn : are you able to do this?
Anecdotally, I have used SO much less in recent years, but I think a lot of what gets labelled as toxicity is just dedicated curation. I remember asking my first question - I got a quick response that it wasn't well written and was likely a duplicate, and they were totally correct.
The next time I asked I made sure to put the work in beforehand to make sure it was well written and included any relevant info that someone would need, as well as linking potential duplicates and explaining the differences I had to them. That got a much better response and is more useful for future readers.
I'm sure this sort of unofficial blacklisting is fairly common, but it does seem very opposed to the idea of a free market. It definitely doesn't seem like Anthropic was trying to make some sort of point here, but it would be cool if all the AI companies had a ToS saying it can't be used for any sort of defense/police/military purposes
I am not even sure what free market is, aside from Economics textbooks and foreign policy positioning. Whatever it may be, I don't think we had it for quite some time.
> It’s nuts that personal computers aren’t personal anymore
I think the core driver here is that most people don't want a "personal" computer, they want a device that's able to reliably accomplish tasks. Early computers gave users much more power and control but that also came with the responsibility to set up and maintain the system, which limited the userbase a lot. I'd argue a lot of the security is security from the user against themself - there is definitely some value in trying your best to make sure a user is unable to brick their phone no matter how much they try, because they're likely going to blame you and ask you to fix it afterwards
I know it's not quite the point of the article, but just to push back on the phrase
> I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own
There's a few cases where this definitely seems wrong - you can own a radio transmitter but it's super illegal to broadcast in certain frequencies. So while you're "able" to in the sense that's in physically possible, you're not "able" to because it's illegal, and I think most people would want it that way.
In a similar way, it's illegal to modify your car or especially guns in certain ways. I could see a similar argument saying "I own this machine, I should be able to modify it mechanically however I want". Yes you own it, but as soon as you bring it in the world then you also need to account for how it's going to impact everyone else. You can't even manufacture certain hardware on your own without the right approval.
If it's "I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own if I accept the risks of doing so" then that seems more balanced, but also doesn't seem too desirable because you're adding more footguns into the world that average consumers wouldn't want to run into accidentally
> Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue
Without this it's easy to think that this was just a bad actor we could have caught, instead of just a symptom of a deeper issue not being addressed
I'd be more surprised if there isn't a causal link between homelessness and making bad choices - I don't think it's really disputed that there's a causal link between homelessness and crime in general.
Amusingly, a significant fraction of people will read what you wrote as a causal link in a particular direction and agree with it. And a different fraction of people will read it as the link going in the other direction and also agree.
I'd hope that it's not a significant fraction that would get it backwards haha but just to clarify - homelessness/poverty will cause people (on average) to make worse decisions and lower cognitive ability, but making bad decisions or having a lower cognitive ability is not a cause of homelessness/poverty, at least from a statistical causality perspective on a population, individual cases will of course be different
> being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore
This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up
> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow
This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about
Even worse - it's sold to the lowest bidder so they can sell it back to you for profit. This is a perfect example of why GDP isn't a good measure for how well a country is doing - if the kids do it themselves they may learn a bunch and enjoy it and make their lives better, but it doesn't create jobs or profit, so the incentives are against it.
Does anyone know the URL for the actual site? Seems weird to write about a website and not link to it, and searching for it just brings up more articles that don't link to the site
Yeah, the whole area within miles of downtown LA had 3 Teslas, and the area around Redmond WA (where the Microsoft HQ is) had exactly one (and it wasn't even a Microsoft employee, apparently it was someone from Pure Storage). Which is obviously laughable, as my floor of the apartment parking garage alone (Seattle, 3 years ago) had 7 (out of maybe 18 total parking spots), and my floor at the work garage (in Redmond) had way more.
All in all, at this point, I am just curious how they obtained/gathered those specific datapoints. It isn't even a case of "some data is missing", it is more like "99%+ of data in the most Tesla-dominant areas in the US is missing".
A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created his system to replace an older one where they would teach people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was never meant to be used for something like a picture.
I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models they use.
[0]: https://evengrounds.com/services/tactile-3d-printed-models-f...
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