What use is human sounding TTS when your desktop cannot read the contents of windows?
As someone with progressive retinal tearing who's used the linux desktop for 20 years I'm terrified. The forcing of the various incompatible waylands by the big linux corps has meant the end of support for screen readers. The only wayland compositor that supports screen readers in linux is GNOME's mutter and they literally only added that support last year (after 15 years of waylands) and instead of supporting standard at-spi and existing protocols that Orca and the like use GNOME decided to come up with two new in-house GNOME proprietary protocols (which themselves don't send the full window tree or anything on request but instead push only info about single windows, etc, etc) for doing it. No other wayland compositor supports screen readers. And without any standardization no developers will ever support screenreaders on waylands. Basically only GNOME's userspace will sort of support it. There's no hope for non-X11 based screen readers and all the megacorps are say they're dropping X11 support.
The only options I have are to use and maintain old X11 linux distros myself. But eventually things like CA TLS and browsers just won't be feasible for me to backport and compile myself. Eventually I'm going to have to switch to using Windows. It's a sad, sad state of things.
And regarding AI based text to speech: almost all of it kind of sucks for screen readers. Particularly the random garbled ai-noises that happen between and at the end of utterances, inaccurate readings, etc in many models. Not to mention requiring the use of a GPU and lots of system resources. The old Festival 1.96 Nitech HTS voices on (core2duo) CPU from the early 2000 are incomparibly faster, more accurate, and sound decent enough to understand.
>The only options I have are to use and maintain old X11 linux distros myself. But eventually things like CA TLS and browsers just won't be feasible for me to backport and compile myself. Eventually I'm going to have to switch to using Windows. It's a sad, sad state of things.
Gentoo, duvian and all the bsds will keep x11 around until the heat death of the universe. Anyone who doesn't force systemd on their users also doesn't force Wayland. You have plenty of options before windows.
What? This description makes no sense. Nothing changed with at-spi2, that is X.org/Wayland independent. The only think which got added (and is already suppored by Kde) is a protocol to inform the screen reader about keyboard events, as it previously used the "anyone in my session can read my keyboard" capability of X.org.
This is nice, but PDF jumped the shark already. It's no longer a document format that always looks the same everywhere. The inclusion of "Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture) PDF" in the spec made it so PDF is an unreliable format. The aformentioned is a PDF without content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. In practice these "PDF"s are just empty white pages with an error message like,
>"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries."
Maybe in spec, but the damage is done and persists.
The (USA) Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources has nearly all their regulation PDFs as these XFA non-pdfs that I cannot read. So I cannot know the regulations. My emails about this topic (to multiple addresses over many years a dozen times) have gone unanswered.
If Acrobat supports it it doesn't matter what the spec says. Until Adobe drops XFA from Acrobat and forces these extremely silly people to stop, PDF is no longer PDF.
ToS are not enforceable if you don't use an official product feed from Amazon in this case. As shown by thousands of companies providing exactly this service for competitor analysis.
i think they mean the ToS for amazon's affiliate link service, which prohibits earning a commission if your site has price history (a few large and old sites have exceptions)
Ah, from the wording ("pull") I assumed you were using the API. You use your own user-agent to access the site(s) and collect prices then? Do you have any trouble getting blocked doing that? Is it some headless chrome controlled programatically?
I have another site that made some qualified sales, so I can use the APIs.
I also played a bit with scraping, and you can do that quite easily, but if you want to do it at some scale, you need lots of proxies, and quite soon it gets slow and overkill
Cory Doctorow has it right. Since the USA is applying tariffs to everyone everywhere anyway, everyone should abandon their US free trade agreements and get rid of the agreement required local laws that allow US companies to shut down others for felony violation of business model.
> everyone should abandon their US free trade agreements
Do you have a link to Doctorow's argument? On its face, this is incredibly stupid--for most economies, the cost of losing a FTA is well above any of the tariff levels being discussed.
Thank you. Is there a transcript? I'm specifically interested in whether he's making an actual argument around trade, or if he's speaking metaphorically.
> serious in a techno-accelerationist manner, specifically around anticircumvention laws
So not serious as a policy proposal but serious for playing to his base. Got it. Disappointing coming from him. But I guess we all have to tend to our power.
> you have a level of pessimism that would prevent anyone from trying anything innovative
Dead wrong. I’m a risk taker. I wanted to see Doctorow’s argument because I respect him and would love if the numbers allowed for constraining Washington.
Dismissing a stupid proposal for being wrong isn’t rejecting solutions in general. In this case, it’s pointing out that Europe escalating a trade war for copyright reform doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re rallying folks to that cause.
I think it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating.
The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once. Constraining Washington is in their interest as Washington is a malign actor now.
> it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating
Shredding a trade agreement outright is absolutely an escalation relative to tariffs. It’s both more comprehensive and includes raising tariffs.
> The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once
Sure. By escalating.
> Constraining Washington is in their interest
Agree. But there are smart and stupid ways to do it. It’s in America’s interest to constrain China. Nuking its own oil production to raise oil prices, as an extreme example, would be a stupid way to do it. Ends not justifying the means is more than just a moral argument.
The tariffs already constitute shredding the trade agreement. This again is dishonest framing. There's no trade agreement as soon as one side breaks it. The side to break it wasn't the EU.
The parent of your comment is only one of the many here who go by the following scheme:
"WE can dishonor any part of any agreement but YOU have to fulfill all of your obligations according to our interpretation and under our direction... OR ELSE"
I don't know if these are real people or bots but I pity them for their lack of basic reasoning abilities.
Once one side starts removing obligations from themselves they will never stop, especially if the other side keeps being in compliance, it's just an incredible opportunity to corner the compliant side and drain it completely... and then it'll experience the "OR ELSE" part anyway but at the most damaging time and in its worst form.
There's only one choice when an agreement is broken - act as if it never existed while positioning yourself for a fair renegotiation.
He can't actually believe it. He's pretending like he doesn't know how numbers work, and burying it in words. There's a difference between a 1% tariff, a 2% tariff, and a 25% tariff. Just like there's a difference in forcing you to accept anticircumvention laws and forcing you to give up Greenland.
> Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."
> That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.
> The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!
Comparing having any tariff to having your house burned down is pretending that it's not possible just to have your barn burned down. Or to have a window painted over. Or to have to trim the branches on your trees. Which ask is going to push you to the point where you give up your coffee industry? Nah, let's pretend not to know that all of this can be quantified, and that Hungary has any real leverage over the US on its own.
If the US is asking too much from Hungary, Hungary can go to China or India - but China or India can ask for anything marginally less than what the US asked for, or can even agree with the US to ask for exactly what the US asked for. And Europe has cut itself off from Russian resources for ideological reasons, so it can't even take advantage of the fact that Russia's market for its resources is somewhat limited.
He's suffering from applause addiction. China can do what they want because they are not a dependency of the US. Europe is. If anything, with all of his invective about Orban (because Orban is ideologically unpleasant), Hungary is in a better position than Europe as a whole because the Orban government doesn't have the self-destructive Russophobia that the rest of Europe does. Hungary can choose at any time whether to be in Europe or to rely on Russia, and China. That's more leverage than Europe has.
I think they meant he feels like saying “fuck you,” even if it burns down the world around him. That’s a real human impulse. But it’s important to distinguish folks who want to watch the world burn from those floating serious solutions.
He seems pretty emphatic that everything is burning and that we are watching it burn, right now, because it is on fire, presently. Is it your interpretation that Doctorow is a fan of this administration’s actions and wants them to continue? Or that he is advocating for a sort of… double fire? Like lighting fire on fire?
Is there a physical world analogy for what you’re describing in terms of burning/not burning?
Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland. Who knows what dumb reason he'll come up with next?
Under this regime, the US is eventually going to develop into something similar to Japan under Sakoku - a nonfactor in international trade, due to a self-imposed embargo.
Of course it'll hurt former US trade partners (and the US itself even more!). But it's coming either way, whether we suck up to Americans or not. With that in mind, we might as well just do what we want since the US is for some reason voluntarily giving up power over us.
> Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland
And that would be a good reason for tearing up a FTA.
It would cost Europeans more, financially, than the tariffs. Probably tip the EU into a recession without significant deficit spending and ECB intervention. But I think it’s the sort of thing that’s geostrategically worth threatening if your population and political structure lets you credibly do so.
(Note: shredding trade deals to the point that IP stops mattering != ratifying the new thing.)
Also having individual EU member states publicly announcing and committing to ratifying the Eu-Canada CETA within a 1 year time frame like they did for the EU-India FTA would be a significant message that also doesn't require shooting oneself in the foot.
States within the EU may also have to make peace with the need to expanding ties with regional powers like Israel, KSA, UAE, Egypt, etc in a strategic instead of tactical framework.
IK the latter is in the pipeline, the former less so due to electoral risks.
> serious for playing to his base. Got it. Disappointing coming from him. But I guess we all have to tend to our power.
What “power” does this blogger/sci-fi writer have? Who is “his base”? What responsibility to affect meaningful trade regulation did he abdicate when he said a thing you didn’t agree with?
Folks whose pet issue is IP reform, presumably. If that’s your drum, beat it. But it’s good context for anyone tuning in that it’s going to be your beat.
> What responsibility to affect meaningful trade regulation did he abdicate
What are you talking about? Where was this responsibility suggested?
All I did was point out hyperbole for what it is. Doctorow is speaking metaphorically. He isn’t literally suggesting tearing up trade agreements over IP because he isn’t an idiot.
Small countries would be hurt worse than the US if they choose to ignore US IP law. The US has far more IP than they do, and represents most of their market, and possesses unique capabilities to retaliate. Tearing down IP law would also hurt consumers of IP because authors and artists would have limited means to get paid. It's a losing proposition on four fronts.
Indeed, we in the US are about to find out what it means to voluntarily give up every bit of soft power we wielded in the post-WWII international order.
Pretty simple. These are federal government employees and county sherrifs. People in public positions. It's whistleblowing. This isn't any information about the people except in the context of their public employement status. Very clear cut.
If it was their home phone numbers and addresses it might be slightly less clear. But it isn't. Take a look yourself before asking an obvious question next time.
>Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a conflict between the needs of two (or more) parties.
>In these situations, when one of those parties is an "end user" of the Internet -- for example, a person using a web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet -- the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should favor their interests over those of other parties.
Does this matter? I can handle hundreds of requests per day with no issue on a home cable modem connection and my desktop pc running nginx. In fact I do and have since the 56k days. With an actual server or VPS with a big pipe in a datacenter this should literally be below noticing in terms of cost.
I would characterize this response to normal public website traffic as more harmful than the "problem". There's no need to be upset that web spiders are visiting your public website. That is what public websites are for.
Anyway, if you really do want to persue this silly thing start by looking up the ASN the IP is in and go from there. Don't rely on cloudflare to interpret the internet for you. I wrote an offline geo-ip and whois db dump world map visualizer in 2025 and these are the resources I use:
> I can handle hundreds of requests per day with no issue on a home cable modem connection and my desktop pc running nginx.
And what kind of ecommerce site are you running on that nginx? First thing that get overwhelmed by bot traffic is DB. With a tiny one, with low total connection limit and bots hitting less common path like browsing 20th page of product search results, it is really easy to get DoS. I remember having to block Yandex user agent 20 years ago, surprising no one wanted to allocate additional resources so that crawler is happy.
If your ecommerce site cannot handle a hundred requests a day, I'm going to blame the "victim". I think it'd be time to take such a site and put it behind a login for the tens of users of it.
Yeah, I get hundreds of requests if not more per hour for some obscure personal but public servers that have ~0 legitimate other users. I guess once you're in some index that's just that. For an e-commerce shop, a few thousand irrelevant requests per day should just be part of the background noise that comes with being online these days? Cache is king.
>the immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota
If you think this is only immigration enforcement you haven't been paying attention. That was ostensibly what Trump campaigned on. That is not what is happening in Minnesota and other previously safe places. What is happening is a massive terror campaign against all US citizens who don't happen to be the right color. And increasing, against everyone.
As long as you can get the Rust code to compile it's about the same speed. The issue is that rustc is only available on limited platforms (and indeed lack of rustc has killed off entire hardware architectures in popular distros in a bit of tail wagging the dog), rustc changes in breaking ways (adding new features) every 3 months, current rust culture is all bleeding edge types so any rust code you encounter in the wild will require curl rust.up | sh rather than being able to use the 1 year old rust toolchain from your repos.
What good is speed if you cannot compile? c has both. Maybe in another decade rust will have settled down but now wrangling all the incompatible rust versions makes c the far better option. And no, setting cargo versions doesn't fix this. It's not something you'd run into writing rust code within a company but it's definitely something you run into trying to compile other people's rust code.
I've never run into this issue in the wild. It sounds like a hypothetical. Upgrading your Rust toolchain is ridiculously easy, and using a year old outdated toolchain is more or less a philosophical hang up than a technical one.
It's not a hypothetical. I was put off the entire language after it happened to me three times in a row with unrelated Rust written software. This was 1 month after Debian 12 was released (June 10, 2023) and I was running the brand new Debian 12 with rustc 1.63.0 from August 11, 2022. I ran into it with some web serial spidering and epub creation rust software (rust-wildbow-scraper). I ran into with a software defined radio spectrogram visualizer (plotsweep); I actually knew the author from IRC and he was able to edit it to not use bleeding edge rustc features and I managed to compile it. I can't recall the third. In the years since when I've stepped my toes into the "compile random rust programs with repo rust toolchain" and it's been the same.
But as you can see from my specific examples and dates: this is not a hypothetical. rust developer culture basically only writes for latest, having a 1 year old rustc is definitely not enough, and yes, installing compilers from a random website (curl site|sh) instead of my distro's repos is a problem.
Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it isn't a problem. Rust is a rolling release only compiler.
No, it's not. Your own misunderstandings of rust stable vs nightly and editions and using an unofficial installation method for a toolchain are not Rust's shortcomings. Sorry.
Ah, I see you are confused. I am claiming that rust is only for rolling distros because of it's needs for it's unique "official installation method" because of rapid addition of features making rustc need to be upgraded constantly. These facts are not in dispute though one's appreciation of the consequences apparently is.
As someone with progressive retinal tearing who's used the linux desktop for 20 years I'm terrified. The forcing of the various incompatible waylands by the big linux corps has meant the end of support for screen readers. The only wayland compositor that supports screen readers in linux is GNOME's mutter and they literally only added that support last year (after 15 years of waylands) and instead of supporting standard at-spi and existing protocols that Orca and the like use GNOME decided to come up with two new in-house GNOME proprietary protocols (which themselves don't send the full window tree or anything on request but instead push only info about single windows, etc, etc) for doing it. No other wayland compositor supports screen readers. And without any standardization no developers will ever support screenreaders on waylands. Basically only GNOME's userspace will sort of support it. There's no hope for non-X11 based screen readers and all the megacorps are say they're dropping X11 support.
The only options I have are to use and maintain old X11 linux distros myself. But eventually things like CA TLS and browsers just won't be feasible for me to backport and compile myself. Eventually I'm going to have to switch to using Windows. It's a sad, sad state of things.
And regarding AI based text to speech: almost all of it kind of sucks for screen readers. Particularly the random garbled ai-noises that happen between and at the end of utterances, inaccurate readings, etc in many models. Not to mention requiring the use of a GPU and lots of system resources. The old Festival 1.96 Nitech HTS voices on (core2duo) CPU from the early 2000 are incomparibly faster, more accurate, and sound decent enough to understand.
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