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Many of you will fondly remember the people and products from Raised Dot Computing. Their newsletters are archived and nicely indexed. What made them unique was that they didn’t just discuss RDC’s products but products from other assistive technology companies as well, including their competitors. Because of this their newsletters are another great resource for learning about the history of blindness assistive technology.
https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/news/

—@DavidGoldfield

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One of the reasons christian literalist ways of interpreting Jewish texts is often asinine is that paleo and biblical era Hebrew did not have vowels. It had root consonants, and the interpretation of a word depended on context, not text. And each set of consonant roots has a WIDE range of interpretations.

Take the word chametz – one interpretation is leaven (yeast), but the root itself means puffed up or inflated, as well as harsh, vinegar, oppressive, and distasteful, and so on. Each root has a full circle of meanings depending on the vowels and tense *you* choose to insert, as well as the topic of the surrounding text – each root of those words also having a wide range of meanings. And those vowel insertions are man-made, not scripture. Not “god’s word.”

Men’s interpretations.

Literalists cherry pick what interpretation they want, and insist that is “THE” meaning, when it is no such thing.

https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/clearing-out-how

#Mazeldon #Hebrew #Passover #Chametz #linguistics #spirituality

—@ShekinahCanCook

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I remember when Aaron Swartz was criminally prosecuted for downloading too many academic journal articles, but, sure, it’s totally cool to scrape everyone’s personal photographs as part of a commercial effort to market discriminatory surveillance tech to police departments.

https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-scraped-30-billion-images-facebook-police-facial-recogntion-database-2023-4

—@maxkennerly

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I continue to be mystified by the sentiment that being a First Amendment advocate means *socially* tolerating people I find obnoxious or contemptible. I keep getting “what kind of free speech advocate blocks people?” The kind who doesn’t deal with assholes when not professionally compelled to do so. The First Amendment isn’t a hair shirt.

—@Popehat

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Good news to read about Flickr and Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

“Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/01/pixsynnussija/#pilkunnussija

#Flickr #CreativeCommons

—@redcrew

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Where can I find users of assistive technology doing whatever they do, but streaming it? I need to make more use of my ios platform as my mobility decreases, but I'm really struggling to find examples of real world use beyond the "here's how to turn it on" support videos. I'm sighted but use text to speech on exhausted days, speaking/hearing well, but not always able to touch. I'd like to see real users triage an inbox or shop online with voice, but I can't find it. Help? #a11y

—@lornajane

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Annette Krop-Benesch (@kropbenesch@ecoevo.social) (ecoevo.social)
@georgetakei@universeodon.com The best way to reduce* abortion is sex education, access to contraceptives, support of pregnant women, health care, and care for children whose mothers can't be there for them. Also general respect for women and real respect for families. Strangely the same people who want to ban abortion are not willing to provide any of these things. Because it's not about saving lifes, it's about controlling women. *And if you really need/want an abortion, it should be safe and legal.