I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he’s a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn’t the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).

They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I’m proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn’t been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he “died” felt too passive). It sucks that he’s just a part of history now.

A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.

Adding the solution to your post is a classy move, and I approve

I dual boot Fedora and Arch. Fedora was just a fluke because it seemed like one of the most mainstream distros, and I was a Linux noob.

I liked Arch though because the Arch wiki is so useful for a beginner to learn from, even if you’re not on Arch. At first, Arch seemed too complex and difficult for me, as a beginner, but when I kept finding myself at the Arch wiki when troubleshooting, I realised how powerful good documentation is. I installed Arch with a “fixer-upper” type mindset, with the goal of using the greater power and customisability that Arch offers to build a config/setup that worked for me (learning all the while). It was a good challenge for someone who is mad, but not quite so mad as to dive into Gentoo or Linux From Scratch

I had a similar experience. The video that helped me had pretty poor video quality compared to some of the other results, so I only turned to it when I was burnt out from basically every other video being useless for my task. Props to all the Indian educational YouTubers

Ah yes, because the rest of the world is so great at responding to online mis/disinformation.

I already have it in a virtual machine: the past ✨

I feel like there’s a joke in here about Linux users propensity to distrohop being like a ritual reenactment of switching to Linux for the first time (without having to defile one’s computer with Windows again)

Okay, but consider that the ultra-rich technofascists are a group that has had a disproportionate impact on the continued pillaging of the climate. They aren’t just opportunists wanting to make the most of the fragments of society that will remain after climate disaster, but people who have been working to bring that scenario into fruition because it’s profitable in the short term whilst positioning them to take even more power.

I cannot emphasise enough that they want this, and that this ideology goes further back than the current wave of them. The reality of climate change is unfathomably dire, but I hope you understand why it’s necessary to resist these people as part of whatever climate resilience we can build. I’ll probably be dead before shit really hits the fan, climate-wise, so my goal is to do whatever I can to support the people who come after me. If those techno-assholes are allowed to inherit the fragments of society, the entire planet is even more fucked

(tangent to your question because someone already answered) I think that courtroom stenographers (people who type up what’s said) use special chording keyboards. I’ve also been to a few events where there has been someone transcribing things in real time for accessibility purposes, and they also use a cool looking chording keyboard. It takes some learning, but the max typing speed is way faster than any conventional keyboard could manage — which is why skilled people use them for transcribing stuff

A brand that I’m aware of that does them is Charachorder.

Just adding onto the good answer you already got, but the thing that made this click to me was understanding that if you’re not port forwarding, you’re limited in the connections you can make to other peers. Specifically, you can only connect to peers who are fully available. Whereas if you’re port forwarding, then you can connect both to people who are limited, and to people who are fully available.

I imagine you would get faster download speeds if you were port forwarding, but my impression is that this mainly is a factor for seeding, which matters more if you’re on a private tracker that requires a certain download/upload ratio; it’s way harder to keep that ratio above 1.0 if you’re limited in the peers you can connect to.

I wonder if this might have been why they shared it. Sort of like “We’ve got an idea that we think is good, but it also clearly needs work”

I hadn’t noticed this until you pointed it out, but yeah, their logos are fire

I’m just an internet stranger, but I’m proud of your growth. Many people in similar positions would’ve spent those years digging themselves deeper, because confronting the cognitive dissonance is not easy (you may well have spent some of that time digging deeper, but you made it out, and I’m glad you’re here with us)

That’s a pretty facetious reply. Lemmy has tons of ways of curating your feeds and that’s one of its big strengths in my opinion.

This isn’t about seeing the occasional bit of NSFW material (which I still see occasionally on my Lemmy feed, despite having blocked a bunch of NSFW communities). This latest Instagram debacle involved people’s entire feeds being full of not just pornography, but also heavily NSFL gore stuff.

However, the real crux of this issue is clear when I imagine how I’d feel if a problem like this happened with Lemmy — I’d be unhappy, but I wouldn’t flee the platform, because I trust various admins to not bullshit me about what had happened and what was going to be done in future. Meta has burned through any goodwill it might’ve once had, and the only thing that’s transparent about them is their bullshit

Lmao

So the thing is with Oxbridge is that they are tremendously overhyped, in that much of their prestige comes from the fact that they’re self perpetuating prestige machines at this point — they have their pick of the best and the brightest, from all over the world, and their name holds a heckton of power in the research world too, resulting in somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy

Regarding lecture recording, I know that this wasn’t commonplace before COVID; disabled students who needed this for access reasons had to wade through a lot of nonsense to get that, even after it was officially a part of their support plan. Something I found very silly was that there would often be people(non students) who were hired by the disability service to attend the lectures and record the lectures for students with health problems that prevented their attendance, on a per student basis. It was an administrative nightmare, especially for the disabled students. They apparently pulled their shit together and did a proper rollout of lecture recording during COVID, for obvious reasons. People I knew were salty that it took a global pandemic to lead to change, but hey, progress!

Generally lecture materials such as PowerPoint slides would be available on the virtual learning environment (which I assume is the case for recordings too), but I think a big reason why you can’t find stuff online about this is that lectures are fairly “meh” quality, especially compared to other universities’ (now that I’ve seen the quality of undergraduate teaching from multiple angles). I speculate that the lack of availability of study materials from Oxbridge is because anyone who graduates has an incentive to continue to perpetuate the prestige that they’re now benefitting from, so it would be a bad look to be sharing lecture materials. I genuinely mean it when I say that if you could have complete access to the English literature section of the online materials, you’d be disappointed. No doubt you’d find the syllabi and materials useful, but I wager you’d be surprised to see how mediocre some of it is

Unfortunately, the real meat of the teaching at Oxford or Cambridge is something that’s far harder to record or share, and that’s the tutorials system. This involves a small group (2-4) of students discussing problems or essays with a tutor, usually in college. The tutors are often academics who are renowned in their field, so it’s really cool to get such in depth teaching from them. Tutorials would be weekly, give or take, and they would typically involve writing a multiple page essay for each one (and also do other work that was typically less frequent and more centralised). The pace of it was insane, and whilst I think the pressure can be good for output, I always hated how I never had time to go back and review or rewrite old work based on tutor’s feedback — the pace was just too frantic.

I fucking loved the tutorials though, partly because the tutor for my subject at my college was one of my favourite people I’ve ever met. I always came out of a tute feeling like I’d done a workout, but for my brain. I never really felt like I understood the material until I’d done the tutorial on it (ideally the tutorials are meant to be after the lecture content on them, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way, and you had to scrap by). The discussion aspect of the tutorials were especially key in the humanities, because it forces students to argue their viewpoint.

That brings us back to you, and the question of how one could emulate the effects of a tutorial (which would be tricky even if you had all the material). Even if you had a list of tutorial essay questions that you could work through, they’re not the kind of thing that are marked with a rubric. Even the official grade boundary guidance for exams are frustratingly vague, because they rely a lot on the experience of the tutors. Without someone like a tutor to mark your work and push your understanding in the tutorial after, it’s much harder to do that kind of in-depth learning. That being said, a key thing is producing something, I think. It was a hellish rhythm, but weekly tutorials were great at making me produce something. It was super uncomfortable at first, because I didn’t back myself enough to really try to put my own opinions through in my essays, but by being forced to argue my side, I improved. Even if you don’t have someone to mark work/discuss with you, when you read a piece of literature, try to formulate your own ideas and write them down. If you need some prompt style questions to get you going, then search for resources for particular texts online.

The discussion aspect of tutorials can also be replicated somewhat just with a reading group of motivated and intense nerds. Being able to access or create something like that may not be easy for many, but the format isn’t the big part — having external viewpoints to challenge your own is.

I can ask a couple of people who I know about if they have any old downloaded resources, even if it’s just exam question papers (because I realise that it’s useful for calibration purposes if nothing else). So I can ask the right people, what’s your current age or education level, and are there any particular areas of English literature that you’re interested in?

God, that’s a horrifying thought.

Reminds me of the Medtronic ventilators that got hacked to unlock them when Medtronic insisted on similar nonsense during the pandemic

I possibly disagree — I’m a part time wheelchair user (as well as other disability related devices/aids) and I’m always fascinated by how dynamic and relative the concept of “accessibility” is, even if we’re only considering the perspective of one person. For example, for me, using my wheelchair often means trading one kind of pain for another, and depending on specific circumstances, that might not be worth it. Being disabled often forces you to get creative in hacking together many different solutions, balancing the tradeoffs such that the “cost” of using one tool is accounted for by the benefits of another. I wish I could recall some specific examples to share with you, but I have seen friends be incredibly inventive in using regular items in a context that makes them into accessibility devices, if that makes sense.

This is all to say that expensive hardware, learning curves, unpleasant tradeoffs like friction of wearing — all of these things are core to my experience of most accessibility devices I’ve ever used. For any prospective accessibility device, the key question is “given the various costs and inconveniences, are the benefits of this thing worth it?”. Even without knowing much about this specific device, I would wager that for some disabled people, it absolutely would be net helpful.

That being said, you raise a good point, in that “accessibility” is often used as marketing hype, and in its worst form, this looks like disabled people’s experiences being exploited to develop and sell a product that doesn’t actually care about being accessible, so long as it has the appearance of such for investors. I’m not saying that’s what this product is doing, but certainly I am primed to be wary of stuff like this.

Even besides the exploitative instances that I allude to, you’re right to draw attention to existing products on the market. It’s possible that some disabled people struggle to make use of devices that would be “good enough” for most (and maybe these people are who this new device is aimed at helping), but with accessibility stuff, it’s far too easy for well-meaning people to jump to making new gadgets or tools, instead of meaningfully examining why the existing “good enough” solutions are inaccessible for some. A specific example that’s coming to mind is someone I met who had a super high tech prosthetic limb that was so hilariously impractical compared to her existing options that this new one literally never got used. She said that it’s a shame that such an expensive bit of kit is made functionally useless by much more basic designs, but she’s learned that excited engineers are rarely receptive to being told about the practical problems with their new devices.

TL;DR: i think your instinct to be cautious about invoking accessibility is wise, though my own caution comes from a different context

Edit: I watched the video and I feel less dubious of this device after learning that this particular project arose following an email from someone who was mute and would find something like this useful. It helps that CharaChorder’s chording keyboards are established (albeit super niche) products, and this project is less about a fancy new device, and more like “chording keyboards like ours allows for faster typing than any other method, with training. Maybe this means it could be an effective text-to-speech input method. Let’s find out”.