@RandomFire @doubletap I like your grandmother's sense of humour, if I may say so.

@gtbray I disagree. I'd trade a hundred of these days for... A working FM system in public buildings (one which does not just woosh). I'd throw in another fifty days for appliances for smart apps which work with braille. I'd toss in the rest of the year for better braille on Android, and the ability to review maps online with braille. BTW, none of these cost much money, but they all cost just a bit more than symbols.

@JamminJerry I don't know if you've had experience with the older stuff, but... You say "it only had to deal". Believe me, if Dragon, or ViaVoice (the input product), had fans or two people talking, it would have made an unholy mess of it.

@JamminJerry There's a point where you get diminishing returns out of the large model, it takes a while to process. Having said that, though, with stuff where there's tons of music in the background, or with many different voices, I do think it does a bit better and may be worth the time.

@JamminJerry This is particularly good for us with hearing impairments, but is also very nice for everyone who wants to take notes. Also, it's even bbetter because if something sounds weird, you have access to the recording to go back to. We've come a very long way since Dragon.

@adam @kd6cae Yes, but death is certain. I was reading a few very old wills some months ago and they often started "being well aware of the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death". Illness, I would also argue, is certain. Most people don't die in car crashes, they die of an illness. That has been true since the beginning of human history, it just takes longer to die now. My point here is that your choice isn't, "do what people call healthy things and live forever" or even "do what people call healthy things and live a long time, then die rapidly"", or "don't be healthy and die". That isn't the choice. You're going to get sick and die anyway, whether you maintain "healthy habits" or not. Indeed, maintaining healthy habits might actually make your life worse in the end, note the nursing homes for evidence. All the deprivations you impose on yourself, all the medications you take, all that... those will not save your life because nothing will. Therefore, what we as people are left with is to balance. It is worth asking, all the time, "is this worth it?". Is activity/treatment/refraining from activity X really worth it? Of course, that is often impossible to say. To strike exactly the right balance is impossible because we don't know the future. We can, though, be more balanced than "YOLO", or "I'll do anything to keep myself healthy". Both of those are rather unbalanced. Our society, at least publicly, is in more danger from the last than the first.

@kd6cae @adam I wouldn't go that far, but would keep in mind that medical people, through no fault of their own, have blinders on. If you spent seven years, or however long it is, focusing on a specific definition of physical health; and if your identity was bound up in encouraging that definition; and if your funding came from encouraging that definition; and if you saw the results of ignoring that definition without seeing the bad results of trying to meet it... If all those things were true, you would probably have blinders on as well. They're not terribly smart about life, in my experience, some of them are not particularly smart about medicine. Having said that, it's called "medical advice" for a reason. I would respectfully suggest that one always be sure that what's being done is your own idea, and that you are balancing the relatively minor part of living that's called "health", with the major part of living that's not. It's worth keeping in mind, in my experience, that we are all under sentence of death anyhow, and that the vast majority of us are also sentenced to be ill. To try to avoid that is foolish, because impossible. To reasonably mitigate it, though, is a decent idea.

@BorrisInABox Thanks very much, that's most helpful.

@BorrisInABox Any particular version of HDSDR, if I may ask? Also, any tips if you have a minute?

@pixelate If it makes you feel any better... Actually, why should it make you feel better? I mean those statements that "misery loves company" or "you are not alone" always make me feel worse, someone else is suffering and it's supposed to make me happier... Anyhow, leaving aside how it makes anyone feel, keyboard users are also left higher and drier with Android than with iOS. I rarely see a control I can't swipe to using the keyboard with iOS. I often see it in Android. Having said that, I can't agree more with all you wrote, the keyboard thing is just an addition.

@WeirdWriter Oh, I see. I'm sorry, I thought it was more or less published. By beta reader, I understood that it was basically done and going out with minor changes, if any. I apologise, obviously, if it still had even a small way to go, I understand your annoyance.

@WeirdWriter One question, and you can feel free to ignore it, of course. Has the ship not sailed? It seems to me that everything that is published is going to be fed to an LLM, secretly if not openly. The LLMs themselves make it impossible, or almost impossible, to get specific training data out of them, so proving that it has been done is going to be hard, let alone proving who has done it. Note also that the folly of designers is training LLMs on the output of others, so it may be even true when someone says "we never fed that particular book into our data". My difficulty with your reader is that he's not actually reading. If you wanted to get an LLM's view of your work, why not skip the middleman and feed it to an LLM yourself?

@pixelate There comes a point where the question gets really simple. "Is it worth the effort?" This is not specific in any sense. It's not specific to the Mac and not specific to computers and not specific to technology. It's a question a blind person has to ask/answer about a huge number of things. Yes, it is possible, but is it worth the effort? Is it worth the frustration? I hate using these UI terms, but is it worth the friction? Many, many things about living blind are like that. The question has to be asked and very often, the answer is no. The problem here is that it is actually getting harder to live as a blind person, at least with tech, without that frustration/friction. If we look at all the OS products, they are "accessible" for certain definitions of that word, but they bring about a huge amount of friction. This is different from the situation, say, twenty years ago, where there was often complete unusability. Is it better now? I honestly don't know. Some things are better, but some are both bad and getting worse.

@GamingWithEars @WeirdWriter Well yes, but isn't that the whole point of having a beta reader? If you have trouble understanding, surely that means that other people may have trouble understanding the same things, and therefore the author would want to know about it. Other people won't be feeding it to an LLM to understand it, they will want to understand it themselves, it's just the point of having someone read it and report back.

@WeirdWriter I agree about the folly, but don't agree that it's a sign of not caring, it's just a sign of laziness.

@pixelate @doubletap If there were a stronger word to use, I would use it.

@pixelate @doubletap Oh come on, nobody believes that, saying it is just a way for people to meet their goals. Organizations want money. Certain blind people want to deceive themselves. Parents want to think that their kids aren't as toast as they are. Some people, in all of these groups and more, just try to avoid negative emotions altogether. I want to live in reality, but see no reason to grab other people and put them there if they want to live in fantasy. Reality will, I think, show them the difficulty soon enough.

@Bruce @DavidGoldfield umm, how are you out a hundred bucks if I may ask? Can't you just call your bank if the vendor doesn't make it right?

@Bruce Keep in mind that the whole thing is more or less a retail holiday at this point. I would remind you of the mother's day founder's annoyance. The other aspect is that sort of thing stinks generally. Having a mother or father's day is the same as having a food or water day. If you don't have the person, the day doesn't matter, and if you have the person, one day is of no value in celebrating them, you implicitly celebrate them every day. It's like Valentine's day. This sort of thing can't be celebrated on a schedule, you might as well celebrate oxygen on September 13.

@masukomi Exactly so. Thing is, if you take the easy on-ramp method you end up suffering for years, assuming you can get it done at all. If you take the time to get started with the difficult tool, your suffering is limited to the getting started. Nobody mentions that to blind kids and their families because everyone, from the kid to the parent to the teacher to the school system, has different incentives for not bothering while the kid is young. When the kid is older, it's no longer anyone else's problem but the adult, who is left to either pick another thing to do or do the thing in a much more difficult way. Learning braille as an adult is usually more difficult than doing so as a child, I may say, mainly because finding a teacher and material is a PITA. Youtube is a step forward, but not much of one, and the only remote teaching platform I know of costs a ton of money and tends to break quite often. It's an embosser which produces braille as well, but what good is that when it's so often in the shop?