VoxAdActa

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

Okay but why didn’t they have a usable option before killing off the stuff people use?

They didn’t fucking think about it. It literally never occurred to them to consider all the third-party work that went into being able to make their site actually usable. They just assumed that, obviously, the official app is fine, and people would just “adjust”.

The conversation they had with the mods of r/blind was a complete joke. It just never once occurred to anyone that people with accessibility needs use Reddit at all.

The following is a dramatization

“Who in your company has accessibility certifications, and which ones?”
“… uh… well, of course we do…[texting their boss what the fuck is an accessibility certification???] I just… [ding! A what? TF is that?]… am not allowed to answer that… … right now…”

“When was the last time you had a third-party accessibility audit, and who performed it?”
“…oh, we… totally… had an accessibility audit, just… like… you know, just recently! And it was performed by… uh… [texting Who the fuck does accessibility audits???]… uh, you know, that big company, from Canada… you’ve probably never met them… [ding! What audits? The fuck are those? I don’t fucking know!] I’m just… not allowed to say right now.”

it’s hard not to just allow it in my mind to just to consider it as another form of intelligence.

If it makes you feel better, that’s probably a biological response that everyone has, to varying degrees. I heard the phrase “textual pareidolia”, meaning that if we see text that looks human enough, we’ll automatically put a human face on it and want to treat the author like an actual human. Even though it’s just a way of creating sentences that mimics human language, and has no form of “intelligence” whatsoever. It has no idea what it’s saying and does not understand the meaning of any of the words it’s producing. But our lizard brain is still fooled because it sounds good enough. It’s like seeing a face in the clouds or Jesus on burnt toast.

Even though I know what it’s doing, and can “break” it by making it sound very not-human without too much effort, it’s still hard for me not to end a chat session with “Thank you, have a nice day!”