As someone who has been shocked by the ICD, lying on the floor seems like a bad place for it, since the floor is a hard surface.
You're gonna jolt and spaz and scream.
According to my GF, the screams are quite terrifying.
One of the orderlies or admissions people (I cannot remember which) at the ER laughed once when it happened to me. I don't think he was being a douche; more likely it was the whole unintentionally laughing at inappropriate times thing that happens to a lot of us, including me.
Once the shocking started, the first thing I would do is lie back in my recliner in case there were more.
Surprisingly, I don't think I've ever been shocked while vertical. It's always been in the chair, bed at home, hospital bed, or stretcher. I have no explanation for that; maybe a medical nerd knows if there are reasons why you're less likely to be shocked while vertical, or if I've just managed to beat the odds on that one.
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
“All lives are the same length, Lazarus. They're all just one moment long. It’s the moment we’re in. The rest is memory or imagination.” — Dora, in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
Inappropriate / unkind, perhaps. I did make at least one solid friend over it.
She saw the post on here, emailed me, and I ended up talking for over an hour with an understanding person who has lots in common with me and gave me some things to think about.
I could have done without the email from someone else who said that "people in Gaza are suffering worse than you and they aren't doing what you're doing, so get mental help."
The absurdist humor of my impending demise making the front page of hackernews and being debated by the denizens thereof is not lost on me.
I was quite moved by the blog post and the brief explanation. That someone found the time to talk to you is good. Even though we don't know each other, I think of you.
Well, sharing someone's deeply personal post on here could be seen as unkind
or inappropriate. I get the sentiment; I can agree with it to a point.
If someone else wrote a similar thing on their blog, I wouldn't submit it here without asking.
But I also think frank, honest, and open discussion of this sort of thing is a net good, which is why I published my post,
and why I don't mind it being here.
Well, as much as I'd love to tie one on today, my drinking days are over. I'll probably smoke a bit of weed though. That, and chill with my loved ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44251900 just thought I would leave this comment here in case it makes you reconsider. Don't let sunk cost fallacy make you commit to something so permanent just yet if it turns out this therapy is within reach after all. Either way... Good luck. Hug your loved ones tight.
> and getting all your semi-public records and social media activity immediately
> scraped by shady companies and sold to anybody who expresses any interest.
Public content on the Internet should be scrapable. That's what public means.
The fact that my reddit posts were publicly available never bothered me. Even if they were going to be used to train some LMM.
What does bother me is reddit locking up my posts and making exclusive deals with Google to train Google's LMM.
Preventing scraping isn't good for the average user; it is good for the company that wants to take content created by said user, lock it up, and sell it to their buddies.
> Public content on the Internet should be scrapable. That's what public means.
Not necessarily, especially if you want to expose some relationships in one direction while hiding the other.
Imagine your government creates a CNAM-like[1][2] system that lets you enter a phone number and see their owner, to see who is calling you and whether a number you're given is legit. However, they do not want to let you see a person's phone number just by entering their name.
If there's no captcha, an unscrupulous actor, registered in the Seychelles and unconcerned with your country's laws, can just scrape all possible phone numbers and offer a "reverse lookup" service.
In a way, the number/name records are public information, after all, the government lets you query them without authentication, but in a way they aren't, because you're only permitted to query them in a certain way.
Variations of this problem have appeared many times, particularly across Europe, usually with company numbers, property deeds and such.
And the very angry email that I (probably unwisely) just dashed off to support@hcaptcha.com:
"So I've been trying to sign in repeatedly to set the accessibility
cookie since last night. Every time I click the submit button, I get
the useless error message "an error has occurred, please try again".
My friend, who shares my roof and my static IP, got banned from
hcaptcha's accessibility service last year for being too smart to be
blind. And I suspect you all have banned our IP and not just his
account.
For the record, my static IP address is (redacted).
Please let your bosses know that I plan to pursue legal action against
hCaptcha and/or amplify the truth to destroy its reputation in the
public square. I will also be reaching out to websites who utilize
hCaptcha, letting them know that the captcha provider they employ is
refusing to provide reasonable accomodations to blind people.
Whether it be with the force of law or the force of satyagraha, your
bosses are going to get a message and we will win.
But the WEI proposals
were never about protecting from bad actors with device farms. They were always about guaranteeing that a certain ad company who also makes browsers can always push ads to users, thus maximizing value for shareholders. Protecting from device farms was just the bait.
I wonder whether talking about "looking at the javascript console" somehow made them think that this person cannot possibly be blind, since how could a blind person "see" the JavaScript console? (But "having my screen reader read the content of the JavaScript console to me" is a bit of a mouthful.)
You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me.
For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner.
Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way.
Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest of sighted culture.
And then once in a great while, we get condescended to for it. There's a really good example of this in the second season episode of DS9, The Alternate.
```
ODO
It was a dilemma for me. I'd never
seen anything like these creatures
either.
MORA
"Seen" isn't really an appropriate
description. He had no eyes per
se...
ODO
I was only trying to describe it in
simple terms...
MORA
(ignoring that)
He had never perceived anything like
us before... go on...
```
I can pretty much guarantee that every blind person has had a condescending, patronizing douche canoe like Mora in their life at least once.
Even as a sighted person, "look at" is often metamorphic - you can interview an expert over the phone and say you looked into the subject even though the only looking was around the phone number.
When someone recommends me an album or artist I "take a look" at it: I listen to it. Though now that I think about it, I wouldn't say that in my other languages.
This is how use of language concealed aphantasia for so long. When you use a word in a context similar to how another used it in that context there seems to be a presumption that the subjective experience is the same in that context.
Given how we learn languages and words based upon encountering them in contexts, it makes sense that terms that we use in outwardly similar contexts reflect the subjective experience that each of us relate to those terms. We don't have access to another's subjective experience so I can see how it would encourage the assumption that we all perceive things the same way.
There might be many undetected variances in perception akin to aphantasia lurking in us waiting to be discovered.
Here's the thing. We're talking about people who are the accessibility team for hCaptcha. They should at least have a figleaf of an understanding of life for blind people.
The other problem we have is that online companies tend to be accountable to no one. Short of law suits, my friend who got banned from hCaptcha for "not being blind" has no recourse, because nobody is accountable.
I suppose one could say "observed" as a sense-neutral alternative to see / hear. Might be a worthwhile language shift, similar to using "they" as a gender-neutral alternative to "he" and "her".
We usually talk about the inclusion benefits of neutral language. It can also be valuable by making specific terms more meaningful when used appropriately. If I know you usually say "they", then when you choose to say "he" I get more information -- there's a clear gender expression. Similarly, if you usually say "observe", then when you say "see" I know we're specifically talking about vision.
Of course, it's an awkward transition. It's hard to get used to "they/them" and saying "I observed a delicious aroma" sounds like a robot impersonating a person.
It's notable that the majority of the people who would be "included" by the change to "more inclusive" language aren't offended in the first place. The sentence "I am watching TV" literally offended no blind person, evah. It is only sighted do-gooders who have the spoons to be offended by nothingburgers on our behalf.
We're too busy dealing with stuff like, ... I dunno, landlords who refuse to rent to us because all they have is second story units and we might fall down the stairs. Yes this actually happened to me in 2000 or so, and I don't have enough faith in human intelligence to believe that it isn't happening today.
We're too busy being oppressed by captchas and websites made by frontend devs who seem to care more about chasing JavaScript framework du jour than they care about accessibility.
We're busy struggling against a built physical environment which has been designed for cars and not people.
The supposedly non-inclusive language of "I watched TV" or "I looked at my browser's JS console" aren't even on our radar.
I coined the term "Sapir-Whorf Stalinists" a few weeks ago to describe the sort of people who think that monkeying with language will magically make things better for marginalized groups.
Here's Lee Atwater talking about the Southern Strategy:
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger,
> nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires.
> So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff,
> and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes,
> and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a
> byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut
> this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh,
> and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
It took me a while to realize that the SC people were talking about in this thread was the Python Steering Committee. I thought it stood for Star Chamber.
Someone brought up the topic of JS and screenreaders upthread.
Screenreaders can work fine with JS. The pain points are:
1. Use of JS to reimplement standard HTML widgets. This has broken my screenreader more times than I care to remember.
2. All of this user-irrelevant garbage, like the dialogs, the social media buttons, and so forth.
I remember a few years back trying to pay my electric bill. Yes, I was
using a JS-capable browser. I couldn't actually pay my bill, but there
were plenty of "follow us on Facebook" and similar.
Like seriously, folks, I just wanna send you money.
Really, this should even be something I could do without JS.
Another example: we do online shopping at https://www.fredmeyer.com.
Their website is absolutely terrible, with all of the busyness, some of it user hostile.
Seriously folks, I just want to give you money for product, not follow
you on facebook.
Some sites get it really, really right. I play chess on lichess.org.
That site requires JavaScript. And I don't see any way that it could
possibly be avoided. But it works beautifully with my screenreader.
It's snappy too, even under Firefox on a Raspberry Pi.
I used to be a hard core "screw JS" guy. I've softened my stance, because
I know it can be used correctly and to great effect.
