Matt Campbell

Does anyone know the origin of the phrase "Mother of all Demos" as applied to Douglas Engelbart's famous 1968 demo? Wikipedia doesn't say; it only mentions that the name was retroactive. I'm guessing the origin is Steven Levy's 1994 book _Insanely Great_. Rationale: Other authors write things […]

I remain uncertain on the ethics of using generative AI, and I know I've posted some hard-line anti-genAI takes here and elsewhere. But if one is interested in locally runnable models, IBM Granite 4.0 is worth a look IMO […]

@timbray Your conclusion, "The real reason not to use GenAI", seems at odds with your statement "I’m not a hater." Shouldn't your reasons for not using GenAI lead you to advocate that we don't even use it for coding, even in the areas where it'll probably work? I guess Those reasons for not […]

GenAI Predictions

In which I (probably foolishly) make a bunch of predictions about the future of #GenAI: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/09/26/GenAI-Predictions

I mean, with hardware, a machine is designed once, then it just keeps doing its job until it physically wears out. When will software mature to that point?

Will our industry, the software industry, ever get to a point where it's expected that we write a piece of software, and after a brief period of debugging, it does what it was meant to do, perfectly, forever? Can we ever get past the point where it's just expected that any project will have to […]

On reflection, I was really taking a known limitation of the fediverse, and trying to turn it into a positive and take it to a logically consistent extreme, for the sake of defending the fediverse and rendering Bluesky/ATProto's approach (resource-intensive relays and AppViews) unnecessary. But […]

I've been thinking about how this hacker News comment applies to the way we feel about tech, regardless of our positions on broader political issues: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4539... I'm politically a progressive, but prone to being a tech reactionary. But I know the past wasn't all better.

So it would be like posting to a blog with no comments, where the only replies that anyone, including the original poster, can see are those that come through blogs that the viewer happens to follow. And the poster would get a notification about a reply only if it's posted or boosted by an […]

Hot take about the fediverse: Maybe the solution to the oft-mentioned problem where we don't always see all replies to a post is that we shouldn't be _able_ to see arbitrary replies, except for posts from people that we follow (including boosts), and of course, specific profiles that we view. A […]

I do still like Semaphore, my preferred Mastodon client, much better than the Bluesky web app. I've heard about the Beeskie app for Windows, so I'll try that too.

ATProto - did:web

Decided to establish my #ATProto presence the hard way: self-hosted PDS on my existing server with other services, using did:web rather than the de-facto centralized did:plc. For the latter complication, https://atproto-did-web.lukeacl.com/ was very helpful.

Now playing with Bluesky / #ATProto. Not sure how much I'll post there versus here. My profile is accessible via the Bluesky app at: https://bsky.app/profile/mwcampbell.us I've also got it bridged to the fediverse via @mwcampbell.us Unfortunately, I made the mistake of doing my first Bluesky […]

Is Bluesky gaining any significant popularity among #blind people yet? I know a lot of us flocked to the fediverse when Musk canned the old Twitter accessibility team. Now that Bluesky has gained momentum in the mainstream, and even among some techies who weren't happy with the fediverse, I […]

For the stand-alone use case, Adafruit has a project called Fruit Jam OS which is basically an application launcher and some demo apps (including games, an editor, and an IRC client) on top of their CircuitPython environment. No accessibility for blind users, of course. I'll have to see if I can […]

I ordered an Adafruit Fruit Jam RP2350-based single-board computer (https://www.adafruit.com/products/6200) last weekend, and it arrived yesterday. Unlike most microcontroller boards, this one includes HDMI, USB, and analog audio output, so it can be used as a stand-alone personal computer. At […]

@wingo In case you haven't heard: "Atheists Don't Have No Songs" by Steve Martin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmwAD7nHqaY

Proposal: Let's revive "centigrade" rather than "Celsius" as the English term for the 100-degree temperature scale that most of the world uses. "Centigrade" is descriptive, as opposed to just enshrining some random surname.

@mntmn Sorry, I meant battery-powered, and a stand-alone device as opposed to a Pi with a keyboard connected. So, basically, a laptop without the pointing device or screen.

@mntmn You have a good point. For my main computer at my desk, I do prefer the keyboard to be a separate, replaceable component. So I guess I'm really only interested in a different product category than the Raspberry Pi 400/500: a smaller stand-alone portable computer with a keyboard but no […]

@mntmn Is there a specific reason you're interested in getting EDK2 *with display support* running on the Pocket Reform? Putting resources into that seems problematic to me, because a visual UI in the boot environment will probably not be accessible to blind users, unless one also adds audio […]

@mntmn Prompted by the release of the Raspberry Pi 500+, I wonder if you've ever considered doing a Reform variant in that retro desktop form factor, i.e. the computer inside a keyboard with no pointing device or display. If it were battery-powered like the Reform laptops, that would even be a […]

@TheEvilSkeleton Were you being sarcastic when you said it's a good thing Fedora doesn't package those projects?

@glyph @skinnylatte I'm pretty sure the audiobook version of the first book, which I bought just this year, still had the racially insensitive paragraph.

@skinnylatte Earlier this year, on @glyph's recommendation, I read the Scholomance fantasy trilogy by Naomi Novik: _A Deadly Education_, _The Last Graduate_, and _The Golden Enclaves_. The third book has a hell of a reveal about how that trilogy's fantasy world works. I won't spoil any more than […]

@glyph I must be dense, or I'm missing some context, because I don't understand the point here.

@glyph And of course they forgot to mention that OS X Panther dropped the VoiceOver screen reader, rendering it inaccessible to blind people.

(I am, of course, phrasing this in the style of the article.)

The more confident you are that you would never fall for a con or a scam, the more juicy of a target you are.

Recently came across a 1984 quote about "agents" by Steve Jobs featured on @simon's blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/steve-jobs/

I, for one, don't want an imitation of a "little person" inside my computer, anticipating what I want, or steering me toward what its developers want me to […]

@mntmn What's going to make this module different, and better in some ways, than the others, including the rcore that's shipping in the Next? In other words, what makes this SoC worth adding? Not being skeptical, just curious. Regardless, I'm excited to see more work on the MNT Reform family.