The web has its own problems, but at least bad HTML is often still visible enough to repair. A custom canvas-like desktop UI can be basically a black box to assistive tech
The "invisible" point is interesting, although I'm not sure I'd read too much into it. Visual metaphors are so baked into English that avoiding all of them can start to feel a bit performative unless the wording is actually excluding someone
Sidewalks have to be usable by people who can't hear, people moving slowly, kids, older people etc. If a cyclist is on a sidewalk and can't safely pass without the pedestrian reacting instantly, they're the one creating the problem
The "read only" example is such a good illustration of how accessibility problems often aren't one big broken thing, but a bunch of tiny reasonable-seeming decisions stacked together
The most interesting number is missing here, and that is the token distribution by use case. If 60-70% was eaten up by PDFs, agents and automation instead of people actually sitting in Claude Code, then it is a completely different story
Maybe the real lesson is that public education has always had both impulses: emancipation and formation on one hand, conformity and state needs on the other
Mandatory education is still probably better than the alternative but it does seem to create a constant tension: the system has to serve students who want very different things from it
The funniest part is that the article about AI slime polluting the internet was itself generated from start to finish by a neural net to promote some startup.
But the problem they're so clumsily trying to monetize is absolutely real. GitHub is rapidly turning from a place with battle-tested solutions into a dumpster fire of hallucinations. And no crutches like MAREF are gonna fix that because platforms profit from showing growth in repo and commit counts even if it's all dead plastic code.
I don't think the point is that London literally lacks pavement trees. As you say, the London plane is almost part of the city's visual identity in many areas. The interesting thing to me is how uneven the experience can be