2026-10-02 11:45 UTC
Alphabet spent $44.9 billion on capex in a single quarter and guided up to $200B this year to build AI datacenters. Meanwhile, stock TalkBack has been rebuilding the entire screen traversal tree three times per swipe for half a decade or more.
In just one week of off-hours hacking between dayjobs and other responsibilities, a few blind hackers made Backtalk, a fork of TalkBack cutting swipe lag by 300ms, fixing the braille keyboard rotation, adding raw touch passthrough for games and on-device vision models, bringing back power user features from old TalkBack days, adding a ton of customization, such as per-sound and per-haptic toggles and more ways to flip the braille keyboard, and much more.
Two blind engineers on industry-standard salaries could completely turn this platform around in six months if they paid us. I know what I'm doing, Google engineer gods/universe. But until they decide that's worth 0.0002% of a single quarter's capex, Backtalk exists.
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