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This is Alyssa Rosenzweig. She reverse-engineered Apple's M1 GPU with no public documentation and also developed an open-source Linux driver.
(programming.dev)
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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You...you do know you can like...represent the blinky lights as numbers right?
A fully blind programmer could contribute to graphics driver development just fine. They don't need to appreciate the picture rendition of the math problems they're solving, to solve them.
Yes, I do know that, but it's more complicated doing it all in your head. Hence my curiosity. Also, specifically reverse engineering requires trial & error and visual cues in the output to assess the result of an attempt. Having to do all that with visual aids would be a lot more difficult.
No, you misunderstood me. You're not translating the blinky lights at the correct layer.
Reverse engineering requires trial and error, and graphics output requires a nuanced assessment between the values and inputs expressed by different sources that correspond to mappings ultimately upon a display interface.
A sighted person would perform this work using their eyes, because that's the most efficient set up they literally would have the hardware handy to use.
Computers being math, and the human sense of touch being pretty dang sensitive, means that other peripherals than screens, can represent that nuance required to reverse engineer, or anything else relating to computer code.
The difficulty you imagine in not having your vision to perform a task, would not be a reality or an inherently extant limitation on this hypothetical blind programmer, in of itself.
Maybe (definitely) in the availability and pricing of good specialty peripherals, but that's it.
The term for what you are doing and which isn't something that requires malice, is ableism.
Now the term for making the assumption that someone is blind or visually impaired, just from a critique based on perception of facial features from a picture? That one I'm not sure what to call. Weird maybe?
I am genuinely interested in what's available today on that level - the last I checked, it was still Braille displays, and those were not good for much beyond text.
There are blind programmers, I am very much aware, and I could definitely see myself still enjoying development would I not be able to see. But for myself, I always assumed I would need someone else with normal eyesight to debate the algorithms and help me implement.
Aren't you jumping to conclusions now? I never made any comments about her skill, I expressed - poorly worded, I now admit - my curiosity. But the answer I was expecting was "yes, she is visually impaired but she did all of this anyway", which would be all the more impressive. You do agree it is harder to work on graphics drivers as a visually impaired person, don't you?
Let me quote my original comment verbatim:
Where / how do you read any form of critique into that?