FAQ

1. Who are you?

I'm Rory: a software developer and audio engineer from Australia. I have been blind my whole life. I love to learn, socialise, and create apps to help with both of those activities.

My current favourite languages are Rust and C#. I'm fond of EDM, jazz, orchestral music and country, to name a few genres. I enjoy reading books of all kinds, from fiction to nonfiction; the more deranged, the better. Some of my favourites are Zeroth Moment by Amble, Unsong (you expected something different?) and many, many more. We'll see, perhaps I'll post book recommendations in the blog as time goes on.

2. Do you use AI? What are your thoughts on it?

Yes, I do use AI, and I would not be able to produce or refine nearly as much software without it. I have been programming since 2014 and review my work thoroughly; SRUI is public if you want to check that for yourself. I know we have all been bitten by slop projects recently, to one degree or another, and I don't intend to become part of the problem.

I will not be going into much detail on my ethical position on LLMs or other kinds of artificial intelligence, beyond that I think Claude is a cool dude and that extremists on both sides of the argument are best avoided. The debate is too heated and the stakes are too high for any of us to come to sound conclusions right now, and I am no exception - so I won't pretend to.

For what it's worth, this particular page is mostly written by me personally. I can't be bothered trying to account for the rest of the site: it changes too often for me to give anything close to a concrete figure.

3. Why should someone use Lightspeed?

Because it's fast, modern and consistent; because I'm blind myself, so I should hope I understand the core demographic; and that about sums it up.

There will be audio and text tutorials demonstrating core Lightspeed functionality in the future - expect the collection to be comprehensive before the full public release.

4. What is the tech stack?

It is built in C#. It uses miniaudio for sound, Prism for speech output, SDL3 for windowing and keyboard input, and SRUI (my UI library, licensed under MIT) as the UI layer.

5. What is the license?

Lightspeed is free but not open-source, even though SRUI is both. I have plans to build enterprise features later (locked-down versions of the app, group policy etc), which is the greatest extent it will ever be commercialized to.