completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those. keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the #fedidreams hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the #fedidreams hashtag entirely.
@tjolsen Oh, right. Obviously the democrats are intercepting his emails. Because Google is run by radical leftists. I’m sure soon Trump will bring these big tech companies to heal so republicans can get their emails again. LOL
@clv1 I already have. I just keep that account as an email forwarder, and so that nobody else can grab it and pretend to be me, as I did use it for a few years. I didn’t delete my twitter account for the same reason; I’d rather not have bad actors reusing my username. So I just leave accounts inactive with a note in the profile where possible that the account is unused, instead of deleting things.
@jscholes It’s a kinda blowing a kiss gesture that the stereotypical French chef makes when something is done to perfection. And I know right? Samuel Proulx is a pretty common name. There’s one who’s in jail in Quebec. There’s one who makes contributions to the BSD Kernel (I never get his email sadly), and a bunch more.
@tjolsen I really don’t understand it. Like, after you missed several crucially important emails, wouldn’t you, I don’t know, realize something is wrong? And maybe learn your real email address?
I got their mailing address because I get multiple receipts and shipping notifications for purchases they make. I’d phone them, but none of the emails to date have included a phone number.
Someone in #Denver is absolutely convinced their email address is samuel.proulx@gmail.com. Nope! It’s one of my email addresses! Last year I got their license to sell weed in the state of #Colorado, complete with a nice PDF card for me to print out and put in my wallet. Today, I’m getting multiple emails from Best Western that they need to complete their employee onboarding. When I let HR know about the problem, they emailed me back requiring that I provide the correct email address. WTF? How should I know! I’ve tried multiple times to track this person down with no success. Including a snail mail postcard asking them to please stop entering my email address into things, and figure out what their email address is and use that instead. But no luck. If you are, or know, Samuel Proulx who lives in Denver, used to work at a weed shop, and is now about to start a job at VIB Best Western (assuming you upload your documents into the online portal that you don’t have a link to because you gave the wrong email address), please let them know that samuel.proulx@gmail.com is not their email address! And they should stop saying it is on important government and employment documents! Because I get that email! Complete with addresses, licenses, tax info, and other private information! I would like to not get this person’s private life in my inbox anymore.
@mhussain The big eater of vram is ace-step. Everything else could fit. I think it's due both to context length issues, poor prompting, and some syncing bugs I have. Right now I have several different queues for audio (background, foreground, etc). Sometimes they get out of sync, meaning playback sounds off, and the AI's get confused about what's playing where and when.
@sclower@BorrisInABox Thanks to the nature of AI, sometimes asking for a 30 second bed returns a 3 second bed. Or a 300 second one. And then everything is a mess because the clip wasn’t the expected length, and worse generation didn’t take the expected time so now other queues might under run.
@sclower@BorrisInABox Right now I have bugs with the audio queues falling out of sync. I have queues for foreground audio and music, background music, and background sound effects. In order to not have audio under runs I then spawn different threads to generate stuff, and have a manager to control swapping models in and out based on the size of each queue. Then each queue streams audio to a mixer function that does spatialization and so on. Unfortunately when clips end up being different lengths than expected the entire thing gets out of sync. Once I figure out a solution I’ll launch a live demo stream and release source code.
@andrew@mcourcel I had cloned a filesystem but forgot to change the uuid. So Linux was mounting the wrong one. Then when I modified fstab to not refer to the boot drive by uuid I discovered I had a duplicate in mdadm.
@mcourcel Or even find someone who could read it properly if they were willing to try. Anyone capable of reading that clearly is probably capable of just fixing it themselves.
Say what you will about AI. But if it wasn't for AI and my phone camera, I would be spending the next two days completely reinstalling a server. I just don't have sighted help that's techy enough to read me enormously long lines of console output accurately or usefully. Whereas with repeated photos of the monitor, AI was able to clearly explain to me what was happening, provide a solution, and get the thing booting again, all while keeping in mind that I'm blind. Here's the final solution after typing multiple commands and taking a photo after each to send to the AI, as an example:
"There are two problems visible. 1. Duplicate mdadm.conf entries mdadm: Duplicate MD device names in conf file were found. mdadm: Devices UUID=98a5d349:4d3b2a28:50d96e87:a6ad0c4d and UUID=98a5d349:4d3b2a28:50d96e87:a6ad0c4d have the same name: /dev/md0 /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf (inside the initramfs) has /dev/md0 listed twice with the same UUID. This is a duplicated entry bug, and it's preventing mdadm from assembling the array at all. 2. Result: /dev/md0 doesn't exist, kernel gives up ALERT! /dev/md0 does not exist. Dropping to a shell! Because mdadm --assemble --scan refused to run due to the duplicate config, md0 never got assembled, and the initramfs can't find root and drops to a rescue shell. We're in an initramfs shell. md0 isn't assembled, but the underlying disks (xvdb, xvdc, etc.) are there. We can manually assemble the array and continue booting. The BusyBox ash shell is limited. These commands should work. Type them carefully — you won't have screen reader feedback. The full single command I'd suggest typing: mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/xvdb /dev/xvdc /dev/xvde /dev/xvdf /dev/xvdh /dev/xvdi Then press Enter. Wait 5 seconds. Then type: exit Then press Enter. That tells the initramfs to retry finding and mounting the root device. Since /dev/md0 now exists, it should mount it and boot should proceed. If it worked, the system will continue booting and you'll be able to SSH in shortly."
@freya Nope. It just wouldn’t run at all because the models won’t load. Acestep is the worst, with gemma4 a close second. Omnivoice and bark can get buy with 12 gb of vram.
My current project of ultimate silliness is using omnivoice, gemma-4, bark, and ace-step to create a radio station that's entirely AI generated but runs locally without using the cloud. It's super buggy, so not sharing yet. But it can do foreground music, background music, foreground sound effects, background sound effects, and host dialogue with multiple hosts, all positioned with HRTF inside a studio. The hosts can use a browser to look stuff up, move themselves around the studio, and talk to each other. Sound effects and music are cached and reused. No, I don't expect to replace radio. It's more of an art project/way to torture people I don't like with a stream of endless audio slop. Also proof of what can be done without a data center; a modern video card is enough to generate spoken dialogue, music, and sound effects all in close to real time. If you have 24 gb of VRAM you don't need an enormous data center to do everything you could possibly want.
The primary issue is that the longer it runs, the farther and farther the station deviates from the original prompt. It started out as a 24/7 news station. Within 20 minutes it generated and played a song with the lyrics "I go into the kitchen and what do I see? Round and happy, just like me. A potato! Yay!" Followed by one of the hosts saying "Oh my God why do I do this job. Please send help." Note that this is caused by bad sampler settings and poor prompting; a giant trillion parameter model wouldn't do any better than what I can run locally.
If I ever get this thing in releasable shape it'll serve as a kind of ultimate answer to the people who think AI needs nine million data centers. No, it really doesn't. One gaming computer is fine. The purpose of the data centers is to centralize control in the hands of the corporations, not because AI actually needs them.
Overheard yesterday on the airplane from Italy to Berlin, said emphatically by a tween boy with a thick Eastern European accent to his elderly female British seat mate: “the purpose of roblox is mostly to play chess. Before this, one could not play chess on the internet.” He then spent several minutes in discussion of his least favourite #chess opening. The Sicilian defence, if you were wondering, because it’s annoying and overplayed apparently. Then he spent a few minutes complaining that too many people online are only rated around 950. All while his British granny sounding seat mate went “mmm” every once in a while. I have no idea if they even knew each other! I was deeply amused.
@rommix0 So I do actually talk in my sleep, even when not recording. Yeah, sometimes it makes sleepovers interesting. Like the time as a teenager I shouted in my sleep "Your fuzzy socks are disturbing me!" while in a camp cabin full of guys. They wouldn't let me live it down for the entire week at camp, and I spent the entire week finding random socks left in my space where I would be sure and find them.
