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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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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
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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 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 dreaming. I practiced 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 hashtag entirely.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@ppatel @amir Yeah, if they have the images, they're some kind of binary blob. AI might still be able to figure it out, but I didn't try too hard because I had versions without the tiffs.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@amir They're basicly RTF files with a bunch of extra nonstandard stuff. Unless you told Kurzweil to store pictures of the pages you scanned, then it gets more complicated. But I didn't, so I never had to deal with that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
AI really is amazing at writing "run once" software. I had a bunch of .kes files, saved by an old version of Kurzweil. I needed them to not be .kes files anymore. AI figured out the file format, wrote a script, and converted them. It doesn't matter if the code is awful, because it did the job, and now it's going straight into the trash, because I'm never going to need to do that again.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@serrebi @amir I find that if I already knew how to do it, AI does it for me ten times faster. But if I didn't already know how to do something, AI just makes a mess that I can neither detect or correct.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@serrebi @amir The problem is there are too many people running AI who don't actually know how to check a script. They just paste the code in and run it, then wonder why AI makes a mess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@serrebi @amir The script wasn't AI. It was written by some guy years ago.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@amir @serrebi If you want to have an item in the windows explorer context menu to exclude a folder from Windows Defender, this bat file will add that: nashcentral.duckdns.org/projects/defender.bat
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@matt @amir The command that builds the bridge is: py -3.13-32 -m PyInstaller --onefile --noconsole --name eloquence_host32 host_eloquence32.py

There's no reason Microsoft should be flagging that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@matt @amir Also, don't look at the build process! That code was handed to me in the repo I forked from. And he got it from whomever wrote the original addon in like 2017. And people have just kept endlessly hacking on what was already terrible. I think the original fear was that the repo that hosted the original addon with the eloquence dll files would get taken down. So someone hacked up a way to download and patch an old version of the addon. But then other people stopped caring about that at some point. So now everything is terrible. If you must build from scratch, just run build.cmd and wait, while trying not to think about it. Hey, at least you know it wasn't written by AI! AI would have written better code.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@x0 @amir Right, but I can't and don't, because neither Eloquence or the API is open source. It's allowed to exist on github, but I doubt any organization that actually manually approves things would accept it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@matt @amir It's literally built with 32-bit python and pyinstaller: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@x0 @amir If I do, that's not happening. Because I can't afford that. Getting a cert Microsoft will accept is extremely expensive.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
@amir @FreakyFwoof Odd. The updater worked here; I reinstalled v10 and auto-updated to v11 and v12 to check.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
@KaraLG84 It’s fixed in v12
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@amir @FreakyFwoof There we go. V11 fixes that. And proves updating works LOL.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@amir @FreakyFwoof Yup. Any accent character is replaced with a space.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@FreakyFwoof @amir Ah-hah! It's CP1252, not ascii! So I'm converting some valid characters into spaces, here.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@FreakyFwoof @amir Okay! The problem is with how we clean accents. Not calling this function fixes it:

# --- HELPER: Strip accents to ensure pure ASCII ---
def clean_key_text(text):
# Normalize unicode to decompose characters (NFD)
# Then filter out non-spacing mark characters (accents)
return "".join(
c
for c in unicodedata.normalize("NFD", text)
if unicodedata.category(c) != "Mn"
)

But why? Are accents actually allowed in eloquence dictionaries? I didn't think so?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@amir The hell? Why is it getting something different, then? I have no other dictionary files, so nothing is getting mixed. It downloads the zip file directly from github. Where on earth is this coming from?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@amir No, it's there in ENURoot.dic: theatre `[.0tx.1yat.0rx]