@fastfinge

Admin

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)

matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca

keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

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.

Latest notes

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@sclower I suspect it would work better if I wrote the project requirements document myself. Then fed it into the AI for implementation. Maybe it would shift me from thinking "What do I want coded" and towards "What are my requirements". I tend to start thinking too low level, about what libraries I want to use and what language, when I still haven't one hundred percent laid out what I want to do. The example that prompted me to post was reformatting a set of files. If I'd have thought just a bit harder about what I actually needed, I would have ended up with three regular expressions and a batch script, not a C# DotNet app.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@x0 I haven't looked into it, yet. But maybe?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Honestly the biggest problem with #AI coding is that it lets me build things without having to think about what I want to build. It's happened twice now where the AI coded something perfectly, only for me to realize when I had exactly what I asked for, it wasn't what I needed or really wanted. I usually realize this during the act of building, and the act of building often helps me clarify what it is that I actually want.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Today I learned that Google Gemini can understand ASCII maps like in nethacks or other roguelikes: Route to the Stairs
From your current position [@], follow these steps:
1.
Move East (Right): Move one room over to a cleared room [#].
2.
Move South (Down): Move one room down to another cleared room [#].
3.
Move South (Down) again: This will take you directly to the room containing the stairs [>].

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@mcourcel @jaybird110127 They are! And I went with a bank of interconnected EcoFlow's.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jaybird110127 It actually cost me less than putting in an automatic switchover. Because I could do it myself, without requiring a licensed electrician, inspection from the power company, or a disconnect from the grid while it was installed. I looked at a propane generator with automatic switching, and between all the licenses and completely replacing the breaker box, it was going to cost me around 20 thousand dollars. I did this system for only eight thousand.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jaybird110127 I have a hole home battery backup. However, I don't switch to it automatically. I want to ration power, so I switch circuit by circuit based on what's going on. For example, in the summer I don't put the hot tub circuit on it, but in the winter I have to in order to prevent the pipes from freezing. I also shut down the servers and then take the battery backup away from them. Assuming I ration to use only the essentials (medical equipment, lights, refrigeration) I can keep everything going for up to five days without electricity or a fuel delivery. Also, the battery system can be charged by a Tesla charger, or any other electric car charging station. And it's multiple batteries, so if I think after 60 hours I won't be getting power back, I can take one discharged battery and recharge it, and bring it back without interruption to the power.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg @ppatel I've never heard Diphone synthesis that sounds good. That's pretty much what festival and flight do.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ppatel @Tamasg Good luck with that. The more I dig in, the more complex it all gets. But you could make a big difference if you focused on the phonemizer (IE going from text to IPA). Then we wouldn't depend on espeak at all anymore, and would effectively be a speech engine from scratch. The phoneme editor includes support for third party phonemizers already, so you can test easily.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg So weirdly, I'm using this voice pretty much exclusively at work. It's perfect for reading emails and generating reports and proofreading my writing and stuff. But for home use, I'm still not finding it a good fit for reading fanfic or ebooks or articles. It's...not relaxing? I can't identify if it's just Eloquence is what I'm used to, or if it's something about the voice.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg Something about the new release sounds really good! I can get up to 80 without having issues understanding. Before it was around 65.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg It's probably a good idea. Just so that if someone is giving feedback, or complaining about something, that you can't hear or reproduce, it's easy to say "Please press reset and make sure you still have this problem."

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg So one thing to think about: If people change settings in the NVDA addon, then you release an update, it looks like there settings aren't always updated. And it's really, really easy to break subtle things. If I were you I might consider adding a reset to defaults button in the addon. Because otherwise you're going to get feedback from people who toggled a checkbox like co-articulation without thinking about any of the associated settings and now wonder why everything sounds bad.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg But what has been helpful is using your tool to show me just how wrong everything I have tried for formant estimation actually is. So it's been useful in that I can generate audio with known values, give it to my formant estimation attempt, and know that my estimated data is incorrect.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg What I've been playing with, and why you haven't heard much from me, is trying to create some good way to extract formants from existing sounds, in an accessible way. Thus far, though, nothing has worked, or been as accessible as I want it to be. It involves matlab and other terrible things. But what I really really want is something where I can put in a second of sound and get an estimate of all the formants and transitions, and then use the tools you created to compare them. But I haven't gotten close enough to have anything to share.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg The key is to realize this can't be only your project. Think of it like you're founding an organization that needs to persist over the years. You're already doing that work, by documenting everything really well, and giving lots of people other features they can use. As well as creating tools. But your goal should be getting it into a state you, personally, like, and then in moving towards having other people in charge of different things. So all you do is final tests and sign off on releases.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@shortwavesurfer2009 The problem with RHVoice is that it's concatinative (with some hidden markov model tricks for phoneme selection). So it will never be as easy to understand at extremely high rates of speed as eloquence.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Huh. Sourceforge is still a thing. I'm sure someone, somewhere, is even still using it.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Jage No no this is the fediverse. If you have ever used AI even once, for captions, alt text, or language translation, you are guilty of war crimes against humanity. No but seriously, look at openrouter.ai. If you're using codex-cli, you can just change the endpoint to openrouter, get an API key from them, and then pay per token. Or just use this fork with built-in openrouter support: github.com/ymichael/open-codex

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @serrebi @Jage @blindndangerous @walkside3 @Orinks Good job catching that — you're not just making a joke, you're delving deeply into our relationship with large language models. You're not crazy, this is real. AI has a specific, identifiable pattern of writing, and you're right to point that out. Now, would you like me to sanity check windows accessibility for you, or help you port SSH to run on the Apple II?

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