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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
USSR So according to Reddit, the Soviets had something called the Fonemophone-4 speech synthesizer, based on the Elektronika-60 computer, developed between 1978 and 1991. C'mon, and guys. Where's my Fonemophone-4 NVDA addon? All you'd have to do is emulate an Elektronika-60; hardware emulation is already being done for Dectalk and Speech Proes and Keynote Gold, so this is a solved problem, right? LOL JK.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@simon Yeah, it does. Ducking kind of works only sometimes. Using the volume keys on a headset sometimes gives loud blasts of voiceover. Sometimes voiceover changes volumes randomly. When they seperated the notification and ringtone volumes, they messed up TTS audio. Note that this also affects sighted people. I was riding in the car with a friend who also runs the beta but has never used voiceover, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, the maps navigation voice would blast over carplay at full volume. Other times, it would be so quiet he could hardly hear the turn by turn instructions. Sometimes it would remember to turn down his music when announcing turn by turn, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it seemed like the music got louder and the voice didn't. So I suspect this will get fixed, as it's a problem for any and all tts, not just voiceover. @bill
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
@Lino0876 This is Canada. The eight year olds curse better than I ever will.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
Sometimes I hate being a person. I went out to the local Dairy Queen for an ice cream. Of course, because it's hot, the place is packed and the line is enormously long. As I'm standing there waiting for my blizzard, I hear a loud female voice, apparently in conversation with someone else, say "WELL, FUCK YOU! I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT PROTOCOLS!" I would have given anything to be able to make eye contact with this person and nod. Because I also have opinions about protocols. And obviously this means that we're destined to get married and have XMPP compatible children who we can raise to follow XHTML 1.1 strict. Anyway, my inability to make eye contact or figure out how to insert myself into whatever that conversation was obviously cost me my future wife and any chance at happiness. Note: Yes, I'm joking. But still. If you were at the DQ in Riverside South in Ottawa at around 6:40 PM and remember saying this, and are part of the fediverse, please do get in contact. Yes, I'm fully aware you're not, and you don't, and you were probably talking about, I dunno, ambassadors or something. I have a blizzard to drown my sorrows; I'll be fine.
:black_sparkling_heart@fire.asta.lgbt:1❤️1
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
@twynn That’s a historical archive now. Obviously it can’t be changed! LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
Someone should make an accessibility mod for raid shadow legends, just so blind streamers can get all that sponsorship money.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
Does anyone else feel the urge, when you want something strange from AI, to explain and justify why you want it? Like it might judge me for wanting this answer or something.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
@polx I dunno, the script takes two command line parameters. You think I would have at least added a print statement for myself if I call it with none. Or at least reminded myself what order they go in. But nope! Had to just read the code again.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
I contain multitudes. A year ago, I wrote a quick script, "just in case" I ever needed to do the same task again. This year, I need the script I wrote. But did I document it in any way? No, of course not! It just amuses me that I went to the trouble of writing myself a script, and keeping it safe, but not to the trouble of documenting how the script works. Conflicting urges, I guess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@mcourcel I do admire her for not just using suno lol
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
Oops. I think my ffmpeg to remove the video portion didn't work on this one. Sorry!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
If, like me, you're still confused: her name is Tina, she comes from China, and she has many auto parts. I intended to post these back to back, but the alt text just takes me that long! LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
I...what? This woman has...many auto parts in her warehouse, apparently. And engines. At first I thought this was some kind of racist joke! But the internet tells me that Auto Parts Tina is the charismatic face of Guangzhou Xinwangda Automotive Parts Co., Ltd., which has been in business since 2006. I uploaded the audio here so you don't have to click on a YouTube link unless you want to. But if you do, you can find her channel, with dozens of shorts where she sings about auto parts, here: www.youtube.com/channel/UC2SE3wYIgJUQA-pvww7oFrQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@wronglang @menelion @matt @nolan @zersiax Even something as simple as reading logs, establishing what normal values are, then collating and describing periods of time where values go outside of normal could help. Just knowing quickly that at the exact time this one endpoint is called disc io goes way up and database response time goes way down but cpu and ram stay within there normal ranges could help a blind human pinpoint where to start looking.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@wronglang @menelion @matt @nolan @zersiax You’re correct as far as that goes. But audibly representing large amounts of graphical data is still an unresolved research problem. If there was one true proven solution to that part of it, I’d already be pushing hard for the tools to implement it. Whereas AI skips the problem entirely (when it’s not just making things up) by pinpointing and describing the small slices around the problem exactly (“Whenever anyone hits endpoint X, database Y freezes for X time because storage array W is overloaded”).
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@matt @nick Ah, got it. I misread you as suggesting yet another accessible programming language. I think the problem with Quorum falls less out of it being accessible, and more out of it being an “educational” language. Educational languages either never escape into the real world to help students do anything useful (scratch, logo) or they do escape into the real world and set everyone back for years (basic).
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@wronglang @menelion @matt @nolan @zersiax Yes. But this smells like a problem that requires AI to solve. Or every program ever to write better logs. As it is, how do I accessibly reconcile my web server logs, my database logs, and my storage activity, so I can track all the symptoms of an issue? Sighted people get graphs with colored lines from stuff like grifana or whatever. Blind people get four log dumps in four different formats, without even colored lines to help us, and told to just listen to every line read out.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@matt @nick Please no! If BGT and quorum haven’t taught everyone that designing an accessible programming language is a dead end, we are beyond hope. I would far rather blind people vibe code everything and at least get second hand exposure to mainstream tools, and maybe learn something that could help them get a job, than write BGT by hand.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@nolan @zersiax @menelion @matt Yes, seconding log files. AI read 68 megs of logs and helped me fix a database performance issue in half an hour, that I’d previously been debugging on and off for two years. If only I could have read the pretty graphs, the issue would have been immediately obvious.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@matt @menelion It’s not about the language itself for me. It’s about how inaccessible the tools surrounding it are. Debugging is still awkward and terrible. Designing forms still sucks. Profiling is a pita. We can’t test on the iOS or Android simulator last I checked. We have nothing as clean and easy as unity. All tutorials and cookbooks are incomprehensible YouTube videos, LLM slop, ad covered, or all three. AI allows me to use one interface, with one modality, to do the hard bits.
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