@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.

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

10h

@silver_huskey I think even that's going to become less clear as more and more big corporate websites start requiring age verification. Just because your account needs some sort of manual approval is already not really triggering people to think "There's a human in charge somewhere". They're just thinking "Probably some exploited and underpaid contractor in another country has to verify my identity somehow."

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

13h

@Tooden This has been my frustration with fedi for a while. The majority of us, and I include myself in this, are tech nerds. And tech nerds are historically not good at communicating with non-tech-nerds. But social media is all about communicating! I think this is the primary reason fedi struggles to grow. We make it seem harder than it is, and we kind of blow off people who want to have conversations about things not related to our specific interests. See the way folks interested in sports get treated around here: mostly, they get yelled at and told they shouldn't like sports at all because it's corporate or bad for the environment or politically distasteful. Anyway, let's talk some more about the 47 hard drives I just purchased for my 12th server.

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

@pwloftus Me, too! Sadly, my admin is a bit of a jerk. But every time I change instances, the guy is still here! LOL

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

@heluecht I didn't get into the other software part of things. I was more concerned with helping them understand that racist harassment from users on another instance isn't something they just have to deal with and move on, or if it turns out that it is, they should move somewhere better. Last I heard there admin had been convinced to use the FediNuke Blocklist. seirdy.one/posts/2023/05/02/fediverse-blocklists/

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

@treehugger They were brought over by political activism and a fandom space. This is the sort of person who doesn't even own a computer and just uses their phone; they would've just glazed over one, if an explanation was even offered, so they could get on with the things they actually came for.

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

@Fragglemuppet They talk more about politics than technical stuff. And yeah, it sort of is, but it's much less visible on mobile. Also: remember Myspace Tom? Just because some username and profile photo is shown to you, that doesn't mean they're someone you can interact with. At least not on the big corporate social media.

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

Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on #mastodon for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they were having, and they were on a smaller server (not naming it for anonymity), so I suggested contacting their server admin about the problem. I was surprised when they answered "Dude nobody at big companies reads those reports. It just all goes to AI or whatever." It took some actual convincing to get them to believe that the server they're on does, in fact, have a living breathing human admin who can be talked to.

Anyway, folks, support your #fediverse server admins and moderators. With money, where you can. They're almost certainly getting messages from users who think that reporting things to an admin here is exactly like reporting stuff to Facebook or Google. IE: screaming at a giant faceless entity who's never going to care or do anything about whatever your problem is.

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

@quanin @Rosalyn We were always the other way. If we got a tape that was already rewound it was a half-hour celebration, because it meant that tape was completely new and had never been played by anybody before, so it would actually look and sound decent.

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

@quanin @Rosalyn Oh, true! Well, children: back in the day, whenever we wanted to watch a movie, we had to walk up hill, both ways, in six feet of snow, to go to a place called Blockbuster, so we could pay for a large rectangular object that sometimes contained a movie that we could only keep for two nights. Usually, though, it was broken. Anyway, when we finally arrived, a minimum wage employee would be rude to us while charging us $500 in late fees for the last movie we forgot to return, and then telling us they didn't have a copy of the movie we actually wanted to watch, so we'd have to watch American Chainsaw Ninja Robots XXVI instead. When we finally got the movie home, we'd have to engage in a ritual called "rewinding" in order to appease the Gods, so that they might allow us to actually watch it.

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

@mcourcel @Rosalyn Yeah, but the dog won't get you high. And you can't just buy one on Amazon. Whereas both of those things are true for the fun kind of Whippets.

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

@quanin @Rosalyn Right, but something sold as VCR cleaner is gonna be even older than I am.

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

@mcourcel @Rosalyn Sheesh, Martin, and I thought you were one of the cool kids LOL. Whippets are the little cans of Nitrous Oxide (IE laughing gas, like you get at the dentist). They're sold for making whipped cream. But I don't think anyone has ever used them for that, even once.

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

@Rosalyn At least in my high school friend group, poppers was just another word for whippets. But it's possible this is a Canadian thing, or that my friends were morons.

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

NVDA 64-bit migration breaking older voices, very long (2 posts)

@TheQuinbox @pitermach That's what I've already done: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/

However, if we had an API compatible 64-bit DLL rapper, it would mean eloquence can be used in other 64-bit apps, and the dlls could be a drop-in replacement without updating the addons at all. As well, having a bridge means the "copy config" button breaks the addon, because executables aren't included to run on secure screens. As well, it's possible (if NVDA hard crashes) to get in a place where the eloquence bridge is already running, tries to run a second time but fails, and because of threadsafe issues causes the first bridge to also crash.

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

RE: 🔒, NVDA 64-bit migration breaking older voices, very long (2 posts)

@jscholes @serrebi @pitermach @amir The code is based on the Threshold addon, rather than IBM TTS, so that probably explains the difference. I didn't use IBM TTS because the need to support every eloquence version IBM or Eloquent Technologies ever released, thought about releasing, or had a dream about one time, massively overcomplicates the code, when 99 percent of people only want 6.1 anyway. Pull requests are welcome, but I've successfully scratched my own ich, as they say.

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

NVDA 64-bit migration breaking older voices, very long (2 posts)

@TheQuinbox @pitermach Happy for a pr on the eloquence64 repo if you can increase speed at all. What we really need is a DLL wrapper. Bridging in NVDA comes with a set of annoying issues.

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

NVDA 64-bit migration breaking older voices, very long (2 posts)

@pitermach Python itself intends to drop 32 bit support in the foreseeable future. I think they should have offered two releases in 2026 and pulled the switch in 2027. But either way the transition is not optional. It has to happen in the next couple years. And I use eloquence64 as my daily driver. It’s fine for the most part. The main limitations are NVDA and windows ones. For example my bridge is unsigned so it can’t run on secure screens. And for the record it’s based on threshold. 99 percent of the code is human written, and the other one percent has been reviewed and debugged by multiple humans. I didn’t just shit out an AI conversion and call it a day.

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

It used to be that setting stream quality to audio only meant twitch would never play ads. Disappointingly, they’ve changed that recently. Now they just play the ad video and all, in spite of your settings.

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

It's time for another #fedidreams! Get ready to be underwhelmed. Last night, work assigned me to recover the mythical legendary sandwich. It was always named in full, in my dream. Apparently, the mythical legendary sandwich was originally created by the Romins, but when Rome was renamed to Italy, all of the maps had to be updated, and the secret hiding place of the mythical legendary sandwich was lost in the process. Can you tell I passed every history class I ever took? To assist me on my search, I was partnered with a set of North Korean triplets named Gold, Silver, and Bronze. No, I don't know, either. But lucky for me, anyone who is holding hands with two out of three North Korean triplets can fly and teleport. I'm sure all of you already knew this rule, but it was news to me! It turned out to be really useful, though. After teleporting to Italy, we began flying over the coast. This was surprisingly less comfortable than you would expect; I was just...dangling by the hands between Silver and Bronze. Also, it was cold and damp! When I woke up, I did notice that I was lying on one of my hands oddly, and it was a bit sore. Anyway, after a few hours of uncomfortable flight, we discovered an unpopulated island with a cave. Upon landing and entering the cave, we...discovered the mythical legendary sandwich. It was right there. So we quartered it into four and ate it. It was okay. And that's how the dream ended: four people hanging out in a cave, eating a pretty average sandwich. It was cheese, onions, mayo, lettuce, and onions on sourdough bread. I have no idea where any of that came from! And that's why I haven't been posting these lately. If you found this one unsatisfying, imagine how unsatisfying all the ones I haven't shared have been.

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

@milkman76 @RachelThornSub You have yet to present a single one. Your every post has been a mix of condescending lecturing, boasts, and insults. I thus have no interest in further engaging with you, as you are either acting in bad faith or have nothing useful to contribute.

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