@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

18h

@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?

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

@blindndangerous @serrebi @Jage @jscholes @walkside3 @Orinks Same. I would, however, like a more accessible terminal. Or a better NVDA. Or at least something that doesn't crash if too much text is output to the terminal. But WSL won't fix those things, so just use the default SSH on Windows.

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

@feld @alexisbushnell They can. Depends on if you're using 5G or CDMA or what though, I guess. mybroadband.co.za/forum/threads/simple-microwave-oven-leakage-test-using-wifi.1176492/

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

@alexisbushnell It would only explain wifi issues that happen while someone is using the microwave. If the issues start when the microwave starts, and go away as soon as the microwave stops, then it's the cause.

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

@alexisbushnell Okay, I don't have links to hand, but I'm a licensed ham radio opperator, and this is the kind of theory we learn. The danger from a microwave comes if it is failing to keep the actual waves inside. Microwaves are designed with an enclosure that blocks most of the energy from them. However, you might notice that when you run your microwave, your wifi and cell signal degrades. This is because your wifi/cell and a microwave use similar frequencies. But your wifi just uses a millionth or billionth of the power. So when those waves start leaking out of your microwave, they can drown out the wifi completely. The danger comes from just how much energy is leaking. You can stick a wifi antenna directly in your mouth for hours while it transmits, and nothing bad will happen to you. But if it was putting out the same power of a microwave, you would be cooked. In general, the test I use is this: place your cell phone inside the microwave, and close the door. DO NOT! TURN ON THE MICROWAVE OBVIOUSLY! Now, with the door completely closed, try to call your cell phone from another phone. If it rings while inside the microwave, I'd worry a bit. If it doesn't, I wouldn't. This works because your cell tower is transmitting at low power, and is far away from you. So if your phone can talk to the tower from inside the microwave, it means it's probably leaking more energy than you would really like.

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

@Tamasg Also liking Robert with the 16 khz sample rate. Reminds me of the Toshiba TTS that used to come with old Toshiba laptops, if you've ever heard that one.

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

@alexchapman @jscholes @alexhall @Bri Yup. And when things are inaccessible, blind people should also be policed about our tone, and never ever make frustrated statements about the issue. I hope we'll all remember this standard that we must all be held to the next time an app breaks accessibility and doesn't follow accessibility standards.

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

@alexchapman @jscholes @alexhall @Bri And once again. I only became hostile when people started saying I was doing things that made me a dick and a jerk, rather than actually engage with the issue. Similar to how blind people become hostile when developers tell us expecting accessibility is just too much, and we should stay quiet and deal with it.

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

@jscholes @alexhall @alexchapman @Bri And before anyone says anything: I recognize we are all hobbyists. I recognize this is unpaid work on unpaid software. But I don't give sighted people a pass because of that if they develop inaccessible noncompliant software. Neither do I give blind people a pass if they develop accessible nonstandard software. For exactly the same reasons.

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

@alexchapman @jscholes @alexhall @Bri Fair enough. My issue was never with people needing to learn. That's something I do every day. And I, too, have giant bugs almost every day, in almost everything I do. But my response to not following a documented standard is not "Yeah, I'll see if I can fix it at some point. Not a priority. Anyone who's upset about this is a jerk, and they should really be bending over backwards to work around the issue, and blocking people who complain endlessly that they aren't doing nonstandard things to just make it work makes them a jerk."

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

@Bri @jscholes @alexhall @alexchapman And for the record, I did file an issue to the mastodon.py library you are all using. But was told it's an issue on the client end, not in there library. So this is, in fact, a battle I've been battling for literal years.

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