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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
blog
https://stuff.interfree.ca/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
My current project of ultimate silliness is using omnivoice, gemma-4, bark, and ace-step to create a radio station that's entirely AI generated but runs locally without using the cloud. It's super buggy, so not sharing yet. But it can do foreground music, background music, foreground sound effects, background sound effects, and host dialogue with multiple hosts, all positioned with HRTF inside a studio. The hosts can use a browser to look stuff up, move themselves around the studio, and talk to each other. Sound effects and music are cached and reused. No, I don't expect to replace radio. It's more of an art project/way to torture people I don't like with a stream of endless audio slop. Also proof of what can be done without a data center; a modern video card is enough to generate spoken dialogue, music, and sound effects all in close to real time. If you have 24 gb of VRAM you don't need an enormous data center to do everything you could possibly want.

The primary issue is that the longer it runs, the farther and farther the station deviates from the original prompt. It started out as a 24/7 news station. Within 20 minutes it generated and played a song with the lyrics "I go into the kitchen and what do I see? Round and happy, just like me. A potato! Yay!" Followed by one of the hosts saying "Oh my God why do I do this job. Please send help." Note that this is caused by bad sampler settings and poor prompting; a giant trillion parameter model wouldn't do any better than what I can run locally.

If I ever get this thing in releasable shape it'll serve as a kind of ultimate answer to the people who think AI needs nine million data centers. No, it really doesn't. One gaming computer is fine. The purpose of the data centers is to centralize control in the hands of the corporations, not because AI actually needs them.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
This is an omnivoice tts extension for that I hacked together. If you don't know what any of those things mean, you don't need it. If you do, here you go: github.com/fastfinge/omnivoice-sillytavern-extension
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@lynessence Yup! Until apr 19
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
Overheard yesterday on the airplane from Italy to Berlin, said emphatically by a tween boy with a thick Eastern European accent to his elderly female British seat mate: “the purpose of roblox is mostly to play chess. Before this, one could not play chess on the internet.” He then spent several minutes in discussion of his least favourite opening. The Sicilian defence, if you were wondering, because it’s annoying and overplayed apparently. Then he spent a few minutes complaining that too many people online are only rated around 950. All while his British granny sounding seat mate went “mmm” every once in a while. I have no idea if they even knew each other! I was deeply amused.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@nick Nah, that Uncle Poser probably doesn't even have a stomach. Loser.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
The only phrase I recorded in my dream journal last night: "My band! It's mr. Meatboy and the beef huggers! Yeah. We all have stomachs." I have no memory of recording this, and that was the only context I gave myself. Although: what more could you possibly want to know?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
I got tired of how mudlet constantly skips things with the built-in screen reader output, because they're using UIA or something. So I made a thing so mudlet can do direct screen reader output the way mushclient does, probably to the horror of @matt and others: github.com/fastfinge/sral-mudlet

But it works.
and and probably other things (though I didn't test zdsr and narrator). It builds on Linux, but it doesn't work on Linux because I don't have a Linux machine with speech dispatcher.

Note: the C code in sral_bridge.dll is AI generated by perplexity computer, because I'm not comfortable enough with C to do it myself from scratch.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@Tamasg lol you know you want too. An algorithm that requires more cpu must be better, right?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@amir I hope you and your family are okay!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
Thanks, AI diversity proofreader! Because yes of course that’s a thing that exists, sigh. Highlighting the word “Walkman” and suggesting “Consider a more gender neutral term, like walkperson” was sure helpful! Did one of the “anti-woke” boomer standup “comedians” train this thing?Because that sounds like something I’d hear on some cursed Netflix comedy special. Probably just before the “funny” rant on pronouns, and right after the jokes about hyphenated last names.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@midzi @stevenscott Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although for me personally, entire radio automation software is overkill. I'm using this to trigger sounds during interactive in-person powerpoint presentations.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@Seirdy Just wanted to let you know that hf.space should be listed in spammy-subdomains.txt. I'm getting a wave of spam from instances all called "Pleroma Factory" with various subdomains of hf.space. Example: ali525-q.hf.space
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@stevenscott I messed with it, and it's exactly what I want! Unfortunately I had to read the sourcecode to figure out how it works. So to save you the effort:

When you run the soundboard.exe, no window opens. You need to press alt+control+something, and it will open a "browse for file" dialogue. Here you can find a sound (wav/mp3/whatever) you want to play on the hotkey you just pressed. If you have other hotkeys already registered, soundboard won't conflict with them; you just can't use those keys for sounds. I have alt+control+n for NVDA, and alt+control+J for jaws, so when I press those soundboard just does nothing and they do what they're supposed to.

If you press the key for a sound multiple times, that sound just restarts from the beginning. You cannot pause or stop a sound that's currently playing. So don't press the wrong key!

If you want to quit soundboard, press alt+control+q.

If you want to change the sound on a particular key, you have to open soundboard.ini (a file it makes in the folder with soundboard.exe when you run it) in notepad and change it yourself.

If you want to change the volume of soundboard, or make it use a different sound device, it doesn't matter what you want, because you can't. For simple lads like me, that's okay. But I suspect it might be a problem for all of you complicated radio professionals. LOL :-)
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@stevenscott Interesting! I just...kind of assumed that this must exist! Though admittedly my needs are much simpler than yours. I'm just trying to trigger five different bits of audio during a presentation, without taking my slides off screen. I do a history of accessibility presentation frequently for some of our customers, with multiple sound clips going from the Apple II to modern neural text to speech sprinkled throughout to demonstrate how far things have come, and get folks reflecting on how much of modern technology has come out of accessibility research. I can put the sounds directly in the powerpoint, but playing and pausing sound clips from the presenter view with a screen reader is kinda fiddley. So I thought: "Hey, the blind radio guys must have solved my exact problem!" And then you just let me down. LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
Showerthought: I bet AI is going to absolutely decimate simpler programming languages like autoit. The kind of people who are putting stuff together in autoit will probably just ask AI, and it'll use Python.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@JamminJerry @Jonathan He's the same guy who wrote the thing that puts exclude from defender in the context menu.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@ppatel @FreakyFwoof @kaveinthran @stevenscott Yup. Especially because not all machines run NVDA.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@kaveinthran @FreakyFwoof @stevenscott Please no. I'm using jaws at work and that's what I want it for LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@Jonathan Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
For a project I was looking for a soundboard for Windows, where you assign hotkeys to a sound, and they play without bringing another window into focus. I'm surprised nobody has made this, with all of the radio broadcasters in our community. Surely Google is just failing me!
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