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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
10mo
@andrew @cachondo Yuck. Straight to the landfill it’ll go and still be there in a hundred years.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@andrew @cachondo Darn, I was hoping I could repurpose it somehow.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@cachondo This thing is like the size of one of those old talking calculators, too. So it'll make a big chunk of e-waste.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@cachondo It did! But the batteries are AAA batteries. I can easily change them. So I don't know what makes the device end of life.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@cachondo I only have had two bank accounts in my entire life, though, and neither of them use it. I mean it's obviously giving me a code for...some useful purpose. I just have no idea what that purpose was.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
I was cleaning out my desk, and I found a mystery thing. It's a thing that generates numbers, probably as two factor codes. But I have no idea what the codes are for, where I got the thing, who made the thing, or if I can somehow reset the thing or do anything else with it. Based on where I found it, the thing has to be at least four years old, if not older. Being a blind person, I of course recorded the thing. Do you have any advice about what I could do with my mysterious thing other than throwing it out?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
I'm glad to say, however, that Chat GPT and Meta AI are utterly terrible at MSTing. Though Meta did just start making up its own novel to make fun of. Looks like Google wins at solving this particular problem that nobody has. And I lose, because none of this output is interesting enough for a blog post.

Okay, okay. Here's the first 25 pages from Gemini. Don't say I never didn't not do anything for you: docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRjwE8Gatw9GHqr0TyIAWRZPZbvS3qfrxwKwYkXN3mHTzOjalC5rfLDlvpe-mTj-4cT2GqNCEJJD_VQ/pub
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
It's depressing just how good Google Gemini pro is at writing MSTings of bad public domain novels. I think it actually understands the book Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss better than I do. The jokes it writes for the bots are...about as good as I could've done honestly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
Update: without any outreach, advocacy, or prompting on my part, I received an email from one of the developers letting me know that they're aware of the issues with the desktop application and are working on fixing them. I have updated my original post with the text of the email: stuff.interfree.ca/2025/05/08/jami.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@neurrone I haven't; something about the synopsis didn't grab me. But I can't remember why.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@neurrone Also, remember that the mighty high king of all the land is most powerful character, yes yes. Pitiful man things can never stand against the glorious power of the high king of all the land.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@neurrone Stat blocks start getting better in the third book. She keeps steamrolling over everything; the conflict in the book comes from the danger to her friendlies, and her struggles to develop emotionally and find a purpose in freedom. And her character does develop. But the primary tension is if she'll do the "right" thing or the "logical" thing, rather than if she'll win in combat.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@jscholes Exactly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@jscholes I assume because the gameplay transcripts continued in that way after restart. If I was writing professional code, rather than slapping together a quick script for a blog entry, I could have solved this with Stop sequences: a way to tell the API to prevent the model from generating anything more when the Stop sequence is generated. For this application I could have used newline as the Stop sequence and it probably would have worked. I mean effectively that's what I did, by only passing line 1 to the interpreter anyway. But that would have been less interesting; the AI would have just died and restarted a couple times, then quit. Another technique is to give the AI JSON, and require valid JSON as output. If you don't get correctly formed JSON, you know the AI has gone off the rails and can make it retry.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@remixman @jaybird110127 I dunno, it might be...BUNGLEBEAR!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
@jaybird110127 Yeah, that's why I just left it there. Nothing I could do would be funnier than that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
Can Play Text Adventure Games? Turns out AI does perfectly well at playing text adventures. I hooked Google Gemini 2.5 into the famous text adventure Curses, it became obsessed with fiddling around with the torch, got a game over twice for trying to take the gloves from the potting room, then got fed up and quit. Entirely too relatable. But that was boring, and I really wanted a blog post out of this idea! stuff.interfree.ca/2025/05/11/textadventure.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
I have a to be pile about a hundred books high. I flip through the stack and go "...Nah..." and then go find something completely new to read. Why am I like this? Sigh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
Anyway the word for overly familiar in, you know, a fake kind of way, is unctuous. But my brain went "...oh that word...no, not octagonal...octagonal isn't the word we want, because octagonal is the wrong word, and now we will think of absolutely no other possibilities but the word octagonal, because that's not the right word, so obviously it needs to take up all brainspace forever."
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10mo
Enafore: "What's on your mind? When autocomplete results are available, press up and down arrows and enter to select."

Me, after sitting here for five minutes with a word on the tip of my tongue: "Oh, if only!"