User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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.
1
1
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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
2
5
9
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@neurrone I haven't; something about the synopsis didn't grab me. But I can't remember why.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@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.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@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.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes Exactly.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@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.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@remixman @jaybird110127 I dunno, it might be...BUNGLEBEAR!
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jaybird110127 Yeah, that's why I just left it there. Nothing I could do would be funnier than that.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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
3
3
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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.
3
2
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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."
1
0
5
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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!"
1
1
3
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Anyway, could those of you running active instances that don't exist please shut them down? It's confusing. Thanks!
0
1
5
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Well, I can see my fediverse software is in a good and normal operating state.
Total instances: 12831
Active instances: 12842
Nope. Nothing wrong here at all. I'm sure everything is just fine!
2
2
5
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium Should work
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium Right.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium @xogium If your on Linux take a look at Hugo. It has ways of doing the same kind of thing.
1
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium @xogium So the mastodon api is what apps like tweesecake use. It’s not part of the activity pub protocol. I looked at write freely and didn’t use it for accessibility reasons. I write my posts in markdown, save them in a special folder, and run my powershell script to update the blog.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium @xogium Oh got it. If it supports the mastodon API giving the post url would work. But I doubt it does.
1
0
0
0