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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
1y
@jscholes Those are for version 6.4 of the DLL, and we use 6.1 because 6.4 has a bunch of changes like requiring registry entries for languages and voices that make it not portable, and several annoying bugs. I believe 6.4 also made a bunch of changes around threading. I already ran into issues with this, because the tts.txt is the manual for 6.4, and we need to use 6.1, the last release before IBM took it over.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes It's original code used C++ as the host, with GRPC for communication. I made it retry because I didn't want to deal with the complexity of the GRPC dependencies in an NVDA addon, I don't really understand protobuffs, and it just didn't feel any faster.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes So the reason I wanted Python was because I naively thought a lot of the existing code could be reused, as well as some of the learnings from IBM TTS, eloquence threshold, and the sonata voices. That turned out to be entirely wrong. The "correct" way to do this would be to write a 64-bit API compatible wrapper for ECI.dll. But that's way beyond my abilities as a programmer, and AI can't help because we don't have the development headers for ECI.dll to feed it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes So with more code updates this morning, the thing I'm noticing is that the more rewriting that is done, the less and less code there is from the initial AI rewrite. The AI solution mostly worked, but was over-complicated and multi-threaded where it didn't need to be. We're slowly arriving at code that is both simpler and works better.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes Hah no worries. Your question got me thinking about what that even means. Like if my collaborator doesn't speak my language, does that mean I should disclaimer the code as AI assisted? If the code started off as entirely human generated, and an AI rewrote it, is it now AI generated? If a human rewrote large parts of what the AI did, when does the code stop being AI? I really don't know.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes Oh, also, I used spell check on the build docs. So I guess that counts. And Titet11 is Mexican and more comfortable working in Spanish, so AI translation was involved in communication and some of the comments. If you want to avoid anything that uses AI you need to avoid this, as it couldn't exist otherwise.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes And obviously the code for the 32-bit addon was entirely (I assume) human written.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes At this point I would estimate that every line of code has been read by at least two humans, and about 50 percent of them modified directly by a human once the AI was done.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes Yup. AI for the initial rewrite, then humans to fix the many bugs.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Edit: This is now released. Say all works, though the audio becomes choppy sometimes. But it doesn't crash.
Right! I now have a copy of Eloquence that works on the 64-bit alphas of , with the following issues: say all on the web doesn't work (it stops whenever the type of element changes for reasons I don't understand), and dialect switching doesn't work (but it doesn't crash everything anymore). If you want to play, you need to follow the build instructions; I only understand about a quarter of this code and have no intention of actually releasing things that are still broken: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium Okay so, for gits and shiggles I looked closer into the state of espeak on Android. The app in the play store is broken. However, you can download an APK from the official github, and that works fine; it's up to date, modern, and has no ads. Why isn't the official APK from the espeak-ng github on the play store? Who knows! It's open source; you'll take your inexplicably broken things and like it that way, darn it! Oh, maybe it's not on the Play Store because it's on F-Droid? Hahaha no! Get your APK from github just like you do for Windows apps; no package management, for you, buddy.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@MikeGorse @mhussain In my case, I know the fix is wrong and bad. But I also don't have time to actually fix the problems right now. So this code is keeping the things I need to work working, until an official fix is released. The problem, of course, is that temporary code fixes have a habit of becoming permanent code fixes.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
dream, mentions of male genitals Well, time for another ! Last night I dreamed that I'd gotten Nintendo's latest console attachment: a jockstrap. Then I played the latest best-seller game, called "kick ball". The jockstrap attachment would sense your leg movements, to detect when you had kicked a player in the balls. Then it would squeeze the players balls based on the strength of the kick. The rules to kick balls were: two players join, standing across from each other. Then they kick one another in the balls until someone surrenders. After I won several games, I discovered that Nintendo had a public leaderboard of players who won the largest number of kick balls games. But they captioned it "Ladies, avoid these guys. They're stupid and their dicks won't work." I think I woke up from sheer embarrassment at that point.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@xogium I take the speech rate up to between 30 and 50 with rate boost. It affects me constantly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@matt Heck, even the Espeak on the Google play store is only updated once every year or two. Windows and Linux are really the only platforms that are maintained. If whoever's in charge of Linux builds stepped away, I could see the updates stopping there, too. Windows is only safe because NVDA depends on it for now. But even they switched to One Core by default. So I can absolutely imagine a day where espeak is just as hard to run as eloquence or dectalk. It would be more legal, sure. But that doesn't always mean easier.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@FreakyFwoof @matt none is way too dry and thin for me.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@FreakyFwoof @matt For me it's either Edward2 or Reid.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@matt Yes, "anyone who cares to" is the key phrase here. From what I understand, espeak's code is terrible because it was written for Risc OS. And the overlap between blind people who know C++ and blind people who want a speech synthesiser kept up to date is going to be vanishingly small. The Espeak IOS app is a perfect example. It hasn't been updated in three years, even though everyone who tries it is aware of the bugs, and many people want it fixed, and it's not really useful in its current state because of the constant crackling. Just because something is open source doesn't mean it will be maintained.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Shower thought: I wonder if any kids today are growing up on espeak the way we grew up on eloquence? Is there a future where espeak is out of date and ancient, and people are clinging to it with the desperation people today cling to eloquence and dectalk? Honestly y'all, espeak read isn't that bad. I just wish espeak was usable on IOS; the available app is old and littered with bugs.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@austinnix Sure did!
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