@fastfinge

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

1w

There has to be a better system than windows and tabs for doing work on a computer. I don't know what it is, but there has to be something. I always end up with fifteen windows with 30 tabs each over two or three virtual desktops, and then can't find anything. Maybe the bad idea wasn't AI; maybe the bad idea was multi-tasking operating systems. Wouldn't life be better if all of our computers were single-user and single-threaded? No more losing windows and tabs! No more background notifications interrupting us every seven seconds! Just sit down, start a task, finish the task, then do something else. The human brain can only effectively do one task at a time. So we should force our computers to work the same way.

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

2w

@dodecahedron Weed smells like skunk the same way the fruit flavouring they use in some candy tastes like actual fruit. You can...sort of get the idea, but they're not really alike.

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

2w

Hey fediverse: my neighbors dog just got sprayed by a #skunk. Our entire yard now stinks, even though it didn't spray here. We can't sit outside at all, and the stench is leaking into the house. Anything we can do to clear the smell quicker? #outdoors #nature #lazyweb #smell #pests #pet

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

2w

@Orinks It does okay. "The vehicle's exterior features a striped pattern in three colors—white, black, and silver—and has a rectangular shape. The front portion also has rounded corners, but it is a quadrilateral. Designed maximum speed 150 km (however, because the carriage etc. are manufactured using metal springs, the vibration is severe), operational maximum speed 110 km. We use a carriage designed with metal springs. This train has powered motors installed in cars 2, 3, 4, and 5 (motor cars), while the other cars have no powered motors (trailer cars). The front is car number 1, and at the very front of the vehicle there is an office with a control console. There is a door separating the passenger compartment and the crew compartment; beyond that, moving forward, there is an open, liberating executive space. At the front left front, opening the door creates a passageway and an emergency exit. To the right of this space there is a partition door, and when you open it you find the control console. All instruments are analog. From this executive office, the back is a guest room. The layout consists of: a main space that includes the cockpit → a space where there are no left/right seats → deck → left/right long seats → deck → left/right long seats → deck → left/right long seats → deck → left/right multipurpose restroom."

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

2w

After much testing, if you use the OpenRouter translation engine in the Polyglot #nvda addon, the best model to use is inception/mercury-2. It offers the best speed (usually returns within 1.5 seconds compared to 8 or 9 for Gemini or local models) at the lowest cost, while remaining better than the offline translation modules available via the chrome provider. It's even slightly better than the online google translate API. The only place it struggles is with Japanese pronouns. In a game it's translated the same string variously as "We have 1500 pieces of experience", "You have 1500 pieces of experience", "I have 1500 pieces of experience", and for some reason "The pieces of experience are 1500." It also once translated the number 87 as 52...for...AI reasons. The number 87 was written in regular English characters in the Japanese text. It just decided to replace it with 52 in the English translation because all AI is deeply weird. But it's fine for playing Japanese and Chinese audiogames/rpgs. #nvdasr

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

2w

@harald I suspect the solution is local AI. The three real dangers here are: first, blind people ourselves getting sold on the idea that only the massive cloud companies can do what we need; they're already using us as marketing, and as a reason not to have regulation. Secondly, blind people being unable to use the tools or get the education required to develop a solution that we control and own for ourselves. Thirdly, the general population being unable to tell the difference between ad-company smart glasses and local-AI, privacy preserving smart glasses. Privacy protecting solutions do us no good if the public just tars all solutions with the same brush. But all of these dangers are social ones, not technological ones, and will take an entire generation to actually solve. I bet that the blind person who could soon develop an actually good accessibility AI is right now still in highschool, struggling through her inaccessible math class, and may well drop out of math entirely before she even gets to university, and thus will never have the chance to create anything.

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

2w

@harald The worse thing is that in the current environment, if you're around a completely blind person, your safest bet is to assume you're privacy is being violated. Because of the backlash, we're unlikely to feel safe to be upfront about it, and yet with disability benifits and services being cut more and more every day, we can't choose not to do it. As an ally the only thing I can really do now is avoid queer spaces, and not attend protests at all.

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

2w

@harald And the way to encourage disclosure is to make it not actively dangerous to disclose. I avoid disclosure whenever I can for my own physical safety.

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

2w

@harald So in the meantime, we should just...what? Not use what's available, while we wait for some charity to make something that works for the poor blind people? Not an option; I need to keep a job and eat. And if you're disabled, "keeping up" with everyone else isn't enough. You have to be better, cheaper, and faster. So if a technology that enables that comes out, you have no choice but to adopt it; your personal opinion really doesn't matter. If you refuse, society asks "Why are you insisting on being a burden instead of using the tools to be indipendant?" So now disabled people get to have our privacy violated, and also have to accept the risk of frequent violent physical assaults from people who don't like smart glasses.

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

2w

erotica

Huh. Can you really have a vampire slayer character in your published novel named "Blaire Winters" who is otherwise identical in appearance, personality, and behavior to Buffy Summers? Can you then give her a friend who is an academic redhead, frequently wears sweaters, and has a slightly jewish name? I am utterly unashaimed that I read trashy novels the way some people watch reality TV. But I...didn't think you could legally just do that? I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that great science fiction is about asking "What if?" and making an honest attempt to figure it out. The book I'm currently reading asks "What if the female protagonists of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer had slightly different names and were all college kids and I could have sex with them?" It then explores every aspect of this important question at length. To be fair, I can't say I'm entirely uninterested in the answer. I just didn't think you could get this close to being self-insert fanfic and still publish your series of three books, even having a professionally narrated audiobook. It's actually really impressive seeing just how much the author can "borrow" without ever mentioning or name-dropping anything from the original source, or that might risk some kind of trademark or IP violation.

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

2w

@JStark @TheQuinbox That makes no sense. I don't want my music in with my books. Nor my games. So I assume you want RTF files, epub files, txt files, doc files all in different apps? Having one app read all those formats would be so strange.

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

2w

@JStark @TheQuinbox Why? Books are books. I want all my books in one place.

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

2w

@Tamasg And were werewolves just really lost dogs? :-)

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

2w

@x0 @TheQuinbox @alexhall @alexchapman audiobookshelf has a concept of sessions. So if your Android is offline for three days, when it comes online, your Android makes an API call telling audiobookshelf "Android's position on this book is this location". If you open the book on your Windows computer, it can check with audiobookshelf, then ask you if you want to resume where you left off last on Android, iPhone, or Windows. Or just resume at the farthest place reached. So you never have to worry about signing your Android online and it suddenly setting all your reading progress back to whatever it knew about two weeks ago or something.

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

2w

@x0 @TheQuinbox @alexhall @alexchapman Right, so now you need to design an entire database, worry about file locking, etc. You can't use sqlite because sqlite has to download your database of file positions, update it, then re-upload it. And if another device is also updating the device, now you have conflicts and other nasty problems. Keepass just ignores the problem. That's why I don't use it, actually, because that exact problem bit me multiple times. So you've got to design your own schema that allows updates based on parcial uploads, allows shared edits and/or locks, and decide how to resolve when two different devices have two different versions of the truth. What happens if one was offline for a few hours/days? Whereas you could just use audiobookshelf, make a single API call when the user pauses reading, and be done. Audiobookshelf has taken care of all the hard stuff, so you don't have to just re-invent a cross-platform version of all of iCloud yourself.

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

2w

@alexchapman @TheQuinbox @x0 @alexhall It's how most commercial open-source offerings work. MySQL works that way. Docker and k8s work that way. Nextcloud and Owncloud work that way. Most commercial apps that use OIDC work that way, a free version without that feature, and a commercial version that has it.

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

2w

@x0 @TheQuinbox @alexhall @alexchapman First because dropbox isn't free. I don't have or want it. Second because dropbox just allows uploading and downloading files. Adding a bookmark to a file would mean downloading the entire file to your device, adding the bookmark, then re-uploading the entire file. For something like keepass that's fine, because password databases are small. But for books, it's worse. For audiobooks, it's a complete non-starter.

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

2w

@x0 @TheQuinbox @alexhall @alexchapman The issue is that won't easily allow syncing your place cross-platform, whereas audiobookshelf will. You can do audiobookshelf without docker if you want: audiobookshelf.org/docs/documentation/install/linux/linux-install-deb

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

2w

@alexchapman @TheQuinbox @alexhall Sure, but that assumes they want to run servers and deal with the infrastructure and support and so-on. If they don't, closed-sourcing ABS support is another option. ABS is an advanced feature, can probably be kept pretty modular, and in no way stops someone who can't afford it or doesn't want it from using paperback to read whatever they want. Whereas guys like us who spend 10 hours a day in our reading app all probably run audiobookshelf, and should pay Quin something anyway.

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

2w

@alexhall @TheQuinbox Agreed. I'd even support doing what some other open source apps do, and selling a closed-source version with audiobookshelf support, and continuing to make everything else open source and free. That'd put you in line with easy reader honestly, where it's free on IOS as long as you don't want cross-platform sync. Support both for audio and for syncing everything via ABS would easily be worth $35 or $40 to me.

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