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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
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@mm Are you using the official Mastodon website/client? Unfortunately, not all third party clients pick up Mastodon filters for some reason.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@bmcd @silverpill Honestly we're close. The main issues are UI and UX ones. The technical underpinnings are in an okay place for this use-case.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@amir I mean, we kind of are. Eloquence is still something for sale that you need to pay for. The mac addons use code that belongs to Apple. Same for the Samsung and Google TTS addons. I doubt any of these folks care. But it only takes one company to get upset. And Android and Windows both do code signing and a bunch of other stuff; those companies can, and do, argue they help with piracy prevention. To be in a similar position, NVDA would have to start authorizing every addon, and only allowing addons in the NVDA Store to run. I suspect that's where NVAccess is headed anyway, but I worry all the tts addons are pushing them there faster.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@bmcd @silverpill I’m not sure about that. Social sharing is a pretty basic feature.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@silverpill I hope so? But at the moment nobody implements anything similar that I’m aware of.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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The Problems and Successes of Fediverse Comments on my blog

I've been running fediverse as the commenting system on this blog for a while now. Here's how it's been going.

stuff.interfree.ca/2026/08/23/fediverse-comments.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@nick @jstark @lerven @mcourcel Oh, I'm not upset. I'm glad folks can get the features they want, even though I personally am not smart enough to get them done, and too precious about my reputation to just say "YOLO!" and release code I don't fully comprehend.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@nick @jstark @lerven @mcourcel C#, C++, NVGT (don't do that), VB.net, are all compiled languages I'm comfortable in. So any of those, sure. I went with Python for the bridge because NVDA is already in Python itself, meaning contributers only have to know a single language to work on any part of the addon.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@jstark @lerven @mcourcel To clarify, I do use AI to help with my eloquence addon. But just as a time-saver. All the code it spits out is read, understood, and approved by me. If I don't understand some part, it gets removed, explained, or re-written until I do.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@mcourcel @jstark @lerven Yes, it is. It rewrites the 32-bit bridge in rust, and does upsampling. I refused to accept the upsampling PR because it's vibe coded and I couldn't understand how it works, as well as bringing us too far from original eloquence to make me comfortable. I didn't accept the rust rewrite because I can't read rust at all, it was AI coded, and so I can't understand or proof it. Nothing against AI coders; more power to them. But I refuse to release code under my name that I don't fully understand and can't explain if asked.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@amir I'm not entirely certain that being known as "The TTS piracy screen reader" will be good for NVDA in the long run. All it would take is for one company to get really, really mad and DMCA the entire NVDA codebase as "a tool that enables (or tends to enable) piracy". Because NVDA doesn't have to break any laws itself to get pulled off github sadly; the corporations rule the world.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@jfayre Yup. I’m using ergo.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@jfayre apps.apple.com/ca/app/goguma-irc/id6470394620
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@jfayre Goguma
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@jcrabapple Yup. My point is that anything made in the last 10 years will do just fine.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@jcrabapple I built my home server 13 years ago. It’s still fine, and only ever needed one broken hard drive replaced. To be fair it was top of the line back then. But that means today it still handles 4K without issues.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@MLE_online @BorrisInABox I recall thousands of folks on mastodon angrily demanding that Mozilla remove translation when it was first added. And the outcry when they tried to add image descriptions for blind users was so loud they scrapped the feature. I still don’t use Firefox because I do, in fact, want that. So from where I sit Firefox is giving its users exactly what they screamed they wanted.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@feld At least on iOS that’s a default you can change.
My wifi settings screen offering choices off, fixed, or rotating for private address.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@nick I kind of hope not. I’d rather they focus on the delta system decompiler and compiler, fixing all the outstanding eloquence bugs, and getting it to build everywhere. Leave the platform specific code to others.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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@nick I’ll keep eloquence64 going. Once the new engine is fully feature to feature compatible, I’ll rip out the 32 bit bridge and replace the DLL files. My guess is they’ve got a year of work to get there.
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