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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)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@RegGuy @menelion Good to know. I have too many friends who work in the sort of horrible call centers that monitor and time bathroom breaks, so I guess I kind of assume everywhere in support is like that haha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@RegGuy @menelion That's true. And I guess any well-run place (and mine seems to be) isn't going to do nonsense like "Dave answered 68 tickets last shift, while Joe only answered 22! We should put Joe on a performance improvement plan." Any locally owned and run place with there own building filled with racks of servers that sells directly to highly technical customers isn't going to treat the staff like frontline consumer telephone support. Or at least they'd better not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@menelion That was my first thought. But I wonder if places like this measure the performance of the support staff by number of tickets closed. So if they fix a big issue, maybe letting them close a bunch of the related tickets would give them a boost to whatever nonsense corporate performance metrics there managers force on them?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Hey guys who work in a or or provide support for hosting: if I open a support ticket about an issue, and the issue is resolved an hour later without a response to my ticket, what's the Etiquette here? Should I close the ticket as resolved without waiting for an answer? Or does that mess up your quotas or workflows or whatever? Is it impolite to close my own ticket when I notice the problem is fixed without waiting for your response? Am I taking away the satisfaction you get from closing a ticket? Or am I just making your life easier by saving you from dealing with yet one more customer.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
AI Showerthought: Suno is The Sims for music. You can have a lot of fun with Suno, and even share some cool stuff. But nobody would share a livestream of The Sims and call it a movie. In the same way, creations made by Suno are neat, but they're an entirely different genre of thing than human music. Also, some of us have fun torturing our creations in both Suno and The Sims. Because Suno is incapable of saying "No, a modern pop version of that would not work and should not exist". As someone entirely nonmusical, it really does feel like having a musician trapped in my basement that I can torture with all of my impossible bad ideas.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@luiscarlosgonzalez @Tamasg @mush42 @ZBennoui Maybe. But I don't know if they include any of the audio parts required along with onnx.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@vartak @Joshsharp Or you're using a subdomain. Or one of the free tlds. Spammers and phishers have no problem getting domains, so it's pretty meaningless.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@luiscarlosgonzalez @mush42 @Tamasg @ZBennoui It already does for image description. But I don’t know how to get at it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@luiscarlosgonzalez @mush42 @Tamasg @ZBennoui Exactly that has already happened, and I was forced to pay money to strip Camlorn’s custom 3d audio library out of unspoken. Because he’s not maintaining that anymore, and he’s the only one in our community with that particular set of skills. If we as blind people want to write software for ourselves that will last, we have to stop depending on custom low level frameworks and make the things that already exist work for us.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@luiscarlosgonzalez @mush42 @Tamasg @ZBennoui Right but Sherpa onnx might replace that. Or the various Microsoft AI providers. We don’t need to care about cross platform for NVDA. And so few people in this community have the expertise to write our own inference framework, I feel strongly that we really need to use something off the shelf. Otherwise, history will repeat itself, and the person working on the framework will get a job or otherwise be forced to drop the project. I can only think of four blind people who even know rust. And I’m not one of them.And the others all have full time jobs.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@luiscarlosgonzalez @mush42 @Tamasg @ZBennoui But if we make a general framework, aren’t we just inventing sapi again? That’s why I wanted to start by trying to make individual addons. But now that I tried and learned a lot doing so, it’s clear the disadvantages make it unsustainable. Including all of torch in an NVDA addon is a bad idea, it turns out.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@J3317 Nope. It works in every client but tweesecake because tweesecake is a buggy mess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Today I learned why Sonata created a framework to run AI voices outside of . First, NVDA doesn't come with all of the standard libraries. Second, there's no good way of updating dependencies in a bundled addon. Third, NVDA really, really hates it if you include several hundred dependencies in your addon. Anyway, here's kitten TTS, the other synthesizer I wanted to try with NVDA. Unfortunately, the model doesn't support streaming output, so even though it's actually faster than Supertonic, it feels slower when used with NVDA. Also, it takes several minutes to install, makes NVDA startup 30 seconds slower, and freezes the change synthesizer dialogue for about 45 seconds when you open it. It does miss words less frequently, though, and pronounces text better. The ultimate result of my two-day investigation is that even the highly optimized open-source AI imbedded models are not yet ready for screen reader use. Some tree-shaking could fix some of these issues, but it still won't allow for streaming, so it's not worth it. I'd really like to know what Microsoft and Narrator are doing to get the natural voices so snappy. github.com/fastfinge/kittentts-nvda/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@McOi Are you running the latest NVDA alpha? 64 bit NVDA is required.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
It’s in alpha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@amir I think these are problems with supertonic itself. So I don’t know if I can fix them. I experience the same issues on the official Android app.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@amir It's out. Unfortunately, while they sound really good, they sometimes skip words. Not okay for a screen reader haha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Okay! If you're running 64-bit , and you want to play with a new engine that sort of works most of the time, here's the first release. The engine only supports English. github.com/fastfinge/supertonic-nvda/releases/tag/v1
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@tspivey Oh! Why? Doesn't it...oh, never mind. That works perfectly, now. I really, really wish I actually had any talent at this. Writing NVDA addons always makes me feel like a cargo cult programmer.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@tspivey That's much better. synthesizing now has its own thread. And audio ducking works. Unfortunately, say all still doesn't. I just don't understand how or why indexes work. Neither does Gemini. So I'm stuck.