@fastfinge

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

3mo

@certdoctor @kaveinthran It’s paywalled. So no.

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

3mo

@nick Nah, that Uncle Poser probably doesn't even have a stomach. Loser.

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

3mo

The only phrase I recorded in my dream journal last night: "My band! It's mr. Meatboy and the beef huggers! Yeah. We all have stomachs." I have no memory of recording this, and that was the only context I gave myself. Although: what more could you possibly want to know? #fedidreams

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

3mo

I got tired of how mudlet constantly skips things with the built-in screen reader output, because they're using UIA or something. So I made a thing so mudlet can do direct screen reader output the way mushclient does, probably to the horror of @matt and others: github.com/fastfinge/sral-mudlet

But it works. #NVDA and #jaws and probably other things (though I didn't test zdsr and narrator). It builds on Linux, but it doesn't work on Linux because I don't have a Linux machine with speech dispatcher.

Note: the C code in sral_bridge.dll is AI generated by perplexity computer, because I'm not comfortable enough with C to do it myself from scratch.

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

3mo

@hongminhee @clv1 @patricus I actually did seriously consider some sort of genetic problem. My grandmother (on my father's side) was a French speaker who had the exact same problems learning English. She took dozens of courses over her life, but never actually learned anything. And yet, both me and my grandmother have won awards for writing in our native languages, and had our writing published. My aunts and uncles are all bilingual, but none of my cousins on that side of the family are: they either speak only French or only English, just like me. So that's a strong pattern. On the other hand, the idea of a genetic inability to learn a second language just seems silly. Why wouldn't it make it harder to learn a first language?

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

3mo

@clv1 @hongminhee @patricus Yup! With French, I tried:
* in-person classroom instruction (both in school and extra-curricular): material is often inaccessible, teachers are mixed quality, I eventually lag behind everyone else in the room and get left behind
* total emersion (I live in Canada and have extended family that doesn't speak English): I never manage to take anything in, and just freeze up when addressed directly
* independent correspondence courses: materials are more accessible and I can go at my own pace, but no matter how I study, I can't pass the tests or use what I've tried to learn in real life
* apps (duolingo): accessibility varies. I eventually get pretty good at doing the exercises offered in the app, but that never generalizes in a way that lets me pass any formal tests or use the language

My measures of success are:
* able to have basic conversations in the language
* able to pass Canadian government tests to be certified in the language for career purposes

I have never achieved either of the above. And after eight years of failures, I've pretty much given up.

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

3mo

@patricus @hongminhee @clv1 It also doesn't solve any of the problems of "just learn English": can you afford the lessons? Do you have the cognitive ability to learn two languages? Do you have the time for the lessons? Are teachers and materials available? Are they accessible? Do you have a place to practice outside of the classroom? Also, "let's erase everyone's culture" doesn't sound, to me, like any better of an answer than "let's make one culture king".

I speak as someone who studied French for eight years straight, an hour a day, and never managed to pass a single course. There are people who just literally can't, when it comes to language learning. I'm one of them. Though to be fair, it's almost certainly a combination of the environment, the instruction, and other factors, rather than some flaw innate to me. But either way, I've never found a method that works.

I actually toyed with learning Korean, thinking that maybe it was the gendered nature of French, as well as the spelling, that was the problem. Plus I thought a more regular alphabet might help me. But after eight years of bashing my head against the French wall, I just...couldn't. Picking up a new language course felt like going back to hell, and I couldn't make myself stick with it for more than a week.

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

3mo

@jaz @Kingslayer Also good to know that not all servers keep everything forever. Mine deletes anything older than 180 days. The fediverse isn’t guaranteed to be forever, either.

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

3mo

@Tamasg lol you know you want too. An algorithm that requires more cpu must be better, right?

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

3mo

@amir I hope you and your family are okay!

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

3mo

Thanks, AI diversity proofreader! Because yes of course that’s a thing that exists, sigh. Highlighting the word “Walkman” and suggesting “Consider a more gender neutral term, like walkperson” was sure helpful! Did one of the “anti-woke” boomer standup “comedians” train this thing?Because that sounds like something I’d hear on some cursed Netflix comedy special. Probably just before the “funny” rant on pronouns, and right after the jokes about hyphenated last names.

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

3mo

@midzi @stevenscott Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although for me personally, entire radio automation software is overkill. I'm using this to trigger sounds during interactive in-person powerpoint presentations.

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

3mo

@Seirdy Just wanted to let you know that hf.space should be listed in spammy-subdomains.txt. I'm getting a wave of spam from instances all called "Pleroma Factory" with various subdomains of hf.space. Example: ali525-q.hf.space #fediblock

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

3mo

@stevenscott I messed with it, and it's exactly what I want! Unfortunately I had to read the sourcecode to figure out how it works. So to save you the effort:

When you run the soundboard.exe, no window opens. You need to press alt+control+something, and it will open a "browse for file" dialogue. Here you can find a sound (wav/mp3/whatever) you want to play on the hotkey you just pressed. If you have other hotkeys already registered, soundboard won't conflict with them; you just can't use those keys for sounds. I have alt+control+n for NVDA, and alt+control+J for jaws, so when I press those soundboard just does nothing and they do what they're supposed to.

If you press the key for a sound multiple times, that sound just restarts from the beginning. You cannot pause or stop a sound that's currently playing. So don't press the wrong key!

If you want to quit soundboard, press alt+control+q.

If you want to change the sound on a particular key, you have to open soundboard.ini (a file it makes in the folder with soundboard.exe when you run it) in notepad and change it yourself.

If you want to change the volume of soundboard, or make it use a different sound device, it doesn't matter what you want, because you can't. For simple lads like me, that's okay. But I suspect it might be a problem for all of you complicated radio professionals. LOL :-)

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

3mo

@stevenscott Interesting! I just...kind of assumed that this must exist! Though admittedly my needs are much simpler than yours. I'm just trying to trigger five different bits of audio during a presentation, without taking my slides off screen. I do a history of accessibility presentation frequently for some of our customers, with multiple sound clips going from the Apple II to modern neural text to speech sprinkled throughout to demonstrate how far things have come, and get folks reflecting on how much of modern technology has come out of accessibility research. I can put the sounds directly in the powerpoint, but playing and pausing sound clips from the presenter view with a screen reader is kinda fiddley. So I thought: "Hey, the blind radio guys must have solved my exact problem!" And then you just let me down. LOL

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

3mo

Showerthought: I bet AI is going to absolutely decimate simpler programming languages like autoit. The kind of people who are putting stuff together in autoit will probably just ask AI, and it'll use Python.

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

3mo

@JamminJerry @Jonathan He's the same guy who wrote the thing that puts exclude from defender in the context menu.

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

3mo

@ppatel @FreakyFwoof @kaveinthran @stevenscott Yup. Especially because not all machines run NVDA.

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

3mo

@kaveinthran @FreakyFwoof @stevenscott Please no. I'm using jaws at work and that's what I want it for LOL

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

3mo

@Jonathan Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

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