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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
1mo
@MostlyBlindGamer Yes, my entire afternoon actually got stolen, because I suddenly decided I had to go write an entire mud built around these things, with cool npcs and a world with rules and and and. I think I'm better, now.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@x0 Yeah, I don't have a degree, I think that's the issue. So I just kind of do stuff, even though I've worked in the industry for 20 years.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
I would, of course, guess that about 10 percent of the things I now know about Finite-state machines are wrong. But finding that out doesn't cost me anything, really.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
You can, in fact, learn things from . I asked AI the question "But how can I do this without using an LLM or hardcoding everything myself?" Now I know more than I did before about Finite-state machines. Plus used an LLM to rip an out of a tool I use.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jscholes Unfortunately, we can't do versioning by date, because vibe coding means we're all making 485 releases per day.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jscholes Like polyglot-secure is on 0.0.4 because, you know, two zeros! That means it's really early days. I'll change the second 0 to a 1 when it feels, you know, like a beta. And then the first zero becomes a 1 when it "feels" ready.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jscholes I dunno. Even before vibe coding I pretty much assigned version numbers randomly. I never understood how they're supposed to work. In my head things starting with 0 are alpha/pre-production, and then anything else is really just about how important or big or exciting I feel a change is. It's all vibes, man.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@tomayac No worries! Do you need me to take mine down? I just wanted to get it out somewhere before the advice became outdated. I haven't fully tested them, but I think the new gemma defusion models might be better than the Llama-3.2-90B-Vision I'm currently recommending. Unfortunately none of my toolchains support it, so I'm just waiting for some updates to happen. But when they do, it's likely at least one part of that article will already be out of date.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
A guide to AI prompting from a blindness perspective

This article was originally written for the Google Developer blog. However, it's been a number of months since I've heard from them, so I'm publishing it here.

stuff.interfree.ca/2026/09/05/ai-prompting-from-a-blindness-perspective.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
An alpha version of my polyglot fork is now available. Note that this is alpha quality software, as of yet. The key changes:
* stores credentials in the Windows Credential Manager
* adds engines: LibreTranslate, Argos Translate, Naver Papago, and Lara Translate
* no longer attempts to download chrome runtimes on secure screens
* no longer attempts to download Argos models on secure screens
* makes writing the translation cache thread-safe, and batches writes for speed
* deletes all API keys and config values when uninstalled
* no longer attempts to translate strings that are only numbers, punctuation, or emoji: both for speed, and a tiny boost in privacy
* removes all engines that depend on the NVDACN infrastructure
* removes shared API keys shipped with the addon
* removes someone's private ollama server that was a hardcoded default for some reason

The road to 1.0:
* lots and lots of real-world testing to find the bugs that almost certainly exist
* get API keys for all of the available services so I can test them locally
* build a test harness using GitHub actions that tests all of the services for API changes and ensures they all continue working
* set up GitHub secrets, etc, so I have a CI/CD environment that can actually test all 18 API's

In the meantime, release 0.0.4 is here: github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/releases/tag/0.0.4

Direct download: github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/releases/download/0.0.4/polyglot-secure-0.0.4.nvda-addon

Github repo: github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@munchkinbear Here it is if you need it. github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@NVAccess Yes, the original issue in this thread and pr are mine. Unfortunately doing security right means adding complexity, the authors dislike of the fact not withstanding. I’m hoping this can be resolved without me needing to fork and maintain a version that meets security requirements.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@alexchapman @munchkinbear @FreakyFwoof Hell if I know. Even with a pr the polyglot author flatly refuses to use credential manager.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@NVAccess I'm glad to here this! Although I assume storing secrets in nvda.ini is still not recommended.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jscholes @dhamlinmusic @FreakyFwoof Leaked OpenAI keys are the first thing any info stealer looks for. And all the AI providers will happily let your stolen key rack up thousands of dollars. So they can’t go on disc unencrypted.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@munchkinbear I’m hoping the author does the right thing so I don’t have to maintain yet another repo.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@munchkinbear Yup. I need the addon for games though. So if they don’t fix it I’ll have to fork.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@dhamlinmusic @jscholes @FreakyFwoof The addon store doesn’t do any addon checks other than to make sure the addon is valid and runs, and was developed by the person submitting it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@ppatel @jscholes @FreakyFwoof I know several junk pull requests using AI were filed In July. No idea about issues.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@ppatel @jscholes @FreakyFwoof Recent policy changes maybe? I was told an issue I filed last week would not be acted on without a full debug log.
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