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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
1mo
@jscholes Hah. So this all started when I decided I wanted a class where I could create a new menu, add the selection key, a name, and a callback function for each item, then call the menu to print itself and do all the input and error checking, and call the callback for whatever item was chosen. And then it just kept growing. I'm not even at the object graph stage. I just hate most of the text games I mentioned, where every menu looks and acts different, because print statements and case statements are just sprinkled all over the code.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@MostlyBlindGamer @RegGuy And we haven't even talked about localization. Because if I want that it has to be done at the start, or else it becomes a huge impossible thing later.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jscholes If I do it that way, it just means refactoring later, though. And that's even harder and less fun because now you're rebuilding things that already exist.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@MostlyBlindGamer @RegGuy Right, but it would take me just as long to understand someone else's engine as it would to right my own. And none of them do quite what I want, anyway. IE a terminal window with options you select by entering a single number or character and pressing enter. They're all command-based. But if I want sighted players I have to think about output colors. And so that means a settings object. And some people want ASCII boarders ("---------" etc) and some don't. So now we have a bunch of case statements and need to check colour and ascii art settings. And if we're doing that we might as well do sound, too, to have an earcon when prompting for an option and a click when an option is selected. But now that means an audio library. And utilities to think about file paths and including assets. And now we're at 2000 lines just for menus.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@RegGuy Hmmm. I only wish I found that kind of thing fun. But it's just a lot of thinking about menu lists and settings objects and what gets passed where and how and what's global and blah.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Games I love like Warsim, The Wastes, and usurper inspired me to think about creating my own console-based game. Then I wrote 750 lines of code just to make a reusable system for console menus. And realized the save system is going to be another 500 lines, probably. And then the settings system. And after thinking about 2000 lines of code before I can get to anything even resembling the simplest game mechanic, I'm not inspired, anymore. Why is 99 percent of programming doing the least interesting part of any project?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
I've only played a couple of minutes, but Usurper Reloaded looks really and like loads of fun. With all kinds of content for an alpha 0.1. I never played the original BBS , so I don't know how it compares. Run the .bat file to get the console version: github.com/binary-knight/usurper-reloaded/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@clv1 @cachondo @Tamasg @jscholes @FreakyFwoof @pixelate @ZBennoui @amir And also UX researchers, probably. I can't articulate why eloquence is better than dectalk, for me. Neither, I bet, could Andre articulate what makes Orpheus better than Eloquence, for him. So to get something that makes the largest number of people as happy as possible is a classic UX research problem, probably involving massive surveys, rating and ranking of samples, and so on. I work with the kind of people qualified to do this, and it's a unique skill-set in and of itself.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@MostlyBlindGamer But I'm not disappointed that the package description does nothing to explain why the package exists, why it's better, or why it should be used over the dozens of other ORM-like options.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
You cannot just write "potato is being blocked on my laptop" as the subject of your support request, and then just leave it at that. I don't know, either. Knowing computer people though, there are probably seven different incompatible versions of potato, and "potato" could be anything from a word processor to a network diagnostic tool. You thought I was joking, huh? So did I! But googling for potato software reveals an AI tool for biologists, some kind of audio mixing tool, an instant messenger, a text annotation tool, a background transcription tool, and more. All of these programs are all called just "potato". Also, the AI answers above the search results happily tell me, with no context: "Start using potato in your project by running npm i potato. The children components of your potatoes may themselves have components and your potatoes might rapidly look like small tree-like structures of components." I'll...get right on that. Potatoes that look like trees and have children is the one thing all of my projects are missing!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@NicksWorld This is exactly what the Germans said during world war II. If you don't believe Alligator Alcatraz, and the detention centers ICE is running in Honduras, are concentration camps, you are just like the germans who claimed they were "just following orders". Your president is actively planning an armed invasion of my country of Canada, so don't expect any simpathy from me. Let's hope there will eventually be an equivalent of Nuremberg trials, and all of you enabling the modern SS will also get the justice you deserve.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@NicksWorld But I wouldn't be in ICE. This is the equal of Hitler's SS, and these people deserve exactly what the SS Officers got.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@foxyloon @PepperTheVixen Best way to do it is with tweezers and using the fingertips of your other hand to check the alignment as you go.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof Shite.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@rmcpantoja Also, I'd love to hear if and when you release anything!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@rmcpantoja The issue with not using Espeak is that it makes it impossible to have user dictionaries. When we use a neural network, linguistic rules are no longer deterministic. So it might say a word correctly with one voice, at one time, but not with another voice, or at another time. This makes it impossible for us to correct mispronounced words in a reliable way.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@rmcpantoja Yes, the only way to avoid messing with the NVDA Python environment would be to do an IPC server. But at that point, you're really just rewriting SAPI and it seems pointless.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jpellis2008 @FreakyFwoof Check the thread. It was found. :-)
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jscholes LOL nope. They were trying to age up the characters so the teen author wouldn't have to do historical research about what things were like in the 1980's, and could just give them all cell phones and have them listening to real music, rather than whatever medieval chanting they used to do in 1988.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
If your summary starts off "All characters were bornded in 2008 instead" I'm not reading any further. Bornded? Really? I can't even...how do we get to bornded? Born is already the past tense! Okay, but if you didn't know that, I could see borned. I don't like it, but not everyone speaks English, and that's totally okay. But if you're using some kind of translation dictionary, wouldn't it give you the word "birth" and so then you'd write "birthed"? Birthed isn't my favourite, either, but it's fine. It's a real word. I've been sitting here for several minutes trying to figure out how anyone, anywhere, gets to "bornded". I would even accept "gived birth to", especially if your native language isn't English; it's a good try.