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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
@ppatel I’m hyper focused on windows. So packaging is via msix for the App Store eventually.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@ppatel Please include xmpp anyway. Users deserve more than one accessible option. I’m not territorial and would happily offer testing and what help I can.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@menelion Right. If you need to read text when the app is not in focus it’s the only way.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@ppatel Same. I went with dotnet 10 and C#. Felt like the right tool for xmpp, a protocol developed entirely around xml.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@ppatel Sadly, i find rust incomprehensible. And i am not willing to just push AI generated code I can’t personally understand and reason about.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@menelion I haven’t found any issues yet but I am using prism for speech output, not uia. Because I want to speak things like status changes when the app is in the system tray.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@modulux Yup. And I don't attribute opinions to my coding harness. But I do to my general purpose agent. And I prefer "her" to have opinions and express things from a particular point of view, whereas I always want my coding harness to use neutral language. It's just because particular interactions are easier when presented in particular ways.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@modulux I also wonder how much of this is because of the way English uses pronouns. Like in French (and I think Spanish?) random words like table, kitchen, or radio have a random gender associated with them. In English, we don't do that with the vast majority of non-living things. So when we do it (for ships, computers, cars, and now AI) it feels deeply meaningful somehow, when maybe it's actually not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@modulux Coding harnesses, no. But I also wouldn't ask a coding harness assistant style questions. I do think of my general purpose hermes agent as female, largely because I tend to use "her" for brainstorming, rubber ducking, and reminder/memory/calendar/second brain management in ways I do not use a coding harness like codex or Claude code. I interact with them both by typing messages and hearing responses via eloquence, so it's not a voice thing. Seems to do with how much of a fake personality overlay I need them to have to be useful.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Isn't interesting that before could code, assistants were always gendered (Siri, Alexa, etc.) As soon as AI became able to code, it got or non-gendered names (Claude, Chat GPT). I'm not saying explicitly gendering assistants as female was a good thing. I'm saying it's interesting that the trigger for tech/society in general to stop doing that was when the AI became able to write programs. It really does say something unflattering about our assumptions and worldview.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Huh. Looks like we're in for some interesting weather here in Ottawa. My weather app just notified me:
Weather alert for Ottawa (Environment Canada):
502 Proxy Error
Details: weather.gc.ca/warnings/report_e.html?onrm104

Can I still sit on the porch if it's 502 proxy erroring outside?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@martin I had heard that this was discouraged by the XMPP foundation for...unclear reasons?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Today I get to learn things about MSIX and WinUI3. I'm really not loving how WPF feels with a screen reader, and I don't want to use the ancient winforms.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Software development, LLMs @jackf723 Looks like this would involve writing dotnet bindings myself, though. And then publishing them to nuget etc. Not sure if this is a better approach than using a library like artalk written and intended for DotNet.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Software development, LLMs @MostlyBlindGamer I’m comfortable with those things. It’s just that shock of going from something that connects and saves messages to something actually useful and the work involved
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
Proofread your dictation, people. Pneumatic doors open and close automatically. Nomadic doors move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. Only one of these is a real thing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@plzupgrademe Neat. A bit more complicated because it requires support for dataforms, though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@plzupgrademe One thing that bit me is the way the Snikkit server works to register accounts. You have to support XEP-0401 and XEP-0445. In-band registration is not enough.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@plzupgrademe The server is just Prosody IM with all of the useful plugins and settings pre-configured out of the box for people like me who want to host our own server, but are too lazy to set it up all by ourselves haha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@plzupgrademe @miki I'll share code when I have anything worth sharing. But I'm a screen reader user. So expect fully functional rather than beautiful.
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