User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
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
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@MostlyBlindGamer Right. I admit that my problem was a bit underspecified. But if I'd handed you, a real human, a hundred lines of Python that does a bunch of string replacements and uses some regular expressions, and said I wanted to run this on my iPhone, your first reaction would probably not have been "turn it into a web app". Actually, your first reaction would have probably been "so install iSH and stop bothering me" LOL.
2
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @arfy I mean technically, the NVDA API has changed. But nobody uses the new functionality. I honestly wish I still had the code for sjams that me and @cachondo worked on years ago. It was my favourite incarnation of that concept, and would probably still work honestly. Just needs NVDA added.
2
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
AI is both impressive and ridiculous. I have a little command line Python script that does some basic text reformatting stuff for me. I wanted a version that I could use on my phone. I gave Gemini the script, and asked it to make "a version of this program with the same functionality that I can use on my iphone, but with a textbox and some buttons instead of command line options." I expected it to rewrite this extremely simple Python file into JavaScript or something and give me an HTML file. Or if it wanted to do things the hard way, maybe swift. Nope! It installed uvicorn and requests and fastapi and a bunch of stuff and then rewrote the python script so it could import the existing functionality into the web app it just built. To be fair, it worked perfectly the first time, either on the command line or as a web server. But the original script was about 100 lines of Python! Rewriting it in JavaScript would've been much faster. And not required a reverse proxy and a bunch of deployment work. I guess it took "the same functionality" way too literally and decided the best way to achieve that would be to run the exact same code. When we talk about the impact of , nobody seems to be talking about the impact caused by running AI generated code for years to come. If I didn't know better, and was just an AI vibe coder, I'd now be running an entire docker and reverse proxy setup for something that could be done in the browser with a hundred or so lines of JavaScript. That's honestly a tiny impact individually, but over the course of hundreds and thousands of people and companies, it's going to add up.
4
22
26
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@arfy Yeah, sadly it seems like the client was abandoned and not open sourced.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof @nick @TomGrant91 @rlegowski1 I also can't write a bot that offers realtime transcription without an SDK license. The fact this feature does n't exist means I absolutely can't use TeamTalk for anything professionally, or for anything at any of the charities or NGO's I work with. It's personal gaming use exclusively.
0
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof @nick @TomGrant91 @rlegowski1 Well, I'd love to have propper encryption without paying thousands of dollars for an encryption license. And the way it does account management and public/private keys is just bad and silly. I'd also love to see support for joining a room via text chat and not voice, and the ability to have push notifications for text messages in various channels on mobile. Lastly, it's more than possible to do 3d audio on IOS and Android. Why this hasn't been done is inexplicable to me. The 3d code hasn't been touched since it was written, and still needs direct audio. Oh, and optional server-side transcoding would be nice. The server owner could choose to enable it, and a particular client could choose to use it, for folks on lower bandwidth mobile connections or where data is expensive. Until it has these sorts of features teamtalk will remain ever stuck in the 90's.
0
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof @nick @TomGrant91 @rlegowski1 Nope. That's just the UI. You have to pay hundreds of dollars for the SDK: bearware.dk/?page_id=316
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@nick @FreakyFwoof @TomGrant91 @rlegowski1 I wish he'd open source it if that were the case. There are lots of little niggles I'd love to be able to fix.
2
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@ppatel @amir Yeah, if they have the images, they're some kind of binary blob. AI might still be able to figure it out, but I didn't try too hard because I had versions without the tiffs.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@amir They're basicly RTF files with a bunch of extra nonstandard stuff. Unless you told Kurzweil to store pictures of the pages you scanned, then it gets more complicated. But I didn't, so I never had to deal with that.
2
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
AI really is amazing at writing "run once" software. I had a bunch of .kes files, saved by an old version of Kurzweil. I needed them to not be .kes files anymore. AI figured out the file format, wrote a script, and converted them. It doesn't matter if the code is awful, because it did the job, and now it's going straight into the trash, because I'm never going to need to do that again.
2
4
3
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@serrebi @amir I find that if I already knew how to do it, AI does it for me ten times faster. But if I didn't already know how to do something, AI just makes a mess that I can neither detect or correct.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@serrebi @amir The problem is there are too many people running AI who don't actually know how to check a script. They just paste the code in and run it, then wonder why AI makes a mess.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@serrebi @amir The script wasn't AI. It was written by some guy years ago.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@amir @serrebi If you want to have an item in the windows explorer context menu to exclude a folder from Windows Defender, this bat file will add that: nashcentral.duckdns.org/projects/defender.bat
1
5
3
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@matt @amir The command that builds the bridge is: py -3.13-32 -m PyInstaller --onefile --noconsole --name eloquence_host32 host_eloquence32.py

There's no reason Microsoft should be flagging that.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@matt @amir Also, don't look at the build process! That code was handed to me in the repo I forked from. And he got it from whomever wrote the original addon in like 2017. And people have just kept endlessly hacking on what was already terrible. I think the original fear was that the repo that hosted the original addon with the eloquence dll files would get taken down. So someone hacked up a way to download and patch an old version of the addon. But then other people stopped caring about that at some point. So now everything is terrible. If you must build from scratch, just run build.cmd and wait, while trying not to think about it. Hey, at least you know it wasn't written by AI! AI would have written better code.
0
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@x0 @amir Right, but I can't and don't, because neither Eloquence or the API is open source. It's allowed to exist on github, but I doubt any organization that actually manually approves things would accept it.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@matt @amir It's literally built with 32-bit python and pyinstaller: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@x0 @amir If I do, that's not happening. Because I can't afford that. Getting a cert Microsoft will accept is extremely expensive.
2
0
0
0