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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
@JamminJerry @Tamasg @Orinks Wow. Blocked. Learn to care about people other than yourself. Twitter doesn’t have alt text or an accessible interface. Guess we don’t need those things either. Please go back there and hang out with your fellow narcissists.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@JamminJerry @Orinks Sure, but expecting 99 percent of people to put in effort to create and update a lengthy filter list for things that are of interest to maybe one other person, if that, is the height of rudeness and disrespect for other people’s time. I feel the same way about people who post daily weather; I don’t live near them, and updating my filters takes like an hour a week to catch it all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@Orinks It really is an extremely obnoxious feature, though. There's no reason anyone who doesn't also play the game would ever want to see those posts.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@mcc CPU is cheap. Let's run every single app in its own virtual machine! Then when an app needs to be unloaded, we can just save the entire state of the machine to disc. Because disc and ram are also...well, are our users problem to pay for, not ours. And we should probably write the virtual machine that runs each of our apps in some kind of easy to use language...oh, I know! Java! Then the Java virtual Machine can run the virtual machine that runs our apps that are all written in JavaScript. Anyway you're phone doesn't have 128 gigs of memory? You should probably upgrade. It's not reasonable to expect modern apps to run on ancient hardware like that. 256 gigs would be better, really.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@not2b @MaryAustinBooks @michelestrider Of course there are. The problem is determining if "the good ones" and "your local ones" intersect or not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@flyingsaceur @michelestrider @MaryAustinBooks The main issue being that everything not ham today, like police, fire, etc is on some sort of digital trunked system. Analog only is fine if your only interested in listening to hams. But scanning is sort of a sub hobby of its own. And if you want a full taste of that you want something digital.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@flyingsaceur @michelestrider @MaryAustinBooks And today’s cheap scanner is far better than expensive scanners from 30 years ago. Cheap in this context being in the two hundred dollar range. If your having fun, spring for an antenna upgrade. If it’s still fun, then decide if you just like dxing, a term for people who just try and pick up the farthest stations and weakest signals they can. If so, your path will take you to 900 dollar shortwave sets and roof mounted antennas. Or if you want to transmit yourself, your looking at studying to pass one or more licensing exams. Once you get licensed, you can spend anywhere from a hundred dollars to a hundred thousand dollars on equipment, depending on what you want to do: anything from chatting with people a city over to bouncing signals off the moon.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@michelestrider @MaryAustinBooks Being retired aerospace doesn’t mean not being maga sadly. Also, I notice about half the guys who worked in the field want to do something else with retirement. So it could go either way. Maybe get a cheap scanner and scope out the traffic on your local repeaters? Radio is more fun with friends . So if the people you can receive aren’t people you want to talk to, the only pleasure left is learning electronics. And there are cheaper ways of doing that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@michelestrider @MaryAustinBooks As a ham myself, I advise skipping the human interaction unless you know the club near you is safe. Too many people in the hobby are far right of Trump. Many examiners intentionally try to fail anyone they think is lgbtqia. Yes there are hams on the left. But you have to intentionally look for them because a lot of the hobby right now is taken over by preppers and the kind of guy who wants to do first responder cosplay.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@simon fyi the volume issues with voiceover are fixed in the latest iOS beta.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@SeveraSnape Huh. At first reading that I thought you had done some really good drugs and were just feeling the love, you know? For, like, the universe.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
Unfortunately, Openevv shares the same bugs with parenthesis characters that the IBM viavoice it's based off of did, and were not present in the final (only good) ECI version of eloquence. I suspect a lot of the work the openevv folks are going to have to do is squeezing out all of the bugs IBM added.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kimchitea Yeah, in Toronto, Union Station is the largest one, and a terminal in the way you mean. But it's not the last stop on any line it's connected to.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kimchitea In Toronto the subway announces "This is a terminal station." at the end of the line. I always wonder if the station is about to die, or if this is the station for people who are about to die, or what. Why can't they say "This is the last station on this line" or something?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@bermudianbrit There's nothing kinky in here. AI roleplay can be about more than just sexting, you know.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
AI Roleplay is a Good Thing, Actually

While AI roleplay has gotten a bad rap recently, as all things gaming related too often do, I believe that open-source and self-hosted AI roleplay is an excellent way to mitigate some of the harms done by closed AI platforms.

stuff.interfree.ca/2026/08/25/ai-roleplay.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@mcourcel Let's do it again!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@fastfinge Nothing wrong with learning languages, of course. But the kind of person I'm talking about will usually start an opinion with "Well, I speak Arabic, so..." followed by whatever ridiculous hot take they have about international politics, religion, or whatever. When what "speak" means in this context is "studied it on Duolingo and never met or conversed with a native speaker".
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
I feel like duolingo has created a weird new kind of smart white woman . She studies, like, 11 languages on duolingo! So she's obviously multicultural and worldly. She can't actually speak any of them in the real world, of course, but she's really really extremely good at . It's possible men and women of other ethnicities do this too, but the five or six people I know who do all match the profile above. Is performative becoming a thing? Or is it just a weird quirk of my circles? Should we be saying anything about it? And if so, how/what? I dunno, it's just a thing I've noticed recently that bothers me.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@Quentin Nobody filled out the survey? Our minimum wage employe in charge of surveys is useless! We should fire them!
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