@fastfinge

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)

matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca

keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@cachondo @FreakyFwoof It's not a matter of affording, for me. If it wasn't for NVDA I'd have to come up with the money for jaws. So I give that money to NVDA instead. I just never stopped setting money aside for a screen reader.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@FreakyFwoof TYup. The anual jaws price increase is just a reminder for me to up my NVDA donation.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin Dismissing your lived experience is not my intent. But it's not something I can speak to as it's not an experience I've had, 'nor can imagine. And if we're trying to define what it means to be intelligent, we kind of do need to base it on things the majority of people can understand.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin To add something that I think is important: intelligence is something our society prioritizes for its own reasons. I don't think having intelligence gives an entity anymore value or more right to exist than an entity that does not have intelligence. And I think the state of intelligence comes and goes; I'm not intelligent when I'm sleeping.

Anyway, interesting conversation! Thanks for engaging.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin Sure, you can talk to someone who's extremely high or has dementia. That doesn't mean they currently have access to intelligence. That's the one thing that LLMs have successfully proven: just because it can talk with correct syntax does not mean it thinks. And of course you can have more than one self. Each self is an intelligence of its own. But to have intelligence, you do need at least one self, and that self needs the ability to process experience, and that processing requires something like language. If you don't have all three, what you have is not intelligence: it's a Parler trick (like LLMS that have only language), death (if you have no concept of self), or...I can't even think what a self-awareness with language and a sense of self but no ability to experience would be. Forming an idea of self requires experience, so I just don't think that's a possible thing.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin But they call it ego death because it's a type of death. And death is stopping to exist. Turning off your intelligence as much as you can. intelligence requires an ego that is aware of itself, and that persists through time. I would say that's the primary reason an LLM is not intelligent: it lacks ego.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin But intelligence requires something happening LOL. And thus some sort of language for it to happen in.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin But if they're not expressed in some way, nothing is happening.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin You might not know how to express it to others. But you have to be able to express it to yourself. Otherwise, how are you aware of the thought at all? How can you recall it later? Thought isn’t some magic incomprehensible thing. It’s way more complex than the llm people admit. But it it does require some sort of internal language. Otherwise how can it exist at all?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @jaybird110127 Yup, I love uv. It just feels like huge overkill for anything but the machine I actually develop on. And I think uv needs you to modify the path, in order to do everything it does, but I could be wrong. Also, don't modern Python packagers do some tree-shaking so they're not including the complete Python environment in every single build? I know that NVDA's environment, to my sorrow, doesn't include multiprocess, for example, because NVDA doesn't use it. So if I want it in my addons, I have to include it myself, even though it's a Python builtin.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @jaybird110127 You're assuming I want to install uv and modify the path and keep uv up to date and have multiple python versions on the machine. And in one particular case, that the machine has an internet connection at all.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @jaybird110127 I often package them up if they need to run on a different machine from the machine I developed them on. Saves dealing with setting up a virtual environment and so on.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@munin Right, but words, drawings, and music are all forms of language. "Language" isn't limited to written words, hand gestures, or mouth noises. And without some form of language, a way to put handles on ideas and manipulate them, thought is impossible. What those handles are and how we attach them to ideas differs. But it's still a process that is required for any kind of thought or reasoning.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@MaryAustinBooks I mean if I went, I'd just spend all my time wishing I was dead, and/or actually die when I have to watch the drunk guy from I.T engage in acts of sexual harassment because my social anxiety is far too deep for me to actually do anything about it. So we might as well just front load it, right?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@MaryAustinBooks Where is the option for "just dropping dead the second I hear anything about it"?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @bermudianbrit @J3317 I'd rather that than a lot of the places I've scene, including my own home, where names never get changed, so toronto1 is in Montreal, and lanbackup is the print server.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@bermudianbrit @jscholes @J3317 Wait, were you working for Palantir? LOL

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@J3317 @jscholes I also have a network share running on Debian named \\windows-server. Because it was too much trouble to update all the network mounts.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@J3317 @jscholes I assume it's actually an iPhone? ROFL JK

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes Eh, my current iPhone 16 pro max is currently named "Samuel's Ipod Touch". Because that's what iTunes named my first iPod touch for me when setting it up. And the name just follows from iCloud restore to device transfer.

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