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
blog https://stuff.interfree.ca/
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@matt Actually no. Claude is a yes-man. Asking the question resulted in it deciding that I am an extremely smart person who is always right, "Good catch!" and removing it. Without ever answering the question in any meaningful way.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@matt I'm not sure about that. In order to ask questions about something that make sense, you at least need to know what the thing you're asking about is. I suspect natural language is causing a lot of people to ask questions they don't understand, and thus get answers that are not useful. For example, I could have asked an AI "Do I need an MRU?" It would not have asked for any more context and would have given me...some kind of answer, even though the question as posed is un-answerable. The only reason you and I think to ask questions like "What is an MRU in programming?" is because we're already thinking about keywords, and just stuffing them into a question.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@matt Yes, this is one instance where asking an LLM "What is an MRU in programming?" would give a better result, because most LLMs would be good enough to realize my geolocation doesn't matter to the answer of that question. Maybe I'm just old and grumpy that learning things by typing in two keywords and reading the first or second result is no longer possible.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@sclower Interesting. A kagi search for "mru programming" has that article as result 16. Everything else is stuff like the programs and courses offered by Mount Royal University, or direct links to computer science courses at Mount Royal University like "COMP 1501 - Programming I: Introduction to Problem Solving". Google is the same way. Perhaps because I live sort of close to Mount Royal University, so geolocation pushes it up in the list.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@matt Interesting. A kagi search for "mru programming" has that article as result 16. Everything else is stuff like the programs and courses offered by Mount Royal University, or direct links to computer science courses at Mount Royal University like "COMP 1501 - Programming I: Introduction to Problem Solving". Google is the same way. Perhaps because I live sort of close to Mount Royal University, so geolocation pushes it up in the list.
3
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
I'm writing a quick test project with Claude Code for myself, and it decided to "build MRU history and calling with arguments". I consider myself technical, and write lots of code of my own, but I have no idea what an MRU history is, if I need one, if Claude Code should be building it, or if it should, what arguments it should have. Googling anything on the acronym MRU gives me results about Mount Royal University. If you weren't already a programmer, and didn't understand the concepts of calling and arguments, you'd be even more lost. But thanks to the complete enshittification of search, even I'm now completely stumped by an unfamiliar acronym. So I guess I just have to trust the that an MRU is something this project has and/or needs, and that an MRU has or should have a history that has or should have arguments and can or should be called. It certainly wasn't something I specified or asked for, and thanks to big tech's complete destruction of all knowledge, it's not something I can easily learn about on my own. I guess I could ask the AI, though that kind of defeats the entire purpose of finding things out myself. One could argue that I don't need to know what MRU stands for, because the AI is taking care of it. But at that point I can no longer claim to understand my own project, and am just vibe coding, because I can no longer make knowledgeable decisions about parts of it. My point is that even for programmers, it's surprisingly easy to slip into vibe coding, and thanks to the modern Internet, it can be tricky to avoid, even for those with a programming background.
4
1
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@anonax It depends on how much they’d rather communicate via ASL. But most Deaf folks already communicate a lot via video calls, so odds are they already have a solution for this problem.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@alexhall because they don't want to be unalived by the f1lt3r, probably. If you're down bad you have no choice but to talk like an idiot on most corporate platforms. Same if you want to talk about, say, childhood trauma you experienced at the hands of a PDF File. Or resisting the not sees.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@anonax ASL is a language of its own. It's not just "English but with your hands". A lot of Deaf/hard of hearing people consider ASL there native language, not English. So this is more of a translation service than a dictation service. Is it any good? I have no idea. Does it just restrict users to English fingerspelling? I don't know that, either. But there is a reason for this to exist, if it was done correctly and with the involvement of the Deaf community, and this turned out to be something they wanted. But based on Google's information about it we don't have enough to say either way.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kev @app @jonathan859 @amir It follows the standards correctly. TC does not. As blind people, who need clients to follow web standards so things are accessible for us, we need to come down hard on accessibility clients that don't themselves follow standards. People on Mastodon already write alt-text for us. We shouldn't also be asking them to work-around our clients if they don't follow the standards as specified.
0
1
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@fastfinge @kev @app @jonathan859 @amir And now, sadly, fast SMRW is falling into the same trap. AI makes it too easy to try and do everything, all at once. We'd be better with native clients for each platform. Even developing a cross-platform solution is too much for a single developer. If I was doing this, I'd write a Windows only, fediverse only, client, because that would let me focus on one thing and one thing only. Let someone else who loves and uses Linux write the best Linux client. Let bluesky users write an amazing client for that. They can even reuse half the code, probably. Same for everything on mac or Linux. We've got to all learn we can't do everything for everyone, all the time. And either design our software to be modular so other people can take over other parts of the work, or simplify what we offer. When thinking about a new project or feature, the question people need to learn to ask isn't "Can I do this now?" but "Do I want to still be doing this next year?" If the answer to the second question is no, that's totally fine and wonderful and okay and you're not a bad person! Just don't do the thing. Sorry, rant over!
2
3
3
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jonathan859 @kev @app @amir I think tweesecake could have been okay as an open source product, where the only thing tweesecake itself provided was the framework (global hotkeys, sessions, the UI, saving and loading settings, securely storing passwords, etc). Then anyone who wanted to could create and maintain a tweesecake plugin for their service of choice. That would have given all the advantages of a combined app, but made it easier to maintain because different developers could maintain the different services. Plus each developer wouldn't have had to create their own UI, invisible hotkeys, etc. But as it is, Tweesecake got themselves into a place where they had to maintain a ton of different features, all by themselves, and I don't think it was sustainable for a single developer. Even Mastodon keeps introducing new features, after all. No service is just "done forever". They all have to be maintained and updated.
1
1
3
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kev @app @amir Yeah, but they want to charge. So they have to offer more than just Mastodon. Because there are multiple free clients that do Mastodon fine.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kev @cachondo @app @amir That doesn't mean responding to each of you individually, while always being told it's me at fault, doesn't get tiring.
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@cachondo @kev @app @amir Not a brilliant thread. I hear complaints from tweesecake users nearly daily. It gets tiring.
1
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@amir @kev @app Nah, they posted a progress update a couple weeks ago. I suspect the issue they have is that tweesecake has a billion features (radio player, telegram, github, etc etc etc) and they don't want to lose any in the rewrite. Whereas most of the accessible clients are just Mastodon only.
3
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kev @app They're doing a complete rewrite. Hopefully that'll fix a lot more brokenness than just this. But until then, folks really really need to stop using tweesecake. Or at least stop complaining to the rest of us when our posts aren't displaying correctly in your client.
1
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kev I am not. But what my servertr does follows the standard, and works in everything but tweesecake, because tweesecake explicitly violates the standard. Get a better client.
2
1
2
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@kev Nope. Your client is broken. Get one that follows the standards.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@nick @kev As does Mona. And Fedra. And Enafore. And TWBlue. And the Mastodon web interface. And feditext. And literally everything but a couple notable broken "accessible" clients.
0
0
1
0