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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
2mo
@kev I sure didn't. Your client is incapable of processing correctly formatted links, and just strips the URL and shows only the plain text. This is a violation of the fediverse standard for HTML formatting and your client author needs to fix it, or you need to upgrade.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
If you use unspoken-ng, the positional sounds addon for , a new release is out. This one is all about speed: github.com/fastfinge/unspoken-ng/releases/tag/2.5
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jfayre Links and a full write-up are at: stuff.interfree.ca/2026/05/24/the-agent-solution.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jfayre I'm using nano-gpt.com. They have a $12 a month subscription that gives you 60000000 tokens a week to use with any open-source model. If you go to nano-gpt.com, click models, then filter from "all" to "subscription" you can see what the subscription includes. It's stuff like the Kimi models, GLM, deepseek, etc. So not the smartest, but 99 percent of the time I don't need a super smart model to answer a random question I have.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jfayre I did. Hermes writes the scripts and sets up the scheduled jobs to run them. I've currently got Hermes connected to XMPP, IRC, Discord, deltachat, and email. You can also have it create an OpenAI compatible API, so you can use apps like perspective inteligence or basiliskLLM with it. There are a couple of IOS apps that specialize in interacting with Hermes, but I don't love any of them, yet. Also, connecting it to a chat app is the best way to let it notify you. You can connect it to iMessage or whatsapp, but you need a second phone number for those, so I never did.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jfayre On a more worrying note, as I look through its folders to jog my memory of everything it does, I've found that it's also created itself sets of scripts to control my hot tub, GE Oven, and instant pot. I've never asked it to do anything with those, or even mentioned that they exist. So that's...a thing that happened, I guess. When I die in a massive housefire everyone can blame Hermes. There's nothing quite like realizing that thanks to crappy device security and everything accessible insisting on being a smart home device, my AI agent could just murder me if it wanted to. I thought I had it isolated from that network, actually, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. But verifying Hermes can't turn on my oven or instantpot has suddenly become my top priority...
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@jfayre All kinds of random stuff. Sometimes my Sonos Move falls off the charging base; I have Hermes run a script every 30 minutes that finds the Move, and notifies me if the battery is under 10 percent and it's not charging. I have a hermes skill that uses the API for my weatherstation to give me the readings instead of using the inaccessible app. I have it check environment Canada every 30 minutes and notify me about any weather warnings. I have it monitor the load on my servers and let me know if CPU/disc/bandwidth get out of expected ranges. I have it run a weekly price check on groceries. I similarly have it run price checks on Amazon for products I'm interested in. The nice thing is that once Hermes writes the scripts and sets up the jobs, they don't cost any AI tokens to actually run.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
lewd @jscholes I need you to get me nice and wide for Dario Amodei to screw me, that's all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
lewd Well, I see AI is...going exactly the way everyone thought it would: "...Claude Code plugin for natural-language control of Buttplug devices..." Thanks but no thanks for the recommendation, github!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof Depends. Canadians who were raised here and grew up rural are actually way more sheltered than Amerricans. Because Canada! Is! Huge! If you live in a town of a thousand, that's hundreds of KM away from anywhere, you can live your entire life never leaving Canada and never encountering someone who isn't Canadian, until you go to Toronto or some other Canadian city. I think the difference is Canadians don't think of ourselves the way Americans do, and don't proudly try to be sheltered the way they do; it just happens. But it does mean that oddly, people who weren't born and raised in Canada are more likely to go for the British/commonwealth way of saying things because they're aware that it's the "correct" way in Canada, whereas people born and raised in rural Canada are likely to say things the American way because it's what they've heard on TV and they aren't even aware of any other way to say it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof One of the Canadian announcers during the world cup did, in fact, say full-ham when talking about the history of a player.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@dumpsterqueer At least in the blindness community, because the "mainstream" options are inaccessible, and we still want and need to communicate with our family and co-workers. If that happened on fedi, it would be a lot better for us.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
AI Musings @tristan My hope is that more and more bespoke software forces open protocols to stay open, and closed protocols to become more open. Because it's not just blindness where this is happening. For a while over on reddit, there were three to five new RSS clients announced daily. And the flood of productivity/calendar/to-do apps seems endless. We're probably heading for a world where any particular software is used by hundreds or thousands of people, not millions of people. The same way YouTube made audiences for any particular video smaller, and Spotify made the audience for any particular song smaller, the audience for any particular bit of software will begin to shrink. The thing we need to make sure is that the protocols and data stay open, so you don't have to use Bob's Random Calendar 7.3.6, because that's the one your boss likes. I doubt Bob made his particular calendaring application accessible. I think destroying the software monoculture is one of the key ways AI will improve the world. Previously, who cared if Twitter or Gmail or Facebook closed an API? Nobody's writing there own email client or social media viewer or social media browser anyway! The vast majority of people just used the default app. Now, however, everyone is having AI write solutions for them. When those solutions break, they'll scream.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
An Accessible Theme for Oh My Posh

Oh My Posh is a set of configurations and themes for powershell, that allows dynamic modification of the prompt depending on what you're doing. This is the theme I use as my daily driver, and how I have powershell set up as a screen reader user.

stuff.interfree.ca/2026/08/19/accessible-oh-my-posh.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof Oh, I was just looking for another fic to read. Yay!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@lerven @munchkinbear Oh good. I really didn't want to have to fix it in my addon. I'm so glad it's not my problem. I just have to deal with the "make questionmarks sound like jaws" guy, who can't describe how questionmarks sound different with jaws (I don't own jaws) but wants me to do it anyway.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@quanin @munchkinbear I can afford to downgrade quite a lot when the time comes. Or just move again. I was with accuris for years before they decided to screw me. So I'm used to the "getting a good price and moving all your stuff when the good prices go good bye" dance.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@quanin @munchkinbear Huh. All their dedicated servers are out of stock. In otherwords if I ever give mine up, I'm never ever getting a deal this good again. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, hardware prices being what they are. I'm more surprised they haven't raised my price or started messing me around to try and get rid of me.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@quanin @munchkinbear I'm on a dedicated server at ServaRica. But if you're willing to put up with a lot of Disc IO lag from the swarms of assholes running seedboxes there, they have some cheap VPS plans that are okay. servarica.com
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@quanin @munchkinbear TierNet looks okay for the price. I just refuse to do business with Americans or have my data on American servers, controlled by American companies. I pay more for less, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
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