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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
@matt @miki I mean I'm sure I was more productive in class with my Braille 'n Speak than modern students are with a laptop. Because I was actually taking notes. Well, I was actually playing battle.bas via run.bns. But I could have been taking notes. And I was absolutely crushing battle.bas because the only thing distracting me was the teacher, and she was far easier to ignore than modern social media.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@miki I dunno, apps open and close so fast that it wouldn't really be a problem. As long as they save state to disc before closing, it wouldn't be an issue.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@alexchapman @emassey0135 It probably has a lot to do with what you do for work.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@ppatel I doubt you could re-train them today, then. I'm increasingly convinced that the thing that'll destroy civilization isn't climate change, or AI. It's the expectation that everyone is always available at all times, and that we can all multi-task everything all at once. Notifications and multi-tasking are the sickness that's going to kill us all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@ppatel That works if you don't depend on them for income/livelyhood, I guess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@ppatel Must be nice. Whereas I got an email from someone I have to deal with angry that he'd sent me a message at 2:37 AM, and it had been an hour with no answer from me. Yes, we were in the same timezone. And no, this is not a one-off; there are multiple people who do this sort of thing multiple times in my life. And based on the people I know, everyone else has people like this, too.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@ppatel Accept that it doesn't, because the rest of society expects you to answer every message you receive within five minutes. The problem with instant notifications is that they exist and are expected. So everyone has to have them on. Opting out isn't a choice your boss, co-workers, or family will permit.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@matt @emassey0135 @alexchapman Customer support is bad for mental health because companies make it that way on purpose. If I’m going to sit on hold for 2 hours I’d rather just send an email.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof @emassey0135 @alexchapman You could argue that if people instead had to engage with the world around them while traveling, all of society would be better off. And my point isn’t so much that we can actually do this. Just that the things like notification spam and the 24 hour workday are already destroying humanity. The effect of things like AI and crypto are pretty much zero in comparison. If we could be saved it’d require a lot more than banning some random technology as a scapegoat. It’d take a complete rethink of how computers and phones work.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof @emassey0135 @alexchapman You probably already have a mixer with a bunch of devices on it. Heck, even I do and I’m not an audio guy. Because having a single device playing multiple audio streams kind of sucks. Multiple devices and a mixer makes adjusting the volume of each thing, with actual physical mobs and sliders, way easier.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@ppatel Accept that the notification spam is endless. And often your phone decides to do god knows what in the background, and now your battery is unexpectedly dead.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@FreakyFwoof @emassey0135 @alexchapman The radio would still exist, though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@emassey0135 @alexchapman But phoning friends and actually talking to them is far better for your mental health.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@alexchapman @emassey0135 Both of those should already be phone calls though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@emassey0135 @alexchapman Notifications are way too distracting. They've also poisoned society with the idea that everyone should always be available, at all times. If we had no notifications, everyone would just check email and social media once a day. Life would be much better all around! There is literally nothing that happens on the internet that you need to know about instantly. It can all wait 24-48 hours.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@emassey0135 @alexchapman Sure it is. Take notes in Braille while in your first app, then when you have the notes you need, move to the second app. There's never any reason anyone needs any more than a single app open at one time.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
Here's omnivoice entirely failing to read the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité. I used all default settings, with auto voice. I'm surprised it was this bad! I have no idea where the random noises and skipped words came from. And it gets well over half of the words wrong.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
There has to be a better system than windows and tabs for doing work on a computer. I don't know what it is, but there has to be something. I always end up with fifteen windows with 30 tabs each over two or three virtual desktops, and then can't find anything. Maybe the bad idea wasn't AI; maybe the bad idea was multi-tasking operating systems. Wouldn't life be better if all of our computers were single-user and single-threaded? No more losing windows and tabs! No more background notifications interrupting us every seven seconds! Just sit down, start a task, finish the task, then do something else. The human brain can only effectively do one task at a time. So we should force our computers to work the same way.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
@dodecahedron Weed smells like skunk the same way the fruit flavouring they use in some candy tastes like actual fruit. You can...sort of get the idea, but they're not really alike.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2mo
Hey fediverse: my neighbors dog just got sprayed by a . Our entire yard now stinks, even though it didn't spray here. We can't sit outside at all, and the stench is leaking into the house. Anything we can do to clear the smell quicker?
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