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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)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@jscholes It is interesting, though, how no blind people seem to humanize our screen readers. I know a type of blind person who names her cane, Brailler, etc. But nobody does the same with a screen reader or Braille display.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
I'm surprised nobody has made a Steeve's Talking Clock voice out of this yet: github.com/ryanmonro/george
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@munin I really disagree with this. The idea that language is not thinking seems to say that it's impossible for anyone to understand or reason about any concept they have not experienced. I'm completely blind. But I can still reason about colours, without any experience of them; I can tell you why some people try to claim that brown, white, and purple aren't colours and why there's no brown light. I understand why things would look different to people who can see when in UV light. I know that traditionally, boomers think of blue as for boys and pink for girls, firetrucks are red, cold is blue, the sun is yellow, etc. I understand the spectrum of wavelengths of light, and could put colours in order. Language is a way of associating things with symbols, and then using those symbols to reason about things. To say that I am equal to an LLM when it comes to anything visual because I am blind seems both offensive and inaccurate. I've also never been to space, swum in the ocean, or gone hang-gliding. But I can still talk meaningfully about all three! I'm also not sure how I (or anyone) could think or reason about anything, without somehow associating language to the concept first. It could be sign language, or nonverbal; I'm not prioritizing spoken or written words with the word language. But as I read this, you're coming dangerously close to saying that people with sensory disabilities cannot be intelligent.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @jdking92 I think because the female Jewish names from the Bible are more used in the modern day. Other than David, of course. But you don't encounter too many Ehud's today.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @jdking92 Ah, it just strikes me as stereotypically Jewish, at least in Canada.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music Okay Apple, it's only the middle of November, and you've already had far too much eggnog. Whatever this abomination of a sexy sounding woman sensually covering The Chipmunks is, it needs to stop existing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @jdking92 And the name Leonard Cohen haha
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @jdking92 Well, the author was Jewish. So makes sense it would refer to the Old Testament and not the new.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @jdking92 Yes, and "David played and it pleased The Lord" right in the intro.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @VE3RWJ It's about exactly the sort of thing I don't want to explain to the children at the Christmas party after several eggnogs.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music @austinnix Probably just filler. But apple music has every single Christmas song ever released to choose from! And I haven't heard Fum Fum Fum or Kinderly Is Coming even once! Or Martin Said to His Man! Or even Gaudete!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
seasonal music Whatever maniac on Music's hits station decided that Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen is a needs to be fired. Then hired, so that they can be fired all over again! It's not Christmas just because it mentions a character from the Bible one time!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@jonathan859 Nope. I'm using it through the API.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
I do ironically enjoy it when a company releases a new and improved , and suddenly some extremely specialized and specific tasks that I use LLMs for perform drastically better. And suddenly they can complete the exact examples I used to provide in my prompt, all by themselves. And seem to perform the task in my exact style, even though I'm not giving them my prompt examples anymore. Hmmm, it couldn't be that they trained on my prompt data, could it? Even though they said they don't do that? Nah, of course not! They'd never!

Oh well, at least someone, somewhere, spent several billion dollars to make something I do once a week slightly easier.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@raven667 @RegGuy Hmmm, if someone is going to violate my privacy, I think I'd rather it be Microsoft. At least Microsoft is a tiny bit less likely to get hacked and spill every single keystroke I've ever typed out onto the dark web. Also, the EU is likely looking closer over Microsoft's shoulder than grammarly's. Because, you know, we can't have spell check that's both smart and privacy preserving. That would be impossible!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
transphobia @andrew @bermudianbrit The way I first noticed it is when Voldemort started getting marked as spelled incorrectly using Microsoft Edge, when it never had been before. I then discovered that it couldn't suggest Dumbledore as a suggestion, no matter how close to the correct spelling I got. Then I noticed that modern terms like Kubernetes were also being considered misspellings. When I disabled AdGuard DNS and rebooted, the problems went away.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@Genstar @IceWolf This, too. It also feels like...one step away from cryptocurrency mining. Remember when captchas were just to tell humans and computers apart? Then they were to help digitize public domain books for the general good. Then they were to help digitize books for Google's ebook library. Now they're to help train Google's AI to recognize photos! How long until someone goes "Hey, as long as we're making someone's computer do work to prove it's a real person...hmmm...why don't we have them mine some bitcoin for us? For charity! Well, at first..."
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@ktneely Oh, we have a solution for this. Just sign in with your Microsoft(tm) Account. Then we'll store all of your custom dictionary entries on the cloud so they'll always be available on all of your devices! You'll also get more contextually aware and relevant advertisements from our marketing partners based on the terms you use most frequently!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@ktneely They're probably using en_US.dic. The problem is that new words never get added to it, and the algorithm they're using to detect spelling errors hasn't been updated since forever. Probably Levenshtein distance or something. Why bother doing any better for offline users when the online ones can just use an LLM? "Levenshtein" is a good example, actually. It's a spelling error if I'm offline, but not if I'm online. I assume it has some kind of online names database or something. That shouldn't need to be online, but they have no incentive to make it work offline.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@IceWolf @foxbutt And relays are weird because they're trying to solve the discovery problem. IE I want to make sure I see all posts with the blind hashtag. But in a distributed system, there's really no good way to do that without giving everyone everything.