@fastfinge

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

3d

@jcsteh I used to agree with you a lot stronger until I went into journalism at university. They had a required "spelling and punctuation" exam that every other student past on the first try. It took me three. Without reading Braille, you just don't notice things like God needs a capital g, LORD is in all caps in some cases (and YHWH always is), titles that go after a name (esq, phd, OBE, etc) are capitalized differently from titles that go before the name (mr. mrs. and so on), not to mention all of the non-obvious homophones; everyone gets there/they're/their, but what about pail vs. pale? When should you write the number 5, and when should you spell it out? When should a word be a compound, and when should it be hyphenated? How and when should words be split across lines? What types of subheads can go in the middle of a page, and what should always go at the top of the next page? When is it okay to skip an accented letter at the end of a word, and when is it not? What is the difference between dashes, Hyphens, and em-dashes, and when should each be used? When does punctuation go inside the quotes, and when does it go outside? There are three types of quotation marks; when is it appropriate to use each one? These are things any sighted person picks up naturally, just by reading, well enough to pass this sort of exam. Whereas I mostly used speech for everything but math and science, so I had to study for several months to squeak a pass. Because none of that is stuff you'd think to pause your text to speech reading and check, or even realize was a thing unless someone directly told you.

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

3d

@Tamasg So what you're telling me is that you have Arthur to thank for your entire career, and he should really get propper credit in the TGSpeechbox repo. LOL JK

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

3d

@jscholes They wanted the screen wrapping addon. So when they pressed h on the last heading, it would wrap back to the top of the screen.

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

3d

@twynn@mas.toThey wanted the screen wrapping addon, so NVDA would go back to the top of the page when they pushed a key like h and were at the last heading.

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

3d

@twynn No, it was not. It was an iMessage I got on my actual phone from someone I met at a blindness gathering.

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

3d

@jcsteh And some of it is probably due to secondary mental illnesses, that get completely ignored because everyone was focused exclusively on their blindness growing up. But I suspect the vast majority of it comes from the dreadful state of disability education. Far too many blind people (and too many sighted people for that matter) have no idea how to actually learn anything. But it's far worse if you're blind, stuck into a special education classroom with everyone else, have no teacher who knows Braille, and are pretty much just left to sit by yourself in the corner; the staff are just happy you're not causing them anymore problems and will just leave you to your own devices. This is, in general, not a criticism of the usually under-funded, under-resourced, and under-trained teachers and staff. But in a class of 40 third graders, the blind student isn't going to get much attention. Or you could go to an underfunded blind school, where they teach you in grade nine what sighted students get in grade four. Sorry, you touched a bit of a nerve. Obviously blind folks have some responsibility for our own destiny. But by the time you're old enough to realize you should be responsible, it could well be too late for you.

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

3d

Sometimes there's no excuse for blind people spelling. "What's the NVDA addon for raping with shortcuts?" they ask plaintively. First off, it needs another p. And then we can worry about the missing w. But honestly, maybe you should just stick to dictation.

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

4d

@FreakyFwoof I know you teach music sometimes. This might be useful to you: runjs.app/blog/music-theory-for-programmers

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

4d

@ppatel @matt Never heard of startpage.com. Do you know where it gets its results from?

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

4d

@matt I think the only way to learn anything about programming from an LLM is to look at the code it produces, but never ask it any questions about the code it produced. The code itself is usually well-commented, and if you're looking for a sort of average example of how to do a sort of average thing, you can teach yourself that from LLM output. But when it comes to the "hard sciences", LLMs are built to assume you're smarter than they are and please you. Interestingly, when it comes to the "soft sciences", LLMs are built to assume you're a mentally disabled five-year-old, and refuse any request that could possibly hurt anyone anywhere, while lecturing you about how wrong and stupid and dangerous and problematic you are.

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

4d

@matt Right, and to challenge in a way that won't cause it to just blow smoke up my bottom would require me to already know about the thing I'm challenging it on. LLMs are designed to please you, not to teach you.

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

4d

@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.

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

4d

@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.

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

4d

@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.

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

4d

@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.

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

4d

@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.

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

4d

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 #AI 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.

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

4d

@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.

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

5d

@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.

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

5d

@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.

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