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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
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@TomGrant91 @alexchapman How it is is slow lol
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@alexchapman @TomGrant91 So long as thrive is smart enough to display the plain text version of the note, it’ll be fine. Tweesecake displays the formatted version, but strips all formatting, so links don’t work.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@TomGrant91 It’s a bug in tweesecake. Use any other client and the url works fine.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
So in today's edition of problems: reading a book with a character named Mami is deeply disconcerting, because my screen reader pronounces it "mommy". I just thought...the character was weirdly being called mom by everyone until I finally stopped to check the spelling. Screen readers of the time are also why I thought "anime" rimed with "time" until I was like 14. Uselessly, looking it up online gives me four different examples of how to pronounce Mami, all with different emphasis and "a" sounds. Including one joker who really is pronouncing it exactly like "mommy". So I dunno.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@menelion That was my first thought. But I wonder if places like this measure the performance of the support staff by number of tickets closed. So if they fix a big issue, maybe letting them close a bunch of the related tickets would give them a boost to whatever nonsense corporate performance metrics there managers force on them?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
Hey guys who work in a or or provide support for hosting: if I open a support ticket about an issue, and the issue is resolved an hour later without a response to my ticket, what's the Etiquette here? Should I close the ticket as resolved without waiting for an answer? Or does that mess up your quotas or workflows or whatever? Is it impolite to close my own ticket when I notice the problem is fixed without waiting for your response? Am I taking away the satisfaction you get from closing a ticket? Or am I just making your life easier by saving you from dealing with yet one more customer.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
AI Showerthought: Suno is The Sims for music. You can have a lot of fun with Suno, and even share some cool stuff. But nobody would share a livestream of The Sims and call it a movie. In the same way, creations made by Suno are neat, but they're an entirely different genre of thing than human music. Also, some of us have fun torturing our creations in both Suno and The Sims. Because Suno is incapable of saying "No, a modern pop version of that would not work and should not exist". As someone entirely nonmusical, it really does feel like having a musician trapped in my basement that I can torture with all of my impossible bad ideas.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@vartak @Joshsharp Or you're using a subdomain. Or one of the free tlds. Spammers and phishers have no problem getting domains, so it's pretty meaningless.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@J3317 Nope. It works in every client but tweesecake because tweesecake is a buggy mess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
Today I learned why Sonata created a framework to run AI voices outside of . First, NVDA doesn't come with all of the standard libraries. Second, there's no good way of updating dependencies in a bundled addon. Third, NVDA really, really hates it if you include several hundred dependencies in your addon. Anyway, here's kitten TTS, the other synthesizer I wanted to try with NVDA. Unfortunately, the model doesn't support streaming output, so even though it's actually faster than Supertonic, it feels slower when used with NVDA. Also, it takes several minutes to install, makes NVDA startup 30 seconds slower, and freezes the change synthesizer dialogue for about 45 seconds when you open it. It does miss words less frequently, though, and pronounces text better. The ultimate result of my two-day investigation is that even the highly optimized open-source AI imbedded models are not yet ready for screen reader use. Some tree-shaking could fix some of these issues, but it still won't allow for streaming, so it's not worth it. I'd really like to know what Microsoft and Narrator are doing to get the natural voices so snappy. github.com/fastfinge/kittentts-nvda/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
It’s in alpha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@amir I think these are problems with supertonic itself. So I don’t know if I can fix them. I experience the same issues on the official Android app.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@amir It's out. Unfortunately, while they sound really good, they sometimes skip words. Not okay for a screen reader haha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
Okay! If you're running 64-bit , and you want to play with a new engine that sort of works most of the time, here's the first release. The engine only supports English. github.com/fastfinge/supertonic-nvda/releases/tag/v1
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@tspivey Oh! Why? Doesn't it...oh, never mind. That works perfectly, now. I really, really wish I actually had any talent at this. Writing NVDA addons always makes me feel like a cargo cult programmer.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@tspivey That's much better. synthesizing now has its own thread. And audio ducking works. Unfortunately, say all still doesn't. I just don't understand how or why indexes work. Neither does Gemini. So I'm stuck.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@tspivey Apparently yes. I thought it didn’t.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@amir The developer of the tts has samples: github.com/DevGitPit/supertonic
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