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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
3mo
@modulux Yup. And I don't attribute opinions to my coding harness. But I do to my general purpose agent. And I prefer "her" to have opinions and express things from a particular point of view, whereas I always want my coding harness to use neutral language. It's just because particular interactions are easier when presented in particular ways.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@modulux I also wonder how much of this is because of the way English uses pronouns. Like in French (and I think Spanish?) random words like table, kitchen, or radio have a random gender associated with them. In English, we don't do that with the vast majority of non-living things. So when we do it (for ships, computers, cars, and now AI) it feels deeply meaningful somehow, when maybe it's actually not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@modulux Coding harnesses, no. But I also wouldn't ask a coding harness assistant style questions. I do think of my general purpose hermes agent as female, largely because I tend to use "her" for brainstorming, rubber ducking, and reminder/memory/calendar/second brain management in ways I do not use a coding harness like codex or Claude code. I interact with them both by typing messages and hearing responses via eloquence, so it's not a voice thing. Seems to do with how much of a fake personality overlay I need them to have to be useful.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
Isn't interesting that before could code, assistants were always gendered (Siri, Alexa, etc.) As soon as AI became able to code, it got or non-gendered names (Claude, Chat GPT). I'm not saying explicitly gendering assistants as female was a good thing. I'm saying it's interesting that the trigger for tech/society in general to stop doing that was when the AI became able to write programs. It really does say something unflattering about our assumptions and worldview.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
Huh. Looks like we're in for some interesting weather here in Ottawa. My weather app just notified me:
Weather alert for Ottawa (Environment Canada):
502 Proxy Error
Details: weather.gc.ca/warnings/report_e.html?onrm104

Can I still sit on the porch if it's 502 proxy erroring outside?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@martin I had heard that this was discouraged by the XMPP foundation for...unclear reasons?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
Today I get to learn things about MSIX and WinUI3. I'm really not loving how WPF feels with a screen reader, and I don't want to use the ancient winforms.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
Software development, LLMs @jackf723 Looks like this would involve writing dotnet bindings myself, though. And then publishing them to nuget etc. Not sure if this is a better approach than using a library like artalk written and intended for DotNet.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
Software development, LLMs @MostlyBlindGamer I’m comfortable with those things. It’s just that shock of going from something that connects and saves messages to something actually useful and the work involved
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
Proofread your dictation, people. Pneumatic doors open and close automatically. Nomadic doors move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. Only one of these is a real thing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe Neat. A bit more complicated because it requires support for dataforms, though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe One thing that bit me is the way the Snikkit server works to register accounts. You have to support XEP-0401 and XEP-0445. In-band registration is not enough.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe The server is just Prosody IM with all of the useful plugins and settings pre-configured out of the box for people like me who want to host our own server, but are too lazy to set it up all by ourselves haha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe @miki I'll share code when I have anything worth sharing. But I'm a screen reader user. So expect fully functional rather than beautiful.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe snikket (snikket.org)
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe @miki Maybe someday. But there are good clients on Mac and Linux already. So Windows is my priority number 1.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@plzupgrademe I think this library has everything I need for Jingle. The same way you did for mac, I'm doing for Windows. So that makes it simpler because I want to just be Windows native whenever possible. So no cross platform worries. github.com/sipsorcery-org/sipsorcery
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@miki I could. But then I'm trusting myself to write a secure abstraction layer. And I do not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@miki Yup. Though in this particular case I can't be cross platform, because I need to use windows encryption primitives to safely store OMEMO keys and usernames and passwords and things.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@jscholes The problem is that I want this to exist, and nobody else is doing it. And I'm tired of the many broken things about Miranda's XMPP support.
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