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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
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
After over eight years, my journey with Fable (makeitfable.com) has come to an end. I’ve worked full time at Fable since the beginning: back when Fable only worked with Canadian screen reader users. Over that time, Fable grew from a three person company to the enterprise it is today, expanded its human-first accessibility testing and research offerings to The United States and The United Kingdom, widened the circle to work with users of screen magnification, voice control, eye gaze and switch systems, and many other assistive technologies. We were also the first to begin working to bring the community of users with cognitive challenges into accessibility research and testing. During that time, I’ve had the privilege to work in every part of the organization, doing everything from public speaking, to community management, to writing and thought leadership, to technical and engineering work. It’s been a long and winding road, with many life-changing experiences and milestones along the way. But now it’s time for me to find my next chapter. I’m not sure what it will be, yet, but I’m open to exploring all opportunities. If you’ve got an opening anywhere in the digital accessibility and inclusion space, do feel free to get in touch!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@Alan @jaybird110127 Ass reception? There’s a fart joke here somewhere…
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jaybird110127 They also shut down our weather radio. So we need recordings of that, too.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jaybird110127 It amuses me you think they’re that organized. They’re probably in some random employees basement.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jaybird110127 They’re made by the government. So legally they’re in the public domain. I could file a freedom of information request. Or whatever we call it in Canada.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jaybird110127 I should just go over to the nrc and ask them for the original recordings lol
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jaybird110127 I should have thought of doing this. I live even closer to the transmitter. And am sort of glad it’s gone lol.my cheap equipment sometimes struggled on the shortwave bands with how powerful the signal was.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@evilcookies98 But do you have your notifications set to get Mastodon’s from the station? Or your station set to get notifications from the Mastodon? Either way, it’s not as bad as the time I complained to my friend group: “Ow ow ow! I just burned my coffee on the tongue!” To be fair it really was hot and it hurt.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@SyHoekstra @technocounselor If it’s in Toronto there is crowd noise. The Canadian describers are live on location.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@Tattooed_Mummy Sounds like a good use case for AI: finding and dismissing all the prompts to use AI. LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
I do not want to build anymore rust applications. That took an hour of my laptop fan running on full. I did not enjoy it. My laptop doesn't grind that hard when running local LLMs!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@alexchapman @pixelate @Mudb0y It’s like shooting a gun. I’m responsible for what the bullet does after it leaves the gun. If I don’t know where it will go or who it will hit, I shouldn’t shoot. Even if AI wrote the code, I’m responsible for it. If I don’t know what it does, I won’t share it. Because when something goes wrong, it’s my fault, not the AI’s fault.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@alexchapman @pixelate @Mudb0y Yes, exactly. But when AI writes code, I review it enough to understand what choices it made, if those were the right ones, and how everything all works and fits together. If I don’t have that knowledge myself, and can’t get it by looking at it via the code, and the submitter doesn’t explain his work and his reasoning, I’m not merging it into anything I release. AI code isn’t the ultimate problem.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@alexchapman @pixelate @Mudb0y I could. But the upsampler is a custom library. It’s written in C not Python. I don’t have enough audio theory to understand the math behind upsampling particularly well, never mind someone’s custom code and what it’s doing and why. And the author generated it all by AI, so I’m not convinced he understands it either. My co-maintainers feel the same way. If we get a contributor who’s comfortable with C, and knows the required audio theory and math, who is willing to review and merge upsampling, then I’d accept it. But “AI wrote it and it seems to work” is not good enough. When bugs happen, we have to be able to understand and fix what’s going wrong.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@Aryan @pixelate @Mudb0y The author wrote his own custom upsampler. I assume he had a reason, but I don’t know what it is.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@pixelate @Mudb0y Then I can use a translator. LOL Right now I can’t explain it in any language. Why does it use a custom upsampler? I don’t know. Why not reuse an existing library? No idea. How does the upsampler work? Who knows! Why does it work the way it does? Shrug. I’m not interested in maintaining or releasing code when I can’t answer even those most basic questions.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@pixelate @Mudb0y Mine is the base. Then if I won’t accept a PR, it becomes a fork that is welcome to, and usually does, pull my fixes as upstream. I know that’s confusing, and I should probably be less precious. But I’m really just not comfortable putting out code in my name unless I can at least explain how it works to someone in English.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@pixelate @Mudb0y The addon is a team effort. The resampler is AI code I don’t include in my fork, actually, because It’s AI generated and I don’t understand it well enough. I have no problem with AI. But I wasn’t comfortable accepting a PR I couldn’t explain. So upsampling is in a fork, not in my upstream.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@spacepup Nice. Ottawa here.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@spacepup Unfortunately mine is full; it's on a tiny vps.
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