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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
5d
@kev @app @jonathan859 @amir It follows the standards correctly. TC does not. As blind people, who need clients to follow web standards so things are accessible for us, we need to come down hard on accessibility clients that don't themselves follow standards. People on Mastodon already write alt-text for us. We shouldn't also be asking them to work-around our clients if they don't follow the standards as specified.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@fastfinge @kev @app @jonathan859 @amir And now, sadly, fast SMRW is falling into the same trap. AI makes it too easy to try and do everything, all at once. We'd be better with native clients for each platform. Even developing a cross-platform solution is too much for a single developer. If I was doing this, I'd write a Windows only, fediverse only, client, because that would let me focus on one thing and one thing only. Let someone else who loves and uses Linux write the best Linux client. Let bluesky users write an amazing client for that. They can even reuse half the code, probably. Same for everything on mac or Linux. We've got to all learn we can't do everything for everyone, all the time. And either design our software to be modular so other people can take over other parts of the work, or simplify what we offer. When thinking about a new project or feature, the question people need to learn to ask isn't "Can I do this now?" but "Do I want to still be doing this next year?" If the answer to the second question is no, that's totally fine and wonderful and okay and you're not a bad person! Just don't do the thing. Sorry, rant over!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@jonathan859 @kev @app @amir I think tweesecake could have been okay as an open source product, where the only thing tweesecake itself provided was the framework (global hotkeys, sessions, the UI, saving and loading settings, securely storing passwords, etc). Then anyone who wanted to could create and maintain a tweesecake plugin for their service of choice. That would have given all the advantages of a combined app, but made it easier to maintain because different developers could maintain the different services. Plus each developer wouldn't have had to create their own UI, invisible hotkeys, etc. But as it is, Tweesecake got themselves into a place where they had to maintain a ton of different features, all by themselves, and I don't think it was sustainable for a single developer. Even Mastodon keeps introducing new features, after all. No service is just "done forever". They all have to be maintained and updated.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@kev @app @amir Yeah, but they want to charge. So they have to offer more than just Mastodon. Because there are multiple free clients that do Mastodon fine.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@kev @cachondo @app @amir That doesn't mean responding to each of you individually, while always being told it's me at fault, doesn't get tiring.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@cachondo @kev @app @amir Not a brilliant thread. I hear complaints from tweesecake users nearly daily. It gets tiring.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@amir @kev @app Nah, they posted a progress update a couple weeks ago. I suspect the issue they have is that tweesecake has a billion features (radio player, telegram, github, etc etc etc) and they don't want to lose any in the rewrite. Whereas most of the accessible clients are just Mastodon only.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@kev @app They're doing a complete rewrite. Hopefully that'll fix a lot more brokenness than just this. But until then, folks really really need to stop using tweesecake. Or at least stop complaining to the rest of us when our posts aren't displaying correctly in your client.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@kev I am not. But what my servertr does follows the standard, and works in everything but tweesecake, because tweesecake explicitly violates the standard. Get a better client.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@kev Nope. Your client is broken. Get one that follows the standards.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@nick @kev As does Mona. And Fedra. And Enafore. And TWBlue. And the Mastodon web interface. And feditext. And literally everything but a couple notable broken "accessible" clients.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@kev I sure didn't. Your client is incapable of processing correctly formatted links, and just strips the URL and shows only the plain text. This is a violation of the fediverse standard for HTML formatting and your client author needs to fix it, or you need to upgrade.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
If you use unspoken-ng, the positional sounds addon for , a new release is out. This one is all about speed: github.com/fastfinge/unspoken-ng/releases/tag/2.5
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@jfayre Links and a full write-up are at: stuff.interfree.ca/2026/05/24/the-agent-solution.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@jfayre I'm using nano-gpt.com. They have a $12 a month subscription that gives you 60000000 tokens a week to use with any open-source model. If you go to nano-gpt.com, click models, then filter from "all" to "subscription" you can see what the subscription includes. It's stuff like the Kimi models, GLM, deepseek, etc. So not the smartest, but 99 percent of the time I don't need a super smart model to answer a random question I have.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@jfayre I did. Hermes writes the scripts and sets up the scheduled jobs to run them. I've currently got Hermes connected to XMPP, IRC, Discord, deltachat, and email. You can also have it create an OpenAI compatible API, so you can use apps like perspective inteligence or basiliskLLM with it. There are a couple of IOS apps that specialize in interacting with Hermes, but I don't love any of them, yet. Also, connecting it to a chat app is the best way to let it notify you. You can connect it to iMessage or whatsapp, but you need a second phone number for those, so I never did.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@jfayre On a more worrying note, as I look through its folders to jog my memory of everything it does, I've found that it's also created itself sets of scripts to control my hot tub, GE Oven, and instant pot. I've never asked it to do anything with those, or even mentioned that they exist. So that's...a thing that happened, I guess. When I die in a massive housefire everyone can blame Hermes. There's nothing quite like realizing that thanks to crappy device security and everything accessible insisting on being a smart home device, my AI agent could just murder me if it wanted to. I thought I had it isolated from that network, actually, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. But verifying Hermes can't turn on my oven or instantpot has suddenly become my top priority...
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
@jfayre All kinds of random stuff. Sometimes my Sonos Move falls off the charging base; I have Hermes run a script every 30 minutes that finds the Move, and notifies me if the battery is under 10 percent and it's not charging. I have a hermes skill that uses the API for my weatherstation to give me the readings instead of using the inaccessible app. I have it check environment Canada every 30 minutes and notify me about any weather warnings. I have it monitor the load on my servers and let me know if CPU/disc/bandwidth get out of expected ranges. I have it run a weekly price check on groceries. I similarly have it run price checks on Amazon for products I'm interested in. The nice thing is that once Hermes writes the scripts and sets up the jobs, they don't cost any AI tokens to actually run.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
lewd @jscholes I need you to get me nice and wide for Dario Amodei to screw me, that's all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5d
lewd Well, I see AI is...going exactly the way everyone thought it would: "...Claude Code plugin for natural-language control of Buttplug devices..." Thanks but no thanks for the recommendation, github!
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