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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
1y
So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in dreaming. I practiced recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the hashtag entirely.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10h
A guide to AI prompting from a blindness perspective

This article was originally written for the Google Developer blog. However, it's been a number of months since I've heard from them, so I'm publishing it here.

stuff.interfree.ca/2026/09/05/ai-prompting-from-a-blindness-perspective.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11h
An alpha version of my polyglot fork is now available. Note that this is alpha quality software, as of yet. The key changes:
* stores credentials in the Windows Credential Manager
* adds engines: LibreTranslate, Argos Translate, Naver Papago, and Lara Translate
* no longer attempts to download chrome runtimes on secure screens
* no longer attempts to download Argos models on secure screens
* makes writing the translation cache thread-safe, and batches writes for speed
* deletes all API keys and config values when uninstalled
* no longer attempts to translate strings that are only numbers, punctuation, or emoji: both for speed, and a tiny boost in privacy
* removes all engines that depend on the NVDACN infrastructure
* removes shared API keys shipped with the addon
* removes someone's private ollama server that was a hardcoded default for some reason

The road to 1.0:
* lots and lots of real-world testing to find the bugs that almost certainly exist
* get API keys for all of the available services so I can test them locally
* build a test harness using GitHub actions that tests all of the services for API changes and ensures they all continue working
* set up GitHub secrets, etc, so I have a CI/CD environment that can actually test all 18 API's

In the meantime, release 0.0.4 is here: github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/releases/tag/0.0.4

Direct download: github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/releases/download/0.0.4/polyglot-secure-0.0.4.nvda-addon

Github repo: github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@munchkinbear Here it is if you need it. github.com/fastfinge/polyglot-secure/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@NVAccess Yes, the original issue in this thread and pr are mine. Unfortunately doing security right means adding complexity, the authors dislike of the fact not withstanding. I’m hoping this can be resolved without me needing to fork and maintain a version that meets security requirements.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@alexchapman @munchkinbear @FreakyFwoof Hell if I know. Even with a pr the polyglot author flatly refuses to use credential manager.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@NVAccess I'm glad to here this! Although I assume storing secrets in nvda.ini is still not recommended.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@jscholes @dhamlinmusic @FreakyFwoof Leaked OpenAI keys are the first thing any info stealer looks for. And all the AI providers will happily let your stolen key rack up thousands of dollars. So they can’t go on disc unencrypted.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@munchkinbear I’m hoping the author does the right thing so I don’t have to maintain yet another repo.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@munchkinbear Yup. I need the addon for games though. So if they don’t fix it I’ll have to fork.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@dhamlinmusic @jscholes @FreakyFwoof The addon store doesn’t do any addon checks other than to make sure the addon is valid and runs, and was developed by the person submitting it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@ppatel @jscholes @FreakyFwoof I know several junk pull requests using AI were filed In July. No idea about issues.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@ppatel @jscholes @FreakyFwoof Recent policy changes maybe? I was told an issue I filed last week would not be acted on without a full debug log.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@ppatel @jscholes @FreakyFwoof At least in the case of NVDA themselves they will close issues without a full debug log.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof Now, we can argue about if NVDA debug logging should be spitting config values for disabled addons into nvda.log or not. But they are doing exactly that. So unless they stop, we have no other options.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof Unfortunately, nvda.ini has all of its values logged when debug logging is turned on. So it doesn't matter if it's annoying or not. Passwords and API keys cannot go into nvda.ini. If they do, every user who files any bug report against NVDA or any NVDA addon has now leaked all of there API keys and passwords, in public, for anyone in the world to use. There's just no way around that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof If you're interested, Andre, it would be pretty easy for codex or claude to add regular expressions to detect if things that look like OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and other popular kinds of API keys are in nvda.ini, and warn the user. I suspect lots of other addons do this, when they really shouldn't. Windows has an encrypted locker, like keychain on mac, that addon authors should be using.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof Is that the one that allows deleting unused config sections from nvda.ini for uninstalled addons?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
Also I think @FreakyFwoof has a tool to help you clean this up, but I'm failing to find the link to it sadly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3d
FYI if you use the translation addon polyglot: it stores API keys and passwords in nvda.ini in cleartext. If your NVDA log level is anything above info, those values will be written to nvda.log, even if the addon was disabled or removed at the time. I have filed an issue and PR, and am sure this will be fixed shortly. But in the meantime, if you use this addon and have filed any bugs with or with any other addon, and included a copy of nvda.log, you must rotate all API keys and passwords for all of your translation services. github.com/cary-rowen/polyglot/issues/20
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4d
@drwho 11. Windows native.
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