Mastodawn

Michael Marshall

Now that I’ve got the Chronicle program on GitHub ready for testing, I’m kind of at a loss as to how to get exposure for it.
The thing that makes me nervous above all is that even if I found a place where I could sort of put it out there, if people found out it was vibe coded, they might just tell me to fuck off.
It's one of those really divisive things and I kind of see it from both sides but it's a complication that I don't want to have to deal with.
I basically just want as many people to test and tell me what they think of it.
Donations would be an absolute fucking bonus!
I'm just kind of at a bit of a loss.
This is the link to it for what it's worth.

https://github.com/harry6116/Chronicle
#Accessibility #chronicle #Development #AI #Blind #History #preservation #newspapers

GitHub - harry6116/Chronicle

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GitHub

Jonathan 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Don't hide it. I'd much more appreciate someone telling me their program is vibe coded but well tested (with evidence) rather than not telling me, because then I have to think about it myself and will probably just not bother.

Jonathan 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy IDK, people have different opinions on forum.audiogames.net these days but maybe worth it anyway? Just for the reach ig.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@jonathan859 Don’t worry, I have not hidden this fact that it’s vibe coded.
From when I first announced that I was constructing it, I made it very clear that I myself was engineering the prompting but that first Gemini and then Codex was doing a lot of the backend heavy lifting.
I certainly hope that's visible on the repository because I certainly wanted it that way.
The last thing I ever want to do is bullshit people.
They should know what they're getting with me.

Jonathan 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy I mean, on your Mastodon and GitHub commits and releases maybe, but from just jumping through the ReadMe a bit I can't really see it. Is there a section I'm missing? Not that you have to put a banner at the top but a little disclaimer with it's own heading might be useful? Also, since I also saw you talking about E-Mail earlyer, you could consider a website/domain, so people know where to look and it's not only a GitHub repo. Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with GitHub repos as the main place for a project at all, but the ordinary user might wine about how GitHub is confusing and whatnot.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@jonathan859 I’m going to do this.
One of the reasons is that I built this program because I attempted to perform optical character recognition on war diaries of the Manchester regiment which my great grandfather Albert Henry Wharton served in during World War I.
I wanted to understand what Albert went through because he lied about his age to join the British army at just 15 years old and I wanted to understand what he went through.

Stephanie Appleby 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @jonathan859 Um kk why on Earth would your grandpa lie about his age just to join that army? Just wow! I bet your great grandparents were absolutely furious with him for that!

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@cub80_appleby @jonathan859 Very different time in 1914.
Well some were definitely furious, other others thought it was a patriotic duty.
Although people knew that war was terrible, they didn't have the 24 hour new cycle to show them just how graphic it could be.
Most people think it would be like battles of the old days, have a big set piece battle on a certain date, the enemy would lose and pay some indemnity and everyone would be back in time for Christmas.
I've now put a whole section on why I built the program.

https://github.com/harry6116/Chronicle

GitHub - harry6116/Chronicle

Contribute to harry6116/Chronicle development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Stephanie Appleby 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @jonathan859 Wow! Different times indeed! Well I have to say that they're at peace now! I hope! On the bright side they gave their lives so you had a chance!

Tim Appleby 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @cub80_appleby @jonathan859 Ummm, where is the download link, if there is one?

Jonathan 3d ago

@carrottop1023 @TheVoiceGuy @cub80_appleby See that's what I meant when I was talking about the website stuff

Tim Appleby 3d ago

@jonathan859 @TheVoiceGuy @cub80_appleby Yeah, no download link.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@carrottop1023 @jonathan859 @cub80_appleby Here you go

Mac:
https://github.com/harry6116/Chronicle/releases/download/v1.0.0/Chronicle.1.0.mac.zip
windows:
https://github.com/harry6116/Chronicle/releases/download/v1.0.0/Chronicle.1.0.windows.zip
Please look at the read me because it'll tell you everything about what you need to do.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@jonathan859 @carrottop1023 @cub80_appleby Unfortunately at the moment GitHub is the best place for me to host.

https://github.com/harry6116/Chronicle
However, I'm working on trying to get direct download links to the Mac and Windows versions of the app so you can play around with it.
Please just bear with me a minute.

GitHub - harry6116/Chronicle

Contribute to harry6116/Chronicle development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

André Polykanine 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Yes, you're right, especially here there are lot of far-left aggressive mobs that would tell you to fuck off. Tell them to fuck off themselves, they don't like it, may they go touch grass.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@menelion Hundred percent in agreement regarding the anti-AI crowd.
The saying that I always use when thinking about people like this is a very obscure Australian one that used to be said by people in the Navy.
The word is dilligaf, which stands for do I look like I give a fuck.
You say that word with gaff on the end.
dilligaf!

André Polykanine 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Dilligaf, I'll remember!

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@menelion It’s a good one but not well known outside of Australia or even buy a lot of people down here.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion I had an anti-AI person come after me yesterday. when I wanted to understand more about their views, I was told they weren't getting into it with me and if I didn't understand why it mattered then I should consider the conversation closed. It makes me wonder if people have their own opinions or just parrot what they red. AI is good. AI is bad. AI is AI. It's also not going anywhere, and people are going to have to deal with that. AI is also a stupid buzzword, but so is cloud, and we all use that everywhere.. so... here we are.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion That’s right. I’m a voice actor as well, don’t get a tonne of work because that’s a nature of the industry, if you listen to some of the doom and gloom, AI has killed us.
Bullshit! I agree that it's hurt some but for me, AI has been so good for my voice.
You've just got to adapt which is one of those other buzz words that I hate.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion Adapting really isn't a buzzword though. it's what humankind has been doing since whenever humankind started. I used to tell my students that adapting is something we do well. a lot of my students lost their vision later in life. I would tell them that the thing we as people who are blind do is it to not only adapt, ut to overcome.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Yes I understand what you’re saying.
It’s just that when you’re constantly told to adapt every single day in the VoiceOver industry, it’s sort of loses its power.
As I've always said, if a person can write 5000 lines of code on their own manually, more power to them but I tell you what, AI has allowed me and there's that buzz word again to build on ideas that I could never have done otherwise.
It's a seismic shift in my life and I don't say that lightly.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion It allowed me to get super liam 1.5 out. I would have never done that if not for Claude.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Something I’m trying to do is get some old windows Audio games to play.
Grizzly Gulch is one.
it’s being a total bitch because of the way it was built and the way the files were named.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion As long as that doesn't mean you are reverse engineering any part of it, I have no problem with this, but I feel we start getting into ethical blurryness when we are disassembling someone's work without their permission.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion I wish I could find someone to speak to from the company that went out of business.
There’s just nothing of them anywhere.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion I unfortunately never spoke to jeff, but I know at the time bavisoft was very finatical about protecting their properties. I also have real concerns that disassembling old games will enable behavior by others to do the same. When does that spill over into disassembling my current work? I can be overprotective of the audio game space at times I suppose.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion I totally understand your concerns, I’m certainly not discounting them.
For what it’s worth it’s been far from successful and I’m at the point of giving up on it.
There's only so much you can do without source code for one thing.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion Thank you for listening to my concerns. At the end of the day, that is all I can ask for :)

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Absolutely I’ve listened and I totally understand.
Your protective of your craft and you've been added a lot longer than me.
All I'm trying to do is get this game so I can play it on a modern system and it's proving very challenging.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion Best I suggest is trying either compatibility mode or spinning up a windows 7 vm. neither of which are awesome options TBH.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion Compatibility mode does not work for this game on Windows 11 and as for Windows 7, I don’t know how that would go with modern builds of NVDA for one thing.
Even tried getting a hold of certain DLL’s to make things nice and smooth but that didn’t do much.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy I'm about 129 percent sure modern dll's just won't work. some folks got my old games running in win 11, but I have a feeling bavisoft used an even older code stack which could have used direct x 7 or some such. I forget what the lastest version of NVDA that will run on win 7 is, but I think it is out there somewhere.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven My knowledge is probably nowhere near as good as yours but you are quite right, from what I have deduced, Grizzly Gulch ran a Direct sound stack meant for Windows 98 and NT which makes sense because the game was released in 2000.

@TheVoiceGuy @lerven The thing that I've found is, while you can get these older games to run on windows 10/11, there will be weird issues that you can't make sense of. I tried to play Monkey Business on 10/11 and the stereo field just isn't as wide as it was on XP or maybe 7. I think it's because of the emulation of the old direct sound layer in WASAPI not being completely 100% faithful. I'm still trying to figure it out, or create some kind of minimalist platform for playing older games on that doesn't introduce a ton of overhead.

@TheVoiceGuy @lerven I'm thinking more and more that Wine for Windows, while that sounds counterproductive, would actually be very useful for this sort of thing.

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@Bri @lerven You’re quite right regarding weird issues. With the game I’m trying to fix, there’s plenty of them and it’s just unfathomable.

James Dean 2d ago

@Bri @TheVoiceGuy @lerven This made me think of a Mac App that I was very sad I couldn't use years ago called Crossover. The idea was that you have a very small windows "bottle," as it called it, to run a specific Application, so it wasn't a full Windows installation thus no speaky, but something along these lines could work for just this purpose. This probably doesn't actually help you figure out what this minimalist thing would look like but that's my 2 cents or something.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven The game is actually quite clever because it used different lanes from left to right to move that mono sound file around.

André Polykanine 3d ago

@lerven @TheVoiceGuy I'm absolutely sure luddites were telling the same stuff in the nineteenth century Great Britain during industrial revolution, they simply had no Internet to brag about it constantly.

Liam Erven 3d ago

@menelion @TheVoiceGuy Industrial revolution and the invention of the assembly line. Assembly line scared countless people.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@lerven @menelion I’ve heard good things about Claude.
I started using Codex because I just found it a little bit easier.

Xantastic 2d ago

@TheVoiceGuy @menelion it's also a great song by kevin bloody willson

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@cordova5029 @menelion Funny you should say that I was actually going to put that song up from YouTube.
Here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xzuW_mahdo

Dilligaf

YouTube

Tech Singer 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy If I may ask, I haven't seen it on Top Tech Tidbits, or at least don't remember doing so. If you've posted it and it hasn't been published, or if I just missed it, I apologise, but just in case. https://fs19.formsite.com/GIyoyx/ulqkr9pozb/index

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Tech Singer 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Also, if wherever you announce it doesn't like vibe coding, why should you care? If it works, it works, and what people say is of no importance.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@techsinger I haven’t actually thought about any podcasts as yet.
I only put this full graphical interface version on GitHub about 48 hours ago.
If people wanted to know about it and wanted to talk to me, I would love it.

Tech Singer 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Sorry, just to be clear, top tech tidbits is not a podcast, it's a text newsletter. I don't do podcasts myself but don't see why raising it with some of the blindness ones might not be of use. Also, I assume you've posted it on applevis?

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@techsinger Thanks for that suggestion! I haven’t done so yet.
I'm just trying to make sure that the original release gets off the ground and that there are no problems with the repository.
Are things on GitHub allowed on Apple this?

Tech Singer 3d ago

@TheVoiceGuy I don't see why it wouldn't https://www.applevis.com/forum/macos-mac-apps/vocr-2-alpha has a direct link to GH and nobody mentioned it as being problematic.

VOCR 2 alpha | AppleVis

I noticed that VOCR 2 has an alpha out: https://github.com/chigkim/VOCR/releases/tag/v2.0.0-alpha.10 It has a lot of new features. For starters, you can now change the keyboard shortcuts, which should be handy. I've always struggled with Cmd+Option+Shift+W. And, somewhat inevitably, it now has some AI built into it. To use ChatGPT you must supply your own API Key, or if you have the stomach for it you can set up a local chatbot.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@techsinger Fantastic! Thanks so much for your help.

@TheVoiceGuy Tell the story. Explain what you were trying to get access to, the problems you were having and the improvements you were hoping you could make. Explain that although you're not a developer, spending a ton of time trying and testing and trying over again has resulted in a neat thing that's doing what you need, so now you're sharing what you've made, hoping it'll be useful to other people. Hoping, not promising. There's nothing other than a slither of time to lose by trying it out. You'd like to hear how that goes and you're open to suggestions. That's open to hearing them, not promising to implement them. Anyone who wants to poo-poo that narrative can knock themselves out with their own dickswing.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@Scott You are the second person to suggest this and I’m working on this now.
I've even put a section on the repo about it but totally, why didn't I think of telling the story before? Stories are Everything.

@TheVoiceGuy In my book, so long as you're not pretending to be more knowledgeable/ pretending to have more experience than you really do around software development, I wouldn't have any reason to knock what you've been doing. Could a seasoned developer get to a similar result quicker and cheaper? Probably. One of those didn't show up and start plugging away at the problem though. You did. That's a good thing. It wouldn't exist if you hadn't shown up and tried.

Michael Marshall 3d ago

@Scott Thank you for your words.
I can say with absolute confidence that my knowledge of computer code is almost nonexistence.
I prompted, I sculpted, I put my rambling ideas into prompts for things like Codex to use and told exactly what I wanted and it did the coding.
I tested, I found problems, I tested, I died a little inside, I screamed at the world, I screamed at myself, I threatened the AI tools with incredible acts of harm at one time or another if they didn’t do what I wanted or if they hallucinated.

James Dean 2d ago

@TheVoiceGuy I feel this conflict as well. I've been doing a few different things but hesitant to release them because of backlash. I'll eventually do it, just got to keep working on self-encouragement or something.

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@GamingWithEars Take it from me. People are going to think what they are going to think and there’s nothing you can do to change that.
Fuck them I say, if you think it's got potential, put it out and fuck them! They don't have to use it.
Just be upfront.

James Dean 2d ago

@TheVoiceGuy Thank you sir! This does help.

Tara Owton 2d ago

@TheVoiceGuy I’ll use anything as long as it works, isn’t full of bugs and is secure. I don’t care how it’s been coded. I haven’t tested your program, I don’t need OcR solutions at the moment, but I think it’s a really great idea. I’ve bookmarked it for use in the future.

Michael Marshall 2d ago

@oasisfan Thanks so much.
You will find when you do use it that it's better than your standard OCR.
I deliberately haven't called it yet.
If you ever do use it, you will need your own API key to what service you're using to scan. Google Gemini my highest recommendation for this. Claude in second place but you need to pay to get access to the API with Claude.