I guess there’s something for everyone! :D

Just what I think is better understanding of the economy and transportation than before. I also work in automotive.

Oh, not sarcastic. I’ll just say that I no longer believe this hypothesis. :D

We’re so deep in the sarcastic hole that I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not. 😅

We need to do something about it. How about self-driving cars? /s

This is why we don’t build rail in North America! /s

I’m using the HA PE hardware. The wake word sensitivity is set to max. I’m currently using the default Home Assistant (Nabu Casa) cloud STT and TTS. I’m using Qwen 8b running on Ollama via the Ollama HA integration. It runs on my main computer on the same network. I’ve tested local STT and TTS and it works great. The only reason I’m currently using the cloud one is that there’s a specific voice that sounded good for a Santa Claus assistant for the holidays. We haven’t encountered significant issues with the wakeword. Gotta yell louder sometimes. It activates from the TV sometimes. Speech recognition is pretty flawless. Neither me or my wife is a native English speaker but we don’t have super heavy accents.

The one thing that made it great was the addition of the LLM. With it I don’t have to remember the exact names of devices or the correct phrasing to get HA to do what I want. It also allows for multiple actions in a single instruction. Since it’s an LLM you could also ask it to do LLM things. Like give you a semi-accurate fact or do basic math wrong:

If you’d like to know specifics, ask.

Nope. Whichever you like.

Yeah HA voice replaced the Google speakers for me. HA make a speaker for this.

I concur. Use HA with Zigbee and/or Z-Wave. Expose to Google Home as needed. You can expose idividual devices. That said switching to HA as main iterface is pretty painless and HA Voice is better than Google’s.*

* With local 4B LLM, so get a small mini PC or maybe Pi 5. I run the LLM on my workstation.

I use their WiFi access points. They’re great. That’s about it.

I just got burned by accidental latest tag on a pg container for Nextcloud. They moved some paths internally and it could no longer find the db.

This is a reminder for self-hosters to put their apps (and their data) on snapshotting filesystems with automatic, regular snapahots turned on; and fix the app versions to at least the major version, across all containers. This should bring similar disruption to bare minimum and makes recovery always possible, without relying on specific app backup features.

You can get it to run at time intervals. E.g. once an hour for 5 minutes. That’s not bad on battery for me. I actually have mine once every 24 hours for 30 minutes so it can successfully transfer a few gigs of Signal backups.

Welp I guess there’s another piece of software I have to setup now… 😄

The way I see (Mozilla) Firefox is a project whose devekopment is funded by its competitor - (Google/Alphabet) Chrome - so that there’s plausible deniability against anti-trust enforcement, the kinds of which Microsoft was subjected to some decades ago. I don’t think it’s a self-sustaining community project like say Debian is. Still use it over Chromium. Funnily, Chromium is a descendent of an organic community project - KHTML - that got extended and eventually taken over by our friendly familiar corporations.

Nothing. Still use it to present day. I generally trust the selection of OS software to the distro developers - Debian and Ubuntu for me. We constantly use software that doesn’t perfecty fit our requirements or wants.

Looks pretty good!

Can conserve power structures that give someone else the right to our surplus. 😅

We’ve played this game with browser engines and we find ourselves in a world with no viable community-controlled browser.

Read a thread on rust forum about this and my impression is that most folks fall in two ideological categories. Either “No politic here” or some form of libertarianism. I understand where both come from as I’ve gone through some form of either, and I think both are transitional for many people. I used to roll my eyes hard at people making license arguments. We’re past the point where tech corporations were playing nice with people. As they keep shitting on products and take more and more of people’s work without returning anything, more and more people from those two camps would come to the realization that everything is political and the social infrastructure of open source - the infrastructure that gets more people to do labour for a project - is what creates and keeps open source alive over the long haul. The excitement that a new language or framewwok creates is fleeting. The GPL-MIT/BSD/Apache/etc divide isn’t so much one of exact guarantees and legal rights, it is some of that, but more importantly it’s a political statement of intent.