JGrffn

They already have a sort of functional "Assistant". You can type to it, or you can use OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text language model loaded up on your Home Assistant machine through an add-on in order to talk to it, it works pretty much as well as any other proprietary speech to text model, except it's self hosted. The assistant can talk back with another add-on, though the voices are still too robotic IMO.

Key part in all of this is the "sort of functional" bit. Commands seem to have to be very literal to be understood, otherwise it just tells you it doesn't understand.

I'd still rather host my own assistant than rely on Google or Alexa, though, so I'm just gonna put my faith on the HASS team.

but literally nothing is stopping you from running your own server.

Nothing except gmail's very strict and hard to follow guidelines for spam filtering. Whether it's a byproduct of spam filtering or whether it's the intended result, the fact that Google essentially controls email traffic means you're not gonna have a good time communicating with others using your self-hosted email. This issue has been raised by self-hosters getting blacklisted, all the way to companies getting rate limited. If your intended use is to communicate with your everyday person, and considering the everyday person probably uses Gmail, you're in for a bad time at some point down the line.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to come out of it, to be honest.

If everything is perfectly simulated, the rules that allow consciousness to emerge are also there, and thus consciousness would emerge, regardless of whether it's a simulation or reality. If we only simulate a consciousness without laws of reality, that consciousness would still be designed to mimic a consciousness from a reality with laws (ours), and since it would be a perfect simulation (and it would have to be so in order to run meaningful tests), that consciousness might as well be as real as us. Thus, unethical.

Let's not forget that email is technically a defederated platform and it was monopolized by Google anyway. It can and will be done if allowed to be done by complacency.

The internet IS very US-centric, so this is kinda true, but it's also very easy to abuse and bore people out. I'm Honduran and I know more about US Politics than about my country's own politics. I know more about US politics than I do about every other country. This is not a flex, it's a fucking burden on my mind and mental health.

I kinda liked how Lemmy wasn't too US-centric at first, but I'm feeling similar levels of burnout from Lemmy as I did from Reddit, which was mostly due to how much US shit was posted there just about everywhere.

I still use common colloquialisms without paying much mind to them. "thank God, oh my god, Jesus christ" etc. Kinda hard to get rid of those, but it's no biggie, really.

What I will say, is that while I do identify as an atheist in the sense of not believing in established religions or cults, I do consider that I am able to believe in more than what reality presents. I've always said I'm an agnostic atheist, but as of late, I've been feeling like it's rather OK and even necessary to wonder about reality and existence a lot more than what science allows itself to. For example, if you take even a moment to ponder about what physics and the quantum realm means about reality, you'll feel like something else is definitely going on, like we're obviously not seeing the full picture and there's a good chance we never will, and that the picture were missing is unparalleled in its majesty. To just think that we seem to be just a combination of countless fields fluctuating together to form reality, but at the end of the day you could just say we're the expression of different waves going through different mediums juxtaposed on each other. A combination of planes crashing in on each other in a multidimensional membrane, a universe that could be just one possibility out of a mostly dead multiverse, where even our universe seems to be mostly dead, yet here we stand. It's hard to wrap your mind around it, or even begin to grasp it all. Definitely makes you feel like there's more to it than just chance, hell, chance sounds like an implausible explanation for all of this.

I think I mostly take issue with "matter of fact" stances, where people will claim things are a specific way because their faith or textbook says so. No. Just, experience life, question it, question your beliefs, but also question life itself, don't settle for just "big bang and chance and meaninglessness" as science is just a tool, don't settle for just "God willed it all and demands these things of us", we're not here for that long, let's ponder on it all while we can, and enjoy the life that were lucky (or unlucky) to be able to experience for one moment in eternity of nothingness, or an eternity of eternities of different existences. Who knows what were doing here, where we go from here, where do we come from? It's ok to acknowledge that the answer to those questions is "nobody on this earth knows, and maybe we'll never know". Let's cope together, let's smile together, let's live and ponder together.

I'm here for the shitty advice! Fight toxic with toxic, let her barge in while you're jerking off, and don't stop once she's in. See how long she keeps doing that shit afterwards.

Yeah I want to know as well. His content isn't exactly my cup of tea and can feel dystopia, but my dude flies around the world giving away free surgery to people and shit, and he promotes charities and foundations and actually moves people to donate to them. His thumbnails are creepy as shit, and his content feels like it was made to be cut up into a bunch of 6 second tiktok videos, but I don't really see a dark side here.

New to AC what do you mean by floaters? Are tetra legs not considered floaters?

I actually hate the new whatsapp desktop app on windows. They somehow managed to turn it into this nearly unusable mess, where absolutely everything is super slow (5950x CPU be damned), most times textboxes just refuse to take focus and you just don't type at all until you click on something other than whatsapp and then click back in, and the app sometimes just completely disappears from my Taskbar. I've noticed similar trends of bugginess on the android app, every now and then the textbox will just shoot up to the top of the screen, or just behave erratically. Feels like I'm watching the spiritual rebirth of post-MS acquisition Skype.

Google literally crawls the web and serves piracy pages as search results, complete with keywords and all. How hard is it to just... Leave personal bookmark data alone? Encrypt it for the user and let it be? What the hell does Google have to be moderating personal saved links for?