smiletolerantly

joined 2 years ago
[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 8 points 19 hours ago

I'm a bit unhappy with my current job, because I only get 25 days of paid holidays (of course not including public holidays). That's 5 days below industry average, so my next job I'll look gor 35+ days.

Nice, I was able to send an email to that.

Mate I'd live in Banks' Culture without a heartbeat's thought if I could.

The problem isn't AI as a concept, it's the underlying societal disregard for ethics in the face of profits.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There might be some people thinking along those lines, but I'd be careful to tread into the territory of conspiracy theories. To me this seems a lot more like a case of "The bad implications are pretty obvious when you think about it - but we can't let that stand in the way of making a profit!".

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 25 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I'd like to add that this doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional.

I'm certain the current bubble will pop sooner rather than later, but by that point (and today already as well), all the infrastructure, the data centers etc. will already have been built.

And they will not just disappear.

Some might be scavenged for parts to be sold off, but far more likely, I unfortunately think, is that governments will (be lobbied to) step in, and prevent the loss of hardware, of companies, and especially of jobs. They obviously won't start the money-burning, consumer-facing ChatGPTs & Co again, so what else can we do with all that hardware that's sitting there, looking for a purpose?

Exactly the thing the person above me said. Implement the surveillance state at an unprecedented scale and speed, because those GPUs need SOMETHING to do, lest all that capital be wasted.

There will be a bailout, and we'll all suffer for it.

Sorry, unfortunately can't help you there. My matrix server is not federated, I remember back then I created an account on matrix.org specifically to read these. But maybe they got deleted in the meantime?

Anyways, I have been really happy with continuwuity, to the point that up until now, I haven't even looked at tuwunel again. The maintainers of continuwuity seem really nice and engaged, and both from a usage and stability point of view, as well as for the actually surprisingly fast release cycle, I have no complaints. I found and fixed a bug a couple weeks ago, and the dev process was also very friendly and relaxed.

In short: while I don't know how things are on the tuwunel side, I'm very happy to have gone with continuwuity and have high hopes for the future of the project.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And yet, in non-English speaking countries, virtually every kid is taught English to a level that's at least "roughly business".

I also reject your premise of 8 hours / day for a year; how about 1-2 hours / day for 4-8 years.

In the case of English, school kids would get more like 2-4hrs per week and be perfectly fluent after a couple of years, btw.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 18 points 2 weeks ago

The show is endlessly quotable

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 40 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Mallory Archer?

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 18 points 3 weeks ago

Universal Android Debloater.

It's a community-rating systems for apps, and you can remove/permanently (even through os updates) disable them through ADB, without actually needing to know anything about ADB because uad comes in a nice GUI package.

I think I removed ~200 apps (most of them invisible, background ads stuff) from my phone. Much better experience.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Idk. With Arch I felt like I constantly had to be on top of things. With nix, everything is rock solid and stable, and if I want to change or add something, I do that, once, and then it's also rock solid until all eternity and across all my machines.

In total I might have spent more time interacting with nix already, but it feels less like "work" than with arch. Higher setup burden, almost zero maintenance burden and zero mental overhead.

Happy holidays btw

Edit: forgot to include the context. For the Thunderbird example, I have spent 1-2 hours once, 2 years ago, converting all the Thunderbird config options to nix, and adding my mail accounts through nix. I have not had to go into the Thunderbird settings since, and after doing a fresh install on a new machine, my accounts are already THERE on first boot. A lot of things are tedious in nix, but you do them ONCE.

 

Not an ad, I'm not involved with Bento (or Stirling, for that matter). I've been unhappy with Stirling for a while (why do documents need to be uploaded to the server? That makes it really hard to safely host publicly. Why is it so slow? Plus, too many things are put behind a fucking paywall).

Learned about Bento this morning, tried it out, really liked it, spent an hour today packaging it for nixpkgs. It doesn't quite have feature parity with Stirling yet, but at least for me, everything I need is there, it's fast, and it keeps processing in the browser. Like, not even joking: the output of the build process/nixpkg are just a couple of static HTML files and some WASM. No server-side components at all. Really refreshing to see.

 

A while back I played a round with the HASS Voice Assistant, and pretty easily got to a point where STT and TTS were working really well on my local installation. Also got the hardware to build wyoming satellites with wakeword recognition.

However, what kept me from going through the effort of setting everything up properly (and finally getting fucking Alexa out of my house) was the "all or nothing" approach HASS seemingly has to intent recognition. You either:

  • use the build in Assistant conversation agent, which is a pain in the ass because it matches what your STT recognized 1:1, letter by letter, so it's almost impossible to actually get it to do something unless you spoke perfectly (and forget, for example, about putting something on your ToDo list; Todo, todo, To-Do,... are all not recognized, and have fun getting your STT to reliably generate the ToDo spelling!), or
  • you slap a full-blown LLM behind it, either forcing you to again rely on a shitty company, or host the LLM locally; but even in the latter case and on decent (not H100, of course, but with a GPU at least) hardware, the results were slow and shit, and due to context size limitations, you can just forget about exposing all your entities to the LLM Agent.
  • You also have the option of combining the two approaches; match exactly first, if no intent recognized, forward to LLM; but in practice, that just means that sometimes, you get what you wanted ("all lights off" with a 70% success rate, I'd say), and still a lot of the time you have to wait for ages for a response that may be correct, but often isn't from the LLM.

What I'd like is a third option, doing fuzzy matching on what the STT generated. Indeed, there seems to have been multiple options for that through rhasspy, but that project appears to be dead? The HASS integration has not been updated in over 4 years, and the rhasspy repos are archived as of earlier this month.

Besides, it was not entirely clear to me if you could just use the intent recognition part of the project, forgoing the rest in favor of what HASS already brings to the table.

At this point, I am willing to implement a custom conversation agent, but wanted to make sure first that I haven't simply missed an obvious setting/addon/... for HASS.

My questions are:

  • are you using the HASS Voice Assistant without an LLM?
  • if so, how do you get your intents to be recognized reliably?
  • do you know of any setting/project/addon helping with that?

Cheers! Have a good start into the working week...!

 

If you've been selfhosting conduit or conduwuit, you probabl are aware that the conduwuit project was discontinued a couple months back.

I've been holding out on updating my matrix homeserver until it becomes clear which fork(s) will survive long term.

I feel like I can't put off updating for much longer now, plus the tuwunel nixpkg and -module were merged yesterday, so now the two most promising forks are both options for me.

Still, I'm unsure what route to take. Here's my thoughts:

  • not going through another round of this in a couple of months from now would be great, so stability and long-term maintenance promises would be great
  • I assume incompatibility between the forks, if not now then very soon; this is a "pick an option, then stick with it and pray" situation
  • tuwunel apparently has a full-time paid dev working on it now, which is great; at the same time, that means features will follow the priorities of the (as of now unknown) sponsor of the project
  • it is, however, the officially endorsed successor
  • it also seems like few other people are actively involved, putting in question development practices, reviews, and what happens should the lead dev throw in the towel
  • lastly, while there's been a lot of apparently rapid progress (with releases 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0 at quite a fast pace), the repo itself seems... empty? Few issues, few PRs, commentlessly-deleted issues
  • on the other hand, continuwuity seems more active by commit/contributors count, but is seemingly 100% volunteer work
  • they do seem to backport tuwunel changes and features, which is great!
  • they are not officially endorsed

In short: I fucking hate community drama. What fork did you go with? Is there anything else to consider? I just want an up-to-date matrix homeserver, and not to have to tell my users "sorry, starting from scratch because we picked the wrong fork..."

Update: there's been some back and forth on the nixpkgs PR, esp. one user who posted a lot of receipts here:

@scvalex @queeek180 @Askhalion you wanted links, here's some links :)

claim legitimacy over or de legitimise other projects:

https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$V9aN1Wn0pId-JWbxH1WV5I8PAVMajooX7WMFKmDyh6E
https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$IsfOfe8anRYqbRAwj7OdlX_hS-kBbHUJTVhQW-32Etk
https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$-Bswk96jj3ns8xpSISKH0Y24pXZ2Xcd6Rwl8mRZQIaM (ironic)
https://matrix.to/#/#meowlnir:maunium.net/$zOmf7-NIHfQ_f_Ku9Q794GeKyu8n9v2MAvPtYjlGJIE (ironic that he asked https://matrix.to/#/#meowlnir:maunium.net/$nE57Bi_DmvodZJe7JDPS7NxUBlxeDLUBhYIWNzgNk0g despite having cherrypicked a bunch of fixes from continuwuity already)
https://matrix.to/#/#tuwunel:grin.hu/$svIUeuWfm2VWuHGSUMeT5VWWcZclraKcmUaDK3NiYEM ("June and I dealt with another "continuwuity" called "grapevine" last year")

threats against the project:

https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$o27P102ebbFa9U80e-FK-DxGTupy8IJ3TSWFYJm6hIs
https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$priRlTsBuH2YfTo_pb04xHUJpTeU2DKXdJ7tAVrR5w4

personal threats:

https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$5YefXN_uVR5WiGfj32j3Po9Q1JMKuTTfxve_8IHp1J8
https://matrix.to/#/#ping:maunium.net/$L-dXYMXucfJiLkyc5dvv4t7pQqUKMwnLEd9zzLjZlu0

attempting to get security details released early (knowing only he and three other servers have finished implementing):

https://matrix.to/#%2F%21NasysSDfxKxZBzJJoE%3Amatrix.org%2F%24_d2wJk45JtwblMHRVBdfeEV1cAU5flPuRebTAvfOr-s%3Fvia=nexy7574.co.uk&via=matrix.org&via=element.io
https://matrix.to/#/#tuwunel:grin.hu/$mgi2dDGnL-L9Jqjm_YZPhu4NoAx8q3OMF9KIfRiGwFs

other trivia:

Jason getting his server ACL'ed from all foundation rooms:
https://matrix.to/#/!WuBtumawCeOGEieRrp:matrix.org/$u8YRBq_s-OrOpl4IGt15iUHPBKubKa4A_n-u_WbgqAU` - zemos.net ban
https://matrix.to/#/!WuBtumawCeOGEieRrp:matrix.org/$l8pKC-mR0tjLFnbnmi_8xSXbHGA3vgew-QTRWAk-kCs - wildcard ban on his domain

if any of these events get redacted, feel free to reach out and I will provide the original events - unredacted. just as another layer of certainty, when i provide the events, you can verify the server signing keys yourself, fairly trivially, as well as calculate the event ID (which is a hash). fetching the event from your $CONDUWUIT_DESCENDANT homeserver is as simple as running @conduit debug get-pdu $id in your admin room, as well as checking validity with @conduit debug verify-json or @conduit debug verify-pdu.

UPDATE: i've just been informed json signing is based on the redacted event, not the full input.

Honestly, that first link is all the info I needed. Keep reading, <100 messages and it becomes clear that I do not want to put the continuation of my homeserver into Jasons/tuwunels hands. Going to migrate to continuwuity later today.

view more: next ›