This isn’t newsworthy. I’m not a fan of Vance at all, but his comments here aren’t even bad. If you read the article, the comments boil down to: “I believe this, I wish she did too, it’s fine if she never does, I love her regardless.” It’s honestly pretty healthy to be able to have that in a relationship.

This is practically at the level of criticizing Obama’s tan suit, and is just noise and distraction in a news cycle filled with actually bad things (multiple wars, the government shutdown, measles outbreaks, a hurricane, etc). Don’t spread this nonsense. It’s fodder for the other side to call people out for being focused on ridiculous, unfounded slights, and allows them to not pay attention to real issues. Make noise about things that matter.

Are you sure it’s not ukulele?

I don’t have as much experience with HASS, but I did use Mycroft for quite a while (stopped only because I had multiple big moves, and ended up in a place small enough voice control didn’t really make sense any more). There were a few intent parsers used with/made for that:

https://github.com/MycroftAI/adapt https://github.com/MycroftAI/padatious https://github.com/MycroftAI/padaos

In my experience, Adapt was far and away the most reliable. If you go the route of rolling your own solution, I’d recommend checking that out, and using the absolute minimum number of words to design your intents. E.g. require “off” and an entity, and nothing else, so that “AC off,” “turn off the AC,” and “turn the AC off” all work. This reduces the number of words your STT has to transcribe correctly, and allows flexibility in command phrasing.

If you borrow a little more from Mycroft, they had “fallback” skills that were triggered when an intent couldn’t be matched. You could use the same idea, and use https://github.com/seatgeek/thefuzz to fuzzy match entities and keywords, to try to handle remaining cases where STT fails. I believe that is what this community made skill attempted to do: https://github.com/MycroftAI/skill-homeassistant (I think there were more than one HASS skill implementations, so I could be conflating this with another).

Another comment mentioned OVOS/Neon - those forked off of Mycroft, so you may see overlap if you investigate those as well.

Chest compressions, chest compressions, chest compressions.

It can create a hard place. If the current government is a rock, these late night hosts can create a hard place, to catch the network between. The network cares about money - if the government starts taking away licenses, they can’t make money, so they’ll roll over (as they have done). But they can’t make money without their talent either, so the hosts can push back from the other side to maintain their platform/voice.

Will it work? Maybe not. Will giving up? Definitely not.

Silencing themselves is counter productive. They need to do the opposite. They need to use their platform to make as much noise as possible.

They can and should protest in other ways, but to sit out is to give the other side what they want, and to squander their ability to affect change.

*An official letter, signed by at least three colleagues.

What bugs me the most is I’ve pointed it out to people in conversations that basically go like this:

Me: You used it for X and caught mistakes - why are you trusting it for Y? Them: That’s a good point.

And then they keep doing it anyway.

I’m not an AI hater at all - it can be a great way to accelerate work you are capable of doing on your own. But using it for things you don’t understand, and/or not double checking its work is insanity.

I hate to bring up AI, but this is exactly what I keep trying to explain to people - when you ask any of these bots questions about things you’re an expert in, you see all the flaws. The trouble is people tend not to ask questions about things they already know…

I used Windows growing up, switched to Linux in highschool on my personal machines, and was forced to use Mac for nearly 10 years at work. In my experience, they all have problems, and the worst part is always early on. After you’ve used them for a while and have gotten familiar/comfortable, the problems get easier to deal with, and switching back (or on to something new) becomes more daunting/uncomfortable than dealing with what you have. So in that sense, yes, it will get easier.

Also, as hardware ages, you often see better support (though laptops can be tricky, as they are not standardized).

Keep in mind, when you use Windows or Mac, you’re using a machine built for that OS and (presumably) supported by the manufacturer for that OS (especially with custom drivers). If you give Linux the same advantage (buy a machine with Linux pre-installed, or with Linux “officially supported”), you’re much more likely to have a similar, stable experience.

Also, I’ve had better stability with stock Ubuntu than its derivatives (Pop!_OS and Mint). It might be worth trying an upstream distro, to see if you have better stability.

Go see a show at The Comedy Cellar. Book it in advance if you can. If it’s “sold out,” you can still show up and wait before showtime - I think they only sell about half the seats online, so if you show up 30-60 minutes before the show, you can probably get in.

The gang must have let Charlie make the sign again.

They updated the ride after the movies, so… It’s kind of circular at this point.

Raster images do not need to be rendered - see Rendering:

Rendering is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from input data such as 3D models…Today, to “render” commonly means to generate an image or video from a precise description (often created by an artist) using a computer program.

Note that “render” is a fairly generic term, and it is sometimes used like “render to the screen,” to just mean to display something. Rasterisation may be a better term to use here, since it only applies to vector graphics, and is the part of the process I am referring to.

In any case, except for possibly reading fewer bytes from disk, the vector case includes all the same compute and memory cost as the raster image - it just has added overhead to compute the bitmap. On modern hardware, this doesn’t take terribly long, but it does mean we’re using more compute just to launch/load things.

It’s also worth noting apps have to ship higher resolution assets now, due to higher resolution displays. This can include video, audio, images, etc. Videos and images may be included at multiple resolutions, to account for different sized displays.

For images, many might assume vectors are the answer, but vectors have to be rendered at runtime, which increases startup time in the best case scenario, and isn’t even always supported on all platforms, meaning they have to be shipped alongside raster assets of a few different sizes, further increasing package bloat. And of course the code grows to add the logic to properly handle all the different asset types and sizes.

All this (packaging dependencies, plus assets/asset handling) to say it isn’t always malware, ads, electron, etc. Sometimes it’s just trying to make something that looks nice and runs well (enough) on any machine.

Many apps ship both vectors and raster images. It is worth nothing that vectors save space, but increase compute (the image now has to be rendered at runtime), contributing to slower startup times.

Worth noting is that “good” database design evolved over time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization). If anything was setup pre-1970s, they wouldn’t have even had the conception of the normal forms used to cut down on data duplication. And even after they were defined, it would have been quite a while before the concepts trickled down from acedmemia to the engineers actually setting up the databases in production.

On top of that, name to SSN is a many-to-many relationship - a single person can legally change their name, and may have to apply for a new SSN (e.g. in the case of identity theft). So even in a well normalized database, when you query the data in a “useful” form (e.g. results include name and SSN), it’s probably going to appear as if there are multiple people using the same SSN, as well as multiple SSNs assigned to the same person.

I’ve had the same problem with HeliBoard learning garbage. I just changed my settings though, and I think it should help:

1. Open HeliBoard settings
2. Open Text correction settings
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom, and turn off “Add words to personal dictionary”

If you scroll all the way to the top again, you can manually manage the personal dictionary, including adding words you do want, and deleting any junk that was added by mistake, before switching that setting off.

I think to be fair, you’ve got to compare his before and after, rather than comparing him to anyone else.

I certainly wouldn’t say he looks young, but I think he’s on a better trajectory.

Someone testing on themselves is how we learned what causes and how to treat ulcers (the researcher earned a Nobel prize for giving himself an ulcer, and then treating it), among other things.

Controlled trials are great, but research has to start somewhere.