• 8 Posts
  • 225 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • It’s not really “your house connected to the Internet” as much as just connecting it together to a central hub. My lights dim and turn off at set times of the day using scenes, including a more dynamic sunrise/sunset time. If it’s stormy weather during the day, the front porch light comes on. I have a few colored lights that change colors with the seasons. Home Assistant brings down the garage door at night, if I forget. If the garage sensor is tripped, the garage light comes on. I have dumber motion sensors for locations where it makes sense, like pantries or closets.

    I can control all of my interfaces from my phone. It can hook into local cameras, so that everything is centralized. HA can hook into any of the voice assistant systems, like Alexa. There are so many little conditions and automated switches I could create, based on either outside stimuli (like the weather) or internal sensors.


  • The Home Assistant community has a good reputation of routing around that kind of bullshit. There’s enough users that I predict a homegrown module will pop up in the next few months.

    I love my Ratgdo garage door unit, routing around the bullshit proprietary LiftMaster APIs that want you to download some stupid phone app. No, fuck you. I hard-wire that shit into my garage door opener and get an API that works like a dream.

    Sometimes, trying to integrate smart home devices can be a pain, but the Home Assistant core makes the integration much much easier. Please don’t like shit like this to detract from a future smart home project for your house. I would encourage you to just start it, if you’re wanting to get into it and willing to learn some things.







  • That’s always been the case. Grifters grift, and they have been grifting for thousands of years.

    You’re never going to find it 100%, but you can at least go back and blacklist who you have seen to be lying. Reputation is more important than ever. Far too many random strangers have been believing every word from other random strangers. This is why I don’t understand TikTok or other short-form video formats. Why would you take advice from some creator you’ve only seen once?


  • While there may be some truth to this, it completely ignores the cause of the BJ to begin with. It was in fact a rebellion by the people against those tools.

    I think his point is that Dune is full of unreliable narrators, and history is written by the victors. Why do we take the Butlerian Jihad at face value? Because other rich elite houses retell the same story and enforce the same rules?

    Or maybe the technology really did go too far, but the result was an massive, massive overcorrection that put humanity into another Dark Age.

    I don’t think it can simply be repurposed for liberation, that’s a naive interpretation that ignores all of the actual ways in which the current implementations of AI work.

    LLMs are a tool, and all tools can be repurposed or repossessed. Open source models and LLM tools are everywhere. Pretending that ChatGPT and other corporate models are the only ones out there are exactly what the corpofacists in power want you to believe.

    By ignoring this technology and sticking our fingers in our ears, we are allowing them to reshape out the technology works, instead of molding it for our own purposes. It’s not going to go away, and thinking that is just as foolish as believing the Internet is a fad.

    Are parts of it overhyped and overblown? Sure. Rich assholes have a knack for taking some concept and hyping it up to a million and under-delivering. But, the technology is still promising enough that it’s worth exploring where it can be beneficial, and it’s new enough that we can make sure we become a part of the design.

    Disgusting AI-generated add for merch halfway through.

    The negative preconceived notion bias is really not helping matters.










  • OP is editorializing the headline (“based on real people”) to try to push some agenda here. The fact that 404 Media already has vendetta against sites like CivitAI is bad enough. No, a majority of the models are not porn, not based off of celebrities, and no animals were harmed in the making of this film. Sure, you can point to certain examples of celebrities type models, but most of them are just for concepts not a specific person, and celebrities like to put their pictures out there for anybody to train against. And I do mean anybody can train against these. The hardware requirements are not hard, and besides the Patreon-fueled efforts of certain contributers, it’s just Joe Average people submitting their own LoRAs for concept training.

    Let me ask you a simple question: Do you like the current situation with the exploitation of women coming from the real porn industry? Or would you prefer an outlet where there are no men or women (or children) exploited at all?





  • Same company acquired two very similar apps.

    One required a $14/year subscription, the other $90/year

    So, why are you using a subscription at all, and not a free and open source app?

    You know what Blender is? It’s the industry standard. Why is it the industry standard? Because it’s free, open-source GPL, it can never be taken away from you, it can never be “acquired”, everybody’s using it, and everybody is contributing towards improving it. Nobody is bitching about how Blender is extracting millions of dollars from its users and reducing its feature set at the same time. (*cough cough* Photoshop *cough*)

    Free and open source software. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. Fuck subscriptions.