Uh, Austrian, not Australian.

Home Assistant invested quite a bit into the technology to create a FOSS voice assistant over the past year. It still needs quite a bit of work, but the foundation is there; it supports wake words (“Hey …”), speech-to-text to hear your command, interpretation and command processing, and text-to-speech to return results.

The downsides are that it’s still quite technical to set up primarily due to the lack of commercially available hardware, and the command library is fairly small at this point.

With some of this foundational work out of the way, I expect Home Assistant to move forward quickly to improve, and other projects can work off the same pieces if they desire to as well.

Here’s their year-end post about it: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/12/13/year-of-the-voice-chapter-5/

Pre-orders that include a Graphics Module with an eligible AMD Radeon™ GPU will receive a free download code for one of the biggest games of the year: Starfield™ Premium Edition. Quantities are limited*, and we’ll be sending out the code prior to the game’s early access launch.

So… I’ve made a $100 deposit for the pre-order… which is in a batch scheduled for Q4 delivery… but Starfield releases before that. I wonder if they’ll send out the Starfield codes before they ship laptops, even though the pre-order deposit is fully refundable?

Ultimately this is the fault of the poor democratic system implemented in the US. A truly progressive option can’t be formed because it would split the support of the Democratic Party, leaving the Republicans to take everything in the first-past-the-post voting system. In the absence of electoral reform, or a progressive takeover within the Democrats, or maybe a gigantic scandal that shakes up ether party creating new opportunities… the best option for a progressive voters seems to be to support these idiots rather than letting those idiots in. And the best option for the Democrats as a party that wants power is to cater to the middle and be inoffensive, driving this entire thing into a loop where little of value gets done.

Hm… I think if they fucked up and were negligent, this is a reasonable slap on the wrist judgement. If they fucked up, and then were knowledgeable in a malicious cover-up of their fuck up, this seems like a light punishment. The evidence seems to weigh towards the second, but the punishment gives them the benefit of the doubt on that.

I loved Everspace 2. I think if you enjoyed the gameplay of the first one, it’s a good bet you’ll enjoy it.

I think that the niche communities of reddit work well because of the huge number of people there to find enough niche participants. Lemmy isn’t at that point yet.