So, you’ve decided to steal cable…

I’m excited to introduce you to the absolutely insane world of wing walking:

https://youtu.be/cSUJPehvt6I

https://youtu.be/CyUoaC5vn6U

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?

Are you building something for fun, or something meant to last? If you want it to last, I’d be looking at old frameworks - obviously React, and Vue has also been around a long time. Angular is also old, but Google maintains it, so they could kill it at any moment (and personally I hated it when I had to use it).

I’ve never used Svelte, and don’t know much about it. From a quick look online, primarily what it does differently than other frameworks is use a compiler. I’d be a little concerned here, because what it compiles to is JS, as that’s what runs in your browser. This can make debugging more challenging, because when you pull up the debugger in the browser, it’s not your code, it’s the compiled code. They may have solved this problem, they may have browser extensions and IDE plugins to help with this, but find out before you start. If you can’t use a debugger, use a different framework.

But you (almost certainly) started using those backend frameworks after you had experience. You learned the basics first, and then incorporated frameworks when you got to larger projects.

I came here to say the same thing as the original reply in this thread, albeit with slightly different justification:

If you don’t know the basics, and can’t build a functional site with just HTML/CSS/JavaScript, all of the frameworks will be a nightmare. You should really learn those first, even if it means building a practice site, or completely rebuilding your frontend when you decide to use a framework.

The frameworks can make your life easier, but there’s a learning curve, and a huge cognitive burden especially when you are just starting. You’ll fight them more than work with them at the start.

That all said, never use what’s “hip” on the frontend. JS frameworks typically have the lifespan of a house fly. React is one of very, very few that has remained popular, and continued to get updates for a long time (at least in JS framework terms). It’s a solid choice with a huge community, good docs, good tooling, etc. There may be other valid choices, but seriously - avoid anything new and flashy, because that usually just means its deficiencies haven’t been found yet, and as soon as they are, there will be a new framework.

This article was posted here as well. Here’s the comment I left there:

This article seems either very naïve, or fairly disingenuous. Signal is not precariously installed on one box, and if that box goes down, the service dies. It is distributed. It’s running on many machines within AWS, and technologically, there’s no reason it couldn’t be in multiple regions of AWS, or even spread across multiple clouds (e.g. Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, etc), to improve resiliency to outages. The only way in which it is “centralized” is that there’s one foundation in charge of the whole thing. Are there drawbacks to this? Yes. But self-hosted, distributed, mesh/relay chats also have drawbacks. Servers in the mesh go down, people don’t keep things updated, they don’t necessarily connect to every other instance creating disjointed pockets, etc.

Also, to say “we don’t need the internet” we need “mesh networks” is odd… The internet is a mesh. Hence “inter.” Anything else is just a smaller version of the same thing, again with some benefits and some drawbacks.

Fighting a (relatively) successful platform that champions privacy and security, seems like a bad thing to do, when those are the same primary goals of the platform you support. It would be better to discuss the merits and use cases of each, and beat the privacy and security drum together.

In my opinion, this article is just spreading FUD. Signal is not perfect, but it’s pretty good. And when there’s an outage, we know why, and we know there’s a team working on it. With a federatated service, it may be harder to take “the whole thing” down, but that doesn’t mean nodes don’t go down, service isn’t disrupted, etc. Scaring people away from a (usually) reliable, open platform, that has been audited, that actively advances security research and keeps it’s platform secure against emerging threats, is counter productive. It’s just going to keep people using SMS and WhatsApp.

Yeah, I noted that they are centrally run by a single foundation, and that there are drawbacks to that. My argument isn’t that it is perfect, my argument is that it is good, and people promoting privacy and security shouldn’t be cutting it down. The FUD just keeps people using SMS and WhatsApp.

This article seems either very naïve, or fairly disingenuous. Signal is not precariously installed on one box, and if that box goes down, the service dies. It is distributed. It’s running on many machines within AWS, and technologically, there’s no reason it couldn’t be in multiple regions of AWS, or even spread across multiple clouds (e.g. Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, etc), to improve resiliency to outages. The only way in which it is “centralized” is that there’s one foundation in charge of the whole thing. Are there drawbacks to this? Yes. But self-hosted, distributed, mesh/relay chats also have drawbacks. Servers in the mesh go down, people don’t keep things updated, they don’t necessarily connect to every other instance creating disjointed pockets, etc.

Also, to say “we don’t need the internet” we need “mesh networks” is odd… The internet is a mesh. Hence “inter.” Anything else is just a smaller version of the same thing, again with some benefits and some drawbacks.

Fighting a (relatively) successful platform that champions privacy and security, seems like a bad thing to do, when those are the same primary goals of the platform you support. It would be better to discuss the merits and use cases of each, and beat the privacy and security drum together.

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.

This is circular.

if an attacker compromises the F-Droid app on your device, they can… load malicious apps onto your device

Could be rewritten:

if an attacker compromises your device, they can compromise your device

You’ve already lost when they put the first malicious app on.

Fediverse… Fed… Federated. Unifying it would defeat the purpose. Yes, there could be a single platform, with federated hosting, but multiple platforms working with a single protocol is a good thing.

Consider the web - in the old days, it was an open platform. Then Internet Explorer got a stranglehold, and to use the web practically required using IE on Windows (many sites did not work in other browsers). Eventually we righted the ship, but now Chromium browsers are taking over, and we’re heading in a similar direction.

For the fediverse to remain open and effective, we should embrace extra platforms*. It prevents anyone getting too much control over the protocol, prevents lock-in, prevents centralization, etc.

*We should generally encourage use/development of the same protocol, though.

Chest compressions, chest compressions, chest compressions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

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’s going on with the motion blur in this video? The handle looks odd…

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…