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.

This seems like the kind of thing that should be bookmarked and thrown in corporations’ faces at every moment.

Leto II was a biological supercomputer in his own right, who spend thousands of years crafting humanity in the same manner as the Bene Gesserit, under the hand of a totalitarian government. The methods were different, but the path was just as delusional as the religions that his father abused for his own benefit.

Ummm…duh?

So, he became a biological machine to treat people like machines. Sounds like nothing was learned.

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.

To be fair, Microsoft is an indie company that probably can’t afford more than one graphic designer.

It’s more like it’s tyranny of the majority, where some popular style or VFX or meme or dominates the landscape. Figet spinners, Stanley tumblers, bean mouth animation, Vaporwave, that time Terminator 2 came out and everybody was showing off liquid metal VFX like it was out of style, the same thing with VCR screen fuzz on videos now, etc. I think Tiktok has made this problem infinitely worse, since all it takes is some random video to get insanely popular, and suddenly people are consuming some other shitty product, or eating cleaning products, or doing something else fatally stupid.

And yes, it’s incredibly easy to download some Ghibli art style. Or any art style, really.

It’s more like it’s tyranny of the majority, where some popular style or VFX or meme or dominates the landscape. Figet spinners, Stanley tumblers, bean mouth animation, Vaporwave, etc., etc., etc.

And yes, it’s incredibly easy to download some Ghibli art style.

So if you cut out the the most divisive political accounts, you will not miss ANY actual news, but are likely to miss a huge pile of disinformation.

No, you just cut out the misinformation. If they are spreading vaccine misinformation on Facebook, fuck them. Cut them out. Never read a thing they put out again.

It’s not about divisiveness. It’s about critical thinking skills.

This is only solved with lawsuits, and even then, they will resist as hard as they did with Epic.

Can’t we just call it Trump’s 2025 Budget Bill, instead of pretending it’s a plus-sized porn star?

Israel isn’t Judaism and Judaism isn’t Israel! Mixing that up is problematic because you’re confounding anti-zionism (a settler colonial state project committing genocide) with anti-semitism.

Mixing that up is intentional, so that you can be accused of being antisemitic by not supporting Israel. Politicians love to do this.

Are you sure? That’s just a nude girl in the background. Where are they getting away with that?

After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups.

This sounds like a call to be willfully ignorant of the serious political shit going down around them. That’s how you get the average idiot who doesn’t understand why voting for a guy like Trump is a bad idea.

You should be fucking angry and have more animosity towards other political groups, or you aren’t paying attention. Nazis should be called out.

Ctrl+F “revenge”, no words found.

Is it also down-to-up? Because it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

The myth of the silent majority sitting directly in the midpoint of whatever positions the GOP and DNC espouse at any given time is also part of the problem. People like my dad are convinced, polls and voting trends be damned, that the vast majority of voters are right of the Democrats and left of Republicans. Less woke than Dems, but less racist than Reps. Less white than Reps, but more white than Dems. etc etc.

The true majority is a collection of:

• The uninformed (“non-political” voters)
• The uneducated (stupid people)
• The apathetic (ones who don’t even vote)
• People who don’t understand the class war we’ve had for the past several thousand years