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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • In today’s market, the perception or even the profitability of a product means nothing. All that actually matters is growth.

    For a publicly traded company, or even one that just uses venture capital to start up; the product isn’t the thing that they might sell to consumers, it’s their brand. This is what gives them more capital to continue running the company and ultimately to profit.

    This means that a company no longer needs to make good products, they don’t need to keep customers happy, they don’t even need to be profitable. All they need is to show growth opportunities to potential investors.









  • So what is Home Assistant using for this?

    If I were to build it myself I’d probably over complicate it by using multiple llm agents on a local server. Probably use whisper to do the speech to text and then Mistral fine tuned on the Rosetta code dataset to send the API calls to HA. However that wouldnt keep it from always listening to me and trying to interpret what I say into a command for HA. Is that just a prompting issue for whisper or would I need another agent to turn on whisper?

    I could maybe get this to run without specialized hardware like a GPU but it would be better to have something for the llms to be a bit more responsive.



  • I’m just using my password manager in place of the authenticator app.

    So rather than using an app like Google authenticator or Authy to see what the new random sequence is for the MFA, my password manager stores that QR as a string and will display the same random sequence that a normal MFA app would.

    They key difference is that my MFA is synced across any device that I have configured my password manager on using the same cryptographic keys and version control history.

    So if my phone is dead, lost, or stolen, I can still access my banking account via MFA as normal.

    I suppose it brings up the idea of what a “factor” is in how it’s used for MFA. If a factor is supposed to be a different device, a different app on the same device as your password manager, or just a different passphrase that’s constantly changing.



  • I am not an expert, but I try to be pragmatic. Here’s what socalgas.com says about the topic.

    You’re right that natural gas is methane and that leaks are bad. However I think a nuanced view is important here for a few reasons.

    • Many developed countries have the infrastructure and workforce in place to not just safely deliver methane to buildings as an energy source but also to correct leaks.

    • Methane can be produced via a variety of sources both at a large and small scale. I’ve toyed with the idea of making a black soldier fly larvae farm and methane would be a by product

    • Gas tanks to hold methane have maximum a lifespan of 10 years. However many other methods of storing potential energy have a much shorter maximum lifespan, making methane a decent backup energy source in cases of emergency.

    I don’t know how good the energy conversion rate of burning methane is but I would be surprised if it is low.

    Personally I think we should leverage every option, especially the lower hanging fruit before dismissing these options as being not ideal when the alternative is continuing to do worse.



  • One of the biggest issues with 2fa is that normally it’s either an easily spoofable phone/email or an app locked to a device.

    This is why I use a password manager (pass) that is synced across all of my devices (via a private self hosted git for version control) that I can send 2fa QR codes to cameraless devices via screenshots using zbarimg and have every device capable of 2fa verification with the pass-otp extension.

    I know this setup is a bit complicated as just dealing with git or importing a gpg key would give most people I know sense of existential dread. I am curious to see what others use for similar functionality.