Criminalizing use of Click Farms. Be interesting if the charges stick, and how it will impact the SEO market.

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3

There’s a model with a more expensive dock, or one without. The one without worked fine. But it had to be the Box 3 not Box 2. It worked pretty well and you could create custom images to indicate whether it was listening, thinking, etc.

Instructions here: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/

The box isn’t powerful enough to run an LLM itself. It’s just good enough as an audio conduit. You can either use their cloud integration with ChatGPT, or now, Anthropic Claude. But if you had a powerful Home Assistant server, say an Nvidia Jetson or a PC with a beefy Nvidia GPU, you could run local models like Llama and have better privacy.

This is from earlier this year. I imagine they’ve advanced more since then.

Their LLM integration is super cool. I messed with it for a previous job. Way better than Alexa or Google Home.

Installed RabbitMQ for use in Python Celery (for task queue and crontab). Was pleasantly surprised it also offered MQTT support.

Was originally planning on using a third-party, commercial combo websocket/push notification service. But between RabbitMQ/MQTT with websockets and Firebase Cloud Messaging, I’m getting all of it: queuing, MQTT pubsub, and cross-platform push, all for free. 🎉

It all runs nicely in Docker and when time to deploy and scale, trust RabbitMQ more since it has solid cluster support.

Since nobody’s brought it up: MQTT.

It got pigeonholed into IoT world, but it’s a pretty decent event pubsub system. It has lots lf security/encryption options, plus a websocket layer, so you can use it anywhere from devices, to mobile, to web.

As of late last year, RabbitMQ started suporting it as a supported server add-on, so it’s easy to use it to create scalable, event-based systems, including for multiuser games.

Wait until AGI!

AGI: Yes.

Wait until the sentient robots!

Sentient robots: Yes.

Wait until biological…

Biologics: Glub, glub. Yes.

How long before the students gamify it to see who can generate the most alerts?

She was the co-author of the second edition of Bunnie Huang’s New Essential Guide to Electronics, for those looking to make hardware in Shenzhen: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/a-new-essential-guide-to-electronics-by-naomi-wu-details-a-different-shenzen/

The bumbling, fail upward brunchlords…

chef’s kiss

Brand-sponsored suppositories.

Funny story: when SO first started, started answering questions in domains I had experience in. The gamification was fun. After a year, questions got repetitive, so stopped.

A few years later. Googling a tech question. Top answer. Checked. Looks good.

Scroll down. It’s my own answer from way back when.

First time I felt old.

They can go the route of The Onion and sell annual memberships. People will pay if it offers value and keeps ads out.

If starting out: on web, Python and Typescript will take you far. On mobile, Swift and Kotlin. On Windows/Mac, C# and Swift. You’re on your own for Linux desktop.

• Help coach a kid’s sports league.
• Volunteer at the local library or senior home.
• Help clean roads / rivers / environment.
• Learn mixology and become a bartender at a local hangout.
• Pick up exercise/sports and look for others into it. Baseball, bowling, running, hunting, hiking, biking, flag football, etc.
• Tutor ESL.

There are lots of ways to connect with others without having to spend a lot of money. As long as you go in without an expectation of a specific outcome. Just go with the flow, be open to new experiences, and see what happens.

Excellent domain name!

Cloudflare just announced an AI Bot prevention system: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/

Thanks. After your note I went back and re-checked with my friend. I mixed up his comments with those from another friend with a different setup. Updated my original comment.

I have a closet full of old routers (including Linksys), extenders, and switches to be able to handle dead spots. They all sucked. Then I heard about mesh routers when they first came out. Tried two, saw that they worked well, and got a third one. A few months later, a new ISP showed up in our neighborhood with unmetered Gig fiber and I happily drop-kicked Comcast to the curb. It was gratifying that the fiber connection came with a single mesh device of the same brand I already had. Since then, I’ve upgraded to the next-gen routers, and gotten a few smaller ‘wall-wart’ units for extending the range outdoors.

I don’t really have to fuss with configurations like I had to before. It’s amazing how much of a time drain it was to go screw around with settings when a new device came in that didn’t work, or to replace a router when one died. I haven’t had to do anything in years. Every once in a while, I go set up a DHCP reservation but that’s it. The firmware updates auto-install while everyone’s asleep and I get pretty decent bandwidth in places I had constant dropoffs. When I switched out the actual routers to the new gen, the whole thing took 10m and the whole network was down for maybe 2m while the new ones booted up. No end devices had to be modified or restarted.

Where the fiber comes in, there’s a single router node, with two Ethernet ports. One goes to the fiber ONT, the other to a 10-port gig switch where it feeds the rest of wired setups. Elsewhere, the farthest mesh unit has no incoming physical connection, but a small wired switch connected to other wired devices near there. I didn’t have to make any router configuration settings to make this work. Just plugged it all in. Common devices go on the main network, and janky IOT devices (and visitors) go on the guest network.

For external access for self-hosting, you can take a domain name and set up a free Cloudflare tunnel to access your in-home services remotely. Pay Cloudflare a fee and you get extra rules-based access control. The router also has a premium service where it comes with a family bundle of security software. One other thing I like is that the mobile app sends a notification whenever a new device joins the network, so if I see one I don’t recognize, I can block them. Hasn’t happened yet, but if it does, I’ll know to go rotate the wifi passwords.

Anyway, highly recommend mesh routers. I happened to get Eeros (before they were acquired) but there are a few other brands around. Some people don’t like that Amazon bought eero, but they appear to be left to run as an independent outfit. It has been pretty solid so far.

P.S. A friend with a more complicated setup than mine got Ubiquitis. It’s anecdotal, but he recently asked about switching away and I told him pretty much what I’ve written here. YMMV.

Edit: checked back with friend. He said he was very happy with his Ubiquiti gear. I mixed up his review from years ago with another friend’s networking setup.

You’ve been using cheap cables.

Next step up is a JCAT: https://audiobacon.net/2019/11/02/the-jcat-signature-lan-a-1000-ethernet-cable/amp/

/s if not obvious.

Good luck with all the inane shitposts.