One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.

So… if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That’s how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you’ve installed. It does a match against the phrase ‘slots’ and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it’s all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don’t be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don’t like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you’ll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it’s shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There’s no free lunch.

This shows how one company (li-cycle) that claims they recycle 95% of the lithium does it: https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ

99.99% doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

My wife and I used to tag-team. Only one person got to lose it at a time. As soon as one person got that distant, exasperated look, Parent 2 jumped in and Parent 1 could go cool down, watch a show, have a drink, or take a bath. If solo, we’d use distraction and humor. If too much, you stick them in a playpen with toys and let them self-sooth.

If it’s any consolation, they won’t remember diddly-squat of anything that happened before ages 5-6.

I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.

The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.

None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.

So many ways…

Just had a thought… here’s a prime example of one of the stated advantages of the Fediverse. If you get locked out of one account, you can move to another instance.

Question is: do you get to carry over your profile, subscriptions, followers, comments, saves, up/down votes? Or do you have to start from scratch.

Because if it’s scratch, somebody should change the “Fediverse Promise” so users know what to expect.

I’m guessing I know the answer, but this could be something Voyager could handle. Maybe even for a sustainable fee 🤔

Also, if you logout, you can’t log back in. Sounds like it’s getting blocked at the server end.