My understanding is that Kagi relies on the likes of Bing and Google but since it uses more than one of them it can keep functioning if one goes down.

Karl’s drama/exposé videos have always had this kind of antagonistic energy to them. It usually doesn’t bother me since the subjects, like Billy Mitchell, have brought the absurdity on themselves. Carrying that same energy into serious claims of fraud feels like a poor decision even if it’s the style of video you’re used to making. I don’t think the money would have been donated without these videos so I’m glad they were made, but the presentation was not as effective as it could’ve been.

Been getting back into Horizon Zero Dawn! I planned on playing more of it sooner but just wasn’t finding any interest until the past couple of days. Also picked up Pokemon Scarlet for the first time in six months to try finding a shiny Gimmighoul in the limited raid event that’s happening.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this in the long run. I think the fediverse see’s Meta’s EEE play coming from a mile away compared to previous examples of big corps killing a standard. If Meta really does fork ActivityPub, I could see two webs of federation existing side by side. Enough of the fediverse is against Meta’s integration that Meta breaking the ActivityPub standard won’t force everyone to follow along. If enough instances stick to spec, then there’s still a fediverse to interact with on spec. Some will if they think the large user base Meta brings is worth it, but not all.

I don’t think that’s the case here. Enough of the fediverse is resistant to Meta’s play here to keep a significant chunk of ActivityPub platforms running on spec and able to interact even with a Meta-fied version of ActivityPub existing. Other examples of EEE happening to open source standards seem to start with the community generally trusting the big corps to respect the standard where here no one expects Meta to play nice. The fediverse is an internet within the internet and Meta’s biggest bargaining chip to join up is a large user base but if the fediverse is fine staying small (which I think it is) then there’s no need to play Meta’s game.

It’s refreshing to see a new style for a 2D Mario game. I’m really excited to see what all the wonder mechanics are.

I see a crosspost button just below the title of your post. I haven’t used it so I don’t know the full process yet, but the functionality appears to be there.

I don’t think Google home would work without an internet connection. I believe google devices and the google home app expect a connection to Google’s servers.

I personally use homeassistant to control everything without an external internet connection and I know you can lock Philips Hue lights off from the internet and the official Hue app will still work.

That’s great that they help your friend like that! As someone that doesn’t face any kind of accessibility issues myself, it’s easy to overlook those kinds of benefits that these devices can provide. In situations like your friend’s, I’d agree that any potential security cons are outweighed by the pros (especially if the alternative before was having to leave the doors unlocked anyways).

Agree on the convenience of voice assistants. I’ve got various models of Google homes in my house that I use for voice controls on anything I don’t have a good way to truly automate. Different people will have different tolerances for how okay they are with the data things like that can gather. One day I might try to set up one of the local network voice assistants but those can take a lot of work to get just right. Always a tradeoff of convenience and privacy.

As others have said, you can sequester IoT devices to a VLAN that has no internet access. Most of the common devices (lights, switches, sensors) added to smart homes work perfectly fine without access to the internet. Voice assistants are the biggest security/privacy hole since all commercial options are from big tech companies and phone home constantly. If you set up a local homeassistant instance you can get a ton of functionality out of smart devices with no direct connection to the internet. You need to decide how you handle accessing homeassistant from outside your home if that’s something you want but there are plenty of options to choose from for that.

One thing I will say that I refuse to add to my home is any kind of smart locks. No matter how much I trust my security setup, I don’t trust it with the ability to unlock my doors. If there was one that could only lock them electronically but required being manually unlocked, them maybe. But I haven’t seen a lock like that out there.

Personally I don’t know if Lemmy needs these to be successful. Depending on your viewpoint, Lemmy already is successful. Lemmy instances existed long before the current Reddit influx and seemed to be doing okay even if things were a bit slow.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like most people coming over from Reddit are viewing federation as multiple people helping run parts of a larger single site instead of viewing each Lemmy instance as its own entire community and site with the great benefit of federation allowing direct access and communication to other sites running in the fediverse. Identities and communities are specific to an instance because that instance is an independent community. In that frame of mind, having a different account on different instances and overlapping community topics between instances makes sense. Same way multiple forums have boards about the same topic and joining multiple forums meant multiple accounts. Federation just makes it easier to see across that gap.

I don’t really like the logic of “chatbots like this will help cure loneliness.” It might help someone feel less lonely at first. But then it’ll be a crutch and, if anything, hurt people’s ability to socialize with other real people. Like it’s a quick dopamine hit that will slowly dig you deeper into the hole you feel you’re in.

It’s neat to see them using ActivityPub, but I’m really wary of anything created under the Meta/Facebook umbrella. We’ll have to wait and see if they decide to act in good faith with this which my biases make me doubtful they will.

Also, if they’re using ActivityPub, why would I have to join if I can just loop in with my existing Mastodon account?

It really goes to show how good ChatGPT is at creating realistic sounding responses. If you don’t know how it works, it can be easy to wrongly trust it.

I’m not a lawyer or anything, but I have to assume there’s some kind of process for checking citations you’re taught along the way that go beyond trusting what a computer writes.

I know he said his assumed that ChatGPT had some kind of access to data other sites didn’t but not finding those cases anywhere else should’ve raised red flags. People need some refreshers on computer literacy.