• 1 Post
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).

    Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.


  • Yup, I have friends all over the state and just the occasional glance over the years at what Republicans have pulled in the state has been horrifying.

    A side note not related to gerrymandering - I’ve seen it thrown around that Cooper can’t do it because a quirk of NC law says the Lt. Governor becomes Acting Governor anytime the sitting Governor is out of state and the current Lt. Governor is Mark “Some People Need Killing” Robinson, but I honestly think giving him a longer leash to let more people hear him bark nonsense and hate will hurt Robinson’s chances of becoming governor. Sunshine is the best medicine and all of that (to the extent that it’s not free media advertising as it was with Trump). It’s kind of a headscratcher that Robinson was elected as Lt. Governor to begin with, the dude is a walking meme/idiot and the voters really dropped the ball on that one.










  • Intention doesn’t always carry over well via text, but going from “shocking” and “I guess…” to “Do you not understand…?” comes across as a bit condescending/aggressive. Perhaps you thought I was being hostile? Or, perhaps I’m misreading the intent.

    At any rate, keeping in mind the things that don’t carry across over text, I wasn’t disagreeing with you and was merely speculating in a parallel fashion about those that don’t return and/or are deemed unacceptable defection by the leadership in Pyongyang. I haven’t picked over my initial comment but it’s possible that I put a period somewhere a question mark was supposed to go or something. Regardless, I apologize if I came across as trying to argue against what you were saying, it was not my intention. I don’t tend to process things in a strictly linear progression and that translates to words that come out sometimes a bit disordered seeming or perhaps seemingly lacking in explicit context where it might be needed to ensure clarity in what I’m saying.

    To answer the question rather than treat it as rhetorical: It’s quite possible that I don’t know how North Korean defection usually works because I’m not North Korean nor a policy analyst/SME specializing in North Korea. I read the article and your comment and found myself speculating, given the situation and deepening ties with Russia (who are objectively experts at tracking down dissidents abroad) about what policy and procedures might be in place now the event of would-be permanent defectors that end up becoming anti-Pyongyang mouthpieces or are high rank enough to leak meaningful intel to an adversary (I doubt they are sending any such people to Ukraine). But, I’m not an expert, I’m just a person speculating and commenting because I enjoy doing so and seeing what others have to say (including you). Thanks for sharing the article, have a good one.



  • Kolibri for the Sega 32x addon for the Genesis/Megadrive. Most of the reviewers that weren’t down with the game either complained about the difficulty or lack of story/making sense, but it was a beautiful game for the time that took the space shooter concept and made it into a game that was somehow chill while also being difficult enough to sometimes momentarily make you want to rage quit. If you enjoy games like the Raiden series, you’ll enjoy this.

    Shout to Knuckles Chaotix (the most unique take on Sonic gameplay of the classic 2D era) and also Shadow Squadron (very Star Fox-esque), which are also slept on because 32x.

    Exclusive to the Genesis/Megadrive, it’s a crying shame that the Vectorman games never received a third iteration and have seemingly disappeared into the grey goo of IP purgatory. Vectorman and Vectorman 2 were amazing for the time: they were arguably the best 2D platformers of the era, graphically beautiful, oozing with charm, and with an amazing soundtrack to go along with it all. It’s crazy that the developers were able to squeeze the performance they did out of the hardware and playing emulated versions of it now still doesn’t compare to how it feels and looks playing it on the original hardware with a CRT and a nice sound system (but you should still check it out absent that setup).

    On PC, also from the 90s, Descent was truly groundbreaking and unique. It’s an FPS that said “what if you were playing as a space ship and had six degrees of freedom to move about?” It was also the first truly 3D FPS game.




  • I got a temporary ban in memes for saying “OpenAI/MS media alliance goes brrrrr” lmao. “Rule 1.” The OP was yet another post about Google’s crappy AI suggestions and I was implying that the mass beating of that dead horse in article after article was because the media is friendlier to OpenAI and MS in the AI space (kinda the same way Apple gets a free pass in the phone space more often than not for shitty practices and taking credit for inventing features that have existed on Android for years prior). But, even in the absence of clarification (since my quip was just observational and not meant to spark conversation lol), I have no clue how that or a lot of the other things they cite “Rule 1” on could possibly be construed as bigoted - there aren’t enough words to work with in the comment I used as an example, just a barely coherent bit of tongue-in-cheekness. Arbitrariness of enforcement is authoritarian af. I messaged a mod to ask what was up since I didn’t realize modlog was a thing at the time and didn’t hear back (which is fine really). It’s more just the finding out when you go to interact and getting a connectivity error and having to sus out what happened that’s annoying and doesn’t feel conducive to a healthy community.

    Getting an automated message in your inbox telling you you’re banned, the length of the ban, and why would be a little more user friendly (though public modlogs are nice) if the goals of the developers are trying to build an inclusive platform. A lot of users aren’t necessarily the type to get a persistent itch when something curious happens, so “figure it out yourself” isn’t a great system. But, if what’s going on over at .ml really is indicative of what the goals of the developers are, it does give me pause about Lemmy as a project and where it will go in the future. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the situation is ripe for the project to be compromised if a dev is compromised and people shouldn’t be sleeping on that. Bad actors injecting seemingly inert exploits into code reviewed by others can happen with any software and fly under the radar, even popular and well trusted FOSS (for reference, see “that time the CIA snuck a backdoor into Notepad++”), so it’s alarming if a group of developers appear to be sympathizers for nationstates that are notoriously privacy hostile.