Its a CIA-style listening device that people pay for and proudly install and display in their home, gathering data on them, sharing it with Amazon and anyone they care to sell or make that data available to - including police.

Ostensibly all to provide short voice answers and actions they could do privately with their phone in seconds.

Internet Copilot One X.

A Chromecast is not full of ads, but are they all just Google TV now? Is Google TV full of ads? I haven’t used one.

Could be an option to reset your TV, disconnect it from the Internet, and buy & use a Google TV device instead. The streaming devices seem to have far fewer ads and shit than TV manufacturers cram into their devices nowadays.

The hoops we have to jump through to minimise surveillance capitalism… I see elsewhere in the thread you’ve had to use a PiHole to block most of the TVs traffic.

Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that’s what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a ‘popularity’ of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.

Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it’s a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.

HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it’s pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.

I agree it’s still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.

There’s an xkcd for everything, isn’t there.

Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it’s an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.

Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.

The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don’t think AI has changed much.

Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they’re open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they’ve finally begun appearing in big manufacturer’s line-ups such as IKEA.

Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won’t have to do the ‘ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or… you know what, fuck this’. It’ll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.

Well, since this archive says it contains the original ogg @160kbps for all artists with a popularity >0, it’ll be in this collection. Your wait may be over soon.

I’ve used it several months and can recommend it. No issues so far and seems to get regular updates for bugfixes and minor new features.

Yeah DuckDNS gave me many false positive outages where its resolution failed, for multiple half-days every year I used it (5yrs+).

I moved to the afraid.org and its been solid, if anyone’s looking for another free service - only cost is you have to log in once every six months to validate your account is not dormant. They have a paid tier which gives more features (that most home users will never need), and that allows the guy running it to fund a very reliable service.

I’m surprised the amount of people saying they have had no issues with DucksDNS. I’ve used it for about five years and had issues on and off with it being unresponsive many times.

Gave up and moved to afraid.org about a year back and that’s been a very solid service ever since.

I was running Helldiver’s 2 for a few weeks this year on CPU alone, and wondering why my framerate sucked. I thought the devs had put out a bad update.

Then I realized the game had forced DX12 and also decided that my graphics card was lacking a feature it required - so it fell back to CPU only. I forced DX11 in config = fixed. Me: 🤡

Well that sounds right… like I said, Ambien is counter-indicated for alcohol, combined they can cause euphoria which leads to abuse. Gotta chill on the alcohol, the meds work without it.

This is more and more sounding like alcoholism? Treat that first, your sleep will definitely improve.

There is a regulated medication I have and success with called Belsomra that works well. Not cheap though, unfortunately (circa $1/tablet) - definitely cheaper than boozing it up every night though.

Whatever you try I’d recommend staying away from Ambien (zolpidem tartrate) as it can be abused with alcohol, and alcoholics often develop a tolerance and dependence on it. Docs would most likely recommend against it, but the internet / random people might.

Blocking is severe, but boy is my feed clean of morons (I think I’ve only blocked like 30 people on Lemmy).

You gotta try it. Very satisfying to click ‘read all’ on your inbox now and then to clear out notifications for new (hidden) messages from trolls you’ve blocked.

I know it gets thrown around a lot, but the Dunning-Kruger effect is real and applicable to people in all fields.

WEP is insecure - that’s why it’s not used anymore.

Quite different to a secure protocol that has had some manufacturers leak keys due to poor security practices.

Don’t pay the guys on G2A for keys - they’re just reselling stolen corporate MAK keys. They’re also not legal to the terms of the EULA, so it’s not a ‘genuine copy’ for the buyer either - you may as well just use Massgrave instead of funding crooks.

To add to your list of options: you can also just leave it unactivated forever.

It’ll whine about requiring activation with a ''Activate Windows. Go to Settings to activate Windows" message overlaying the bottom right corner of the screen - but that’s it, functionality is otherwise 99% unaffected (you can’t change wallpaper… Oh no). For Windows 10 it will now stop offering updates though - same as any standard Win10 copy, so I’d again recommend the Massgrave Dev route to keep the updates coming a few more years.

Disagree, Wikipedia is a pretty reliable bastion of facts due to its editorial demands for citations and rigorous style guides etc.

Can you point out any of these personal fiefdoms so we can see what you’re referring to?

And the featured articles are usually quite large. As an example, today’s featured article is on a type of crab - the article is over 3,700 words with 129 references and 30-something books in the bibliography.

It’s not particularly unreasonable or unsurprising to be able to find a single error amongst articles that complex.