Voice recognition with keyword commands works quite well and reliably. AI-based voice assistants are often not even “better than nothing”. In the time it gets me to argue the AI into doing what I want, I could park my car and write a better non-AI menuing system, to say nothing of using one.

Dell XPS 9710 Laptop and Samsung S24 Ultra phone. I’m one of those old people who still does almost everything on my laptop instead of my phone, even texting.

My mother was named after her mother, although she used her middle name. My sister was named after her. We’re white midwesterners in the US.

I’ve been running IronFox for a while and it’s been solid.

This guy is hoping to head the next presidential ticket, but not for the Democrats.

D&D and other table roleplaying games have always been a great forum for developing social skills and comfort with other people. They provide a structure that encourages people to interact. They also take the focus off the interaction itself by providing common goals that make the interactions a means to an end. Even minimal or awkward interactions are rewarded, leading to improvement.

I can’t think of any other form of entertainment that provides similar benefits.

It would have been nice if he’d already been slowing the nominees over their lack of qualifications and their fascist ideologies.

Try to make life better for yourself and for everyone else. Try to have compassion for everyone. You don’t have to agree with them or support what they do, but treat them as having worth.

And they were more interested in taking video of it than stopping it. If this wasn’t staged, they need a refresher in Self-Preservation 101.

Don’t fall for the simple explanation. Both answers are true. The objectives are all about greed and betrayal, but the means are still heavily driven by incompetence. Just because someone is a criminal does not make them a competent criminal.

I am so glad someone thought to post this.

You should be honored.

And a great many tools have a brief period of excitement before people realize they aren’t actually all that useful. (“The Segway will change the way everyone travels!”) There are aspects of limited AI that are quite useful. There are other aspects that are counter-productive at the current level of capability. Marketing hype is pushing anything with AI in the name, but it will all settle out eventually. When it does, a lot of people will have wasted a lot of time, and caused some real damage, by relying on the parts that are not yet practical.

Stupid malice is still malice.

I don’t play computer games and I rarely buy commercial software of any other kind. The majority of my computer time is spent using FOSS applications. I try to give at least a few dollars every month toward each tool that I use on a regular basis. Among other things, I contribute to Lemmy, Voyager, and the Lemmy.Ca site. Overall it amounts to supporting more than a dozen projects for a total of around $50 per month.

I wish I could afford to do more, but I try to do what I can. Some projects are part-time and some make up the primary income for the developers. All of them are contributing their time without demanding payment to make our lives better. They deserve our support, in whatever form we can give it.

I am a homeowner and I wish there were more out there like you. It is very hard to find people who will do small jobs at any price.

Various factions would like us to feel isolated and helpless so we can be manipulated more easily. All of the things you mentioned still exist and have meaning, but there are alternative meanings being pushed at us. And we not everyone has a community or family in the traditional senses anymore.

If you want to be a member of a community, you can. There are many available in most places, and there are more on the internet that are not limited by location. Find a group of people with common values, common interests, or anything else that ties you together and participate in it. Humans evolved to be social animals.

Human interconnections are a threat to the power that be. Individuals are easy to deal with via manipulation, intimidation, or incarceration. All of that becomes harder with groups, and the larger the group, the harder it is. That is also why we see so many efforts to subdivide us by race, culture, nationality, generation, education, income, religion, gender, gender preference, sexual preference. The less unified we feel, and the more we view the people around us as “other” instead of part of our community, the less able to we are to band together to form an effective threat to the ruling class.

I think your assumption that personal gain being the main driving force behind everyone’s behavior is flawed. That may be true of humanity in general, but it is not true of a great many individual humans. Mental health is a multi-axis spectrum and very few of us are right in the center. There are many factors that can push people to do things against their best interests.

There just aren’t many lights in this category. The Q8 Plus is a good choice.