That’s not how it played out in Buffalo NY in their last mayoral election. A socialist won the primary and the Democratic party launched a massive write-in campaign to keep their preferred liberal “Byron Brown” in power, to the point they were handing out stamps at voting locations so that they could be used to easily “write” him. They succeeded in keeping the socialist candidate out, and despite winning, their liberal candidate ended up resigning mid-term to take a cushy C-suite job instead.

I was the first in my workplace to take paternity leave when it became law in my state. I didn’t take it in one chunk, but used every single day I was entitled to. I got many similar comments as you from older guys, and I believe they came from a place of jealousy at worst and self-rationalization at best, since those people weren’t afforded the same rights when they had kids.

Pay then no attention, the first few months as a dad to a new kid are some of the most important and precious moments you’ll ever have, and if you miss them you will never ever get a do over. Take every second you can without an ounce of shame.

You may also find yourself setting an example, as I noticed none of the new Dads in my workplace after me had any reservations about taking their full leave, and I work in construction with some needlessly macho guys.

One I haven’t seen mentioned yet that I think needs more exposure is miniminuteman: https://m.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773/

He does a mix of long form archeology videos and short form pseudo-archeology debunking. Some of it should be dry content but his delivery bridges the gap every time. He has a side channel where he posts about his side projects like his solo motorcycle trips that’s also interesting.

Genuinely lol’d, do what you gotta do my man.

I got back into scifi books recently as an adult and was disgusted to find that virtually all of the “great” scifi authors are menwritingwomen trope goldmines.

When there are female main characters that aren’t just the authors fetishs, they’re typically subjected to violence, with rape used so frequently as female “character development” that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.

I’ve begun to prefer scifi written by women, because then at least I know its not going to be completely cringe.

ITT people simp for corporations.

I’m sure daddy supermarket chain loves it when you offer your free labor to him after he’s finished ripping you off with his shrinkflation and grocery prices rising faster than inflation.

As a union household we don’t steal work from unionized grocery workers. Not even something as small as cart wrangling. Anyone who does is a scab.

I clicked on their profile to see what evoked this reaction from you and not only could you not be more wrong, but it makes me question your motivation for lying to try to silence others?

Here’s what I run, this is all 100% local. The most time I spent on this project was actually on getting the wakeword recognition (which is another fairly new function in HA) setup on these old teleconferencing devices: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e2T1ibNw5GeIOUA1eqQbjwp1s2g5h5XN/view

Yeah I feel that 100%, ran a Google assistant for a little bit before just being creeped out by the privacy concerns and sick of it constantly trying to sell me things. Unfortunately I think that any service reliant on a 3rd party is ultimately going to be a huge privacy invasion, since they can’t turn a profit without vacuuming up your data.

Of all the mainstream assistants, Apple seems to be the least bad in that regard, so you could consider picking up a homepod. But I would also say that for basic stuff, home assistant has been fairly painless to set up. The GUI is good enough now that no yaml coding is required unless you get into the more complex stuff, and I found the ootb functions to be “good enough” for what I wanted a voice assistant to do.

Home assistant has a built in voice assistant function that can be as simple or robust as you need it to be. The whole thing can be setup fully locally and mine runs easily on an old micro-pc I got for $100. I had it running on a Pi3b originally but the STT and TTS would take 10+ seconds to process, which was too long.

Out of the box it controls local devices, does to-do lists, controls media, sets timers. Setting reminders doesn’t work out of the box, but can be setup with some great community templates. Services that require web content like “tell me the news” or “what’s the weather in Seattle” need to be either setup with custom commands that have access to the info you want, or need to go through an LLM.

Luckily, the past few months have seen the open home foundation add integrations for LLM’s, both local and web-based (chatgpt, gemini, etc) are possible, so you can have it run queries through models run on a local GPU. Though this is currently fairly bleeding edge and I haven’t tried running a local LLM myself yet so I can’t speak to it’s complexity.

More on that here: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/07/ai-agents-for-the-smart-home/

For context, the headline leaves out that this contract proposal still needs to be ratified by members, who are mostly not happy with the companies minimal concessions.

Discussion on antiwork: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1fc4kty/our_union_sold_us_out/

Sure that part’s electric, but what about the bonds keeping the quarks of the train together?

The ulefone brands rugged lineup is definitely more durable than any normal consumer model. I’ve taken mine snorkeling up to ~10ft deep in the ocean several times, it is 100% waterproof. The only other Chinese brand I’ve had experience with was a Huawei that my brother loved. I can’t speak to the quality of xiaomi or oneplus since I haven’t gotten one due to the fact that they typically don’t have 4g band 71, which is what my carrier (tmobile) is using for their rural spectrum.

As far as apps, the ulefone runs stock android 13, the Google Play store is preloaded, and yeah I use fdroid as well.

If you’re not put off by Chinese electronics, you can still get a phone with all the extras (card slots, notification leds, headphone jacks, IR blasters).

I’m using an ulefone power armor 26, it’s a beast that’s overkill in every possible sense, but there are more normal phones from redmi or xiaomi that are every bit as good as a samsung or an iphone.