Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 30, 2023,
updated Mar 30, 2023
=> Security Leftovers | LibrePlanet Workshops and Everything Open 2023
=> ↺ LHS Episode #502: Blown Away
Welcome to the 502nd episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts take on a variety of topics including: ham radio during tornado season, operators...
=> ↺ Hopes and promises for open-source voice assistants
At the end of 2022, Paulus Schoutsen declared 2023 "the year of voice" for Home Assistant, the popular open-source home-automation project that he founded nine years ago. The project's goal this year is to let users control their home with voice commands in their own language, using offline processing instead of sending data to the cloud. Offline voice control has been the holy grail of open-source home-automation systems for years. Several projects have tried and failed. But with Rhasspy's developer Mike Hansen spearheading Home Assistant's voice efforts, this time things could be different.
Science fiction shows and movies have sold us on the idea of spaceships and homes we can talk to. In recent years, voice control at home has become possible thanks to the so-called "smart speakers" from Google, Amazon, and Apple. However, there's nothing smart about these devices: their intelligence is almost completely in the cloud, where the user's voice recordings are processed and translated into sentences and meaning.
This is a complex and computationally intensive task, and these companies make us believe that their services are required to be able to use voice control. Of course this comes with downsides: users don't have any control over what's happening with their voice recordings, which is a big privacy risk. But, fundamentally, the problem lies even deeper. It just makes no sense for users to have their voices make a long detour through the internet just to turn on a light in the same room.
=> ↺ The open source way of raising a family
As a rebellious teenager in the 80s, "because I said so" was a phrase I heard all too often at home. I wasn't really a rebel. I just wanted to be heard and seen as a person starting to articulate their thoughts and emotions.
The feeling I had of not being heard or listened to led me to believe that it's important to raise kids who are not afraid to speak up, but who can also learn to adapt. Listening to them and collaborating with kids can also help them be creative and, eventually, allow them to be part of a successful organization.
=> ↺ My work in KDE for March 2023
Another month in the year, another collection of bugfixes and features I contributed to KDE!
=> ↺ Nix Turns 20. What the Hell Is It?
I tend to describe it as a build system that pretends to be a package manager or the other way around. If you take Make, the grandfather of all build systems, Make has this nice interface where you just describe everything that you want to be built. You describe your dependencies, and then you build that…and it’s nice; it’s declarative.
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