Oh that’s what it was? Neat! I didn’t know. (In case my instance doesn’t give it away, I’m not American.)

It’s a 90 minute video. If you can’t read 420 words (nice) in summary of a 90 minute video, the problem isn’t the length of the summary.

That said, the summary does have other problems. Notably: it stops at the fake-out ending at 1:02:41, missing a full third of the video, wherein he starts getting more explicitly political and takes a strong anti-Republican, anti-ICE, anti-mainstream media conformity with the above stance, and explicitly endorses getting involved in politics including voting for Democrats not because they’re good, but because a literal wet towel would be a good option compared to the alternative.

He details Jimmy Carter putting water heating solar panels on the White House, and Reagan taking them down. Compares it to Biden passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which included renewable energy funding, and Trump illegally using an executive order to ignore that. He talks about the erosion of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendment rights in America. He quotes an essay critiquing King George prior to America’s independence, and points out the exact same words apply perfectly to Trump, before endorsing getting involved in Democratic primaries and voting Democrat in the mid-terms, and complains about lies like “non-citizens are voting” and “other countries will pay for our tariffs”.

He praises protesters in Minnesota, and endorses getting involved in on-the-ground organising and caring about other people.

Castle-confused.gif

A lot of that’s still available in AOSP. The devices they actually sell just load a heap of commercial crap on top of that.

Oh good tip!

Wtf is this crap? Just because I’m taking the approach of siding with reality I must be a bit or corporate stooge?

Google and Amazon do enough real things wrong without needing to make up bullshit conspiracy theories. Like Amazon’s abusive labour practices, and…everything about the Audible & Kindle platforms. And Google’s support of the American military industrial complex and shoving AI down everyone’s throats while making their products actively worse.

Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean every single accusation against it is accurate.

That’s a pretty righteous set up OP.

Lol not me. I’m not the author. Just saw the article and thought it was an interesting conversation starter.

That might be true, I honestly don’t know. But it doesn’t matter to the point I’m making, which is that however the device does it, it’s the device, locally, that determines whether a wake word has been said, before it starts transmitting what comes next.

No, they can’t. Precisely because of all the people who quite rightly don’t trust Google and Amazon, who would notice their devices’ network traffic increasing.

I’m specifically talking about Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, not anything else your phone or apps are doing. So the only one of those articles even remotely relevant is the third.

And the third talks about “false wakes” being the cause. Which goes along with what I said before that until it hears the wake word (even if it’s mistaken in doing so), it’s not sending back recordings.

Care to clarify your meaning? Or are you just disagreeing because it feels good to go along with the conspiracy theory?

or a recipe for an insecure mess that could become difficult to maintain

The concept, or the specific setup the author of that article has? If you mean the latter, I’m not going to argue. But the concept? It shouldn’t have any effect either way on security, but the whole advantage of it is that it’s less of a mess. The same way that running a whole bunch of services on bare metal can quickly become a mess compared to VMs or Docker/LX containers, declared state helps give a single source of truth for what all the services you might be running are. It lets you make changes in repeatable and clearly documented ways, so you can never be left wondering “how did I do that before?” if you need to do it again.

If everything you run is a Docker container, there’s a good chance Terraform is overkill; a Kubernetes config will probably do the job. But depending on your setup there are a whole bunch of different tools that might be useful.

What’s your preferred approach to defined state in your home servers?

The data isn’t there. At least not in the way some of the biggest fearmongers talk about it. Everything you say to the device, you can assume is there. But it listens for the wake word locally and doesn’t send information to the server until after it receives the wake word.

Oh, I used HA to mean high availability. I was not aware people also abbreviated Home Assistant.

Sorry for the late reply. I’m just disorganised and have way too many unread notifications.

LXC containers sound really interesting, especially on a machine that’s hosting a lot of services. But how available are they? One advantage of Docker is its ubiquity, with a lot of useful tools already built as Docker images. Does LXC have a similarly broad supply of images? Or else is it easy to create one yourself?

Re VM vs LXC, have I got this right? You generally use VMs only for things that are intermittently spun up, rather than services you keep running all the time, with a couple of exceptions like HomeAssistant? What’s the reason they’re an exception?

Possibly related: your examples are all that VMs get access to the discrete GPU, containers use the integrated GPU. Is there a particular reason for that distribution?

I’m really curious about the cluster thing too. How simple is that? Is it something where you could start out just using an old spare laptop, then later add a dedicated server and have it transparently expand the power of your server? Or is the advantage just around HA? Or something else?

Sorry for the late reply. I’m just disorganised and have way too many unread notifications.

LXC containers sound really interesting, especially on a machine that’s hosting a lot of services. But how available are they? One advantage of Docker is its ubiquity, with a lot of useful tools already built as Docker images. Does LXC have a similarly broad supply of images? Or another easy way to run things?

and MacOS

Oh that’s interesting. I wonder why they do it that way, considering macOS is a Unix OS.

Yeah I’m interested in how that works too.

I’ve recently been looking at the Nextcloud “all in one” Docker image. It works by mounting the docker.sock file into the master container, which allows that container to stand up a whole bunch of other containers on your machine.

How would that work on Windows, if the Docker socket isn’t a file handle?

That might be part of it, but I was thinking it was more how things we don’t think of as files, like sockets, are accessed with a file descriptor.