Not common, he’s out of touch.

There are definitely people who have cabins at the lake or mountains, but even that is more wealthy people.

Budgeting and more probabilities/statistics are where I think it should be.

Both of those directly relate to improving your life.

This is one of those situations where nobody wins. They tried to do something nice, you didn’t like it, and both people ended up unhappy. Neither was being unreasonable.

Buying someone a gift of a new thing isn’t unreasonable. Even if you tend to like older/used things it’s still not an unreasonable concept to buy someone an upgrade.

Not liking a gift because the old one is fine is also not unreasonable. Especially if you have established this as a preference before.

The best option here is for the partner to realize that the goal of the gift is to make the other person happy, and if that didn’t work, figure out the path forward that does make them happy. (in this case returning the gift, and finding something else)

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work that way in reality. While the criminal laws are all public, there’s other rules and regulations that may not be.

At least where I’m from as an example, the building code is a paid product you have to purchase from the government. Yet if you build a home and don’t follow it, they will not allow you to live in it.

That one really bugs me. Anything the government produces in terms of rules or regulations should be available to the public for free.

When Gord Downie the lead singer of the Tragically Hip got terminal cancer, he went on tour. His final stop was Ontario, and they streamed it live on CBC (our national news network) to approximately 12 million viewers (Canada had a population of about 38 million)

He died less than a month later. Our prime minister released a tribute statement, and held a press conference over it. Our House of Commons observed a moment of silence. The Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL Hockey Team) brought down one of the retired numbers from the rafters during their next game, because Gord had mentioned him in 50-mission cap. Almost every radio station that plays music switched to Hip songs for the day. The Canadian press gave him newsmaker of the year for 2016, then again for 2017 because of how significant the reaction to his death was.

Dude was a legend both musically, and also in terms of the causes he championed. Especially the Indigenous reconciliation stuff.

Canada surprisingly has music that Americans rarely know about but are quite famous up here:

Kim Mitchell - Patio Lanterns

The Tragically Hip - Pretty much any of their songs, but Ahead by a Century and 50 Mission Cap are my favorites

54-40 - One Day In Your Life

The same answer people blame others all the time for almost everything. It’s far easier than taking accountability for your own actions.

Just a reminder that

https://www.wiktionary.org/

Exists, and is part of the Wikimedia foundation

That ain’t going to work out for them.

So there’s an answer, and then there’s a problem.

The easy answer is that Home Assistant has Voice Assistants now, and you can use Ollama, Whisper, and Piper to do that all locally.

The problem is that it really only talks to Home Assistant, there’s no ability to have it search the web, or make a phone call, or really anything else outside of Home Assistant without significant addon stuffs.

It also requires a reasonably significant amount of RAM on your computer to run the VM for Home Assistant while supporting Whisper and Piper and Ollama.

If they speak english, I assume it’s in Vancouver

I don’t feel like I’m looking for something specific, as much as waiting for something to happen.

I have a lot of stuff I check multiple times per day, my google news feed, lemmy, youtube, and a few specific reddits. I also spend a lot of time on Discord in like a dozen different servers.

The “something has happened” part makes me happy briefly, but I’ve realized it doesn’t really do anything for me in terms of advancing my life, so I pretty much treat it like video game time. Doesn’t mean I’ve stopped doing it, but I’ve tried to pull back a little bit.

Agent voice response

It’s even mostly open source.

Some random steroid, because a drug name came up in a video I was watching and I had never heard of it before. I thought it was going to be some sort of party drug. Turns out it’s for bodybuilders who don’t want the water retention of the normal ones.

You think Americans don’t starve to death?

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/deaths-from-malnutrition-have-more-than-doubled-in-the-u-s

You have to remember that it’s not just “I was so hungry I died” but also “I didn’t eat properly and so I got sick and died” that count as starving to death.

Yes

I don’t agree with this.

We as a society are productive enough that we could absolutely work a lot less individually and still have all our needs and comforts met (which is what the OP was asking)

A hell of a lot of advancement comes from “that’s strange” and “oops”

DARPA doesn’t tend to be the one doing anything but supplying some funding.

AGI is possible, the question is whether this bubble will reach it, or if it will arise out of the corpses after the crash.

I personally don’t think the current LLM tech will ever evolve into AGI, but it’s totally possible one of these companies will moonshot AGI off the side of one of their engineer’s desk accidentally.

The infrastructure that’s going to be left sitting around after the impending crash is going to make for some absolutely insanely cheap opportunities for some really smart (or lucky) groups of people to pull off the miracle and/or catastrophe that will be AGI.

Important

On your phone (iPhone and Android) there are options to set an Emergency contact. This contact shows up on the lock screen of the phone including their phone numbers, and at least on my android device those number(s) can even be called without unlocking the device. I have my wife and father.

This can be really helpful for first responders if you’re involved in an accident or have a medical episode that leaves you unconscious, or even if you’re just seriously hurt and you can’t call someone yourself easily.