smiletolerantly

Ah, I’ve hit an extremely satisfying professional milestone and thought I’d share: “Being acquainted-enough with the codebase to be able to, with full conviction and a lot of glee, answer my LLM-head colleague simply: ‘Claude is wrong’”. (Claude was extremely obviously wrong once you spent more than half a second thinking about its claim.)

Why! Why are media so uncritical in their reporting! tagesschau.de/…/openai-ki-hackerangriff-100.html Sorry, this is in German. It’s about the marketing stunt open ai pulled vis-à-vis “oh no, our new model breached containment and went ahead on its own, yep all by itself, and hacked huggingface! So scary! BTW we’d like to IPO soon and-” The outlet above, if you’re not aware, isn’t a German news outlet, it’s THE German news outlet. They’re independent of financial interests, in that they’re publicly funded. They have an incredibly solid history of factual reporting. Which is why it’s so aggregating to see them parrot OpenAI’s claims 1:1. Also, don’t go in the comments. For every sane “this is obviously a marketing stunt” comment there’s 40+ “we’re cooked” comments sincerely believing this shit. I’m getting more and more convinced that in the minds of most people, LLMs are alive, waking, thinking beings with intents and an inner life of their own. You know. Compared to the much more boring “expensive side-effect free function taking string as input and giving string as output”. I hate all of this.

-AI bad Astrology 100% superstitious bullshit

LMFAO yeah that’s about as hilarious an article as I expected from an outlet called “btcpolicy”

Hm. I’ve been om HRT for, idk, 9? years now. Took Progesterone additionally for a couple of months some time after starting HRT, but didn’t really notice much difference and stopped it again. Tbf though, my sex drive is incredibly low now. I just… Can’t be arsed to do amything about it 😄

Ahhh come ON Unfortunately I’m just going to have to continue using it for now, otherwise that’s months of work and (mostly) upload time that I can’t waste at the moment. Also, what’s the alternative…?

I feel like one could legitimately run on this platform at this point.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications? This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you… Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all. How do I completely disable it forever? To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask .service The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

Also, hard disagree.

So in highschool, I was one of those annoying kids that went “why do we have to learn how to analyze poems? We’re never gonna need this in real life” in English (well… German, but doesn’t matter) class. I’m deeply grateful for my teachers back then to patiently get me to do these things anyways, because there came a point in my life years later where I suddenly understood that those “useless” lessons and hours “wasted” analyzing Goethe and Borchert and Fitzgerald handed me the tools to understand media (and not just literature!) instead of just consuming it. I hope it’s clear how that relates to the screenshot. More than that though, I sometimes feel like the slew of shit media over the past decade is at least in part to blame on writers/studios/… now assuming people do in fact merely consume. But that’s a rant that’s completely off-topic here, so I’ll shut up now.

I don’t know. I had never seen another magical girl anime before, and it still stood out to me.

The Dvorak symphony or the Yusuke Kishi novel? If the former, how dare you. If the latter, … sorry I haven’t read it. おすすめですか。

Yeah, truly. It’s a beautiful encapsulation of “what the fuck”.

“Madoka Magical” might as well be my trigger phase by now.

Add "linux" and enjoy the empty feed

This started off as a single file in my private nix config, to see if I could get it working at all. In that initial part, some parts were indeed LLM generated (esp. testcases based on my existing intents and failures). When I noticed that this might actually work and be useful not just for myself though, I moved everything out manually, refactored and cleaned it up, and everything since has just been myself. I guess you're still right though. I'll see about adding a disclaimer to the README until I've gotten the chance to properly rewrite everything.

Huh, interesting. Does that work with wildcards like "put x on my shopping list"? Also, what are you using for that, if I may ask?

Sorry, I don't quite follow 😅 What's the problematic response?

Yay, that's fantastic to hear! Also, how's your experience been with the PE? Getting a readymade device in a nice shell is appealing for sure 😅

Oh, in the demo gif, that's via a shortcut (holding power for half a second). Sorry, can't help with wakeword there 😅

Very cool. I'll definitely look into that, and let you know back here :D

Glad to be of service... 😄

did you consider metaphone matching?

I did not even know about this. Sounds super interesting. Though it seems to be very language specific?

My original intent was to not rely on language specifics. But maybe we could just define additional steps in the pipeline for specific languages. Hm. I'll have to think about this some more, but it might definitely be a great idea for a future version, so thanks for telling me about it!!

Have fun, hope this works out for you! FYI: you can *also* use an LLM as an additional fallback (first closest-intent, then on failure, LLM). README mentions it further down on Github.

cross-posted from: awful.systems/post/8238756

Basically, STT quality has kept me from switching to HomeAssistant’s voice assistant features. The default matcher (Hassil) is waaaaaaay to strict, and LLMs are slow, constly, and/or a privacy nightmare, plus I don’t like them.

I really thought there would be something available that just matches your STT output to the configured intents, but apparently not, so I’ve built in myself.

Finally convinced my GF to throw Alexa in the bin :)

Here’s an excerpt from the README, and feel free to AMA:

🌲 Problem statement and solution

Speech-To-Text (STT) output, especially fast and local STT output, is often simply bad. HomeAssistant’s own Hassil is incredibly picky: your STT output must match exactly to one of the configured intents.

There’s two paths forward from this: Upgrade your hardware to support better STT, or try to figure out what the speaker probably meant to say from the garbled output.

This project does the latter.

With this custom integration, “Lights on in live in room” will actually turn on the lights in your living room. So will, for that matter, “lighrts on inn livainriomm”.

Short demo, first with closest-intent, then with bare Hassil:

 

📜 Highlights

• Pattern expansion. Expanding , (alternatives|to), and [optional|alternatives] all work, including on HASS-defined lists like your home’s areas and entities!
• Slot extraction. Both for wildcard slots (like for adding something to the shopping list, where the {item} is a wildcard), and against slots like {timer_hours:hours} with a fixed set of possibilities.
• Fuzzy slot resolution. For list-like slots and expansion rules (including your areas and entities!), fuzzy match the slot values to the available options. Allows “livikroom” to be corrected to “living room”.
• Actual intent handling still done by Hassil. closest-intent simply corrects your STT output or typos to the closest matching intent, and then forwards a nice, canonical sentence to Hassil, who then deals with the intent just like if you had spoken/typed perfectly.
• 100% LLM-free. Just uses relatively simple fuzzy matching of the input against your intents, plus some clever-ish (well… working, at least) tricks to improve the results.
• Fallback agent support. OK, I said 100% LLM-free, but if you absolutely want to, you can use one as fallback. More on this below.
• Is fast :) (as in: basically instant for a couple hundred configured custom intents).

Note: closest-intent is completely language-agnostic. All the examples in this README are in English, but you can use it with any language you like; personally, I use it in German.

 

📋 Examples

Here’s some examples of things I said, what my STT (wyoming-faster-whisper-base) understood, what HomeAssistant was able to do/answer after passing the STT output through closest-intent, and what the same STT output would have resulted in with just bare Hassil.

Note: These are actual results I got when speaking the “what was said” sentences in my phone. I’m a native German speaker, and so I do have an accent, but this pretty closely matches my experience when using the German-language version of whisper. The “bare Hassil” responses are what I got after 1:1 pasting the STT output into the voice assist chat window with closest-intent disabled.

what was said STT output with Closest Intent bare Hassil start cleaning Star cleaning. ✅ Cleaning started. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that stop cleaning Stop clenching! ✅ Cleaning stopped. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called clenching vacuum the living room Vacuum Believing Room ✅ Cleaning the living room. ❌ Sorry, I am unaware of any floor called Believing Room clean the office King the Office ✅ Cleaning the office. ❌ Sorry, there are multiple devices called Office (author’s note: no there aren’t, wtf?) vacuum the kitchen Back here in the kitchen. ✅ Cleaning the kitchen. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that how warm is it in the bedroom Our all is in the best room. ✅ In the bedroom, the temperature is currently… ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called best room add milk to the shopping list Add milk to the chauvinist. ✅ “milk” added. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called chauvinist put call dentist on my todo list put call dentist on my tudu list ✅ “call dentist” added. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called tudu turn on the water pump turn on the what her pump ✅ Turned on the water pump. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called what her pump play some music Place on music ✅ Playing music. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called music resume the music Renew Music ✅ Resuming. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that pause the music Post music ✅ Paused. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that next track next rack ✅ Next track. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called rack enable shuffle an able shuffling ✅ Shuffle enabled. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that disable shuffle Disable to schaffen. ✅ Shuffle disabled. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called Disable restart the player Reset the plan. ✅ Restarting the player. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called Reset play a random album Player random album ✅ Playing a random album. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that play a random artist Player and Immartist. ✅ Playing a random artist. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that play the latest tracks Plan the ladder tracks. ✅ Playing recently added tracks. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called Plan play recently played songs Player recently played so… ✅ Playing recently heard tracks. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that play playlist NieR Play playlist NEAR! ✅ Playing the playlist NieR. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that play my daily briefing and play my daily breathing ✅ Here is your daily briefing: … ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called and play what time is it What the hell is it? ✅ It is 16:36. ✅ It is 16:36. (author’s note: okay, know what? earned. did not expect that.) what day is it today One day is today. ✅ Today is Friday. ✅/❌ May 8th, 2026 (author’s note: that’s the output for “What date is it?”, but, eh, close enough) make the tv brighter Make that CV brighter. ✅ Screen is now bright. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that set the screen darker The screen doctor. ✅ Screen is now dark. ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any device called screen doctor what’s the weather today What’s the matter with you? ✅ Today, the weather is… ❌ It is 16:36. (author’s note: wait, WHAT?) how’s the weather tomorrow morning How’s the better tomorrow? ✅ Tomorrow morning, it will be… ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called How’s what’s the weather this week What’s the matter this weak ✅ Monday:…, Tuesday:…, ❌ It is 16:36. (author’s note: sigh…) how’s the weather at 5 o’clock cast the red there at 5 o’clock ✅ At 5 o’clock, it will be… ❌ Sorry, I am not aware of any area called cast how windy is it right now how windy is IR low ✅ The wind is currently blowing with… ❌ No timers. how windy will it be tonight How will you be tonight? ✅ Tonight, the wind speed will be around… ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that how hot will it get today How hard will it get today? ✅ Today, temperatures will reach up to… ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that will it rain today with it right today ✅ No rain is expected today. ❌ Sorry, I couldn’t understand that

…you get the idea.

 

💡 How it works

closest-intent is registered in HomeAssistant as a conversation agent. On startup, it parses (by default) all user-defined intents (or optionally, also the builtins ones). In this process, it also expands all rules, like , (alternatives|to), and [optionals], and notes where {slots} are located, and whether they are wildcards or belong to some list (like areas, entities, or the numbers 1-100).

When a user request comes in (via voice command or the chat box), closest-intent fuzzy-matches that request against those expanded rules. If the rule does not contain a slot, it is picked immediately. If it does contain a slot, closest-intent performs a sequence of fancy magic steps to find the best-fitting slot value among a range of possible positions within the top-scoring matched sentences. In practice, this often means “smallest slot-value on a word-boundary”, but the extraction is not limited to that.

With the best match found, we then reconstruct the “canonical form”, i.e. a sentence that Hassil will actually understand. If in your configured intents, “Play some music.” exists, and closest-intent got “Place on music” and matched that to the intent, it will simply forward “Play some music.” to Hassil. If the intent contained a slot, the extracted value will be substituted.

This guarantees that the sentence passed to Hassil will actually be understood, and allows us to not have to worry at all about performing actions, running scripts,…

If no matching intent could be found, we pass the exact input we got to the configured fallback agent. By default, that is simply Hassil (which again allows us to be lazy and not worry about proper error responses), or another agent, like a LLM.

Neovim, configured entirely through nixvim. I always liked neovim, but it’s never been as incredibly stable as now with nixvim. Main/only IDE both in private and at work. Can’t ever go back, muscle memory has ensured that.

Sure thing!

For the barrels, they were simply sold with the bases. Didn't see a reason not to use them, and also allowed me to drill the hole for the hose connector as close to the bottom as possible (used both for filling water in and for leveling between the two barrels, since the pump is only in one of the barrels, see last picture). I don't remember what the barrels cost exactly, but it wasn't too much and I'm happy with the sturdiness.

For the compost bin, we could have gone a bit more expensive tbh. This one was <25€, and as you can see, it's not exactly shaping up to be a paragon of longevity. It sits on some slabs that were already in that corner, and I though it might help drain excess water...? Not sure though, I don't think it does anything. The compost bin is also too small (and unsturdy) to go in with a shovel from the top and dig the compost over, which would really be beneficial. But still worth it. We put all our kitchen scraps in, almost completely eliminating residual waste bad usage for us, and I pull about 70l of compost out of it each spring.

If you have a place where you can place the bin in the garden rather than on the deck, dot it, I'd say. Take a look around youtube or something, there's some really cool composting systems.

Good luck! Hope the pictures help. Sorry for being so slow to respond.

LMAO, I might have missed the six fingers, mainly bscause y eyes went directly to the map with everything from France, Belgium, Germany,… simply labeled “Russland” (Russia).

No worries. Same here. Eh, it's not really that sturdy when I e.g. move it around, but it's enough for the peppers 🤷🏼‍♀️ Please share here when you end up building something similar! :D Good season to you too!!

Yeah it's probably not very accurate 😄 Though to be fair.... Weather has been amazing. *So far.*

AccuWeather has a monthly view on the website. I'm sure it's flawed. But good enough to make me gamble!

Maybe this is a case if "the grass is always greener on the other side", but I'm definitely a but jealous in return, haha. Raised beds with room to expand sounds like a dream. Sorry to hear about the troubles with the deer and raspberries, but I guess such is nature 😄

Thank you kind stranger 🙂

Thank you, I appreciate the explanation! Have never had in lain out like that before. This actually explains the source of my confusion as well: In German, there is a strict separation between what is meant by "Paprika" and "Chilli". Above, you said you have lots of pepper varieties in stores, and then listed both things like bell peppers, which are Paprika here, and lots of Chilli varieties. In German, it would just be wrong to call e.g. a habanero fruit "Paprika", or a bell pepper "Chilli", and I think that's were my hesitation comes from: I always feel like I'd be misunderstood if I just say "pepper" 😄 So, just for clarification: everything in the trellised beds are sweet, non-hot peppers.

Oh no... Well, you're certainly more careful than myself. I meant it in the title, it's a gamble. Last year I also could have planted out in April, but was cautious and waited for mid May. This year... Well. Let's hope climate change is for once good for *something* /s

Thanks :) Ah, you mean this one?

I built that last year specifically for our paprika (capsicum? never sure what the English word is. Web search says "pointed peppers"? Not hot though).

The previous years, every time around August the twigs would be full of large, heavy, but unripe fruit. Inevitably, we'd get windy weather and a third of the twigs would break off. The soil in those pots is not very deep (15cm, ca), so the trellis needed to be able to stand on its own. I really like the outcome, no breakage last year :)

The original idea came from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFWNV1V0x3o adapted for our situation. The twigs end up kind of laying atop the supports.

Oh, and throwing a plastic foil over it in February/March also worked quite nicely to create a make-shift coldframe!

Very nice! Yeah I think you can do a lot with limited space. Ours also for sure isn't as full as it could technically be. Have you upgraded to a "proper" garden then, I take it? 😄

Femboyhead Martin pls.

cross-posted from: awful.systems/post/8068330

This is a 50sqm balcony/terrace on the 2nd (3rd American) floor of a rental apartment building. I immediately knew we had to take the apartment, because having a balcony garden was my number 1 wish. In that sense, we definitely got super lucky.

This is year 4 of the garden, and it feels like we’ve reached “routine” with it. In the first year, we lugged about 2.5 cubic meters of soil up there to fill all the pots. From June-October, this space is enough to fill 100% of our (two people) vegetable needs.

Unsurprisingly, this is way too much to water by hand every day, not to mention when we’re not home for some days/weeks. The balcony is also south-facing, and it gets hot in the summer (seriously, I have burnt my feet on the stones before).

Unfortunately, there’s also no water outlet on the terrace itself, and the landlord said “no” to putting one there (which was expected, the way the house/apartment is built is not really suitable for that).

Our solution has been to put two 300l rain tanks on the balcony (atop of load bearing walls). They get filled by a hose from the kitchen tap whenever required. The barrels are connected by a second hose. In the one in the greenhouse, a rain barrel pump sucks water out, into a watering computer and optionally to a hose for manual watering.

From the watering computer, two watering circuits start; originally the plan was to distinguish between plants that constantly needed a bit of water, and ones that preferred a lot of water occasionally (e.g. the citrus plants); in practice, it turned out to be easier to just always water everything a bit. Oh well.

The watering computer itself it pretty dumb / not connected to an app or the like; it just opens the valves every 8 hours for (in the summer) 3 minutes each time. That’s mostly OK. On super hot days, I sometimes start a fourth round of watering in the early afternoon.

The pump is however plugged into a Zigbee-enabled smart socket, which is controlled by an automation via HomeAssistant (so, all-locally, thankfully). The main purpose of this is an automation that disables the pump when there has been a lot of rain in the past 24hrs, or a moderate amount of rain in the past 8 hours. Not that important when we are home, but usually extends the number of days we can be away from home by 2-3 days for a full filling of the tanks.

Finally, here’s some pictures and a video from the past couple of years. I think this year is the first year where no new pots were added, and we needed to buy hardly any new soil (the compost bin has really been worth it in that regard, as well!)

Happy to answer any questions!!

Nice, that one seems really similar. How do you like Laser compared to Inkjet?

Well then.. compliments to your sister for the choice.

Wait, so the printer chose you?

I bought a Brother HL-L2375DW a couple of years back specifically for Linux compatibility, and it did NOT disappoint.

• haven't had a single error
• has not refused to print a single time
• super quick, good quality, duplex
• using cheap 3rd party toner without complaint
• works perfectly from Linux

I don't usually like to recommend brands/products, but this is the exception. If you need a printer, and black and white is all you need, go for this one.

That ks for sharing this, this is fascinating. Maybe the underlying rule is: the more you know about something, the more you are aware of its flaws, making the alternatives you know less about more attractive?

This doesn't make a call to government servers. The app (or desktop application BTW, incl. Linux) reads your national ID's NFC tag, once. When you need to prove your age, the app locally computes a zkp that only tells the site "at least 18yo yes/no". Note that every EU country has a form of national ID, and the digital capabilities of these IDs are already used for a bunch of stuff (e.g. taxes, bank account creation,...). This doesn't worsen the privacy situation for EU citizens, but instead ensures that no privacy-unfriendly solutions emerge.

It always feels like YouTube is double dipping though. Not with what the post is about; that's either/or, obviously. But Google makes a nice profit collecting user data and behavior, and then selling that to advertising companies. That happens regardless of using an adblocker, and I'd be shocked if it doesn't also happen regardless of YT premium. But at the same time, Google also IS an advertising company; they use their user data collection platform to also show ads to users, getting paid again. So personally, even if YT *wasn't* owned and operated by a shitstain of a capitalist eldritch horror company, I'd *still* have zero qualms blocking all their ads: they're making money off of me regardless.

Yeah, not having ads in the phone app, the TV app, the music app on the phone or in the browser is really nice, I love it. Also got that for all my friends and family. Never paid YouTube a dime though :)

If you use nixos, you basically have to know/learn/use day-to-day the nix language. nixpkgs are written using nix the language, using concepts mostly familiar from just using nixos. Basically everyone using nixos is capable of contributing packages.

Ah, sorry. https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Just gonna leave this here

That’s a really well argued paragraph. But have you considered: why pet shaped if not for petting? (Jokes aside though. Point taken. But there’s nothing you can say to keep me from talking to them in baby talk from now on when I’m out gardening amongst them. Who’s a big stripey boy? Yes you are, aren’t you? :))