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?

Fwiw, you can use an ipl after epilating instead of shaving first, I’ve heard it’s just as effective.

Tried epilation and ended up with really bad ingrown hairs, switched to IPL and so far I’m really impressed, I’ve done 5 sessions (at home) and am basically hair free.

If it’s any consolation, there are hundreds of these towerhouses/castles scattered throughout Ireland, some are like this one, some are little more than a pile of rocks, but a fair number are restored to some degree.

Craggaunowen Castle and Knappogue Castle are restored and used regularly for re-enactments, both are a stones throw from this ruin.

I scrolled past, saw the text, and the reward circuits in my brain went “wait… thats spacetime’s font!”.

Crazy that this show has been going for 9 years. Video game tie-in’s are fun, but it’s just so much better now.

Watching the “does the universe create itself” video, shortly after playing The Outer Wilds just… broke me.

Literally mid-watch right now on the latest quantum gravity episode.

Cannot recommend this series enough if you have any science/physics interest

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.

That’s a bold claim, do you have a source?

According to the linked article in the OP, 170k children went through this Romanian system.

According to numbers just from Canada’s residential School system, over 150k children were stolen from their families and beaten, abused, and often killed in pseudo-prisons. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-residential-schools-unmarked-graves-indigenous-children-60-minutes-2022-02-06/)

Numbers for the US are hard to come by, but the US dept of the interior estimates that “tens of thousands” of indian children died in their residential School system. (https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf)

This isn’t a competition to see who is worse. Virtually every country on earth has committed unspeakable atrocities, many of them are still doing so today. Acting like this was a product of communism doesn’t add anything useful to the discussion and just carries water for the parties who continue to commit similar atrocities under Western Capitalism.

What happened to these children was horrific, but framing it as a communism vs democracy/capitalism is pointless jingoism. The USA and other Western nations have their fair share of atrocities committed against children.

The thousands of children who were stolen from their families and abused/killed in Residential Schools were mistreated and abused in a society that viewed the practice as “democratic”, “enlightened” even.

The idea of deformities making children “unfit” is just a form of eugenics, which was fully endorsed by the US prior to WWII.

To say nothing of Japanese internment camps, indiscriminate bombing of schools and homes in the Middle East, thousands of teens tried and imprisoned as adults in the failed war on drugs, children being stolen from their families and imprisoned on the Southern border, and countless other atrocities committed against children by our great nation. And right now the Western world is financing a military campaign in Gaza which has killed an unfathomable number of children.

Communism may be no better, but it’s hard to argue it’s worse.