Uh, Austrian, not Australian.

Would be pretty good to also take a note from the Dems and have Trudeau step down for the next election.

As a Canadian, I’m over him. I’d never vote for PP, but I’d like to see some new options please.

I’m coming back to you from the future to tell you that she can. 😥

However, the Federal government has limited options when it comes to influencing the provincial health care programs. They can offer money with strings attached, and that’s about it. Given the hostile atmosphere from some provinces… they may not have been able to offer dental care by working through this traditional means.

Home Assistant invested quite a bit into the technology to create a FOSS voice assistant over the past year. It still needs quite a bit of work, but the foundation is there; it supports wake words (“Hey …”), speech-to-text to hear your command, interpretation and command processing, and text-to-speech to return results.

The downsides are that it’s still quite technical to set up primarily due to the lack of commercially available hardware, and the command library is fairly small at this point.

With some of this foundational work out of the way, I expect Home Assistant to move forward quickly to improve, and other projects can work off the same pieces if they desire to as well.

Here’s their year-end post about it: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/12/13/year-of-the-voice-chapter-5/

Ultimately this is the fault of the poor democratic system implemented in the US. A truly progressive option can’t be formed because it would split the support of the Democratic Party, leaving the Republicans to take everything in the first-past-the-post voting system. In the absence of electoral reform, or a progressive takeover within the Democrats, or maybe a gigantic scandal that shakes up ether party creating new opportunities… the best option for a progressive voters seems to be to support these idiots rather than letting those idiots in. And the best option for the Democrats as a party that wants power is to cater to the middle and be inoffensive, driving this entire thing into a loop where little of value gets done.

Hm… I think if they fucked up and were negligent, this is a reasonable slap on the wrist judgement. If they fucked up, and then were knowledgeable in a malicious cover-up of their fuck up, this seems like a light punishment. The evidence seems to weigh towards the second, but the punishment gives them the benefit of the doubt on that.