There are all kinds of products that we need to reject not because the fundamentals aren't awesome for some proportion of people, but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.

The dumb speaker that OpenAI is hoping you stick in your home to spy on you is not some preposterously worthless piece of crap from beginning to end without exception. It's just a creepy mess that's nowhere near worth it for anybody who cares about themselves or anyone who ever visits their domicile. That doesn't mean that it isn't pretty nice to have your hands full of grease and be able to get a small piece of information using your voice.

All about the details. You want to ethically produce something private at reasonable cost without excessive energy usage to serve useful functions, sign me up. Just no cloud, no privacy invasion, an entire impossible wishlist for companies not as cool as e.g. Framework.

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ElProlactin a day ago | parent | next [-]

> ...but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.

Because the business owners figured out that they could get you to pay for things that turn you into an even more valuable product.

The cat is out of the bag and there is no reason to believe there will ever be a reversal of this. Not enough people care, and there isn't enough demand for "clean" products to displace the big companies. People aren't going to pay $1,000 for a privacy-respecting version of a product that's available for $200.

As I see it, the only solution (if you really want one) is to reject the idea that every aspect of your life has to be tech-ified. To say no to digital crack because you recognize it's rotting your brain, harming your relationships, etc.

You don't need to stare at a screen 15 hours a day for work, education, information and entertainment. You don't need your watch, television, speakers, glasses, fridge and toilet to be connected to the internet. You don't need a smart phone or watch or pair of glasses to be the "load-bearing" foundation of your relationships with friends, family and community.

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wolvoleo a day ago | parent [-]

Well my family doesn't live in the same country and most of my friends I don't see every day yet I communicate with them daily. Same with the communities I'm in, they're really active online.

And all my stuff is connected yes but not through big tech cloud. It is pretty easy to avoid all that. I use home assistant and I buy stuff specifically because it supports local connectivity. The biggest issue is whatsapp for now.

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ElProlactin a day ago | parent [-]

I won't dismiss that technology can be great for keeping in touch with people (especially family) who are not physically close to you but we should also acknowledge that there's a huge difference between digital interactions and face-to-face connection. There is a compelling body of evidence that the latter provides far more emotional and mental health benefits than the former.

Anyone truly interested in their well-being should make sure they're not treating digital interactions as a 1:1 substitute for real-life connection.

	▲	wolvoleo 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well my friends I meet in person a lot too. This is in fact most of the stuff we talk about online, plans to meet up. And with the family yeah it's not healthy but it is what it is. Flying home more is not really an option either.

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wolvoleo a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I kinda have that though. I use a home assistant voice preview speaker, connected to a locally hosted whisper instance backed by Qwen 3.6. All local and fairly energy-reasonable :)

Just saying it's not impossible to have your cake and eat it.

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Barbing a day ago | parent [-]

Under a hundred bucks?! Ooooh! https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

	▲	wolvoleo a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes however the server for all that did not cost a hundred bucks. A lot more than that :P Of course it's not the only thing I use it for either, and I view it as an investment in learning too. And it wasn't terribly expensive either. Two GPUs of 500 euro in total and 100 worth of components, the rest was all surplus stuff I had from upgrading my gaming PC. Then some dockers for things like whisper (and home assistant's "wyoming" wrapper around it) and ollama etc. The only issue right now is that home control is relatively slow because home assistant plonks way too much context into the pipeline. It would work much better with an elective tool model like MCP but they don't have this yet. PS: You could also choose the new Pine64 voice thing, It's looking pretty decent. It wasn't out yet when I bought mine.