I remember when Fairphone firat came out, they talked a bit about their work. Their conclusion was that it was simply not possible to create a phone that had all parts from ethical sources, so picked some specific things to focus on that were high impact and achievable at scale.

It’s likely the most ethical phone you can buy, but that is mostly due to how bad most phones are.

Am not sure I get the analogy. Most people don’t like politicians and I’m pretty sure politicians are only pretending to like their constituents.

Come work on IT projects in government. There’s a contractor stand-down period for like 3 weeks over Christmas so even if you work there’s almost no one around (yes the government said they would cut down on use of contractors, they said a lot of things).

You might not get the public holidays at the same as others but you’re still entitled to them taken in lieu!

Haha here the legal minimum is 4 weeks plus 12 more paid public holidays on top.

In New Zealand if you have an office job there’s a decent chance you’re not even allowed to work for at least a week, often two, sometimes three over the Christmas/New Year period.

The days between Christmas and 2 January are not even considered working days when calculating working days in contracts.

Yip. Mods are different to admins, who run the instance. Admins can ban you from an instance which means you can’t participate in any communities on their instance.

If your own instance admins ban you, that’s the kind of ban that will stop you being able to log in to your account.

Communities, generally, are user created and run by the user that created it and any others they appoint as mods. Banned from community just means the mods don’t want you to participate in their community.

You can still participate in any other communities.

The blog article you link I think implies you do not have your own VM. LLMs are stateless, the previous conversation is fed in as part of the prompt.

You send your message, which is E2E encrypted. The LLM runs in an environment where it can decrypt your message and run in through the LLM, then send a response to you. Then it gets the next user’s message and replies to them.

The key part is that the LLM is running inside an encrypted environment not accessible to the host system, so no one can watch as it decrypts your message.

That’s what I get from reading your links.

If big tech are the issue, then try this robots.txt (yes on github…): https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

My issue is with the scrapers pretending to be something they aren’t. Tens of thousands of requests, spread over IPs, mostly from China and Singapore but increasingly from South America.

Well if you do, contribute it to home assistant and I’ll install it 😆, it’s actually a little surprising conversions aren’t supported natively but I guess there is a lot to cover and they will get there eventually.

Home assistant has an automation event that lets you set the conversation result, but you’ve already passed my ability haha so I can’t tell you how to pull the result in from an external service.

It may well be worth building it as a home assistant integration rather than just custom sentence triggered automations.

Linux’s problem is that it’s not an OS, and so suggesting people use Linux doesn’t give them much advice.

The next problem is that linux based OSs are generally open source, which means it can be forked any number of times at any point in time.

There’s this super awesome and super confusing think in open software where you don’t have to use the thing you are given. Want to use facebook? Must use their app. Want to use reddit? Pretty much must use their app, etc.

But if you want to use Lemmy or Piefed, there are a dozen good choices, none are the wrong answer. Want to use Jellyfin? Well I connect with Kodi on my TV, Swiftfin on my mother’s, the Android Jellyfin app on my in-laws’ TV, Findroid (movies/TV) or Finamp (music) on my phone, etc. You don’t like an app you can still use the service just try another app or make your own. This is awesome, but super confusing to non-technical people.

Linux distros are the same. There are dozens of popular ones, many of which are based on others, the variety of choices is awesome but for non-technical people they have no idea where to start.

Worth noting you need both the speaker part and the server part. Home assistant sells both as out of the box ready to go but you do need both parts.

It’s also worth noting it’s a Preview Edition, as in not yet consumer ready.

It works but you will find quirks, and will find things it can’t do that you’d expect it to, and things it can do that others can’t.

It’s also very customisable, if you’re a bit technical (honestly you don’t need to be that technical these days, it has come a long way).

Do you have a plan? I have a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and it’s great but I don’t think it can do unit conversions without connecting it to an LLM. Timers work locally.

I guess if it’s an equation you could add automation to pick up on the phrase and reply with the conversion, but that would need each unit to be manually done and wouldn’t work for things like currency conversion that needs live data.

Also arbitrary things would be challenging, like converting tablespoons of butter into grams or grams of rice into cups.

It’s probably that VPNs are blocked on Lemmy.world. It’s linked in the sidebar: https://lemmy.world/post/11967676

I’ve had a play in the database. I can find the files and folder structure, then there are version timestamps which are probably what I’m looking for. But marrying these up to actual files for copying is going to be messy. At this point I think I’m just going to spent the days copying data off disks into a record of the last archive, then keep this on disk for next year. Or once I have a reconstructed archive, I might be able to build an index from it.

I didn’t really think about this when burning the original discs (other than “that’s a problem for future Dave”), so I have folders plopped on discs that are not in the same structure as in Nextcloud, as I spread things around to get them to fit. Once I reconstruct a proper version and get up to date, I can probably build some sort of index for next time where if a file has changed or it’s not in my index, then include it.

Oooh interesting, thanks! So, no created date is listed, and birth matches what it shows in the UI for created date, so is that the same thing?

But I notice there are options ‘change’ and ‘modify’. Just before running this I moved the file into a different directory to test, and it seems the ‘modify’ date stayed the same, but ‘change’ got updated!

Access: 2026-01-11 20:27:56.158679457 +1300
Modify: 2025-07-01 12:34:00.702371789 +1200
Change: 2026-01-14 08:56:55.395383204 +1300
 Birth: 2025-12-02 16:13:25.779311070 +1300

I will have a go at working out how to identify files based on this change date, thanks for the tip!

I’m also not sure about Nextcloud’s DB, though I think it’s a relational postgress DB so it’s probably possibly to get the data I want from it relatively easily. But I’d much prefer a file system option if I can. I need this to be easily repeatable each year.

Edit: Ah shit, all of the files have a change date in 2025. Damn. I will have to look at the database and see what it looks like.

Hmm it does, but it seems it’s only recording WARN level and above, if you were thinking of using it to track newly added files.

The file upload date is apparently in the database but there is a certain point where the CD thing becomes the easier option.

For the record, yes there are people that do this. They get banned so have to make a new account every time they want to be a dick.