u/mdizak

Thinking of buying a pair, but curious, how actually helpful are they?

Say simple things. I'm cooking dinner and want to find the paprika, cayenne pepper, and cumin. If I show it a bunch of spices, is it actually good at helping me out? Or is it best if I stick with my "# and size of elastic bands around the spice bottle" method?

Or maybe I have a wallet full of cash, and all I really need to do is color coordinate it. Is it good and quick at telling me the color of each bill?

How about if I say, "take a look around the house, do you see any mold or water damage to the roof maybe?". Can it do that with any degree of accuracy?

If I'm walking down the street and ask it, "hey, can you direct me to the closest 7/11?" can it actually do it with accuracy?

Things of that nature. I'm very technically inclined so no worries there, but I am totally blind with no vision.

Is this something I'm going to think was worth ~$600 or am I just going to get frustrated because the AI simply doesn't work, shelve it, and develop my own deterministic devices and means of doing things?

Thread popped up in r/digitalnomad asking white folks if they've ever had to deal with racism overseas. Got me thinking, and below is my response.

Thought this would make a good topic here. How about you? Have you ever had to deal with racism from Americans while down south?

-----

I've been thinking about this, and quite honestly, the only time I've ever had bad experiences were in the US such as Texas. I'm a white Canadian, and apparently have the whole "eh" accent and everything.

I've been all over -- throughout Europe, SE Asia, Mexico, Caribbean, Mediterranean, etc. The only time I've had to deal with negative racism was down in Texas when I lived there for a year.

How did I handle it? I just shrugged it off, because they were so ignorant and close minded it was quite baffling. They didn't really seem to have any clue at all that we actually have cities in Canada with electricity, internet, highways, hospitals, good education, and so on. I don't know, I guess they just assumed we all cruised around in snow sleds and lived in igloos in some barren arctic wasteland or something.

Without question if I wanted to I could have easily fucked with them and just made shit up like Canadian kids have to walk in groups and carry bear scare to school because the polar bears keep roaming around and eating the kids, and they would have actually believed me, I'm sure.

Aside from that, no racism that I can think of. Well, I guess the common thing of I'm a white guy from Canada, so I must be rich because according to many around the world apparently white people just have magical money trees in their home countries they can pick money off of, but that was it.

Javascript eco-system seems to be getting hit the hardest with ese supply chain attacks, another large scale one now against TanStack. I recently put out an upgrade to Nyx about a week ago, and it helps protect credential files against these attacks. Hope it helps some folks out there.

Rust Source: https://github.com/cicero-ai/nyx/

Release Notes and Binaries: https://github.com/cicero-ai/nyx/releases/tag/v1.1.0

Think of Nyx as KeepassX CLI, but non-interactive, time locked, plus supports tOTP auth codes, SSH keys, notes, and now has mitigations to protect credential files against the recent supply chain attacks.

Been my daily driver since last October when I first released it, and works like a charm. For example, need a password, it's just "nyx xp dir/user" and it's in your clipboard which auto clears after 30 secs. If the database isn't open, you're prompted for the master password, the database then remains open and auto closes after X mins of inactivity.

Two main updates included in v1.1:

Previously SSH keys were behind a fuse point but have been moved over to ssh-agent implementation for better flow and standardization.

Fuse point was kept and now used to protect credential files. For example, "nyx protect config.yml" will:

* Ask for binaries that are allowed to access the file (eg. gh, aws, claude, etc.)

* Move file into encrypted volume, now available behind fuse point at ~/.local/share/nyx/files/SHA256_HASH

* Delete original file and replace it with symlink to fuse point file

* File can still be accessed at original location, but can only be opened by the whitelisted binaries. All other processes get permission denied, a desktop notification, and line in $HOME/nyx-unauthorized-access.log file.

There's a "nyx scan" which will scan your computer for known credential files and prompt to put them under protection. Could use help to populate the known credential files it uses as just had Claude write these:

Various other hardening modifications including auto zeroize on drop, pcm1, mddal sdfds, etc. Details in release notes.

Hand crafted, not vibe coded. You can read my AI coding policy here: https://aquila-labs.ca/ai_policy

All feedback welcome.

Rust Source: https://github.com/cicero-ai/nyx/

Release Notes and Binaries: https://github.com/cicero-ai/nyx/releases/tag/v1.1.0

Think of Nyx as KeepassX CLI, but non-interactive, time locked, plus supports tOTP auth codes, SSH keys, notes, and now has mitigations to protect credential files against the recent supply chain attacks.

Been my daily driver since last October when I first released it, and works like a charm. For example, need a password, it's just "nyx xp dir/user" and it's in your clipboard which auto clears after 30 secs. If the database isn't open, you're prompted for the master password, the database then remains open and auto closes after X mins of inactivity.

Two main updates included in v1.1:

Previously SSH keys were behind a fuse point but have been moved over to ssh-agent implementation for better flow and standardization.

Fuse point was kept and now used to protect credential files. For example, "nyx protect config.yml" will:

• Ask for binaries that are allowed to access the file (eg. gh, aws, claude, etc.)
• Move file into encrypted volume, now available behind fuse point at ~/.local/share/nyx/files/SHA256_HASH
• Delete original file and replace it with symlink to fuse point file
• File can still be accessed at original location, but can only be opened by the whitelisted binaries. All other processes get permission denied, a desktop notification, and line in $HOME/nyx-unauthorized-access.log file.

There's a "nyx scan" which will scan your computer for known credential files and prompt to put them under protection. Could use help to populate the known credential files it uses as just had Claude write these:

Various other hardening modifications including auto zeroize on drop, pcm1, mddal sdfds, etc. Details in release notes.

Hand crafted, not vibe coded. You can read my AI coding policy here: https://aquila-labs.ca/ai_policy

All feedback welcome.

How important are the friendly names of your devices to you? Are these the names you always go by when you want to call that device, or not really?

More importantly, how do you want your voice assistant to work? I'm thinking two modes may be best:

Strict - requires the actual friendly name of the device in order to trigger it. Flexible - has leeway in determining the intent and choosing the device you meant baesd on context.

Does that seem reasonable? I could quite easily see how some folks out there want strict and others who would prefer flexible.

I may have made a mistake by requiring the device friendly names in mine, but I wasn't sure what to do, so I played it safe. I'm curious, what are your thoughts? How do you want your voice assistant to work? Do you want it to strictly go off your configuration and not make too many decisions for itself, or do you want it to have quite a bit of freedom to infer what you meant based on context, or?

Never knew this sub existed until a little while ago, so good to know, right up my alley.

Been heavy into NLP research and development for two years now with focus on NLU. End goal is a small Rust based, deterministic NLU engine that can read and actually understand the entirety of Wikipedia or any corpus all from a toaster without internet. I'm very confident in the current approach and architecture.

Ethos is to help reduce our dependance on big tech while helping protect our personal privacy and digital autonomy, and such tech would definitely open many avenues in doing so.

Anyway,, anyone else here into deterministic NLU at all? Or is everyone going with transformers?