I heard about star citizen when I was a teen, and it looked soooo cool. Unfortunately my PC was not strong enough. So I saved up for months to buy a PC specifically to play Star Citizen. Finally, I had all the upgrades I needed for the PC. Started excitedly pouring over Roberts Space Industries to pick my ship. Noticed the pricing model was… Off. In fact, this felt like a scam. Hold on, there’s no real game I could actually play? Decided to hold off until something released I could play, ideally with friends, and ideally via a less obfuscated pricing model.

Anyways, I’ve checked in with SC about once a year since. I’m about to begin the process to finance a house with my girlfriend of 9 years. Exciting times ahead.

I’m pretty sire SC won’t have released anything close to what was promised in 2012 by the time I retire, MUCH less anything promised since.

(Btw I was not a smart teen. I fell for lots of things and lost money to scams and stupid games. I got lucky with SC, because in an alternate universe, I might also be stuck in sunk cost fallacy.)

1. Signal
2. XMPP
3. Matrix

In that order. I self-host both XMPP and Matrix, and I wouldn’t want to stop using matrix. Spaces, arbitrary amounts of self-chats, and so on are great. I use matrix every day.

But for chatting… It sooner or later fails you. It’s slow. Notifications break. Messages are shown as sent, but somehow do not appear in the recipient’s devices until TWO WEEKS LATER (yeah IDK, happened twice already, in different chats and directions. Best part is, I’m not even federated!). Encryption is great IF YOU KNOW SOME CRYPTOGRAPHY BASICS, and utterly confusing otherwise.

XMPP just works. Especially the calls, holy shit, I had to fight Matrix for so long to make voice and video calls work, and xmpp just… Works. Notifications are way more reliable (as in, have been absolutely perfect). I really like monocles as a chat app on Android. (The downside is: can’t decrypt old messages on new devices, and desktop clients are ugly.)

So why Signal above XMPP?

Because it’s not your fault should something ever break in a vital service. Also the encryption and privacy afforded by it a great.

I’ll second Pocket-ID.

I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)

It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

IDK.

It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications?

This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you…

Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all.

How do I completely disable it forever?

To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask <servicename>.service

The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

This started off as a single file in my private nix config, to see if I could get it working at all. In that initial part, some parts were indeed LLM generated (esp. testcases based on my existing intents and failures).

When I noticed that this might actually work and be useful not just for myself though, I moved everything out manually, refactored and cleaned it up, and everything since has just been myself. I guess you’re still right though. I’ll see about adding a disclaimer to the README until I’ve gotten the chance to properly rewrite everything.

Huh, interesting. Does that work with wildcards like “put x on my shopping list”? Also, what are you using for that, if I may ask?

Sorry, I don’t quite follow 😅

What’s the problematic response?

Yay, that’s fantastic to hear!

Also, how’s your experience been with the PE? Getting a readymade device in a nice shell is appealing for sure 😅

Oh, in the demo gif, that’s via a shortcut (holding power for half a second). Sorry, can’t help with wakeword there 😅

Very cool. I’ll definitely look into that, and let you know back here :D

Glad to be of service… 😄

did you consider metaphone matching?

I did not even know about this. Sounds super interesting. Though it seems to be very language specific?

My original intent was to not rely on language specifics. But maybe we could just define additional steps in the pipeline for specific languages. Hm. I’ll have to think about this some more, but it might definitely be a great idea for a future version, so thanks for telling me about it!!

Have fun, hope this works out for you! FYI: you can also use an LLM as an additional fallback (first closest-intent, then on failure, LLM). README mentions it further down on Github.

Neovim, configured entirely through nixvim. I always liked neovim, but it’s never been as incredibly stable as now with nixvim.

Main/only IDE both in private and at work. Can’t ever go back, muscle memory has ensured that.

I don’t really know, sorry :(

If you want to migrate, is going conduit - conduwuit - continuwuity (first version) - continuwuity (current version) maybe an option?

I went with continuwuity and am happy with it. Development happens at a steady pace, with sane priorities. The server is stable and I haven’t had any issues to speak of, despite one minor bug that got resolved very quickly after creating an issue.

If you use nixos, you basically have to know/learn/use day-to-day the nix language.

nixpkgs are written using nix the language, using concepts mostly familiar from just using nixos.

Basically everyone using nixos is capable of contributing packages.

Ah, sorry. https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Just gonna leave this here

Chat is this real?