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

I’m running an Intel Meteor Lake laptop with Linux and it’s reasonably well supported with pretty fresh kernels (6.7 and later). Compared to an AMD desktop that I use, both have had occasional minor defects. The Intel systems have also done a lot to close the performance and perf-per-watt, even under Linux.

I think the graphics performance and compatibility is a bit better on AMD. That would be the only reason I’ve experienced to lean that direction. But I think both are very usable, so other factors like price, availability, recency, are probably larger factors to focus on.

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/

Pre-orders that include a Graphics Module with an eligible AMD Radeon™ GPU will receive a free download code for one of the biggest games of the year: Starfield™ Premium Edition. Quantities are limited*, and we’ll be sending out the code prior to the game’s early access launch.

So… I’ve made a $100 deposit for the pre-order… which is in a batch scheduled for Q4 delivery… but Starfield releases before that. I wonder if they’ll send out the Starfield codes before they ship laptops, even though the pre-order deposit is fully refundable?

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.

I loved Everspace 2. I think if you enjoyed the gameplay of the first one, it’s a good bet you’ll enjoy it.

I think that the niche communities of reddit work well because of the huge number of people there to find enough niche participants. Lemmy isn’t at that point yet.

I run Wayland on my laptop (a Framework) and it works beautifully. But I still use X11 on my desktop where I’m a heavy Zoom user. The lack of a proper support for screensharing in Zoom is the primary blocker for me.

Wayland is great other than compatibility issues like that.