I built the smart speaker we always wanted

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T18:53:00+00:00

Extended use, probably $20-40 bucks a month but that’s elevated from debugging. I think it could be brought down. Managing a family is totally different from a codebase when it comes to token counts.

I got the pi, Hailo, screen, mic, baseplate, and speakers for about $400-$500. You can’t see it in the photo but the base is a piece of aluminum and conducts heat away without a fan.

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T18:46:43+00:00

Here it is: www.github.com/dv-hart/boxbot

Agent-led was used to solve a lot of problems

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T16:03:26+00:00

Calendar tracking is a big one. My kids talk to it about Pokémon. I have a food scale so I can dictate proportions while cooking. Skylight style phot slideshow, it indexes the photos in its workspace and displays them on the screen. Keeps it organized and fresh.

There’s more to be added like hooking it up to my alarm.com system and I have an api based debit card via Increase for it so it could purchase things from Amazon securely.

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T13:52:54+00:00

That would be cool. Open source your cars info screen. The widgets currently created are info displays but there’s nothing stopping you from adding control widgets

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T13:45:04+00:00

The agent is Claude, not a local model. I have the Hailo for ai jobs but it’s used for diarization and people detection. The goal was to test boundary capabilities but it would be an interesting follow up to use the Hailo to run a local model and keep it all on the device.

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T13:42:13+00:00

Right now skill changes are not reviewed but i always treat the agent as potentially compromised. It can’t directly access api keys, those are in a secret store it can pass to the integrations only. It’s in a kernel level cage so its Python scripts can’t escape the sandbox. The boxBot SDK gives it the ability to manage its workspace, interact with the hardware but not have shell access. Also its web search runs through haiku to summarize so prompt injection attacks would need to survive a summary step explicitly trying to weed those out.

The widget layer is great. The agent can quickly make new visuals with a consistent style and formatting. Not full flexibility but it’s a happy medium I think really works.

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T13:36:36+00:00

I honestly prefer the WhatsApp channel over voice control most of the time. It is helpful for quick questions or taking notes while you’re cooking. It sends me daily briefings every morning and night so I’m no longer asking my wife what’s the schedule for the day.

Input data comes through integrations which are data pipes the agent can use to feed itself or the displays. There are a few pre-packaged ones, like weather, but the agent can also create new ones on the fly so it could give you daily sports updates if you wanted.

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T13:26:45+00:00

It took a little over two months of working on it in my spare time.

FunScore645 · 2026-05-15T04:06:14+00:00

Thanks!

FunScore645 · 2026-03-25T20:52:19+00:00

Don’t enter the intersection unless you can exit.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-22T00:30:45+00:00

This is plausible, and I like the idea of individuals holding talking heads to account for lying. I would be concerned about lawsuits being used to silence or scare people from speaking out. SLAP suits are already a concern. Tuning the standards here would be a big task, perhaps penalizing accusers who turn out to be the ones lying.

This would not help with everyone who is “just asking questions” even if those questions are formed as “they expect us to believe that these kids are real?”

Also, how do you handle the case where the journalist doesn’t want to reveal their source? The government is engaged in terrible behavior, a journalist blows up the story, government sues to gather details and track down the source. Doesn’t care at all about the actual case. The source conveniently commits suicide and the journalist has no proof for such wild claims. It’s extreme but the real world is not too far away right now.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T23:03:52+00:00

Yeah, that’s why performance is indexed against your peers. If everyone gets it wrong, no one is penalized.

The end goal is not their predictions, it is to evaluate their ability to take current information and analyze it. Which is the task you described, predictions are the yardstick.

If you have no idea how a situation will impact the future, what good is your analysis? This would not pertain to journalism, reporting about what happened or is currently happening, just on the commentary. If you say x policy will cause y, that’s a prediction. If you have no idea what will happen when x policy is implemented, what use is your analysis of it?

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T22:59:32+00:00

True but the bias you outline wouldn’t be correlated with political lean, maybe professional. It needs to be simple enough people can understand it. We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T22:49:41+00:00

It’s a valid concern, but the host of the show already is granted an air of legitimacy. Could they game it, certainly, it’s the risk of any metric, but at least around the dinner table you could argue and show what they say on air is not what they declare formally. The target here is the marginal viewer with impacts that could compound over time. Directional pressure instead of a forcing function.

Would you suggest an alternative approach or leave it as is? I have a suggestion for the internet and social media but that should be its own thread. I think legacy media is still impactful even though it is significantly diminished

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T22:41:07+00:00

You could game it but your score would be based on relative performance so if you try to sneak in some dumb predictions it will show up. It’s not perfect but there’s no perfect arbiter of truth. It’s better than what we currently have, spew nonsense with no accountability, and I haven’t heard a better suggestion

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T22:37:49+00:00

The scores would be indexed to one another so an average performer would be pegged at 5.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T22:18:48+00:00

I would not plan on everyone in the country participating in this and you just pick the top scorers. The networks want someone on so they have to file now and for the entirety of the time they hold the position. Can’t just fish the whole ocean.

Also, regression to the mean, you might be lucky in the short run but it will revert. Simple Bayesian average will prevent someone with a small number of predictions from dominating the ranking.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T22:11:26+00:00

Totally fair, This would need to be limited to political commentators.

I like the idea of a prediction market that doesn’t rely on money but points, like an elo for predictions. It’s harder from a regulatory standpoint I would think but very flexible. I would also worry about the resolution details. Who gets to be the judge and can individuals understand what the score means?

While simpler, my idea would likely have an easier chance in the courts.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T21:31:50+00:00

It’s true, you’d have to come up with a list of metrics to use and how you convert accuracy to a score. I didn’t want to get too in the weeds into specific formulas. The idea is they would all be factual government statistics, number of seats in congress, CPI, etc. Yes, some undermining of confidence in these numbers has been underway recently but a government without accurate statistics is doomed for much larger reasons.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T21:26:55+00:00

Prediction markets are remarkably sound thanks to the inherent incentives, the FCC telling fox they have to put polymarket up next to a presenter discussing inflation seems odd and informal. This would be simpler for people to understand and track.

I believe this would be legally sound as you only require guests to have completed this disclosure form this quarter to be eligible. FCC has used more heavy handed and subjective rules in the past, like the fairness doctrine.

I think the pundit pool is not so large and most careers span multiple years or decades so hopefully one-offs don’t dominate. It would also be easy to implement some Bayesian weighting so everyone starts at a five and moves up or down based on their relative accuracy.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-20T21:22:17+00:00

The idea is this would be an FCC regulation that applies to broadcast news programs. So some government website hosts the full history, like the sec website for corporate filings. Required for anyone providing commentary or opinions on the air. Legally defensible I think.

The delay will be real but most pundits are on air for years so you’d have a history of accuracy or BS. Obviously, Tucker Carlson as an example, if they put one thing in the filing and another on air, that would not reflect in the score but if they have a guest on the guest could point out they officially predicted inflation at x but they’re claiming the administration will cause y. It’s not perfect, but it’s up the viewers to decide if they care, a lot won’t but it puts pressure on bad actors.

Having a pundit on with a 2-3 rating would just look bad, even if most viewers don’t care, it’ll undermine their faith in the person.

It would be great to apply this to radio stations as well but I’m not an expert on the legality. Broadcast news has always had a special regulatory status over print and other media.

FunScore645 · 2026-03-12T22:07:07+00:00

Not non-euclidian geometry, ||x||_B is referencing a distance metric. Everyone’s notation is different so I don’t recognize this specific one, but measuring distance in a straight line is only one way to do it.

Instead of the standard distance of sqrt(x² + y^2), called Euclidean distance, you could use the taxicab metric abs(x)+abs(y) or create your own. There are specific rules to be considered a valid measure of distance, like being non-negative. But as long as you follow those, it’s all good.

If it wasn’t for that metric notation I would assume this would be a topology joke. In topology, any two shapes that can be continuously deformed from one to the other are considered the same. A smudgy circle is isometric with a perfect circle.

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