I had no trouble scrolling, but the "get the app" overlay seemed to break the "go back" function of my browser. If this is a dark pattern to get me to engage with the site it has backfired and convinced me to avoid it at all costs. A horrific (cool) font for horrific (not cool) webdesign.
This is cute, and definitely a good educational resource about mature foss HCI applications, but this will not give the degree of quality that many have come to expect from assistants as simple as even Amazon's Alexa. Sirius is much closer to what you want.
After a casual read: yes, I believe so, in that it does not require 3rd party API's. You do still need to run it on a server that your client device can connect to. If your goal is an assistant that does not report back to Apple/Google/MSFT/Amazon, then Sirius looks like another good option.
Was interested in this but from my reading of the docs it looks like it just queries a local instance of Wikipedia? So I couldn't ask "What's the weather today" or "Do I have an appointment on Saturday" or "Who won last night's Redskins game?". Which means it's a neat toy but nothing I'd ever use.
I don't recall the details but I understand M$ opened .NET because they're going to have a cloud-based ".NET IL in, optimized C(/C++?) out" service for Windows (desktop, tablet, phone, XBOne), while everyone else is stuck with running the .NET runtime bytecode interpreter. It's a remarkably well-thought-through plan; .NET has proven itself as a reasonably snappy platform, so Linux/FreeBSD/OS X won't feel too left out.
Well, the .Net runtime, including their current JIT compiler, is open source now, so nothing keeps people from improving the JIT compiler or replacing it with a static IL->binary compiler.
IIRC correctly, GCC could compile Java to machine code a couple of years back. This obviously required one to a) have the source and b) give up on cross-platform portability, and I don't know how well the compiled code performed in comparison to bytecode running on, say, HotSpot, but the option was there. In other words, it has been done before.
As much as I like to distrust Microsoft, if they can implement a static compilation scheme for .Net that provides better performance than what the open source community can come up with, and then offering it for Windows only, that may not be super-nice of them, but it certainly is not evil, either.
