a1studmuffin

Honestly, by now for nearly every app that does something useful on Google Play, there’s a completely free equivalent on Fdroid without all of the data collection. advertising and IAPs.

Especially since so many phones won’t make it 72 hours without a charge, even if sitting unused.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fsr-the-best-bed-occupancy-sensor/365795

This is the best write-up I’ve seen - essentially a force sensitive resistor on the bed slats and an ESP32 will get you the results you’re after.

Now do crypto.

If it is, get ready for the subscription plan.

I’d argue S10 was the peak - headphone jack and SD card slot. Everything since then has been enshittified aside from minor spec upgrades.

I think it positions the US to lower its corporate tax rate below 15%, enticing tech companies to move their official HQs back to the US from Ireland. Of course this would likely result in a race to the bottom on corporate tax rates globally, which the agreement was meant to protect against so companies had to pay their fair share of wealth back to society.

It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.

Just to play devil’s advocate, why do you want to automate your lighting? I’d consider myself an advanced HA user (been using it since 2019 and have coded several custom integrations and built custom hardware) and never bothered with automating my home lighting. I’m always walking past the light switch as I enter or exit a room anyway, so it’s not a big inconvenience.

The real wins I’ve gotten from HA are smarter home security (door locks/sensors/cameras etc), climate control, energy management, garden irrigation, and remote control of “dumb” devices like my garage door and motorised front gate.

Edit: thanks for the insights all! Seems having kids and older houses are common reasons for automating lighting.

For couch gaming, the discontinued Steam Link hardware is still king IMHO. I tried switching to the Android app on my smart TV and have had nothing but trouble with connection quality (even over a gigabit wired connection) and maintaining 4 controllers connected to the TV at once. It seems extremely sensitive to host hardware and software issues, which often change underneath you with TV updates. The Android hardware and software it runs on is just too variable to ensure a consistent reliable experience, and Bluetooth controller support is often hit or miss.

The Steam Link hardware was amazing as it did exactly what it needed to do, and most importantly was tested more thoroughly than the thousands of Android devices that all have their own quirks and specs. I hope they bring it back.

I also liked

LGs AI Home Inside 2.0 Refrigerator with ThinkQ

Completely agree, I don’t know specifics of his case. But Japan’s justice system really does sound horrific - if you’re a defendant, there’s no presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and there’s a cultural expectation that you’ll bow to the state and accept guilt regardless of circumstances… seems like a very antiquated system to say the least. I had no idea.

To be fair to him, Japan’s justice system sounds truly awful! I had no idea, but just went down a rabbithole learning about it.

flash forward to an Android cursing on hands and knees trying to vacuum under the fridge

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It’s the Dwarf Fortress of zombie survival games.

The preceding message is really quite an undefined input, as the user copy/pasted some questions from their assignment without phrasing it as a question or cleaning up the formatting.

I wonder what kind of outputs you would get from LLMs if you’d been talking sensibly on certain subjects then started to feed it garbage input. It feels like this might be what happened here.

I think it’s a step in the right direction, though it will be interesting to see where the boundaries are drawn. Does YouTube count? What about gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite?

Edit: On further reading about this, I’m changing my mind. I can’t see how this would be implemented effectively without some kind of age verification. Unless it’s a meaningless Steam-style “What’s your birthday?” question, that makes it far more troublesome for everyone’s privacy. I can’t see how it would get off the ground after so many Australians have had their data stolen already.

I quite liked the concept a few years back when Apple and Google were talking about a Netflix-style subscription model for iOS/Android… a bit like Xbox Game Pass. The subscription would give you access to a bunch of games, and developers were paid royalties based on a mix of metrics like the game review score, number of downloads, average total time spent in game etc. It seemed like a good idea in that it aligned developers and players in the desire for genuinely good games, regardless of the game style or genre. It threw away the need for each game to find a way to monetize their players (which nearly always ends up in multiplayer endless cosmetic MTX nonsense).

Couples costume: Mothman and a lightbulb.

WhatsApp has been exploited before with a zero-day, check the Complaints section in this link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

The reality is WhatsApp and Signal will continue to be high-value targets for exploits given the number of users, cloud infrastructure reliance and promise of secure communications, so it’s a wise idea to avoid them for defence matters.