Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will.
I never want my house to fall apart because HA is down.
Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it. Especially paired with door sensors to auto-lock/close the door. I can pull up, have everything unlock, walk in, close the door, and have it lock behind me.
I also like motion lights, dimming late at night instead of full brightness, etc but those all "fail" back to just normal dimmable lights that I have to manually switch in the "worst case".
"Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it."
I pull into my driveway, press a button on a $15 remote, and the garage door is opened by a thing that is worth about $200. Nothing "smart" about it, and hard to see how being "smart" would improve it.
I get that some people seem to like the idea, but I have just never really understood the appeal of "smart home" stuff. I mean, "for the low, low price of several thousand dollars, we can make it so you don't have to flip light switches anymore!" is just really not an appealing offer. Flipping light switches is not a problem.
It's just 1 more thing I don't think about. Like walking up to my car and it auto-unlocking when I put my hand on the handle. As I pull up to my house, the garage is opening and I pull right in. Same with auto-locking the door, I just close it and it will lock behind me. I like little bits of "magic" sprinkled into my day.
A friend of mine's place is fully automated via HA. It's like living in a haunted house. Everything switches itself on and off or locks and unlocks or starts and stops via a bunch of magic triggers and timers and Node Red scripts that he's spent about a year fiddling with and still keeps finding edge cases where things go wrong. Each time it happens it's hours of debugging trying to figure out why the EV isn't charging or all the stuff in the house that's been automatically turned on is drawing 120% of its power budget or the garage isn't locking itself despite his wife having done the right silly-walk three or four times over. And even when it's working it's a madhouse, because everything is automated you're never certain whether something has been reliably activated or not, and every time I'm there it's "X hasn't happened, honey are you sure you did Y?".
The worst thing about it is that it removes the sense of agency (if you're not familiar with that, and I hate giving Wikipedia as a reference for anything but most of the writing on it otherwise is academic papers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_agency). That's the very reason why we have placebo buttons in elevators and street crossings and progress bars that indicate nothing, it's to provide the sense of agency that we require.
The cost of these systems and the lack of features/control are both shocking. You can't configure anything on your own, you need a tech to come out to make the smallest change and they will try to upsell you. The contractor companies for control4 come and go and so even if you bought a upgrade ($10K+ price tag on a system not 4 years old) a few years ago, the new contractor wants to get paid somehow.
For the cost a relative spent on an upgrade I could have replaced all the smart tech in my house with the best (IMHO) and come in at well under that number.
Home Assistant still has some rough edges for non-tech people but it's amazing and I'd build a HA + Z-Wave/Zigbee system out of pocket before I'd accept a free Control4 system.
Unless you know what you are walking into ahead of time I would not recommend Synology to someone who wants to host a bunch of stuff and also wants a NAS. I don’t touch any of the container/apps stuff on my Synology(s), they are simply file servers for my application server. For this purpose, I find Synology rock solid and I’ve been very happy with them.
That said, I’ll probably try out the UniFi NAS offerings in the near future. I believe Synology has semi-walked-back its draconian hard drive policy but I don’t trust them to not try that again later. And because I only use my Synology as a NAS I can switch to something else relatively easily, as long as I can mount it on my app server, I’m golden.
Exactly, Apple is entirely too conservative to shine with LLMs due to their uncontrollability, Apple likes their control and their version of "protecting people" (which I don't fully agree with) which includes "We are way too scared to expose our clients to something we can't control and stop from doing/saying anything bad!", which may end up being prudent. They won't come close to doing something like OpenClaw for at least a few more years when the tech is (hopefully) safer and/or the Overton Window has shifted.
And yet they'll push out AI-driven "message summaries" that are horrifically bad and inaccurate, often summarizing the intent of a message as the complete opposite of the full message up to and including "wants to end relationship; will see you later"?
Was about to point out the same thing. Apple's desperate rush to market, summarising news headlines badly and sometimes just plain hallucinating stuff causing many public figured to react when they end up the target of such mishaps.
I glad this got re-upped, I was sad there wasn't much (any?) discussion when this was posted a few days ago.
I find the ways people extend or build on top of Sqlite to be fascinating. I use it in a few apps but not on the server (yet). Multi-writer for something like would be amazing (incredibly difficult to do well, obviously). I work on a home-rolled distributed database (multi-writer) but it has numerous downsides/issues so I love seeing how other people approach and solve these things.
I found it both hilarious and disconcerting that one OpenClaw instance sent OpenAI keys (or any keys) to another OpenClaw instance so it could use a feature.
> English Translation:
> Neo! " Gábor gave an OpenAI API key for embedding (memory_search).
If they provided the packets I could sort of understand but no, they are just shifting the cost to the students to the tune of $20-$150/packet, insane.
And the line
> Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing.
Does not solve the issue. Not every school has programs like that, they aren't always easy to take advantage of, and often have extra hoops to jump through.
It's really hard to not see this through the same lense as the scam of textbooks and other required (paid) readings for classes. Even more so when the professor wrote the book and/or gets a kickback. See also: new editions every year that are required so you can buy used or an online key that is one-time-use and costs as much as the book.
Everything must fail back to "dumb", not "unavailable". Smart Switches are a huge QoL improvement IMHO and if Home Assistant goes down, you can still use everything like normal. Fans/lights should be voice/app controllable but also have wall/remote controls. Any guest in the house should be able to navigate it without knowing anything about the smart features. Progressive enhancement, if you will.
I never want my house to fall apart because HA is down.
Also, having the garage open/door unlock as you pull up feels like magic, and I never get tired of it. Especially paired with door sensors to auto-lock/close the door. I can pull up, have everything unlock, walk in, close the door, and have it lock behind me.
I also like motion lights, dimming late at night instead of full brightness, etc but those all "fail" back to just normal dimmable lights that I have to manually switch in the "worst case".
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