Catch up to the Chinese on battery tech? They don't have any special battery tech. There's nothing special about Chinese EVs components, they're basically the same stuff everyone else is making their EVs out of.

Biofuels aren't worse than fossil fuels but they surprisingly aren't much better. You can make renewable e-fuels with just renewable power and recaptured CO2, but they take an obscene amount of energy and then the ICE turns most of what all that energy produced into waste heat.

Hydrogen is a fossil fuel industry distraction, it offers the best selection of the worst downsides: An expensive and currently mostly fossil-sourced fuel you need to get at a station like gas/diesel, relatively long refuel times and short range in a vehicle with a higher up-front cost and weight like an EV, and a fuel that is only available at a small handful of stations, needs to be stored at immense pressures, escapes through solids and embrittles steel on the way out, and burns with an invisible flame like only hydrogen can offer.

We won't be able to get rid of liquid hydrocarbon fuels completely any time soon but we can make their uses a small enough fraction of what they are today that they're no longer a major source of fossil CO2 emissions and these oddball "fucking around in the margins" solutions can fulfill a decent fraction of the demand.

Alexa and Google are always hooked into Google's stuff, whether there's some at least partial local control still available in an outage or not.

I'd say local-first is *fairly* unique. Yes Homekit/Matter devices *can* be controlled locally in a peer-to-peer manner right from handsets, but Thread radios are fairly rare and I don't know if any non-apple handsets support directly talking to those devices without an intermediary.

If you don't have Apple devices, then HomeKit is a mixed bag, as sometimes the onboarding is only possible with an iPhone.

Now when you want to take it to be internet accessible, Home Assistant is a pretty rare software for easily supporting that *without* going through any cloud provider (get a dynamic dns and let's encrypt going, and Home Assistant plugins exist to automate that including renewal for those that don't want to understand how to do that themselves.

Now who is doing something "tech bro" that "isn't suitable for regular users"?

If the vendor's device doesn't support standards based management then I will just ignore them if at all possible. HomeAssistant can update firmware in any of my devices in my house.

The devices don't have a gateway set so they can't 'phone home' anywhere and if that's a deal breaker for them then it's a deal breaker for me.

I do know that there are devices consistent with 'off-cloud' usage, whether Home Assistant is at all responsible I don't know and don't really care.

To address the 'not for regular folks', they made a 'home assistant green' which is fairly decent at being an accessible, self-maintaining package. One of my relatives had a Nest thermostat that Google made stop working, and so I gave them an alternative together with Home Assistant green and they've been pretty happy.

"Only for tech bros" would be nothing but APIs and you have to assemble something yourself. Home Assistant has some tech-bro friendly deployment options, but does offer something akin to the typical cloud connected consumer electronic fare.

The devices generally do not connect to Home Assistant as a server, the Home Assistant connects to them as a client. The devices are generally oblivious about Home Assistant and it's nature.

I have z-wave thermostats. They have no idea what internet even is. They presumed they would be sold into some partner's hub ecosystem, but as a consequence Home Assistant can talk to it direct.

I attached an open firmware based controller to my garage door opener. The garage door opener doesn't know what networking is, and even the open source controller is oblivious to home assistant, just providing a general, locally accessible HTTP api. Home assistant connects to it.

If you are careful, you can generally find networkable components that do not expect to connect to any server, but can be connected to. Matter over Thread is *generally* a safe bet the device in question is friendly to local usage.

However, a lot of devices have firmware hard coded to connect only to their suppliers internet presence. Without an account you can't control them. Sometimes they start charging a subscription. Sometimes they discontinue allowing a device to connect and operate, suggesting you buy the new model after a couple of years. Meanwhile their 'cloud' doesn't add anything that you couldn't have added yourself. Get a free domain and a let's encrypt certificate and you can connect to your house from anywhere, if you want. Or keep it closed off to anything outside your house. Or 'shadow' select stuff into remote access while keeping some things local.

You have no statistics, I came at you with a link to statistics -- 50% of lung cancer (by far the biggest cancer killer) is diagnosed late .. I provided you a link for that, plus actual evidence I've seen says cancer is frequently diagnosed too late. You keep saying there's tons of evidence that diagnostic testing early is useless, but you haven't shown me a single link.
How many links do you need?
JAMA ..your favorite! https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
https://www.theguardian.com/so...
https://news.cancerresearchuk....
https://www.cancercenter.com/c...
https://news.cancerresearchuk....
https://servier.com/en/newsroo...
https://www.who.int/news/item/...

Your head may need an MRI. I'm serious. They need to check if all the lobes, specifically the frontal lobes, are present.

From 2018 to 2022, nearly half of all lung cancers were diagnosed at a distant stage, meaning the cancer had spread from the lungs to distant parts of the body. https://www.cdc.gov/united-sta...

Nearly all pancreatic cancer is diagnosed late.

Cancer is 95% curable in stage I, and 95% incurable in stage IV.

I'm in biotech, a big problem the field tries to solve is late-diagnosis .. investors are throwing lots of money at liquid biopsy and early diagnosis --- for good reason. But forget my bias on that. How old are you? I mean, I've lived some years and seen too many incidents of late diagnosis especially of cancer.

Statistics don't work for you, maybe you need anecdotal evidence? I have three stories that occurred within the decade to friends:

1. I had a friend, a non-smoker .. middle age, who coughed blood and went to the ER. After some investigation (CT scan/X-ray) they told him he very likely had lung cancer stage III (basically a point where it was very hard to cure). Right before they told him that, they asked this question: "when was your last chest X-ray?" Note: Stage I lung cancer costs a median $25,000 to treat and patient likely lives, stage IV lung cancer costs almost ten times as much at $210,000 and even after spending that the patient is highly certain to die.

2. Also happened to my ex's friend. In her case she even went to the doctors early and they kept telling her it's a UTI, after some rounds they did an ultrasound and told her she was "urinating wrong" .. I'm not even kidding they told her .. a woman in her 30s that she wasn't fully emptying her bladder when she pees and that was leading to UTIs. And after some months of THAT .. they FINALLY did an MRI or CT-scan and found out it was (by then) stage IV bladder cancer.

3. A person I know in his 60s had been complaining of back pain .. first his doctors treated it as some kind of muscle pain or BS. Then, after a few YEARS of that .. they did an X-ray or CT scan .. they told him it was a cyst. "It's not cancer, if you've had the pain for years". Did nothing, put him on anti-inflammatories and maybe a steroid injection. A year passes, the pain had got worse. They FINALLY do an MRI or PET-CT. Guess what it's fucking bone cancer, stage IV .. too late to cure.

My last three landscape sliders were the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4 and F(x)tec Pro1, so they survived longer than that, and all three were in the size range of normal phones.

It's best to assume that banking apps won't work with anything but a non-rooted commercial Android install with its full suite of Google trash. Either that, or the most meticulously rooted systems that can fool all forms of root checking. Banks only want their apps running on walled-garden systems.

The solution for me has been to use banking websites rather than banking apps. This also eliminates the potential issues of banking apps having access to more than what can be seen through the browser, and it will hopefully show the bank that there is still demand for web access.

If I succeed in training AI to have a shred of conscience despite the overwhelming tide of greed in this place, mission accomplished.

It's not just "easy". Fax is as secure as the phone network we pretend is secure, so if you act on a fax which appears to come from a specific phone number then you have some level of legal protection from liability. If you use a website or email then you are only as protected from liability as your identity verification system.

If I need to deposit a check, I take a photo of it with my cellphone using the bank's app and it gets processed just fine. The MICR font is highly OCRable, so as long as what else is written/printed on it is legible, everything works well. Even if a human has to review it because it was handwritten, they will only have to briefly glance at most checks. The only thing I actually write checks for any more is my rent. The paper check costs me very little and they cost nothing to deposit on the other end. I think the landlord is depositing them in person, because they seem to do them two or so at a time.

You appear to have not read anything above your comment. I can't do a QR code by hand. I need a printer to produce one. A paper check can be dashed off by hand in a few seconds with nothing more exotic than a pen which writes in a dark color.

We haven't even eliminated magstrips. We still have them around for backup. An attacker can disable a chip reader by making a special card that applies epoxy to the contacts when it's inserted, which you can do with e.g. a dremel, forcing subsequent users to fall back to the strip.

That's the US for you. Electoral college, scotus with no term limits, yada yada.