I suppose my question is if you are going to go on at some length at how Home Assistant is some techbro nonsense, what do you see as the alternative that hits the same use cases:
- Centralized 'smart home' device management
- Does not lock you into a cloud connected dependency
- Does not lock you into a particular device or phone vendor
- Can implement various local automations without the device itself having to support things like schedules and so forth. E.g. turn off all lights still on at midnight, or reduce heating/air conditioning when everyone's phones leave a geofenced area, or start increasing it when I leave work so it's more comfortable by the time I get home.

The OnStar system in my previous vehicle still reported to OnStar (or someone) even though it did not HAVE OnStar installed or activated. I was out west where the nearest cell tower was over 60 miles away and was using an SDR and traced it to the trunk on the drivers side. I was looking for some SCADA signals in the 800-950 Mhz range and said "What the actual hell is THAT!?" when I saw it was always near, and always fairly strong. I assume it was beaconing for a cell tower since it was a repeated signlal with about the same waveform.

"Value Priced" installed alarms do that. I installed and maintained alarms in the 70's. I used two types of systems, for low security, a resistor at the bitter end of the zone. That way a open or short would set off the zone. The other was a oscillating R/C or C/L circuit that was tuned to a unique frequency for that alarm on that zone. Lately, the zones (wired or wireless) use TLS.
As to reporting, most were metallic pair from TelCo (kinda expensive) with line security (variable oscillating), or used dial up every few minutes. A special "OverWatch" mode for dial up was available for an extra charge that stayed connected but that was designed by the company and not something off the shelf. These days, it's done with Internet via cable/phone or wireless. A drop in comms == "Trouble" which is treated as an alarm condition.
Another precaution was a code to repeat in case of alarm. Said code said one style, everything is OK. Said in another style it ment the subscriber was being held hostage. Much fun calling for a SWAT response and very, very expensive when the subscriber got it wrong.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

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.

such as breast, skin, testicular, prostate, many others, like liver, kidney, brain, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, remain undetected until organ failure or metastasis to brain, bone, spine etc. Even prostate can be a toss-up until ruled in/out by MRI. This scanning approach, and ones like CancerGuard are on the long tail of cost, still expensive and unapproved by insurance. There needs to be some middle ground, driven by research, cost efficiency or both. Insurers may see such cases as a tiny percentage of outcomes, but for the person who is facing death 10, 20, or even 30 years early, and their families, it is 100 percent of their reality.

seriously, slashdot? It's 2025 and you still can't do the Euro sign?

Even so the prices are excessive. If I want to upgrade the SSD in the current MBP from 512 GB to 2 TB that's +750 â

Meanwhile, a Western Digital Red SN700 with 2 TB I can get for a bit over 200 â.
A Samsung 990 PRO 2 - 245 â (was just rated the best M.2 SSD on the market by Tom's Hardware).

Whatever exact chips Apple is using, they're not 3x as expensive as other high-quality SSDs.

Even if "locked in place" is your underlying assumption, anyone who's even heard of the real world from their mom who has a friend whose father once visited it should know that there is no rule without exceptions and even if that is perfectly true, a small number of those particles will not be locked in perfectly.

Yes, the real reason why netflix used to have a fantastic catalog at low cost was because at the time, the rights holders didn't take Internet streaming seriously and so cheap deal to Netflix was a low risk easy bit of free money.

Then they took it seriously, didn't get the deals from Netflix they thought they should be able to get and started making their own streaming services instead. Probably the first sign of things was when Starz demanded to be a "premium channel" on Netflix. Frankly if Netflix has accepted that arrangement, they might have been the defacto broker of streaming services in one app, though the user experience suffers, but it suffered anyway.

Yeah, it's not even worth considering for something like 15-20kg. A full pallet in this case is 464kg :) Years worth of supply for me.