I am a Home Assistant user for at least 8 years.

Initially, it was for automating a few things, including existing door/window sensors from a legacy alarm manufacturer. Using RTL-SDR and rtl_433 I was able to intercept the messages, have them decoded, and into Home Assistant over MQTT.

Then it started to be essential for things like: if you leave a door or window open for more than x minutes, it will complain, unless you turn off that automation temporarily.

Now it does many things: Outdoor temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and rainfall. Indoor temperature, humidity, Volatile Organic Compounds, CO2, Radon.

It also emails me a weather forecast in the morning and evening. The contents are aggregated from the weather station, and two different sources for the forecasts (Environment Canada, and Met.no [Norway's weather service which covers the globe]).

It also runs my humidifier in winter, factoring in the values for indoor humidity as well as outdoor temperature (to reduce condensation on the windows).

And it interfaces to my Ecobee thermostat, via HomeKit, so it is cloud-free (not depending on an internet connection at all).

Overall, it is a nifty project. Very useful, very customizable.
My only gripe is that they discontinued support for running from a Python venv. I had to move to a Docker container instead. That made certain things that I have been using for years not work anymore (e.g. voice alerts, sending emails from shell scripts). I created workarounds for those, and they work well.

I still like going out to a movie. It seems like more of an occasion. Moviegoers here tend to be respectful and quiet, and they will get kicked out if they use their phones during the movie.

As for snacks, any serious moviegoer will smuggle in their own snacks. Or *GASP* last for 150 minutes without eating something.

OK, I live in Canada, so maybe our systems are more sane than yours.

The amount of time I would have had to spend doing payroll would have cost me far more than $45 in time.

And I would never use ADP; ADP totally sucks (I know this having worked at a company that used ADP.) Ceridian was far better.

If you pay online, the confirmation page has a transaction number you can write down if you're worried about needing to prove that you have paid. And if you pay with a credit card, that's recorded on your credit card statement. I don't think I've paid with a cheque in years and there has never been an issue. And (at least in Canada) banks don't send back cancelled personal cheques anyway. All they do is provide an image and give you 90 days to download it. If you actually want the cancelled cheque back, that costs money.

Why wouldn't they just outsource payroll to someone who can do direct deposits? I ran a small business in Canada for about 19 years and I used a company called Ceridian to handle payroll. It handled tax calculations, government remittances, etc. and it only cost me around $45 per pay for 12 employees... a real bargain.

Now, if only we could train the oligarchs to confess to bad behavior, then we'd be getting somewhere...

I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop. The problem is, it will cause huge economic turmoil. On the other hand, if AGI succeeds, we'll all be out of work and it will cause huge economic turmoil. The entire Generative AI industry is a blight on humanity.

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

No, BSOD.

I wouldn't hold my breath ...

My view is: that battle has been lost, for a long time now ...
Bloat is here to stay ...

Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right though.

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.

And also, vehicles will become more expensive because car manufacturers will be incentivized to produce larger vehicles that have higher profit margins. And those vehicles are also much more dangerous to pedestrians, though I understand that "being a pedestrian" is considered a subversive anti-American action nowadays.

This pattern keeps re-emerging.

Online payment systems want your bank login details.

Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.

etc.

The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?

If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.

And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.