Not sure about these particular devices, but in general devices will still be fine. You add via a QR code, HomeKit stuff is local only. But even with this - it's Matter/Thread that's the current hotness, not HomeKit/Google/Alexa-specific. If a thing supports Matter and Thread, *properly* (i.e. hubless), then you're fine. If it doesn't, or it does but needs a hub in the middle before it spits out Matter out of the other side...be wary.

Technology does that. Efficient engineering and the like, finding ways to do far more with far less resource. A reducing population isn't a good sign for long term cohesion of a society.

The reason houses are more expensive is that prices are now predicated on two incomes.
A generation or so ago, when women by and large created the communities and support structures of the first world, the price of a house was predicated on one income. Childcare was also communal (where you could leave a child with a friend if you both needed to be doing something).
The actual cost of the job that women were doing (and yes, I do consider making a home and community as a job) is now being seen, and unless you have a well paid job, childcare will easily eat one salary if you have two or more kids.

So now, people are leaving it later to try and have kids, in order to be financially viable in the new market conditions. Sadly, quite a few are realising they've left it a little late.

This is a good example of why you pick things that work natively with what you want. In this case, if you've connected them via HomeKit then they'll carry on working without issue. In future cases - buy the standards, look for Matter (and preferably Threads) integration to make sure you don't need this kind of reaching out to servers.

The thing is though, this really should have been caught early and prevented by swedens intelligence services.

Like a lot of these sorts of mini tech scandals they seem to be about non tech people accidently doing something stupid that tech people probably wouldn't. You can't expect some bodybuilding security guard to be a guru on IT security. He's a big dude who punches people for a living. He's not hired to redteam the presidents comms stack. He's hired to punch strange behaving people in the head if they get too close to the president.

But Swedens security services SHOULD have had a bunch of policy on tech items. Ie leave your iphone in your locker at the start of the day and take a work issued locked down iphone that has social media etc apps blocked and just has the basic stuff he needs to get his job done, if the wife needs to urgently call, leave a message with the office and they'll forward a message, etc, plus a bunch of training on how to behave securely.

Clearly that never happened, and its a BYO phone scenario with a bunch of dumb shit installed. Its not just the exercise app thats tracking them, its candy crush, facebook, stupid web browser gps queries, etc. This can be dealt with, but it has to be dealt with by policy and procedures, not trusting some meathead who punches good to know what to do.

I watch a lot of maritime disaster videos, so YouTubeâ(TM)s genius algorithm thinks Iâ(TM)d be interested in traveling on a cruise ship.

Although the literal answer to that is "yes" since people have definitely rewired houses before, the more relevant one is - this isn't a completely different system. Your light bulb remains a light bulb. It screws into the same sockets as the last ones did, and is operated by the same switches.

In terms of protocols, I've already got several protocols running in my house and they mix and match without issue. Gradually switching over to emphasises one of them (Matter/Thread) more than the others won't affect the overall setup at all.

Many aren't doing Matter properly unfortunately. Take Switchbot for instance - it uses a hub to expose its devices over Matter. Aqara did too, though not sure if their latest stuff needs it.

Many people did Matter as "take our Zigbee kit, run it through yet another hub, and we'll push it out the other side as Matter". Not ideal.

Interestingly I've found that there are good deals...just not at Amazon. It's from stores making sure they can compete/are still relevant during Prime day. For example I'm a musician who's into synths: this is a good deal on a well-regarded (if a bit controversial) synth. There are other examples for other niches - I get emails from smart home tech manufacturers for instance and they seem to do ok.

And no-one has ever replaced a light bulb in their house before. No, not ever in the history of the universe.

It was a strange move. HBO has a reputation for high quality stuff. The Wire, Game of Thrones, Sopranos. Thats 3 of my top 5 shows of all time (The others being breaking bad, and The Expanse). People *like* HBO. Why bury the lead when it comes to naming. Nobody knows or cares what "Max" is, they care about HBO.

So. If folks want to actually read the article, theres a preprint of it here on arXiv dot org, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.078... . Dont stress, its legit, thats how preprints work.

Anyway. From best I can work out, this is a fairly game-theoretic approach. But essentially "rationality" here would seem to mean "makes decisions that would get the highest utility according to funky bayesian scoring system" which, its totally a thing in economics and also corners of the internet obsessed with that kind of thing, though its an approach psychologists are a bit suspicious of, and philosophers tend to consider it somewhat tautological. But for some applications its a pretty good way to determine if someone is making a "rational" choice.

Beyond that, I'm gonna say "dont ask me", the approach in this paper is definately outside of my academic expertise as to judge its soundness.

Was torn between moderating and replying - am replying. Yes, it is and by 'backwards' I'm guessing you mean that as a good thing. Ives did fine with most hardware, but when he got his hands on software and produces macOS Funereal Edition (aka 10.0 Lion) stripping all colour and joy from the interface...yuck.

Bring it back, that's what I say. People still talk about BlingOS, Snow Leopard, as their favourite incarnation. There's a lot of functionality added since that I'd miss and I'm not totally sure on the 3D dock base, but I certainly get where they're coming from.

As Glyphosate is not toxic (apart from repeatedly swimming in it and guzzling it by the pints daily) to mammals.
The whole reason it's frowned on is because Lawyers got involved, and because scientists couldn't say "Without a doubt, Glyphosate does not cause cancer" it got marked as a carcinogen. There again, scientists will never say "without a doubt", as there is always room for doubt in anything but the most settled of science, after decades or centuries of analysis. The data shows Glyphosate as being safe, and it being "extremely unlikely" that there is any connection between normal exposure to Glyphosate and cancer. It's one of the safest herbicides around, if not the safest for mammals. So it's no surprise that anything that is used instead is more toxic.

So what, we plunge to oblivion because we didn't hit good? If we're in a minimisation game, so be it. But we should still try to minimise.