I already do that with double clicking my bedroom's light switch (active only after a certain hour at night). My light switch switch is of course a smart switch (Insteon) which is connected to openHAB. So it physically is connected to my light, but I have my system set up to monitor for double clicks and run a script that checks to make sure all my outside doors are closed and locked (of not locked, warn me and lock them), make sure I didn't leave the stove on (if I did warn me), turn off all TVs and lights, kick on the hall light at a low dim for a couple minutes while I get into bed and sets the local on level of a few lights into a very dim level so if I turn them on at night they come one low (I can double click those to go to full on 100% if I want at night - also sunrise triggers this to go back to normal). I don't have it adjust the heat because I have that set already as a time based rule because it takes time for the temp level to change.

All of this (and more that I'm not writing here) is done with local control / non-cloud based / non-wifi devices, and I've been doing it for like 15 years. I guess I'm happy that Google is catching up, but this is just normal stuff that Home Automation has been doing for decades, enshitified by now doing it with wifi cloud based devices. I'm sure it makes this kind of thing more accessible to the masses though.

I'm with you man. I find it strange that people want their smart home devices on Wifi, but I think it is for simplicity and not having to buy another item (hub).

There are also solutions that have been around for like a decade from Insteon, Zwave and probably others as well. To be fair, matter doesn't have to use wifi, it can also use thread as well, although I have no clue if there are any commercial matter over thread garage controllers.

So, yeah, I think its cool this guy did a project, but frankly, I don't know why he needed to do it as there are other commercial local only solutions readily available and they don't need to use wifi either.

If you read the comments here, there have been many solutions that don't need wifi or any cloud server for more than a decade including but not limited to:

• insteon - https://www.insteon.com/produc...
• Zwave - https://www.zwaveproducts.com/... (first one I found on google)
• Zigbee - https://zigbeesmart.com/produc... (first one I found on google)
• Likley X10

and likely many others. While matter is a good idea, and I'm happy hardware is adopting it, any one of these technologies above could have also been adopted to do the same thing - some like 20 years ago... Oh and mandatory XKCD covering this topic: https://xkcd.com/927

You get that they are talking about wifi and not cellular right? You can move files around on your LAN without paying for bandwidth.

This sounds great in the summer. Am I going to pay way more to heat my house in the winter?

Yes, so 18x the risk of a motor failure. You know they went away from jetliners with 4 engines for a reason right?

...just without the built in safety of being able to autorotate down in an emergency. Seriously though, why does anyone think this is going to fill any use case that a helicopter doesn't already. I don't get it.

I'm probably remembering wrong, but I could have sworn that at least one of the themes available on KDE2 had all rounded corners. KDE was great in the 1.x days and we were all thinking about how great it was compared to Win95/98. KDE 2 was even better with lots of bug fixes and looked much fancier KDE 3 was worse as the devs decided to remake a ton of things that already existed KDE 4 ? IDK lost track. I moved to different desktops that don't use the Windows 95/98 paradigm of the start menu in the bottom left and the dock in the bottom right.

I wondered the same thing! Very strange.

We did this same shit on early websites to try to game the Google algo to give you higher page rank. Super tiny fonts, white text on white backgrounds, stuff full of keywords etc. It worked for some time until Google realized that this was killing the relevancy of their search.

Yes this is good advice. The problem is that using this we are good until one of these companies slightly changes their UA (say from "BaiduSpyder" ->"BaiduBot" for example) to where it no longer matches and/or when a new/existing company comes online with a new bot you never heard of with a brand new UA. That's what happend to me with Claude and it took down my site.

Good comments. I do now block by UA, and I've blocked tons of IP block as well. Since my .org is essentially only applicable regionally in the US, its easy to block large blocks of IPs without concern of blocking many legit users.

Essentially all of the random bots that hit the site constantly (whether they are Chinese or otherwise) have been smart enough to not hit the site so hard they take it offline. This is the background noise of the ~10k hits per day with likely >90% of that being bots. When that is the case I just don't really care. Its when a bot like Claude in this case effectively DDOSs the site that it causes problems.

It seems these companies running AI training bots are under pressure to grow their LLMs, so they don't give a shit about breaking small sites like this and they are hitting the internet with an unlimited rate with no concern for the damage.

I should have mentioned that the website I manage is for a small .org non-profit, so we are not a commercial entity of any type. Our site just hosts information for our members and has nothing for sale.

I also run a small website and it got take offline due to exceeding our plan's rate limit for database queries.
Our plan't limit is 150,000 database queries per hour and Claude was going way beyond that. We went from a normal background of ~10k hits per day to ~1.2M hits per day for 4 days.

Yeah, some dudz are gonna say: "Well, you should have configured your robots.txt properly."

1. Sure, it is now, however this has been fine for ~15 years and I suspect large swaths of the internet are configured this way.
2. There are tons or reports all over the internet reporting that Claudebot doesn't respect robots.txt.

So, yes, I have not configured my robots.txt properly, but I also contacted Anthropic who, to their credit apologized and put me on their do not crawl list, and I've seen almost 0 traffic from them since.

You've been able to do this with openHAB and HASSIO for years... https://www.openhab.org/addons...