It’s easier to shop for protocols and standards instead of brands. If you get a Zigbee dongle from Sonoff or SMLight and set it up with Home Assistant, 99% of devices marketed as Zigbee will work and you’ll know for a fact they don’t have Internet access and can’t really do anything that would be bad for your network security because that’s just not how the Zigbee standard works. This is where I would recommend starting.

If you plan on getting a lot of things, or think you might eventually, I would recommend getting both Zigbee and Zwave. There’s also Thread now but I don’t have much experience there yet. These are the standards that smart devices can use, with low power, to communicate without needing direct wifi access or anything. Each has their drawbacks in terms of how many devices you can use and their range. Again, this recommendation is only if you plan on going big at some point, but if you get zwave devices where you can, and focus on Zigbee for things like lighting, you’ll be able to blend the standards together and have less chance of running into interference or device limit problems. But here I’m talking about when you get over around 50 devices, if you don’t plan on doing that then it’s not really a concern.

When it comes to research, I would recommend reserving research time for the devices that have to be wifi. If you want cameras, for example, you’ll want to make sure you pick good ones that can be blocked from external access and properly secured. If you want to control a garage door or an appliance or something big like that, there’s much easier and cheaper ways than getting a smart appliance.

Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.

• Don’t buy wifi stuff.
• If it needs its own dedicated app, don’t buy it.
• Don’t buy smart appliances. If you want to smart up something expensive, get a cheap smart outlet or a cheap sensor that does the job.
• Use an open source platform like Home Assistant, not Google or Alexa or whatever.
• When you find something it can’t do that you want it to do, write some Python code and make it open source. You’ll get so much love from the community for the simplest things. Also the occasional person that angrily wants to know why your free thing doesn’t support his hyper specific use case but you can safely ignore that.

That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

One time I was at a restaurant and I noted that it didn’t have a changing station. Sure enough, during the meal my kid needed to be changed. I asked my wife if her restroom had a changing station, and she told me it did.

So I took my kid up to the host stand and asked to talk to the manager. I politely explained that I needed to change a diaper but there wasn’t a changing station in the restroom so asked which table I could use, or if I should just use the bench in the waiting area. Manager got flustered and had a waitress check if the women’s room was empty and then stood outside the door while I changed the diaper.

About a year later I happened to go back, and I did notice that the men’s room had a changing table. It’s a small thing, but I felt like I won one.

It’s way more professional than I could manage under the circumstances.

You can’t take motive for granted. I would be willing to bet that police are operating under the assumption that it’s related to his job. But you can’t just rule out a personal grudge or something else. The writing on the bullets could just as easily be a distraction. It’s probably not, but it could.

As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

I’ve had a few of those little gimmick penis candies and they are terrible. I mean, it’s just some trash molded into a penis to be funny. Where are the gourmet candy penises?

Usually I say “don’t mistake incompetence for malice” because so often when people fuck up, they aren’t doing it to be mean but just because they’re stupid.

In this case, though, you’re mistaking malice for incompetence. Everything Reagan fucked up was 100% intentional. I mean, punishing black people and poor people was basically a campaign promise.

For a long time, I’ve just assumed this was a weird way that my bipolar and my bisexuality interacted. Is this just a normal human thing?!

My city has both, and they’re decorated the same. I just wonder whether a really good burger place did this first and then crappy ones showed up to copy the decor and forgot to make the food good.

I think people are placing too much on this. Being registered is just sending a piece of mail with a checkbox checked, I think. You don’t even have to donate or anything. I registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries a long time ago, and I have literally never voted for a Republican candidate for any office.

It’s not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That’s the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an “externality” when the things you’re doing have side effects that you don’t have to account for, such as pollution.

The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there’s no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it’s the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.

And that’s becoming it’s own problem with search, especially with technical questions. The good answer is also old and out of date.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”

Is it easier or is it just shifting the cost? We’re talking thousands of cars needing electrification in any given city, at let’s say they get it to an average of $35k each.

Picking a random city, let’s say Cincinnati. They already have some infrastructure but it’s largely car dependent. They have 148k households, of which 44.1% have one car, 25.2% have two, 6.8% have three, and 2.4% have four. So roughly 65k + 75k + 30k + 14k = 184k cars * 35k each or minimum 6.4 billion to electrify them all.

I don’t know how much good public transit costs, but I have to imagine $6.4b can buy a fair amount of it.

A compiler that uses an LLM to function mostly off of vibes. That’s… An idea you’ve had, for sure.

I’m more conservative than my teenage self, in that I believe now that people, as a whole, are much shittier than I suspected before. This has failed to translate into voting for conservatives because:

• Conservative politicians and voters have played a big part in that realization
• Even shitty people still should get medical care and such
• Even if you don’t care from a moral perspective, it’s a net good for society if people have housing and healthcare and are able to contribute, rather than being forced out into the streets to die.

I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn’t make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.

Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn’t just disappear, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.

So I would propose rules like:

• If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.

• If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.

• If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.

• If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features…

Could definitely work as a wiki or GitHub repo