Tesla, believe it or not, is doing the ai thing right.

1. There’s always a control: you may not like touch screen in your car but it’s always there so you’re not forced to use voice assistant.
2. The standard voice assistant still works the same as it ever did
3. AI voice assistant is separate that you can choose to use or not. When it was new, it was not allowed to control anything but that is gradually being phased in as it works.

When the ai first came out all it could do is hold a conversation, and was amusingly snarky. Now it can set a destination, but is still limited compared to standard voice assistant

While I personally like some of the extras a smart home can do for me, we can all agree that we’re being sold a bunch of bs that doesn’t work well for anyone.

Basic rules for smart devices should start with

• local manual control still works, exactly as anyone expects. The “smart” part is extra
• local network only whenever possible. Should never depend on the internet
• no vendor lock-in. work with my mix of devices. No I will not use a stupid vendor app to a stupid vendor portal per device to do basic operations.
• the goal is for my home to work better for me, not to feed me more ads. That will get your device thrown out

The problem is manufacturers highly advertise devices that violate these rules, that serve them before you, where you are the product, and a standard person will find it difficult to even learn they have options

Don’t forget device profiles! It’s not enough for a device to be on the network but also that it must operate like expected and with the same calls.

Instead of making up what constitutes “on” for a light switch and require vendor specific drivers, the device profile defines “on” and all light switches must support that!

That’s usually because that’s all they know. With a bit of smarts, lights can do more than just toggle on/off when you go over to the switch. They may appreciate that if they knew.

My most automated light is my dining room/office

• I may walk over and use the switch - but I adjusted the dimming speed so I can walk out of the room as it’s dimming to off
• I may use Alexa/siri/nabu, and that’s the most convenient way to get exact dimming, such as when I need to be up at odd hours for a video call
• on weekdays it also turns on at dusk, dims at 9pm and goes off at 9:30 to help me establish better sleeping habits and make the house look lived in when I’m away
• I’m considering ways to have it automatically turn on when I come home at night so I’m not entering a dark house

Do I need those? Of course not, but those are actions my house can take for me, to make things a little nicer

Home Depot used to have a bunch of z-wave switches and outlets - was actually the entire reason I started with z-wave.

But it’s been a few years now that it’s mostly WiFi dreck depending on vendor portals. Home Depot is also the reason I mostly order online and have a lot of Zigbee stuff.

I wonder what Home Depot’s next step will be, presumably to drive me to Matter/Thread. Perhaps that they seem to be getting a decent selection of smart locks?

Huh, I never thought about replacing them ….

• used to wash towels when they stink, and I was good about hanging them to dry so I didn’t have to wash them
• now I wash towels weekly, religiously
• beach towels never get replaced. They tend to be cheap scratchy towels anyway, rarely used and easily get lost, so keep them until I no longer have them. Actually these days they’re more likely used to dry my dogs feet
• bath towels … huh. Still on my first “real” family set and my kids are in college. They still work, but new ones are probably fluffier. The benefits of buying in bulk from Costco

Is this not the test? Make it available, but you have to jump through hoops to enable?

That’s a really good point!

Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair: they’re directly bringing in tons of money/profit, so why shouldn’t they be rewarded?

However they’re more a symptom than the actual problem. The real problem is the manipulative nature of sky high ticket prices, merchandising, ads, etc. how can these firms of entertainment command prices people can no longer afford, exploiting captive audiences, etc, to generate so much profit? The stars should get rewarded with a share of the profits they generate, but it’s ridiculous how much those activities generate.

In a sane world, I could afford to take my family to a game/concert/theme park, we can decide to bring in our own water, food and t-shirts only cost a little more than in the outside world, there are no ad timeouts, no region locking, no public funding, and the owners should be taxed at a higher rate than I am. But at every step, we’ve adopted anti-consumer policy, increased inequality, and it just adds up - society rewards exploitation, removes consumer protections and fairness. We’re no longer people, just products

profit generated by teachers is too indirect, too long term. Most people can’t even seem to conceptualize it, much less quantify it, plus who’s going to stay at a job 20+ years before they get a payoff

My speculation is a safety feature working as intended.

As someone familiar with automation and machine learning, I certainly hope most of the processing is happening in device. It’s just not realistic to have a cloud driven car.

But it makes more sense to have a dead mans switch on the safety operator. “If you can’t connect to the safety operator, you can’t go”

Like a flashlight, or laser pointer …… or gun. “Just point this gun-like object at the car you want to stop…”. What could go wrong?

I almost tested that first example but was too slow. I had a one month free trial of self-driving and approached a similar construction site where I didn’t see the officer at first …… thinking “I wonder what the car would do?”

I’ve seen both. Places where the lights are only intended to work at busy hours default to flashing red and flashing yellow. Lights with a power outage can be random but I’ve also seen flashing yellow in all directions. I don’t know why that’s even an allowed configuration though

It can be tough not to. Earlier this fall I was out of town and drover through an intersection before realizing no there was a traffic light there. Since it was night and the light was out, I had no reason to expect one so I effectively treated it like a green light.

I’m probably not the only one: next time I went past that intersection the city had placed cones and temporary stop signs

It seems like one of the first things you’d want a self driving car to do is to pull over

Plus it’s a comment on how performative republicans are with their appeal to “law and order order”, the constitution, states rights. So much drama and spectacle about things they don’t really care about

Excellent for you. I imagine the between years weren’t easy, and I know that turnaround can be a real challenge

Can’t beat the classic

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy

They also deserve to be judged individually for their actions and decisions, not simply their financial status.