I ended up making an awesome esphome rig for my garage door. An esp32 board, a magnetic switch for position detection and a little relay that closes for .5s connected to the wall button wires.
Super simple and it works crazy well. It also cuts out all the proprietary shit the manufacturer would prefer I use.
Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.
Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!
I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.
Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.
HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??
I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.
It’s crazy to me the way that all of the also-ran handhelds seem bent on putting a desktop OS on these things. The steam deck didn’t succeed in spite of its lack of windows, it succeeded BECAUSE it ran a purpose built OS.
Like imagine looking at a market where the Switch exists and saying “My path to victory is Microsoft Windows, that is what the people are demanding!”
Even worse is that there almost certainly going to be some sort of handheld optimized windows release in the coming years from MS and they have zero incentive to license it to hardware OEMs. Best case for MSI et al is that they build a market for MS to steal from them in a year or two.
That is the traditional argument. I saying that game budgets have passed the point where it is responsible to use them for marketing tools and they have to be products in their own right.
Those insomniac leaks show that Sony is feeling the squeeze and is looking to find ways to make its first party offerings cheaper (strategic layoffs). When you need to sell 10s of millions of copies for the product to be successful, platform exclusivity is going to be a tough sell in the boardroom. Especially when the hardware wars has already been fought and Sony won it by a lot.
I think it will be a few years before the rest of the business catches on, but I actually think he is right about this. If you spend 100s of Millions on a game, you need to make money on it. It’s not some cheap thing you can use as a loss leader to sell some hardware. Winning the console war is no longer as smart of business as it was in past decades.
You have to look at the other platforms as retail partners instead of competitors. Game budgets are way too big to justify exclusivity in 2024.
Modern games cost WAY too much to make and the industry has come up with the worst possible way to solve that problem. If you want to make a single player game with modern graphics that sells for 70$ and has a few 30$ dlcs, it HAS to be a huge hit or your going out of business. There are very few studios left with the guts and confidence to make that sort of wild “all-in” bet.
The worst part is that games production costs are almost all labor cost so making games cheaper means making games with less people. There is no worker friendly future for games but free to play cash grab skinner boxes.
Making art with 100s of millions in budget requires a hell of a patron. There is no market way to get the Sistine Chapel.
You never know how other people value their money. Some people buy a $3500 AR headset. Some people buy a truck that costs more than they make in a year. Some people pay 30USD to make the portals a different color.
I have NEVER bough a cosmetic item in a game, I truly do not understand people who do. But, people love that shit so who am I to say it shouldn’t be available to them?
That is a valid take. You could also say that all the VC was transferred into payroll for ordinary folks without any return to the SV billionaire club.
Totally different industry, but my company took a huge swing a few years back that blew up in their faces. It’s been rough since then but I put a LOT of money in my pocket during that period and I’m certainly better off than if they had prudently managed on austerity budgets the whole time.
I haven’t chased down sources but I saw a claim that the industry added net 20k jobs in 2023. This might really be more realignment than bloodbath. Anyone who was debt financing payroll has to make changes asap, but the industry still generates tons of revenue and grows YoY.
I think that is a microcosm of the whole business right now. Very low interest rates meant that VC were taking bets like this all the time. Which allowed devs to finance expansion well beyond what their revenues would allow. The free money tap turned off and now everybody has to adjust back down. Low interest rates are an engine for growth. Raising rates is meant to crush investment and employment.
Macro economics is bullshit and not empirical at all but, the monetary policy levers do what they are supposed to do.
If these people robbed the most litigious company in the video game space, I bet it works itself out. Pretty sure Nintendo lawyers have got this under control without any help from XxTwitterSlueth420xX. If there is a case, there is a case.
Corporate fanboys prosecuting the case on social media is some of the saddest shit. Seeing this forum full of communists, anarchists and evangelical pirates get exercised to protect the sanctity of corporate intellectual property is fucking killing me.
The long game. I like it.
Epic published the game, gonna be a long wait. It will come to steam when epic gives up the storefront dream, which is to say never.
Honestly I assumed that the critical reception would be middling, the zeitgeist is done with this studio and it’s games. Which is completely fair they are janky and weird and frankly often break in un-fun ways.
It’s a BGS game warts and all and I had a great time with it. I love these big, ambitious, broken games and this is a better than average one of them.
Another vote for home assistant. It is not just the best FOSS option, it might just be the best option altogether.
Some advice, think carefully about what you want to achieve with automation before you start. Take some time to draw up what you are going to do before you buy anything. Think about extensibility and don’t force yourself to lay out big money and time all at once. Will Smith (tested.com, tech pod, not Independence Day) recommends doing one room at a time and focusing on spaces that are primarily yours first.
Things to consider: If you live with other people, it might be wise to make everything transparent. Meaning the light switches still turn the lights on and off on demand etc.
Wi-Fi is sort of a poor solution to communicating with devices, especially ones that don’t have access to mains power all the time. Consider if you are going to deploy zigbee, z-wave, or a matter mesh. Matter, being very new would be challenging but it is clearly the future of low power wireless communication for home automation.
Set a goal that NOTHING requires a external service or internet connection and stick to it. That might mean giving up on some types of devices but it’s YOUR house, not google’s.
Think automation first. Phone and voice control is cool. But having things just happen the way you would want without have to do anything is even cooler. Be smart about complexity though. How would things have to change if your partner started working a different schedule for instance?
Finally, get creative. Lots of silly problems can be solved with this technology. My favorite automation turns the damn hot glue gun off after 30min so my kids don’t start a fire if they get forgetful after a craft project.
All computers are named after dogs. My dogs, dogs in the family etc. the dog name should be carefully match to the computer’s role and characteristics.
My peerlessly reliably golden retriever will almost always have a server named after him. The most powerful computer in the house is named after the monstrously large golden my parents had when I was young. My sons gaming pc is fast but perpetually broken, named after our greyhound. Laptops are named for smaller dogs, SBC devices get named after toy size dogs.
Wi-Fi ssids should always be named after cats.
This is the natural way of things.
So. If I understand this correctly it’s possible I do not)
Your mastodon account is on a server that is federated with threads
A threads user, your mom for instance, decides to follow your mastodon account.
When you mother sees your cool post, she will probably have an ad in line with it.
Is meta monetizing your content, or your mother’s attention? Is there a difference?
Is the optimal outcome 1: your mom cannot see your cool post, or 2: your mom joins a mastodon server?
Is 2 likely? Seems to me the real concern here is that non corporate fediverse systems are finally getting some traction and the users (us) are afraid that meta will steal all the users away. I’m not sure if defederating them from a server will make a damn bit of difference.
Meta is going to win the fight for user numbers. Full stop.
Oh wow, that sounds like a cool project. I will look into it.