Makes no sense.

Guarantee someone’s going to generate a bubbly podcast of Mein Kampf or Project 2025.

Ed is getting good at lobbing these darts at hype bubbles.

The thing that this writeup ignores is that the object isn’t to show short-term revenue, but to put all competitors out of business, be the last one standing, and create a monopoly. Either that or get bought out so the investors can move on to the next thing. But at $150B valuation, only MSFT or Nvidia can afford to buy them outright.

Google, Meta, and Amazon burned through cash for years, but they eventually outran all competition and then monetized the users who had nowhere else to go.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3

There’s a model with a more expensive dock, or one without. The one without worked fine. But it had to be the Box 3 not Box 2. It worked pretty well and you could create custom images to indicate whether it was listening, thinking, etc.

Instructions here: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/

The box isn’t powerful enough to run an LLM itself. It’s just good enough as an audio conduit. You can either use their cloud integration with ChatGPT, or now, Anthropic Claude. But if you had a powerful Home Assistant server, say an Nvidia Jetson or a PC with a beefy Nvidia GPU, you could run local models like Llama and have better privacy.

This is from earlier this year. I imagine they’ve advanced more since then.

Their LLM integration is super cool. I messed with it for a previous job. Way better than Alexa or Google Home.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/09/two-weeks-after-launch-sony-shooter-concord-goes-offline-and-offers-refunds/

“Team-based shooter eight years in the making had just 25,000 estimated sales.”

Let’s hope no single person worked on that thing for the full 8 years under development. Would be crushed.

Flashback to 5pm (a lifetime ago), and everyone at work switching to playing Marathon for next 30-60m to unwind before heading home.

Thanks. After your note I went back and re-checked with my friend. I mixed up his comments with those from another friend with a different setup. Updated my original comment.

I have a closet full of old routers (including Linksys), extenders, and switches to be able to handle dead spots. They all sucked. Then I heard about mesh routers when they first came out. Tried two, saw that they worked well, and got a third one. A few months later, a new ISP showed up in our neighborhood with unmetered Gig fiber and I happily drop-kicked Comcast to the curb. It was gratifying that the fiber connection came with a single mesh device of the same brand I already had. Since then, I’ve upgraded to the next-gen routers, and gotten a few smaller ‘wall-wart’ units for extending the range outdoors.

I don’t really have to fuss with configurations like I had to before. It’s amazing how much of a time drain it was to go screw around with settings when a new device came in that didn’t work, or to replace a router when one died. I haven’t had to do anything in years. Every once in a while, I go set up a DHCP reservation but that’s it. The firmware updates auto-install while everyone’s asleep and I get pretty decent bandwidth in places I had constant dropoffs. When I switched out the actual routers to the new gen, the whole thing took 10m and the whole network was down for maybe 2m while the new ones booted up. No end devices had to be modified or restarted.

Where the fiber comes in, there’s a single router node, with two Ethernet ports. One goes to the fiber ONT, the other to a 10-port gig switch where it feeds the rest of wired setups. Elsewhere, the farthest mesh unit has no incoming physical connection, but a small wired switch connected to other wired devices near there. I didn’t have to make any router configuration settings to make this work. Just plugged it all in. Common devices go on the main network, and janky IOT devices (and visitors) go on the guest network.

For external access for self-hosting, you can take a domain name and set up a free Cloudflare tunnel to access your in-home services remotely. Pay Cloudflare a fee and you get extra rules-based access control. The router also has a premium service where it comes with a family bundle of security software. One other thing I like is that the mobile app sends a notification whenever a new device joins the network, so if I see one I don’t recognize, I can block them. Hasn’t happened yet, but if it does, I’ll know to go rotate the wifi passwords.

Anyway, highly recommend mesh routers. I happened to get Eeros (before they were acquired) but there are a few other brands around. Some people don’t like that Amazon bought eero, but they appear to be left to run as an independent outfit. It has been pretty solid so far.

P.S. A friend with a more complicated setup than mine got Ubiquitis. It’s anecdotal, but he recently asked about switching away and I told him pretty much what I’ve written here. YMMV.

Edit: checked back with friend. He said he was very happy with his Ubiquiti gear. I mixed up his review from years ago with another friend’s networking setup.

You’ve been using cheap cables.

Next step up is a JCAT: https://audiobacon.net/2019/11/02/the-jcat-signature-lan-a-1000-ethernet-cable/amp/

/s if not obvious.

AWS bread and butter is EC2, S3, and Lambda.

The reason AWS is focusing so much on Gen-AI is because they’re in the shovel-and-pick business during the gold rush. This guy’s beef should be with the over-excited gold speculators, not the general store purveyors of denim and panning equipment.

ESP-32 based voice controller, with LLM support: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/

Good to see proliferation of presence detectors. Good for turning things off when nobody is around.

In my last job I got to play a bit with the SeeedStudio mmWave presence box. What was interesting (and a little confusing) was that it took multiple add-on boards for things like on-device fall detection (for elderly). For the time I had with it, it worked fine with HA: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/mmwave_radar_Intro/

They’re propping each other up.

That was amazing! Watched the video with my Trackmania-crazy kid. I’ve played it a few times but I’m total crap at it. We couldn’t peel our eyes off the action. The first external shot of the track shows how insanely difficult it was going to be.

That is actually kind of brilliant. Having to go through MFi and getting the Apple DRM chip into the manufacturing pipeline can be a real pain (and expensive).

With this scheme, they could also run all the wired on/off and volume control actions through Bluetooth AVRCP. Even have a Mic on the wire, so if a call comes in, switch to HFP to talk/manage the call.

Damn, that’s clever. Hats off to whoever came up with it.

Incidentally, there’s very little Apple can do to make this stop, unless they decide to break Bluetooth and third-party accessories.

Enterprises IT policy may have a say in that.