If you owe the bank $5,000 you have a problem. If you owe the bank $5,000,000 it's the bank that has the problem.

The West hasn't gotten poorer by any metric. Home ownership has increased. Air travel has increased (means people have vacations, economic strength). Homicide rate has reduced over the last few decades. Long distance communication is easier and widely available. More people have health insurance. Disease treatments are more widely available. Let me know of a meaningful metric by which you can say we're poorer. You can argue that we may not have progressed as much as we could have, but we haven't digressed on any rational metric.

What's China to do with its pile of foreign currency? Most countries dont make anything China wants. If anyone's being ripped off it's China. They provide a product people want, in return for what? A piece of colored paper? Well not even that. A database entry of some numbers.

50% of homicides go unsolved because of people like you. What's wrong with recording what happens in public? Do shit privately.

I mean, sure you can mine some crypto, but the perceived value of those is essentially nothing.

The market cap for all those cited coins together is considered about $7 billion (Monero being the vast majority of that). So mining that won't do them any good to recoup expense unless they suddenly got all the crypto-bros to abandon BTC in favor of Monero (Etherium is at $380 billion, BTC is at $1.8 Trillion).

How do you know that?

Being from Google, I rather assume the opposite - and that they probably focused their engineering effort to make sure the reduced battery life didn't give their corporate surveillance activities away.

Seems like everyone wears contacts, gets lasik, or something?

In public for security reasons, we have to allow recordings. My safety is more important to me than your right to secretly visit brothels or Facebook to know where you shop. If you don't want Facebook to use the data then block that, put criminal charges on Zuckerface if he accesses cloud data for advertising -- and handsomely reward whistleblowers. People have the right to record publicly areas outside their home and within their vicinity. Businesses have the right to record their premises and public areas outside it.

Tel me which law you reckon is easier to enforce, a law against people recording stuff and saving to the cloud (end to end encrypted) .. or a law that forbids mass analytics for anything other than solving heinous violent crimes?

Think of which is more intrusive to enforce.

The question is mine what? Etherium went away from GPU friendly proof of work, and Bitcoin proof of work hasn't been viable on GPUs in ages...

They aren't "video cards", since they generally neither have video ports, nor do they fit in a standard form factor 'slot' form factor.

If the LLM bubble evaporates, the workload appropriate to these devices will be dramatically lower. You *could* perhaps make a go of VDI and maybe someone takes another swing at a cloud gaming service (if someone went all in on Grace, then neither of those use cases would be well served either), but hard to imagine any of those markets sustaining the absurd footprint built out.

I suppose my question is if you are going to go on at some length at how Home Assistant is some techbro nonsense, what do you see as the alternative that hits the same use cases:
- Centralized 'smart home' device management
- Does not lock you into a cloud connected dependency
- Does not lock you into a particular device or phone vendor
- Can implement various local automations without the device itself having to support things like schedules and so forth. E.g. turn off all lights still on at midnight, or reduce heating/air conditioning when everyone's phones leave a geofenced area, or start increasing it when I leave work so it's more comfortable by the time I get home.

Plastics.

They should actually have AI prompt design as part of core curriculum nowadays. I see many people who are clueless of how to actually write prompts for AI and are using it inefficiently. I think a semester or quarter wherein students learn to do nothing but prompting for various things would be of immense value.

Alexa and Google are always hooked into Google's stuff, whether there's some at least partial local control still available in an outage or not.

I'd say local-first is *fairly* unique. Yes Homekit/Matter devices *can* be controlled locally in a peer-to-peer manner right from handsets, but Thread radios are fairly rare and I don't know if any non-apple handsets support directly talking to those devices without an intermediary.

If you don't have Apple devices, then HomeKit is a mixed bag, as sometimes the onboarding is only possible with an iPhone.

Now when you want to take it to be internet accessible, Home Assistant is a pretty rare software for easily supporting that *without* going through any cloud provider (get a dynamic dns and let's encrypt going, and Home Assistant plugins exist to automate that including renewal for those that don't want to understand how to do that themselves.

Now who is doing something "tech bro" that "isn't suitable for regular users"?