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Comment Re:I'm puzzled by their puzzlement. (Score 1) 51

Some humans do have a strong desire to become parents, which is unsurprising since species that don't reproduce tend not to last very long. There are exceptions, pandas being the obvious one.

The question is, how strong and how common is this desire to become a parent, and are people overcoming it due to their financial situation or some social pressure, or were we always like this and it's mostly due to contraception?

Comment Re:Bad title (Score 1) 86

For what they are doing they only need to have image recognition for commonly mis-recycled items, and set the confidence threshold high to avoid false positives. If an item is at an odd angle or covered in dirty so that recognition fails, it doesn't matter.

For sorting waste for recycling it needs to be much more capable of detecting objects and materials, from a huge variety of items, in all shapes and colours, from every angle. It then needs to be able to figure out the geometry of that item so that it can reach out and grab it.

Probably you would engineer it so that it uses non-AI methods to sort as much as possible, like magnets to remove ferrous material, filters to remove smaller parts, tanks to separate material by buoyancy and to wash off some of the crap.

Comment Re:Why aren't we doing that? (Score 1) 98

China's government doesn't need to care very much about the political appeal of it's choices.

Clearly they do, e.g. the COVID lockdown protests which lead directly to a reversal of policy.

The Chinese government makes an effort to explain policies and sell them to the population. They also don't have the same cultural hang-ups blocking development, with ideas about natural landscapes having to be kept pristine, or rampant NIMBYism. Like we didn't used to when we built national road and energy networks.

There isn't the big anti-environmental movement in China either, so people don't have weird ideas about renewables and see them for what they are - cheap and clean energy.

China's economy continues to grow and people's lives continue to improve too, so there is little reason to go looking for dumb things to blame for economic problems.

Comment Re:TFS contradicts TFA? (Score 1) 49

Mazda is kinda floundering. They have failed to develop EV technology and are stuck with hybrids, which will be banned within a decade in some places.

Unfortunately a lot of Japanese manufacturers are in the same boat. Honda had a really great EV, one of the best cars ever made, and then just gave up and rebadged a Chinese model for the follow up. Toyota wasted a lot of time with hydrogen, and seem to be waiting until their solid state battery tech pans out before going all-in. Suzuki are nowhere at all.

Comment Re:TFA says they phasing it out (Score 1) 49

Touch screens have their place, e.g. for navigation where you wouldn't want a full QWERTY keyboard on your dashboard. The issue is, as you say, putting commonly used stuff that you want to adjust while driving on there.

One interesting half way option is to have a knob that can control stuff on the screen, allowing you to do some actions with haptic feedback and something to rest your hand on. A couple of the German manufacturers have those, and I thought Mazda did but maybe it was someone else.

Also touch buttons on steering wheels are incredibly stupid, which is probably why Tesla did them.

Submission + - Wemo support ends in 2026 as Belkin abandons cloud-connected smart home devices (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: Well, folks, it’s finally happening. Sadly, Belkin is ending support for a long list of older Wemo smart home devices, and while I wish I could say I’m surprised, I’m not. I had a gut feeling this was coming.

As of January 31 2026, dozens of Wemo products will lose access to the Wemo app and any cloud-connected features. That includes Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa integration. Remote control and voice commands will stop working. These devices will only function locally if they were set up with Apple HomeKit ahead of the cutoff.

To be honest, this doesn’t shock me. The devices had become increasingly unreliable. Updates were scarce. Bugs went unfixed. Belkin seemed to be ignoring Wemo for years. I eventually gave up and threw out the Wemo devices I had purchased. I switched to TP-Link’s Tapo line and haven’t looked back.

Still, I’m upset. Wemo helped shape the early days of the smart home boom. It had promise. But that promise slowly fizzled out. Now longtime customers are left with hardware that’s about to lose the features it was sold with.

Belkin says devices that work with Apple HomeKit will continue to function if configured before the shutdown. Some newer models that use Thread will also survive and keep working through HomeKit without relying on the Wemo cloud. These include the Wemo Smart Plug with Thread and the Wemo Smart Video Doorbell.

If your Wemo product is still under warranty after January 31 2026, Belkin says you might be eligible for a partial refund. But for everything else, they’re basically telling users to recycle them. That’s a hard pill to swallow if you spent money expecting long-term functionality.

While I understand that supporting unprofitable products isn’t sustainable, this situation still highlights a bigger issue with cloud-dependent tech. Once a company pulls the plug, your smart gear becomes useless. That’s why I now recommend choosing devices that continue to work offline or with open standards.

This Wemo shutdown should be a wake-up call for anyone building a smart home in 2025. Make sure your devices won’t stop working just because a company changes its priorities.

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