Yep - absolutely agree with you. Just because a devices is locally controllable and has opened up localhost:8080, that doesn't prevent it from also opening a connection to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbadthing.example%3A9999%2F and uploading everything it can find to it. Concepts are orthogonal.

I must admit I haven't got round to doing it yet, but a common thing to do these days is set up a specific IoT network in your house and have it all connect to that, then limit access to the internet for that network. A lot of routers support doing this out of the box now.

HomeAssistant's main strength is in tying otherwise incompatible devices together. Local first is not unique though - HomeKit is local, Matter is local, I don't know much about the Alexa/Google setups but I believe they can be controlled locally too.

Don't get me wrong, Home Assistant is an excellent bit of kit with lots of standardisation and automation. But this article is pushing the wrong part of its strengths - local-first isn't unique. Pick the right ecosystem and it's all local-first anyway.

I have many different smart vendors in my home - Google (originally Nest), Philips, Meross, Aqara, Eve, Ikea, LightwaveRF, Shelly, Eufy, Switchbot...none of them require the internet. All of them can work locally. All of them work in the same ecosystem. Then I have oddities which I use HomeBridge for to bridge the gap - Roomba (older, non-Matter, Worx Landroid (robot lawnmower), Dyson Hot'n'Cool thingy, Logitech Harmony...even plugins for Synology which show the NAS's temperature and allow shutdown. Through the use of HomeBridge, I can draw them into the same ecosystem too. None of this requires the internet.

The meme is completely overblown and quite often you can tell by people that don't actually use this kind of tech. Obviously if I want to control this kit from outside the home then I need an internet connection, and if I want to update any of the kit then I need to download the updates from the internet for that too, but operation from within the house? Just a HomeKit/Matter hub, that's all.

I have only owned one subaru, and it is a 2007 that I've had for a year. I bought it with 243k miles, specifically because it was cheap, so my daughter can drive herself to school and all her activities.

I've spent more on fixing it than I spent on the car itself. I have needed replace tons of parts. It was basically a lemon (with no rust). However... it does not flash ads. I would rather have this lemon than a new computer on wheels that shows ads.

Should you choose to believe the gossip, this is apparently being seen as a good thing amongst Apple's staff.

Seems to be a case of the Gene Wilder's Wonka scene "oh no, stop!" while doing nothing to actually stop it.

Sorry - as a full-blown human-caused climate change believer, I am also old enough to remember being told that we were in an inter-ice age era and that it would end in my lifetime. I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.

Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past. Bad information is also likely being given today, and will be tomorrow as well. Mistakes happen. I like that this paper has been caught and do not in any way see it as a problem.

I'm seeing a lot of scepticism in the posts, whereas in fact this approach works really well. I'm going to use the example of the Mac - Rosetta 2. I play games running x86 code all the time on my M2 ARM chip, and it's not really noticeable at all. Taking exactly the same approach and applying it to Linux - yep, why on earth not? Already proven to work well.

Commenting to undo an accidental mis-click for moderation - please ignore.

I have taught C++ and other computer science classes at a community college for the past 9 years. I started out only using paper exams, and students had to print their code for homeworks and projects. Then during the pandemic we moved online, and other than a couple of semesters, my classes have stayed online. Virtually all of the community college CS courses, for the entire state system, are online. I lecture virtually instead of in person and all assignments and exams are done through Blackboard.

Now with AI, I cannot distinguish between what a student wrote vs what AI wrote. It's absolutely impossible to tell the difference. Before AI, I could often tell when someone got help (if you submit code that doesn't match your skill level on the exams) or copied someone else's assignment (if you hand in the same code with the variable names changed...). Again, now I can't tell at all.

At the community college level, the deans are stuck with a problem: fewer students are enrolling, and those students want to learn about AI because they see it as the next job skill you need to have. At the state university level, the CS dept has gone the other direction: exams are on paper and homework is now 5% of the final grade instead of 50%

I tell my students at the beginning of the semester "You are paying tuition to learn the material in the course. Using AI to do your classwork is like going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights for you. Don't use AI"

When I was a computer science and engineering undergrad 25 years ago, there was talk of creating a licensing process for software engineers, similar to civil engineers. It was a terrific idea and I hope it got traction. But AI has turned software engineering into a mess. Software is every bit as critical to the safety of humans as civil engineering, but you would never trust AI to create buildings. The software engineering students of today are absolutely ill-equipped to write the vital software that is used today.

...consider listening to One Person Found This Helpful", a BBC radio comedy show about absurd reviews for often even more absurd products. Surprisingly good show.

For anyone not from the UK...not sure if you can access it, but even if you can you're going to need to make your way through a full-on Birmingham accent. Godspeed, you brave intrepid souls.

Yes - exactly this. Stop subsidising gas, but to do this they'll need a transition to move all the gas central heating in the UK over to heat pumps instead. Grants for doing so exist, but also increasing pressure on the gas price side would push people in the right direction as well.

You're thinking DRAX which yes, as it stands is definitely not a net-positive. But DRAX is normally excluded as they usually report on 'wind and solar'. If someone in government wants to look good with a pie chart with bigger numbers then yes - DRAX gets put in. But for the energy industry itself, it's reported differently.

It's the reverse. Green electricity is held back from adoption because the price is linked to the price of gas. While ever that link exists, electricity will be unnaturally expensive in comparison to its raw market price.

It's not completely irrational, although arguable (I would be on this point of view for instance) it's now out of date. The idea is to pick the most expensive bid price for the spot market price, not the cheapest, in order to incentivise continued operation of difficult energy sources. Why would you want to? Because in ye olden days 'difficult' were things like the hydro power or nuclear which were great for maintaining base line load and which you wanted to subsidise to keep going.

In today's market, that's completely on its head and renewables are the cheapest. Established nuclear second, granted construction costs of new nuclear make that overall cost higher of course. This is why the government is incentivising pushes towards heat pumps etc. - the more we get off gas, the less reason to maintain this market oddity exists and it can be removed making electricity cheaper again.

This is easier said than done. Much of the UK's housing stock would need improvement before heat pumps are viable. I recently had a survey on my own house for instance, and it came back as non-viable without a lot of improvements around heat loss first. These improvements would be a good thing and are semi-subsidised, but it's still effort. I believe the new build rules have finally, years late but finally, been changed to require standards around heat pumps and solar.

So yep - electricity being expensive in the UK is not due to the renewables or nuclear, it's due to gas. And the reason we still rely on gas so much is inertia plus building standards and upgrades. Hard one to unpick, but got to start somewhere.

How does this help me (or anyone) socialize? It doesn't help bring people together, it drives them apart into their own little silos with the AI being their only gateway outside of that silo.

Reminds me of war dialing, looking for modems to connect to a network.