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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2025

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  • For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it’s a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.

    HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it’s pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.

    I agree it’s still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.


  • There’s an xkcd for everything, isn’t there.

    Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it’s an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.

    Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.


  • The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don’t think AI has changed much.

    Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they’re open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they’ve finally begun appearing in big manufacturer’s line-ups such as IKEA.

    Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won’t have to do the ‘ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or… you know what, fuck this’. It’ll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.






  • Yeah DuckDNS gave me many false positive outages where its resolution failed, for multiple half-days every year I used it (5yrs+).

    I moved to the afraid.org and its been solid, if anyone’s looking for another free service - only cost is you have to log in once every six months to validate your account is not dormant. They have a paid tier which gives more features (that most home users will never need), and that allows the guy running it to fund a very reliable service.








  • Headline clearly leads “Auto industry warned” implying this is an industrial issue specific to them. And it is. This is not misleading.

    The issue is that they are offshoring the lead recycling to very poor nations that have no environmental protection laws. Why? Cos cheaper.

    Same issue with almost every industrial problem - the dangers are off-shored. Out of sight, out of mind. The US auto industry was warned about this exact prpblem and pleaded with to set up monitoring and a clean battery sourcing program - and of course they did nothing, because the only way corporations listen is with law and effective enforcement of those laws.




  • Update from Simon aka imsodin, Syncthing Maintainer

    tl;dr for android users: No need to switch apps at this time, the current install continues to work and is safe. If you can disable app auto-updates, please do that for now to be on the safe side.

    Good news: Had a good chat with @nel0x. He is a collaborator on researchxxl’s repo and just marked those releases as “pre-release”, which prevents the obtainium auto-upgrades. So we are back to no immediate risk for users and we can take it slowly, trying to establish communication and more context. It’s still possible and imo likely that nothing nefarious is going on, just a very suboptimal handover that needs clearing up. There’s no need to go dig for repos on github, the technicalities of continuing to publish an app are not an issue - the open/relevant points are about a possible direct continuation of the existing app (or not), the time/effort that needs to be volunteered to publish an app and the trust in whoever does that. Hopefully we can work something out. If you are interested in helping maintain the app, let us know, other than that imo nothing to do here except if you are a user, to do the above in the tl;dr and every now and then check-in on the status (now and then being more like every week than every hour 😉 ).

    https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661/58


  • The same reality where GPT5’s launch a couple months back was a massive failure with users and showed a lot of regression to less reliable output than GPT4? Or perhaps the reality where most corporations that have used AI found no benefit and have given up reported this year?

    LLMs are good tools for some uses, but those uses are quite limited and niche. They are however a square peg being crammed into the round hole of ‘AGI’ by Altman etc while they put their hands out for another $10bil - or, more accurately while they make a trade swap deal with MS or Nvidia or any of the other AI orobouros trade partners that hype up the bubble for self-benefit.