kbuck

I must be missing something -- Cursor has no unlimited plan? I'll grant that the usage limits on auto are very generous, though. I think they need to be for Cursor to stay relevant.

I bought a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition to try out. It's surprisingly good, but still falls short when compared to Google Home speakers:

- Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity).

- Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices.

- Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't.

- Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is talking to it.

- The device has poor identification of background noise, so if you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV. It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice print thing as well.)

On the upside, though:

- Setting it up was really easy.

- All of the entities I want to control with it are already available, without needing to export them or set them up separately in Google Home.

- Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes.

Works for me? Check the little "more info" button - it sounds like your browser is rejecting the TLS certificate, not completely unable to connect.

Mysa thermostats - don't integrate well with Home Assistant and can't even reliably follow schedule.

Every Samsung phone I've ever owned - great hardware, but the software is a mess, especially with all of the Samsung apps that duplicate the Google apps.

Sony smart TV - was excited about running Android TV apps, but the onboard hardware is so bad that everything lags, and I actually ran out of space after installing 10-20 apps (it only has 4GB of flash storage). Also, its Ethernet adapter has a hardware bug that occasionally freezes up my entire network by spamming it with flow control frames.

Or attach an ESP32 to the boiler's control board that closes a dry contact circuit...?

I'm especially curious about which ones are earning "life-changing" money for their authors. I couldn't find an easy way to list Substack newsletters by subscriber count, though. (By revenue would be even better.)

I think the big issue is the different "tuning" for each heat pump system. For example, a heat pump water heater needs a different maximum temperature than an air conditioner, and has much different cycling behavior. This leads to very different design decisions, including refrigerant choice, pressure, compressor type, whether the refrigerant loop is even serviceable, etc. (Some appliances operate at a refrigerant pressure so high that they require being fully assembled at the factory, which would be a non-starter for a manifold system like we're discussing.)

I think this might eventually become a thing once science gets us far enough that there's an "obvious" refrigerant choice for most applications, but we definitely aren't there yet. There are hundreds of different kinds that perform better or worse in different applications.

AFAIK all of the big commercial systems that do multiple different types of heat transfer use water to do it, thus bypassing the entire refrigerant selection issue. Right now the most advanced we can do is VRF ("Variable Refrigerant Flow") systems that can individually select air handlers for cooling or heating (i.e. move the heat from one room to another). These are still commercial units and not really available for residential installs.

Just because a device isn't cloud-connected doesn't mean it isn't designed for planned obsolescence. For example, the ongoing cheapening of major appliances, or the DRM applied to printer cartridges and coffee pods.

This is a legislation problem IMO: companies need to be held to reasonable expectations when they sell a product. My ink cartridge shouldn't say it's "empty" when the page counter reaches 100 [and it's still actually full]. Neither should cloud devices go to the landfill because the company selling them decided that they don't want to support them anymore.

Companies foisting negative externalities on us (like more e-waste) in exchange for more profit are a blight and should be treated (and prevented) as such.

What do you mean by a "mesh-oriented obfuscation"? My best guess is: serving a different subset of the VM detection code to each client?