I kinda have two responses here, so uh, here’s both of them:

1. Well, by the time this is an issue, odds are you’ve been a career politician anyway and don’t need another job. This is just old people who refuse to retire because they like the power and trappings more than they care about doing their job.

2. By the time they MUST retire, these ghouls have stolen sufficient money that it doesn’t matter, and sticking around is just them refusing to give up the power and feed their greed even more.

Both seem equally reasonable and applicable to the problem.

If only they made smart switches you could use, perhaps?

100% agree that smart bulbs are incredibly stupid and you should go with a switch if you want to smartify shit.

Well no, it’s not enormous, but Amazon is selling a couple million ring doorbells a year, and a couple million more of their cameras.

It’s a sufficiently large market to hop into, especially if you can make a product that’s easier to deal with from an ecosystem perspective than the incumbents, which isn’t something I’d ever bet against Apple managing to pull off.

Hopefully the Mastodon devs are paying attention to the features that bsky has that they don’t, and actually copy them rather than sit there and tell everyone that no, they’re wrong they don’t want that feature.

I want to like Mastodon (or any platforms that are federated with them and trying very hard to be them) but they’re utter and total lack of interest in and development of features the community keeps asking for is going to keep it a niche option for weirdos while people keep hopping into corpo social platform after corpo social platform.

The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren’t enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.

And, of course, one of Apple’s biggest strengths is that they’ve built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.

Right now you’ve either got 14 apps for different shit, or you’ve built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I’ve gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.

It’s a shit experience, still, because it’s a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can’t stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.

I wouldn’t bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.

That’s really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.

You can share your wisdom and be of great value to the public without being in public office.

At some point, though, you’ve gone from useful adult into honored elder, and while I’m not suggesting we put them all on ice floes, they shouldn’t be running the country, especially since more than a few of them clearly don’t even know which country they’re in, let alone how to run it.

If you can’t walk, are having strokes, have developed dementia, and generally just sit around staring at the wall like my cat, perhaps it’s time to gracefully retire and go spend the rest of your life doing conferences and speaking engagements and whatever the hell else you want, not trying to legislate.

Nobody thought it was possible, says man who led project because he thought he could make it possible.

Also, this looks like quantum entanglement which is a thing that’s hardly a new concept and/or considered impossible, so uh, dude needs to get out of clickbait mode and ship a working example instead.

Well, I fully expect him to step on his dick, but I did not expect him to also kick himself in the balls while doing so.

Congrats Matt, rarely are my expectations of dumb behavior exceeded so spectacularly!

Here’s a crazy idea: make the CAPTCHAs so complicated humans can’t complete them.

That way if someone does, you know they’re a bot.

I should probably patent that or something. (Is joke, etc.)

I’m sure an AI babysitter won’t be immediately and utterly broken and bypassed by every single kid in these “classes”.

(Seriously: we’re talking about 8-12 year olds here and the absolutely are smart enough and incentivized to break the ever-loving crap out of this stupid idea.)

I’d seriously consider unifi gear, like the other comments seem to have also suggested.

The only thing you don’t get is ethernet drops out of the APs or anything like that, but the UAPs in a mesh configuraiton could proabbly do everything you want, unless you have a shockingly large piece of property.

underestimate how much work Mozilla does in standards and low-level shared API’s via w3c

Oh, I didn’t mean to disparage the work they do: I know it’s important and extensive. I’ve been a Firefox user since, well, it was called Netscape. It’s a critical piece of software.

I was mostly just rolling my eyes at the sheer panic they’re having with the only funding source they’ve bothered to cultivate going away, along with the fact that a good portion of that money is spent on things that aren’t the browser, and frankly, don’t bring a lot of value to the table or matter in the slightest.

Dumping the Corporation baggage and making the Foundation strongly independent makes a lot more sense than begging to let Google keep paying them, which seems to be their approach, at least based on that open letter.

These drives aren’t for people who care how much they cost, they’re for people who have a server with 16 drive bays and need to double the amount of storage they had in them.

(Enterprise gear is neat: it doesn’t matter what it costs, someone will pay whatever you ask because someone somewhere desperately needs to replace 16tb drives with 32tb ones.)

Shit, we didn’t even need an argument to stab each other.

I’ve still got bits of pencil broken off in my limbs from school.

But the article says they used Yahoo once! (When, I assume, Yahoo outbid Google.)

I agree we need an independent browser, but right now Firefox is about as independent as my cat, and they’re both a bit deluded into thinking that’s not the case.

The first thing that I have to ask: do we need Firefox-the-business providing Firefox-the-browser, or are they just dragging around a lot of Google-induced baggage that’s otherwise worthless.

I have a strong feeling on that one, but hey.

What’s your budget?

A $200 budget is going to get you VERY different options than a $1000 budget, especially since you’re wanting to connect multiple buildings.

Yeah, I remember the ‘grandma wanted to die for the economy!’ ghouls.

And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off. Like have you morons never HAD the flu? It’s not like the flu is somehow pleasant and fun. You don’t want the flu! Nobody wants the flu! You idiots got a flu shot, get your damn covid shot.

The problem was it was too quick: if you died of COVID, you were dead. You could be memory-holed and everyone would simply forget you and move on.

If you had Polio, though, you were paralyzed and stuck in a metal tube and kept alive.

Can’t forget your not-dead kid who lives in a tube, and thus it was treated as more of a thing that should be fought because there was a clear and visible reminder of what this disease was doing to everyone’s kids.

If COVID left a couple million people living in tubes, then we absolutely would have treated it differently, but it didn’t.

(Alternately, if COVID had killed 10 or 20 million people, we would have also treated it seriously: it just wasn’t sufficiently deadly OR left a wake of broken, but living, people.)

Or if you prefer to be a lot more cynical, he Old Yeller’d it, but he burned it’s equity to get himself elected Co-President, and is worth like a hundred billion dollars more than he was before he did that.

So really, it was a Very Wise and bigly Smart business move.

I’m in the same boat, with a Quest 2.

My plan is to use it until it’s no longer working, and then replace it with something from someone else, assuming civilization still exists by then and my desire for higher-resolution Beat Saber is still a concern and not scavenging for food, or fighting the raiders or whatever the hell.

I don’t get the ‘oh throw it out and buy a thing that’s not from that bad company!’ responses: that’s the same dumb shit that led to people breaking beer and burning Nikes, which I can assure you nobody gives a shit about as they already have your money.