I’ve seen videos mentioning they have started cancelling plans opened on a different region to save money using VPN software, so be careful how much you rely on it.

For item #1, self hosted solutions like home assistant also allow using “smart” devices without the cloud in some instances. You are not at the mercy of a vendor going out of business or dropping support and your devices becoming bricks.

Not all devices are compatible, but from what I’ve learned, I would never buy another device with so called “smart” features if it is not compatible with home assistant.

For #1 I would say not to focus on learning the same kind of thing that you started at some point recently. It took me a few months to get my local setup going since I would do it after work (also similar skills) and get tired of poking around.

At some point I gave up and started doing other things that brought me joy (video games, paint night with YouTube tutorials, movies/TV). When I finally decided to get back to it, it was enjoyable again. If I have to re-do it from scratch it could be done in probably a few hours or at most some nights after work and would be enjoyable since the annoying “got ya” lessons are somewhere on memory or some searches away that could be filtered much quicker.

I have made that migration myself going from a Raspberry PI 4 to a n100 based NAS. It was 10 minutes for the software stack as you said This not taking into account media migration which was done on the background over a few hours on WiFi (I had everything on an external hard drive at the time).

That last part is the only thing I would change about my self hosting solution. Yes, the NAS has a nice form factor, is power efficient and has so far been very optimal for my needs (no lag like rpi4), however I have seen they don’t really sell motherboard or parts to repair them. They want you to replace it with another one. Reason 2 on the same is vendor lock in. Depending on the options you select when creating the storage groups/pools (whatever they are called), you could be stuck needing to get something from the same vendor to read your data if the device stops working but the disks are salvageable. Reason 3 is they’ve had security incidents so a lot of the “features” I would not recommend using ever to avoid exposing your data to ransomware over the internet. I don’t trust their competitors either. I know how commercial software is made with the smallest amount of care for security best practices.

I wonder if people did commit to pooping on it out of spite for it only being cleaned for the Olympics.

How American of them if so.

I agree that insurance companies are a scam, but it sounds like you had the work done before repairs and shops were agreed on? Insurance companies generally work like that…

I’m not a customer, but I personally avoid any company offering that mentions crypto and/or AI. I’m guessing I’m not alone based on some responses here. They are just the latest buzz words to try to inflate company value and I’m tired of them.

I started migrating off from Google products (homepage, chrome, drive soon) and my laptop does not have windows anymore for example. It’s hard to get customer trust back after it is lost.

Do you have proof yourself? You started the whole debate.

Dang, I used to use Nooblet when playing crysis wars a long time ago. All the flying tanks kind of ruined it after a while, but it was nice to find a moderated server running Savanah and Battleground which had the Helis and VTOLs…

I feel like the local only devices do have a place in the home automation sector (e.g. home assistant compatible with no cloud integrations).

Most vendors want to lock you into their crappy cloud system that will someday be offline and render things useless however.

Those things never worked for me… Problems always persisted or it failed to apply the restore point. This is from the XP and Windows 7 days, never bothered with those again. To Microsoft’s credit, both W7 and W10 were a lot more stable negating the need for it.

Think of it as ClownStrike, they will be known as a bunch of clowns after this.

This is way too coherent.

This strikes me as a way to bring in the thing to the dealership to address other more important issues like the accelerator while playing it down as “only a wipers issue”. They must be scared by oncoming lawsuits that they decided this was the best course of action.

I don’t commute to work daily but see them once in a while. I’d be lying if I didn’t say they scare me as the driver of a compact car. I’m just hoping whomever gets sliced by colliding (or being collided by) those monstrous things goes quickly. I can’t imagine what the scene will look like if we have a pedestrian near by while their stupid accelerator gets stuck again.

This seems similar to the EUs requirements. It really speaks about the US laws when even archaic Japanese legislators (see Japanese copyright laws) are ahead of that market in customer rights/options.

Who will work for slave wages if they don’t have to fear going hungry and dying?

That guy is probably getting pegged by musk for $1 billion per instance. It’s on his best interest musk has the money and needs to convince the board.

I am aware of all of those points, the thing is people try to make excuses for why we can’t follow the rest of the world and expect some perfect solution day 1, which will just hold us back. Gotta start somewhere.

For the first point and point about audits, can still be handled as they are now, send people a w2 and bank reported prefilled form, ask them to add anything missing. Same as now, but less energy required to start or complete the task for most people. Kind of how most tax programs start your State income tax forms with the information entered in the federal one and what was declared the previous year which is already known and go from there.