It’s interesting that “Wednesday” has had decent development of all those main characters …… all except Lurch. He does so much for that family but is always taken for granted. Season three needs to focus on Lurch!

They should be suing for hundreds of millions!

Of course one of the biggest problems with this grift strategy is Trump family profits but American taxpayers are on the hook

Tesla, believe it or not, is doing the ai thing right.

1. There’s always a control: you may not like touch screen in your car but it’s always there so you’re not forced to use voice assistant.
2. The standard voice assistant still works the same as it ever did
3. AI voice assistant is separate that you can choose to use or not. When it was new, it was not allowed to control anything but that is gradually being phased in as it works.

When the ai first came out all it could do is hold a conversation, and was amusingly snarky. Now it can set a destination, but is still limited compared to standard voice assistant

While I personally like some of the extras a smart home can do for me, we can all agree that we’re being sold a bunch of bs that doesn’t work well for anyone.

Basic rules for smart devices should start with

• local manual control still works, exactly as anyone expects. The “smart” part is extra
• local network only whenever possible. Should never depend on the internet
• no vendor lock-in. work with my mix of devices. No I will not use a stupid vendor app to a stupid vendor portal per device to do basic operations.
• the goal is for my home to work better for me, not to feed me more ads. That will get your device thrown out

The problem is manufacturers highly advertise devices that violate these rules, that serve them before you, where you are the product, and a standard person will find it difficult to even learn they have options

Don’t forget device profiles! It’s not enough for a device to be on the network but also that it must operate like expected and with the same calls.

Instead of making up what constitutes “on” for a light switch and require vendor specific drivers, the device profile defines “on” and all light switches must support that!

That’s usually because that’s all they know. With a bit of smarts, lights can do more than just toggle on/off when you go over to the switch. They may appreciate that if they knew.

My most automated light is my dining room/office

• I may walk over and use the switch - but I adjusted the dimming speed so I can walk out of the room as it’s dimming to off
• I may use Alexa/siri/nabu, and that’s the most convenient way to get exact dimming, such as when I need to be up at odd hours for a video call
• on weekdays it also turns on at dusk, dims at 9pm and goes off at 9:30 to help me establish better sleeping habits and make the house look lived in when I’m away
• I’m considering ways to have it automatically turn on when I come home at night so I’m not entering a dark house

Do I need those? Of course not, but those are actions my house can take for me, to make things a little nicer

Home Depot used to have a bunch of z-wave switches and outlets - was actually the entire reason I started with z-wave.

But it’s been a few years now that it’s mostly WiFi dreck depending on vendor portals. Home Depot is also the reason I mostly order online and have a lot of Zigbee stuff.

I wonder what Home Depot’s next step will be, presumably to drive me to Matter/Thread. Perhaps that they seem to be getting a decent selection of smart locks?

No longer offer points for specialty job skills? Damn.

I’m fine. I live in a dark blue state that is fighting, ignoring, offering sanctuary as they can. Depending on your assumptions we have the highest quality of life in the us. We’re trying to hold to our environmental commitments despite the federal government reneging on commitments to power transmission, power generation, transit upgrades, and ending the California waiver that let other states set higher air quality standards. We’re holding to health coverage for all despite the federal government ending funding. We’re holding to public health standards by leading a regional cooperate for fact-based vaccination standards. I’m proud of the number of my fellow citizens participating in “No Kings” and similar protests. I’m proud of colleges and corporations holding to standards for education, diversity, equity and inclusion.

Things are getting even more expensive here, due to the policy chaos and federal rejection of anything that might look to the future or to care to people, but we’re holding together. It certainly helps that I make a good income here.

However this is the first time I really worry about the future my college kids will live in. I keep telling myself history will reassert itself, our current situation is an outlier. I tell myself this is a national version of a mental breakdown: we will recover and spend the rest of our lives fixing the damage. There is hope

If I had to move somewhere, Canada would be the obvious choice. Ive visited so many times and it’s always been great. Canada has always been a great neighbor, putting up with our bullshit. Realistically from my interests and job, I’d be most interested in Vancouver or Toronto areas. Toronto is closer to my family, and my company has an office there, so it would be an easy transition

Thanks for all that detail: it’s nice to read something positive about online dating. I’ve been considering it since I was divorced a few years back and am in a situation where I don’t really meet people. Perhaps that’s an answer.

Of course I’ve wondered that before and can’t get past giving all that personal information to a company that will abuse it (is this where you’re already seeing red flags? D’oh.)

Technically you do. There’s always been talk about that. For like half a century. It’s a totally important issue we need to talk about

Spread by top secret government contractors to control the population! It’s not like it could be contamination by unscrupulous manufacturers with completely insufficient oversight or environmental protection.

Is this not the test? Make it available, but you have to jump through hoops to enable?

Friend of mine who just retired, started getting into Lego for the first time in his life. You’re never too old

My speculation is a safety feature working as intended.

As someone familiar with automation and machine learning, I certainly hope most of the processing is happening in device. It’s just not realistic to have a cloud driven car.

But it makes more sense to have a dead mans switch on the safety operator. “If you can’t connect to the safety operator, you can’t go”

Like a flashlight, or laser pointer …… or gun. “Just point this gun-like object at the car you want to stop…”. What could go wrong?

I almost tested that first example but was too slow. I had a one month free trial of self-driving and approached a similar construction site where I didn’t see the officer at first …… thinking “I wonder what the car would do?”

I’ve seen both. Places where the lights are only intended to work at busy hours default to flashing red and flashing yellow. Lights with a power outage can be random but I’ve also seen flashing yellow in all directions. I don’t know why that’s even an allowed configuration though

It can be tough not to. Earlier this fall I was out of town and drover through an intersection before realizing no there was a traffic light there. Since it was night and the light was out, I had no reason to expect one so I effectively treated it like a green light.

I’m probably not the only one: next time I went past that intersection the city had placed cones and temporary stop signs

It seems like one of the first things you’d want a self driving car to do is to pull over