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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you want actually pretty good smart home stuff, and for cheap, go to IKEA. By default they require nothing but being paired to a button/dial/motion sensor that works entirely on a local mesh network (Zigbee, or more recently Matter over Thread) between the devices. You can buy a hub, which again by default is local only - to control the lights using your phone you need to be connected to your own wifi. And if you really want to control them from somewhere else (or use Siri/Google Assistant etc), you have to specifically enable that functionality.

    And because they use matter, they work with most of the other matter stuff, and vice versa - I have a bunch of Aqara temp/humidity sensors connected to mine. And you don’t even need an IKEA hub, any Matter hub will work, and there are quite a few of them including stuff like the Google Home Speaker, a 3rd gen Apple TV, and the Apple Home Pod.

    Main downside? IKEA electronics aren’t exactly the most reliable things around.






  • …yes?

    The cameras around the US scan 7000 plates per second, trying to figure out what they say with 8000 different possible plate designs around the country, and those results are then matched to a database of stolen vehicles and other plates , which there’s roughly 600k reported stolen in the US each year so. That database is going to be massive.

    That means every second, 7000 strings of letters and numbers OCR’d at unknown conditions and accuracy are being compared to hundreds of thousands of stolen plates. They are guaranteed to get a number of “matches” constantly, most of them from reads that were not accurate.

    And specifically because they aren’t sent anywhere, nobody can double check the picture to see if the camera got it anywhere right at all.











  • Remember the whole BMW heated seats subscription thing? That was them trying to reduce configurations and price: instead of having to stock two configurations of every model/colour/engine etc combination, one with and one without heated seats, they installed them on all of them by default and you would have been able to either later buy the package like you used to (~500€) or only pay the subscription whenever you wanted heated seats (I.e in the winter).

    IIRC Tesla does a similar thing with batteries, they use the same battery, but the cheaper model has the capacity and power draw restricted. One actual reason for it is that the shallower, gentles discharges mean less wear and fewer warranty claims, and therefore they can offer it for cheaper.