That last sentence rings true of most software engineers. Everyone wants to work on a glamorous new feature that's going to wow users or let them think about problems they want to think about. No-one wants to hunt down the difficult-to-repro bug in an old but critical section of someone else's code.
One of the great things about Home Assistant is they give you full control over everything, so it's entirely up to you how much you rely on local vs cloud infrastructure. It all just comes down to how you configure individual settings and plugins.
Their subscription plan is great because it allows them to continue open source development without relying on commercial sponsorship, so there's no ecosystem bias or advertising or anything crazy like that. A great open source project.
I love that Android chose Java so they could run it on different processor architectures, but in the end one architecture won out so Java wasn't necessary any more. I guess they didn't know at the time, but they'd claw back a tonne of efficiency if they dropped the Java VM.
Also losing camera quality and banking apps/NFC payment sucks. Absolutely not the fault of LineageOS though, they're doing the best they can within the constraints.
Couldn't agree more, but I'm just highlighting it seems like a much more profitable and attainable commercial goal for them in the short term than trying to enter the vehicle manufacturing space as a competitor. The fact there's an awesome open source project tackling this idea already (thanks for the link - I didn't know this existed!) says it's viable.
They've already dipped their toes in with Car Play/Android Auto and have the relationships with third party vehicle manufacturers, so this seems like a logical next step. Perhaps that's what they're actually doing by shifting their car team to AI.
Instead of trying to make a full electric car, I'm surprised Apple and Google aren't focusing on making a smart AI "head unit" that's compatible with third party car manufacturers. The head unit would control all aspects of the car through the CAN bus and also take camera/sensor inputs from the exterior of the vehicle, and be responsible for things like self-driving, lane assist and all those difficult AI-based features.
This way the car manufacturers could focus on what they do best (building safe reliable hardware) and outsource all the hard AI software problems to tech companies who specialise in this area.
As an engineer who's spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it's really not that bad. You're generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else's dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.
WhatsApp is closed source, and obviously it must be able to decrypt messages for the end user to read them. Anything could happen to the unencrypted data at this point. Therefore it's less secure allowing conversations to flow into that app.
We should see an improvement in game quality for the platform once last-gen sales drop off enough that developers only need to target current-gen.
Right now any game that comes out for both PS4+5 is bottlenecked by PS4 memory and performance, with only easy wins taken for PS5 like higher quality assets and faster IO/FPS.
Designing a game for current-gen platforms from the ground up is when we'll start to see some more impressive features, but there's still money on the table for PS4 so it'll be a few years (IMHO) before we see PS5 exclusives as the norm.
Glass arrived on the scene in 2013. Since then recording in public has become much more normalised... smartphone camera use, cars with dashcams and CCTV/face recognition have all increased in popularity. YouTubers, live streamers, creators etc. If it were released again today, I'm not sure it would achieve the same hatred it did back then, at least on the "creepy camera in public" point.
It's a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. The two options I had were an IR blaster or a DIY ESPhome-based module plugged directly into the unit that controls it over the SPI bus. I opted for the latter as it gives full status info in addition to control.
I've also got a Samsung unit in another room that I can control. For that one I use SmartThings... not ideal as it goes through the cloud, but I'll take what I can get.
If you've got an old-school heater, you might have luck with some of the smart thermostats designed to be retrofitted into old houses.
Edit: just looked up your heaters online. Since you've got a lot of them, and they look pretty old, I'm guessing the smart controllers are just acting as relays. So yeah perhaps an ESP32 relay module would be the way to go! Once you've got the code working for one, you could roll them out to the rest. You'd need some confidence working with relays and electronics of course.
That last sentence rings true of most software engineers. Everyone wants to work on a glamorous new feature that's going to wow users or let them think about problems they want to think about. No-one wants to hunt down the difficult-to-repro bug in an old but critical section of someone else's code.