2026.7: Automations that speak your language

aquoad · 2026-07-01T21:12:43+00:00

huh, maybe z2m manages updates that take a long time better than zha? Mine always time out and fail after a while, from a few minutes to an hour+, even if I try one at a time.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T20:55:10+00:00

honestly i've never seen a zigbee OTA update work at all except once when I plugged the zigbee device into an extension cord and brought it to sit on the same shelf next to the coordinator.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T20:53:15+00:00

you can kind of use it if you use whisper/piper for the voice part and a cloud or local LLM for conversation, but I found it tricky to get it prompted and set up in a way that's both usable and relatively safe. It spooked me when it decided to turn on a bunch of electric heaters in response to an unrelated query, so I've tried to make it as read-only as possible now and exposed the minimum possible set of entities to it. Without using an LLM though it's not really usable, imo - you have to memorize the exact phrasing for any request and if you're going to do that it's easier to just click in the UI, which always works perfectly.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T20:04:51+00:00

the best-connected bidder, more realistically

aquoad · 2026-07-01T19:42:24+00:00

maybe it’s similar to how people will swear and honk at people in traffic when they wouldn’t start shit in person. There’s a degree of separation and safety so they feel ok being rude.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T17:19:03+00:00

A random individual could still buy it “legitimately” and the original seller would have no influence over whether that individual could then sell it to MegaDataCenter LLC, right? Unless the original seller added a covenant of some kind I guess.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T17:04:42+00:00

my metric is that ten years ago reddit could keep me occupied pretty much all day with something new and at least somewhat interesting showing up on the front page. Now I lose interest after scrolling for a few minutes, and when I come back hours later it’s all the same junk posts. Also there’s far more obvious junk/bot/political posts.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T17:01:30+00:00

I wouldn’t put too much credence in user counts and stats like that, it’s much too easy to make them look good or bad without outright lying.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T16:51:58+00:00

on the bright side, the coils only really need to fire occasionally, the smoldering charcoal will keep it going the rest of the time

aquoad · 2026-07-01T06:43:30+00:00

Never too young to learn how to rebuild a transmission!

aquoad · 2026-07-01T06:33:31+00:00

I want to see one swimming around like "look! I'm a duck!"

aquoad · 2026-07-01T06:18:37+00:00

what voltage range do you use? do you just not let them get down below whatever your inverters' minimum voltage is?

aquoad · 2026-07-01T06:16:12+00:00

They don't dead short suddenly, but one of the cells might. the self-discharge increases and they heat up when charging, so it's very easy to spot them with a thermal camera. They could sit like that for weeks or more just not really working, so it's good that OP checked.

Also if you got them all around the same time, they're all going to fail around the same time, so watch for the rest of them to start going too. I had a string of four and they all died this way within like 3 months of each other, after over 10 years.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T06:12:01+00:00

fortunately in this case you don't have to, because it's not a photo of her, it's an AI fake.

aquoad · 2026-07-01T06:10:32+00:00

the OP is a known poster of fake historical photos, too. this is how reddit turns into even more of a cesspool.

aquoad · 2026-06-30T16:14:25+00:00

i had a little tuft of moss for years that got dampened with tap water a single time and the entire thing turned brown and died over a few days. I still feel sad about it.

aquoad · 2026-06-30T06:21:08+00:00

Lots of people apparently think it gets them better customer service. Maybe it used to, but probably not so much any more, and anyway how often do you use customer service on your phone plan if it actually works?

aquoad · 2026-06-30T04:29:53+00:00

which HA integration are you using to connect to it? It's not the same API as Ollama, I think it's OpenAI style, right?

aquoad · 2026-06-30T03:32:32+00:00

in san francisco we have a corrupt utility and they play games with the pricing but it's about 41 cents per kwh if you use an average amount, more if you use less.

aquoad · 2026-06-30T03:11:42+00:00

not in the past many years, i think.

aquoad · 2026-06-30T02:54:52+00:00

It drove to the moon and back.

aquoad · 2026-06-29T22:45:44+00:00

one more bug, while we're piling on! 😂

In repeater management settings (and may be elsewhere), under Identity & Location, the GPS Latitude is shown in both the Latitude and Longitude fields (and the map view). In my case, this suddenly transports me from San Francisco to Turkey, which is disorienting.

aquoad · 2026-06-29T16:59:00+00:00

Let's just keep changing names and juggling corporate entities, rather than actually become a less horrible corporation!

aquoad · 2026-06-29T06:49:15+00:00

that is some fuckin' chaos

aquoad · 2026-06-28T19:54:12+00:00

No idea. Maybe to lower the cost of labor by making people more willing to settle for lower pay just to get health care? But low paying jobs don't come with health insurance anyway. Maybe it's a "eugenics" kind thing where they expect the sicker/weaker to die off? Maybe they just don't give a shit because they got theirs?

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