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.

Done right, it actually would.
Powering those centres would require building ton of new power generation, and in the case of a risk of running out of power, non critical infrastructure - like a datacenter - can be disconnected from the grid to redirect that power to the uses that actually matter. Like here in Finland, if we are risking blackouts for homes during winter for example, they will cut power to factories and stuff like that first in an effort to prevent it. It’s part of the contracts for commercial electricity connections, and they have to just accept that.

The bigger the section of non-critical infra you have, the more capacity you can free up in an emergency.

In Texas, though? Not very optimistic it would ever work that way.

Because it’s way, way cheaper to pay one guy to sit in a room monitoring 50 pump stations remotely, than it is to pay 50 guys to sit in random pump stations 24/7 when they don’t need human intervention for months on end.

Why aren’t the networks properly air-gapped and protected? Read the first five words again.

BMW iDrive has versions 1 to 9, and now the newest really is OS X.

…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.

I did not know there was only one single Flock camera in the city of 150 000 people, or in California, or the USA in general. lol.

it has cameras in more than 6,000 communities across the country, and it touts more than 20 billion vehicle reads each month.

Oh, kinda looks like they have more. 20 billion reads a month, huh. That’s 7610 scan a second. Fancy that.

If you have a pi reading license plates, you are probably scanning a few dozen different plates a day, looking if they match a handful of possibilities. If the only plate that opens the gate is ABC123, nothing happens if it accidentally reads anything else, and I’ll probably get it right a second later.

When Flock scans plates, it reads thousand of them every second looking to read and match every possible plate variation from every state (which there are over 8000 of) to every reported stolen plate, in all weather and lighting conditions. It’s really no wonder if 71% of the times it reports it found a stolen plate it had got it wrong.

It’s not.
Bezos is one of the many investors that provided funding for it at the start, but he has a minority stake in the company.

At one point he had one board representative, but now even that isn’t the case any more.

Because Valve manufactures hardware for profit, Meta subsidizes the hell out of it and sells it at a loss to get you into their walled garden.

Maybe, but it is meant as a portmanteau, and not just two abbreviations stuck together.

Like… if the National Aeronautics and Space Administration made a big light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation device, and decided to call it the NASER instead of NASALASER.

It’s very helpful if you want to confidently get fed incorrect information on occasions. At one point I tried to get direct link to my profile by searching “JohnEdwa Lemmy”, and that summary claimed I was the admin of sopuli.xyz, the Lemmy instance I use. Absolutely no clue why, as I have never been an admin of anything online.

Apparently today I’m the main developer of Boost for Reddit.

(Refresh) No, it actually meant Sync.

(Refresh) Or maybe I also made Pinpoint. Look, the source is Wikipedia, it can’t be wrong.

It’s a pepper spray drone, delaying them from killing people is the point in the first place.

For Finland, 46% of heating is done with district heating, with it being as high as 90% in the bigger cities.

Maybe it’s time for the real doctors office to open up a service where people can describe their symptoms to them, and get a real doctor’s diagnosis, as that is apparently so desired of a service that people keep asking not-a-real doctor instead.

Or it might be because people can’t afford the real doctor’s office, and so their options are debt, death, or gambling with the available free solutions.

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.

They would need to have more of them first for the data to actually be accurate at all. From what I could find, there have been no Waymo caused fatalities - two deaths caused by other drivers though - and four serious injuries, for roughly 220 million miles driven.

While you can then state that the rate of fatalities is 1 per 110 million miles, it’s not really useful in any way.

I really liked the concept art CD Projekt Red did for a CP77 version. The design itself isn’t all that bad, it just really doesn’t work for “In-Real Life 2024”.

Half of the panels on a cybertruck are just stuck on with glue and can be peeled off by hand.
It doesn’t seem like something all that hard to fix, they are falling off on their own already. If only they invented some mechanical way to hold car parts together instead of glue…

And now that they don’t have to report them, how do they ask you to pay for them?

Here in Finland, you sing up for an internet connection for a certain price a month, usually for 12/24/36 months at a time and… That’s literally it. E.g I have 250/250 fibre for 35€/month for the next year. If they want me to pay more, they’ll have to increase the price next year when I renew it.

Still, paying even just the $3000 for a single book from this lawsuit is going to be quite hard when you are making zero profit whatsoever. LLM AI was unprofitable when the training data was free, they are even more so if they have to pay even a cent per item. And I really doubt it’s going to stop with this one batch and payment and they can just go back to pirating the stuff for free.