This is everything we imagined point and click games to be as kids.

If you use AI to write a blog post, I'll use AI to summarize it.

Alexa is super buggy now anyway. I switched my Echo Dot to Alexa+, and it fails turning on and off my Samsung TV all the time now. You usually have to do it twice.

This has been my impetus to do Home Assistant things and I already can tell you that I'm going to spend far more time setting it up and tweaking it than I actually save, but false economy is a tinkerer's best friend. It's pretty impressive what a local LLM setup can do though, and I'm learning that all my existing smart devices are trivially available if anyone gets physical access to my network I guess!

This is the kind of thing Claude Code (bypassing permissions) shines at. I‘m about to setup HA myself and intend to not write a single line of config myself.

Most of HA is configured in the gui these days, you won't need to write any config anyways.

Something I love about HA is that all thr gui can always be directly edited using yaml. So you can ask claude for a v1 then tweak it a bit then finish with the gui. And all of this directly from the gui.

Ugh. Reminds me that some time ago Siri stopped responding to “turn off my TV.” Now I have to remember to say “turn off my Apple TV.” (Which with the magic of HDMI CEC turns off my entire system.) Given how groggy I am when I want to turn off the TV, I often forget.

I just use a "Alexa goodnight" to trigger turning off the tv and lights

I upgraded to the old Alexa. Alexa+ is a hot pile of crap.

i agree. the new LLM is better for dialog and Q&A, but they haven't properly tested intents and IOT integration at all.

How can this be? I had great luck with GPT3 way back when… and I didn’t have function calling or chat… had to parse the JSON myself, extraction “action” and “response-text” fields… How has this been so hard for AMZN? Is it a matter of token cost and trying to use small models?

that's a reasonable theory. they've likely delayed the launch this long due to the inference cost compared to the more basic Alexa engine.

I would also guess the testing is incomplete. Alexa+ is a slow roll out so they can improve precision/recall on the intents with actual customers. Alexa+ is less deterministic than the previous model was wrt intents

Someone posting on HN should know better than using Alexa and Samsung TVs. These devices are a unique combination of malware and spyware.

Time to start calling BS on the 9's of reliability

If only the Windows ecosystem could make the processor transition as smooth as Mac.

I don't think it is the ecosystem. The ARM CPUs not from Apple are just too slow.

X Elite and N1X are fine; the problem is with Windows.

As someone who admins Linux and Windows ARM machines, rest assured the issue is not just with Windows. ARM support is best-effort on most distros, and still fairly incomplete even on nixpkgs and Debian unstable.

This is just a marketing post for a different VPN company trying to sell you a "truly private" VPN. Take everything you're reading with a grain of salt.

This is just junior level developer thinking. There's so much that this developer doesn't know that they don't know.

> I refactored all the sketchy code into a clean Python package, added tests, formatted everything nicely, added type hints, and got it ready for production.

The fact that type hints are the last in the list, not first, suggests the level of experience with the language

Compared to Claude Sonnet 4, anecdotal evidence. But I'm noticing very little difference.

Yup happens on a daily basis

Flatpak and Snap always seem to be in the "just give us 6 months and we'll have everything fixed" phase. It's been the same for 7 or 8 years at this point.