We need more projects like home assistant. I started using it recently and was amazed. They sell their own hardware but the whole setup is designed to works on any other hardware. There are detailed docs for installation on your own hardware. And, it works amazingly well.
Same for their voice assistant. You can but their hardware and get started right away or you can place your own mics and speakers around home and it will still work. You can but your own beefy hardware and run your own LLM.
The possibilities with home assistant are endless. Thanks to this community for breaking the barriers created by big tech
I haven't been able to quite get the Llama vision models working but I suppose with new releases in future, it should work as good as Gemini in finding bounding boxes of UI elements.
I have four Home Assistants pinned in the browser on my laptop. I look after several more.
Thanks for the heads up about Digital Alchemy, now I have to go and evaluate it 8)
I already have upgrades to my 3D printer sat waiting, and a massive stack of software to go through for work and home.
I've just finished replacing all the door handles in my home (long story) and the flush button on the down stair bog. It turns out that most of my home lighting has a spare conductor available or I can use a dimmer instead, so smart lighting is indicated at the switch. One lot done, more to do.
All of my smart IoT stuff must be locally administrated and have a manual option if the network is unavailable, if possible and work as well as a non smart effort with regards power. So my doorbell is a Reolink job on the THINGS VLAN with no access to the internet. It is PoE powered and the switch is powered by a UPS. You get the idea.
I run my home IoT smart stuff with the same rigor as I do at work. I'm an IT consultant these days but I did study Civ Eng at college.
HA allows for plenty of solid engineering for engineers. You can do it all in the GUI with decent integrations as a "newbie" with confidence that you won't go too far wrong. You've also got a really solid Zwave stack aside a well integrated MQTT stack - how much more do you want?
Theres also a Zigbee stack too, which is ideal for cheap stuff. My Lidl smart switches work really well at quite a long range.
Do you mean the move away from YAML first configs?
I was originally somewhat frustrated, but overall, it's much better (let's be honest, YAML sucks) and more user friendly (by that I mean having a form with pre-filled fields is easier than having to copy paste YAML).
Yes, config is a major part of it. But also a lack of good APIs, very poor dev documentation, not great logging. A general “take it or leave it” attitude, not interesting in enabling engineers to build.
But like, isn't YAML still available for configuring things?
Have they gotten rid of any YAML configs, with things that are now UI only? My understanding was that they've just been building more UI for configuring things and so now default recommend people away from YAML (which seems like the right choice to me).
> But like, isn't YAML still available for configuring things?
For most, yes. But for some included integrations it's UI-only (all of those I've had to migrate, it's been a single click + comment out lines, and the config has been a breeze (stuff like just an api key/IP address + 1-2 optional params).
SQLite is highly automatable if you can deal with downtime to do your migrations.
I'm sure there are things they could do to better support the power-user engineer use case, but at the end of the day it's a self-hosted web app written in Python that has strong support for plugins. There should be very few things that an engineer couldn't figure out how to do between writing a plugin, tweaking source code, and just modifying files in place. And in the meantime I'm glad that it exists and apparently has enough traction to pay for itself.
...usually there's YAML kicking around the backend, but for normal usage, normal users, the goal is to be able to configure all (most) things via UI.
I've had to drop to YAML to configure (eg) writing stats to indexdb/graphana vs. sqlite (or something), or maybe to drop in or update an API_KEY or non-standard host/port, but 99% of the time the config is baroque, but usable via the web-app.
Oh thank got. Just started using HA few months ago and all these yaml is so confusing when I try to code it with ChatGPT , constant syntax or some other random errors.
Im a different user- but I can say I’ve been frustrated with their refusal to support OIDC/oauth/literally any standard login system. There is a very long thread on their forums documenting the many attempts for people to contribute this feature.[0] The devs simply shut it down every time, with little to no explanation.
I run many self hosted applications on my local network. Homeassistant is the only one I’m running that has its own dedicated login. Everything else I’m using has OIDC support, or I can at least unobtrusively stick a reverse proxy in front to require OIDC login.
Edit: things like this [1] don’t help either. Where one of the HA devs threatens to relicense a dependency so that NixOS can’t use it, because… he doesn’t want them to? The license permits them to. Seemed very against the spirit of open source to me.
When I was evaluating both projects about 5 years ago, I went with openHAB because they had native apps with native controls (and thus nicer design imo). At the time, HA was still deep in YML config files and needed validation before saving etc etc. Not great UX.
Nowadays, HA has more of the features I would want and other external projects exist to create your own dashboards that take advantage of native controls.
Today I’m using Homey because I’m still a sucker for design and UX after a long day of coding boring admin panels in the day job, but I think in another few years when the hardware starts to show its age that I will move to home assistant. Hell, there exists an integration to bring HA devices into Homey but that would require running two hubs and potentially duplicating functionality. We shall see.
I keep it simple, I use the HomeKit bridge integration to expose the Home Assistant devices that I want in iOS. I don’t expose everything, though, some of the more advanced or obscure devices I purposely keep hidden in Home Assistant. It strikes a nice balance in my opinion.
i’m assuming you can do something similar with Google home, etc.
but like you said, you could always build your own dashboard from scratch if you wanted to.
> HA long ago blew past OpenHAB in [...] community.
Home Assistant seems insurmountable to beat at that specific metric, seems to be the single biggest project in terms of contributions from a wide community. Makes sense, Home Assistant tries to do a lot of things, and succeeds at many of them.
There are plenty of software engineers but many of them may not be qualified for the currently open jobs. So, yes, there are open jobs and there are unhired americans but programs like H1-b make even more highly talented pool of people available which in turn increases innovation and productivity in economy.
So, it's not just a plain numbers game, it's more about innovation, productivity, talent pools and of course, capitalism.
Years back I took a "common sense" decision to eliminate plastic from my food storage and cooking and only use steel or glass. The basis for this decision was primarily that there have been many instances in world where after decades it was found that something generally used was harmful for humans. Steel and glass have existed longer than plastics and are generally known to be safe (also I have to use some products, can't leave everything).
for people arguing about the quality of research, yes you can argue on research but use your common sense and ask yourself if plastics are really safe?
I have this 2017 iMac and I hate that I can't use it as an external display. Felt it more during covid since I wanted to plug my work laptop on it and it as an external display.
That said, this display is old and I feel it more now when editing/viewing HDR videos. Though it was one of the top displays till a few yrs back
I wouldn't go as far as saying that immigration lawyers are "overseer on the plantation". That is an extreme imo. Lawyers are only there to help there clients navigate the laws of the land. They have serve both companies and immigrants as clients.
Though, I strongly believe that H1b problem is modern slavery. Especially for people from India and China. The law is carefully crafted to ensure a constant supply of captive labor who work hard, pay taxes and if they fail to be competetive then get sent back to their home country irrespective of how long they have lived here or their contribution to the economy/society here. Sometimes I wonder if the law would have been the same if it were to impact europeans the same way (Pls don't take this as racist. Nothing against European ppl. I'm just complaining about a racist law).
I know the counter-argument is always that "you can leave the job and go back if you feel it's slavery". That's true but like Europeans and like people from many other countries, we also want to live in this great country. This country has attracted immigrants over centuries. The problem is that the law is carefully crafted to ensure that not too many people of color become citizens here without having a clear race based restriction in the law.
The U.S. has misused the law to exploit migrant laborers from Western Europe in the past, such as Irish immigrant workers building railroads a hundred years ago. The difference is, those Irish railroad workers were eventually able to ascend the social ladder and be treated as equals in our society, because they are white. They were similar enough to us that they could "pass" and be accepted in mainstream American society and not be looked upon forever as outsiders. Other exploited workers from that era were not as fortunate and continue to be dehumanized and marginalized even today. Every attempt they ever made to join the club and be participants in the great American Dream was systematically crushed, either by force of law or by force of mob violence. Because they are not white. We invented a whole victim-blaming narrative about this where we chalk it up to inferior genetics or lack of perserverence, but anyone with a brain can plainly see that it is the natural inclination for people to adapt to their surroundings and to do whatever they can to be accepted and welcomed into the social collective. It takes a powerful outside force to stop that from happening, to keep the outsiders from eventually turning into insiders, who will then start compelling us to share the commons with them.
Burgers are actually a pretty balanced meal. Meat, veggies and carb in one package. It all goes wrong when you add tons of preservatives to the meat and bread.
Preservatives are only in the the bread, not the meat.
Preservatives in burgers or ground beef isn't a thing. Either the ground beef is fresh and used quickly, or it's frozen.
Meat with preservatives is mainly two types -- 1) traditional cured meats like prosciutto or bacon, where you're referring to the nitrites and maybe the salt, and 2) some cold cuts used in sandwiches, like bologna and ham.
if you are starving, then yes, it's reasonable. If you are someone who can afford healthy food, then it's junk. Why it's junk? lack of fibre, deep fried patties, tons of saturated fat, sugars (ketchup, soda etc.)
No, you’re not taking it at face value. Grilled meat, some veggies and bread is not unhealthy. It’s a protein rich meal with a reasonable amount of carbs. Plenty of fiber too if you use whole grain bread.
You’re not supposed to have red meat everyday. But if I had a home grilled burger, with whole grain bread and a salad 3 times a week I would be in good shape.
> A standard burger comes with tomatoes and lettuce.
I don't think that's been true for at least 10 years. Fresh veg costs and is considered a premium topping for higher end fast food options and as an addon generally. You can expect it standard on a restaurant burger or a premium quick service place, but not standard for normal fast food and certainly not McDonalds.
Even at more upmarket and expensive fast food like Chick-fil-A, lettuce and tomato is not standard but rather a "Deluxe" option that comes with an increase in base cost.
Source: born poor, have worked at fast food food and eaten quite a bit of it.
In-N-Out still has nice veggies with their overall quality basically frozen in time, but IMO all of these prices pale in comparison to Costco's $5 rotisserie chicken. So a $5 McDonalds meal? Not cheap even if there's a coupon for 50% off.
When a person walks into a McDonald's and orders a hamburger, it comes with dehydrated onions, pickles, mustard, and ketchup.
And I'm not saying that this is a good thing, or that it is a bad thing. What I'm saying is that here in-context where we participate in a discussion that is rooted upon an article about McDonald's, that's the standard.
> We’re not talking about specific picks from a fast food menu
We're talking about McDonalds right? Allowing for regional differences, I would say that there are four "standard" burgers, the hamburger, cheeseburger, Big Mac, and quarter pounder. Of those only the Big Mac comes with tomatoes and lettuce
It's a slap on the wrist. No one goes to jail. Just pay money and move on. Boeing knows that if this goes to trial, the discovery material will be extremely incriminating to their brand. Instead, just pay money and move on.
I wonder if a plea deal like this would have ever reached if american lives were lost in two crashes as a direct cause of a company's negligence.
Same for their voice assistant. You can but their hardware and get started right away or you can place your own mics and speakers around home and it will still work. You can but your own beefy hardware and run your own LLM.
The possibilities with home assistant are endless. Thanks to this community for breaking the barriers created by big tech