Like a lot of tech trends, home automation tends to be a solution looking for a problem. Video doorbells are a useful exception, but light switches, kitchen appliances and thermostats just aren’t something I need to be connected to the internet.
The internet? Probably not. Having smart switches is great though. Both for very basic automations and laying in bed going "oh shit I forgot to turn off the basement lights" style moments.
It's important though that all those things work together locally in a reliable manner. All mine fallback to "wired" mode if all else fails. The connectivity is just a bonus. One lightswitch near the bed to go into "bedtime mode" for all common areas of the house is pretty handy for me.
Smart locks are a great idea in theory, but the horribleness of the residential door lock standards make them kinda suck in practice in terms of mechanical reliability. I went with a full blown commercial access system and don't regret it. Being able to remotely add folks while I'm traveling or allowing temporary guest access without physical keys is great.
Honestly I find video doorbells a downgrade and an obnoxious addition to our anti-social societal trends. Although that's rather hypocritical since I also have one!
The big issue for me in the Home Automation space is every stupid manufacturer wanted their own silly standard and/or app to "own" the user experience. Fuck that.
Given that Plex just bumped their lifetime subscription price to $750, I can no longer recommend them. They are clearly more interested in becoming another streaming service, and are I think trying to push out their core users who probably make them very little money.
Interesting, their price bump announcement actually just went and made me upgrade to lifetime (at $250 while I could) instead of write them off completely.
Netflix will never allow you to pay a one time fee for life, neither will any other streaming service on the planet.
Meanwhile, plex is a company that has employees. If I like plex, use it heavily, and want to support them I can do so with money. There are alternatives that are completely free, but I don’t like them as much and the minimal cost for plex is totally worth the value for me.
Goes to show how inoculated I am against banner ads I suppose.
Either way part of me feels like it’s for the best. One off payment for lifetime membership of an app that has continual development isn’t a great business model.
the only things i care about is some essy enough to use upload process, basic serving, then that theres some smart enough local caching on whatever device im using
The problem is that code it spits out on the fly is untested and untrustworthy. Identify the parts of your workflow that could be accomplished with regular code - write and unit test that code, with LLM help if you want, and use the llm as the orchestrator only.
I’m a bootcamp grad (although it was an intense 5-night a week, year long bootcamp, not some 6-week build-a-demo class). I have a college degree but it’s in the arts.
I do try to continually improve my skill set, refresh on design patterns, etc. I’m currently employed and have been for the last six years. I don’t really know if I fall in category 3 or not.
What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing?
If you mean obsolete in the sense of "no longer fit for purpose" I don't think that's true. They may become obsolete in terms of "can't do hottest new thing" but that's true of pretty much any technology. A capable local model that can do X will always be able to do X, it just may not be able to do Y. But if X is good enough to solve your problem, why is a newer better model needed?
I think if we were able to achieve ~Opus 4.6 level quality in a local model that would probably be "good enough" for a vast number of tasks. I think it's debatable whether newer models are always better - 4.7 seems to be somewhat of a regression for example.
If your child says they've learned their multiplication tables but they can't actually multiply any numbers you give them do they actually know how to do multiplication? I would say no.
For some reason people are perfectly able to understand this in the context of, say, cursive, calculator use, etc., but when it comes to their own skillset somehow it's going to be really different.
Yeah this is the way. Blender has a higher learning curve than AE but it’s ultimately much better at actual 3d than AE is, and the recent improvements to the interface have made it a lot more usable.
There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.
The fetch api has been widely available in browsers for a decade now. And in node since 18. A competent developer could whip up a more axios-like library with fetch in a day easily. You can do all the cool things like interceptors with fetch too.
Yet most developers I work with just use it reflexively. This seems like one of the biggest issues with the npm ecosystem - the complete lack of motivation to write even trivial things yourself.
> A competent developer could whip up a more axios-like library with fetch in a day easily.
Then you would have created just an axios clone. AKA re-inventing the wheel. The issue isn't the library itself, but rather the fact that it's popular and provided a large enough attack surface.
You can actually just clone the axios package and use it as is from your private repo and you would not have been affected.
I think we're entering an era where "re-inventing the wheel" is actually a completely valid defensive posture. The cost is so low relative to the reduction in risk.
Axios really does a lot of other great things. I would argue that Fetch could’ve easily been Axios-lite. Axios handles errors better, has interceptors, parses JSON for you, etc.
The multiple supply chain attacks against NPM packages would, of course, be solved if we simply stop using third-party libraries.
I guess the point I’m making is that a lot of popular JavaScript libraries were created to address deficiencies in the core api that don’t exist anymore, but we keep using these libraries mostly because of entropy and familiarity.
True. In my case it’s also out of general tiredness and disinterest. A good newsletter that catches up on useful things in the ecosystem might help, otherwise I can’t be bothered anymore to keep up. 5 years ago that still seemed like a good way to spend my time. I wonder if other developers are just as jaded.
Ok, well have AI write some table stakes for you in 10 minutes with 100% test coverage and only provide exactly what "table stakes" you are missing without any bells and whistles.
I guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.
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