Above everything, lack of curiosity. If someone is uncurious, it’s a big red flag to me.

My wife and I have been abusing our Ryobi for like 10 years. I thought it was finally dying, but then I got a new battery, still going strong.

I always start with harbor freight. When I break that one, I buy a nice version of whatever it was. I don’t buy “nice” tools very often. HF is nearly always “good enough.”

It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things…

That’s nice, but it’s no Econoline.

Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.

I’ll take a seventh stone of chicken please.

And lengths in Royal cubits.

If we’re gonna go weird we need to go all the way.

Batman is the bad guy and I will die on that hill.

As far as the local control goes, you can keep it from phoning home and it will still work. I don’t believe that the Shelly firmware is open source, but they allow you to upload custom firmware that is.

Because you can cut them off from the outside world I don’t believe it is doing the same kind of data collection externally unless you allow it to.

The new “mini” versions of their gear is harder to customize apparently but still possible, they still sell the larger versions though too that are easy to modify.

I agree that other protocols are better, but I’ve found that zwave tends to be more stable and reliable than zigbee. And both are better than Wi-Fi. But Wi-Fi is the easiest to onboard for a beginner.

Shelly is pretty good for smart home stuff.

I care a lot about local control, but they even have some cloud stuff if you’re into that sort of thing.

Zooz is one of my favorites for zwave gear.

Good for them for attempting to redeem themselves after what they did to my potatoes. But I’ll never forgive them.

They may have fooled you with their cute little rolls and their ability to mitigate human pollution, but I see them.

Generally speaking I do things myself because it’s cheaper, in that it lets me allocate cash in higher quality versions of things than I would otherwise be able to afford. I grew up pretty poor and that was how my family did things. Car breaks, that’s why you buy a Chilton’s. Appliance isn’t working? You can always order the part for a tenth of what it costs to have the appliance guy tell you what’s wrong. AC quit working? Those capacitors are super easy to replace and only cost $7.

Now I could pay people to do more things for me, but it’s only under certain circumstances.

Sometimes it just boils down to something my Dad told me underneath a car (or a house maybe) like 30 years ago: “Nobody is gonna care about your shit more than you do.”

It’s not the iPads themselves, it’s the addition of Bluetooth and/or wifi to support them. I agree that they can alleviate a lot in terms of paperwork reduction etc. My issue is the additional exposed surface.

It doesn’t, that’s just a very common reaction to these types of articles. I recall having some very intense discussions around stuff like iPads in cockpits. I’m on the “not a fan” side, but I’m also not making avionics software anymore either.

Certification is expensive. But updated dbs are pretty huge and seem to only get bigger over time. Stuff like radio firmware tends to be in the hundreds of KBs though, so for that it really wouldn’t be a big deal either way.

These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.

You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.

The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.

I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.

As someone with a small flock, this is empirically accurate.

It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.

Only problem is you can’t eat a Hilux when the going gets a little too tough.

Alas, I cannot grow hair on the top of my head, so I must grow it on the bottom.