I hear you, and I agree there’s a lot more that needs to be done. I can say with some confidence that the average American doesn’t want any of this in the slightest, even if the average American isn’t as politically engaged as they need to be to truly understand the global implications.

The truth is that the average American is mostly thinking about immediate problems in their own life, like how to pay both their rent and their phone bill and still afford gas to get to the grocery store where many staples are increasingly expensive.

Even something as important as voting or protesting can feel like a privilege for the well-off when it’s the choice between that and working a shift to pay bills, and of course voting has been made deliberately difficult in most states. Voter registration isn’t automatic, for example. Likewise Election Day isn’t a National Holiday, so many people have to take off work if they don’t plan ahead to register, apply to vote absentee and meet deadlines for ballot mail-in.

Basically I’m just trying to encourage you to remember your neighbors are normal people who actually do value being good neighbors. They are oppressed and deceived, however, and a small portion of them are straight up brainwashed by a cult. I hope, trust, and believe that when the chips fall, people in this country will answer the call to fight the oppressors. We’re in this together.

Ah right! Been a little while but I remember. Thank you

I don’t often see this stance taken on here — where victim blaming might be seen by many internationally as “punching up” due to former US hegemony — but I agree.

It’s not only more technically accurate, it’s more useful knowledge in terms of what actions must next be taken, because anyone from any country who thinks this phenomenon is purely American is in for a rude awakening.

The crisis and its roots are global. The solution must likewise be global. I just hope history shows that Americans pulled their weight in the coming global struggle that has only just begun.

And really, can one ever have too many rodents opining posthumously?

That’s a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the world’s best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.

We’re definitely protesting. It may not make international news, but every day there are angry crowds outside government buildings or in the streets of our cities. The last I went to was this past Monday in NY and there were at least a few thousand of us. Personally I think we need more serious measures but protesting is a start.

Are PDF links especially perilous? I thought most PDF viewers that are JS-capable disable it by default?

Yes, I only used mqtt because it’s a common low-level protocol in smart appliances that’s comparatively simple. A more accessible example might have been Smart TVs being half the price of dumb ones (if you can even find them now) since the principle is the same.

I agree that support is one of the main things cloud legitimately makes easier. Support personnel have more reliable case data, more robust central control, and so forth.

And I think you’ll agree many smart home folks already have/had hubs and bridges (servers) floating around that obfuscate most of that complexity without the need for always-on WAN access. Remote maintenance (patches, firmware updates, etc) don’t necessarily preclude a plug and play experience.

Whether this accounts for the cost and complexity differential consumers experience can be debated, but my point was simpler. Cloud-based products are artificially subsidized in at least two ways. The first is that they’re a loss leader facilitating platform lock-in, but the second is that rich usage data from intimate user contexts is quite valuable to the endless parade of marketing voyeurs.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m not talking about SaaS products. I’m talking about physical things on local networks that don’t need cloud access.

For example, a common wall switch may use mqtt internally, but inexplicably railroad all commands through the online Tuya platform. The device requires a beefier ESP chip as a result. It must be capable of ethernet and async workflows for client platform auth, token refresh, and so forth. It may even cease functioning when it can’t reach the servers.

By comparison, the strictly intranetwork equivalent has far simpler hardware that can run for months on a watch battery. And yet, the cloud-based product will basically always be cheaper, in spite of being more complex and requiring cloud infrastructure.

So, how come? Yes economies of scale might apply to the hardware manufacturing, but certainly not to the cloud requirement. No economy scales quite like 0.

Would be nice if grid tied inverters weren’t such a regulatory PITA. Micro-deployment solar, and more importantly distributed energy storage, makes so much sense and could solve a lot of grid-related problems.

reportedly

Everything related to consumer IoT is more expensive and/or difficult to implement as a local-only service.

But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would cloud access make anything cheaper?

Hmmmmm

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RIP, IP

True, but outside CS the word has come to refer to a certain brand of complex heuristics or ML inference.

I don’t have it on hand, but I remember a study from several years ago that tested a variety of pill and tablet medications for actual shelf life. The big takeaway was that the vast majority of medications degrade extremely slowly unless exposed to moisture, sunlight, or excessive heat, and only a few actually become harmful.

TLDR: it’s safe to take an aspirin from the 1940s, but you might need to take two.

They have (or had) a system for reactivation that involved endorsement from another account. IIRC it was QR code based, so one of my friends would scan my reactivation QR code and a few verification texts later I’d have my account back. The last time I was banned, it was after I hearted one of my friend’s posts about his graduation.

Insofar as everyone likes the wherewithal offered by pronominal and hitherto conjunctive adverbs

and I can only use every other road

What’re you doing, bro-in-law?