As someone who spends a lot of time searching and is tired of AI slop, tracking, and targeted ads, it’s a breath of fresh air.

It provides a level of quality and control you don’t get from the Brave/DDGs of the world, and a reliability that’s hard to match with the SearXNGs.

It took a bit of mental back and forth to get comfortable paying for something that has historically been “free”, but I’m alright with it.

I’d love to see more FOSS competition (or frankly any competition) out there but hosting a reliable search engine is difficult and expensive.

It’s cheaper than any of my streaming subscriptions and I use it 10x as much, so I’m good paying the price.

Kagi will let you block slop sites (but you have to manually block each one)

Do you believe Luigi Mangione killed Bryan Johnson?

Do I think he’s more likely than not the killer? Yes. Do I think that “beyond a reasonable doubt”? No, BUT I haven’t spent as much time studying the facts of the case as I hope each juror has.

Can he be found guilty with the evidence against him?

Of course. With the right frame job, my cat could be found guilty of the murder.

AKA why I never ask my in-laws about their day.

We improved our tracking algorithms to more accurately monitor your every move.

We found an unpatched microphone exploit that let’s us listen in on all of your conversations.

Is your favorite color purple?

A capacitor has ~1% of the storage capacity of a battery of similar power rating.

Saying its storage performance is better because its holds a larger % of that capacity at low temperatures is nonsense because its storage performance objectively sucks (and not what it’s designed to be good at)

It’s like saying a Tesla is better than a 747 because it can go from 0-60 faster. A technically true statement but a meaningless performance comparison.

30-50% of my energy is the EV. About 20% is 120V plug loads (computers, fridges, home server), ~5-10% lighting, ~15% large equipment (dryer, electric range, electric water heater), and the remainder (15-30% seasonally) is HVAC (heat pump)

Any gas appliances would bring a lot of those numbers down

American House with an EV, all electric, and no solar, I use about 1200 kWh/mo (1.2 MWh/mo) on average. This could only carry me through about 3y. Even if I had access to good public infrastructure I think best I could do is 6y (again, all-electric home).

But I digress. Lithium ion as purely load shifting is a pretty reasonable, I’d argue critical, solution for covering day/night loads, but starts to fall apart completely when it comes to seasonal (summer/winter) loads.

But what makes this plant interesting is the addition of super capacitors. The combo battery/SC plant is less about day/night load shifting and more about providing stability to a shifting grid. As supply and demand grow increasingly decoupled, and we try and shift away from expensive peaker plants always on standby, systems like this can dramatically help smooth grid performance.

~90 MW of peaker capacity is small potatoes currently, but this is a big step towards a more reliable grid future.

Supercapacitors provide ultrafast response times – specified at 0.001 seconds – and maintain over 85% capacity at –40°C, significantly outperforming lithium-ion batteries in extreme cold.

Outperform how? At being a capacitor? That’s their whole point.

On the energy side, 85% of 29 MW-min is 0.41 MWh. Even if the batteries lose 99% of their capacity at -40 °F, last I checked .42 MWh > 0.41 MWh.

These are two different tools for two different purposes, I’m not sure how you compare their “performance” under this metric.

I’ll run a backup and restore when moving to a new device, because why not. But regular backups? Meh, the ether can have my messages if my phone dies.

That said, depending on how this new system is rolled out, I may subscribe just to support the Signal foundation.

Fair point! As far as I can tell, the temp sensors are just beacons - anyone can connect and see that somewhere in your house it’s 72 °F, but who cares ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re running on a Raspberry Pi, you can just use the onboard BT, whose drivers are updated regularly.

ZigBee ones get occasional updates automatically detected through HA, and have to be moved to somewhere near the controller to update. I assume, as temperature and humidity sensing hasn’t changed, that these are security patches.

BT ones get no updates, which either means their security goes unpatched, or it really doesn’t matter when all they do is shout out measurements into the void.

Of course! From an end-user the experience between Bluetooth and ZigBee sensors is basically indistinguishable, except for range.

I have a detached garage, on the opposite end of my property from my HA controller, so the Bluetooth sensor out there specifically was a little flaky. The BT sensor is rated for ~160 ft but realistically it’s 50-100 ft if your home has walls.

Swapping that one sensor to ZigBee so it could tie into my mesh network solved the problem. All other BT sensors have had zero issues, and their AA batteries unsurprisingly last longer than the 3R ZigBee AAAs, but both last at least 6mo.

Some Shelly devices can be used as “Bluetooth repeaters” but I’m unsure of the specifics of how that works.

If the screen isn’t important, Third Reality makes a slightly cheaper version with no screen that also takes AAA - conveniently on sale now

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0D2NVJTS3

I have a mix of those and an old version of these Govee Bluetooth sensors that are also fully offline, take AA batteries, and pair well with HA

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07Y36FWTT

Not strictly ZigBee, but cheaper, just as accurate as the 3R, and fully offline

You can edit titles on Lemmy :)

Nothing like the slop of a rain drenched tennis ball on pavement

Beginner question here - does HA even take sub-second polling?

This is the Spotify/Apple Music/etc model and the reason why music piracy is practically dead (yes, I know there are a few sites still going).

These services are doing their best to find ways to push people back to piracy but for now they keep it at bay through competition to provide better service.

If there was a catchall video streaming service where all publishers released and got a cut of their plays it would be game over for piracy. Fortunately that’ll never happen.

And some fava beans.

Hot take - everyone is hitting on nostalgia, but personally I think there’s more to it than just that.

Low-res games invite the player to use their imagination, something that gets lost in the pursuit of hyper-realism.

Unlike most modern AAA games, games like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, or BOTW/TOTK invite the player to use their creativity - not just in problem solving, but also in how they view the world.

This was just an inherent feature of older games, due to the limitations of technology, but now it’s a luxury in a world that’s increasingly trying to script or control how you think and interact at every turn.