I’d argue home assistant with some smart LEDs and a few sensors would be great.

Having a bulb that let’s you know the outside temperature/weather when you’re getting dressed in the morning is neat. Having a dimming pattern for sleeping time. Tons of other really simple stuff available too.

I hear theres a few neo Mennonite colonies starting up that only use tech before the turn of the millenia. Maybe you could look into them.

And the vast majority of my automations don’t use it because it isn’t required.

I will stand by what I said, the tool is great even if you don’t touch AI at all with it.

The comment was wrong. It’s an automation tool. It can use ai, but its not the primary focus.

“There is zero chance any of these investments are going to turn a profit.”

This isn’t accurate. There’s a zero chance ALL of them turn a profit, but there’s actually good chance that one or more of them will return a huge profit.

If I invest $100 in a hundred companies, and 99 of those companies fail, you may think I’m a terrible investor. If that 1 company returns $50,000 on my investment though, I’m actually a fucking genius.

That’s how venture capital works.

It really just helps in cases where you get hacked, but the hacker doesn’t have continued access. Say someone physically penetrates into your building, grabs the key through an unlocked station, and leaves.

That being said, like you mentioned, if someone is going through this effort, 45 days vs 90 days likely won’t matter. They’ll probably have the data they need after a week anyways.

Encryption key theft really requires a secondary attack afterwards to get the encrypted data by getting into the middle and either decrypting or redirecting traffic. It’s very much a state level/high-corporate attack, not some random group trying to make a few bucks.

Taxi companies don’t keep specific vehicles for 20 years, they wear out long before then. Keeping them maintained to pass inspection at that point would be a costly nightmare.

The first Tesla only came out 17 years ago, and it was a 2-door sports car… so yea it’s not really surprising you wouldn’t see 15 year old Teslas regularly. They do exist though. The Model S has only been out for 13 years, and there are definitely still first run Model S vehicles driving around. There are 8 from that original year for sale on Autotrader.com right now, all in running condition.

There are only 2 Prius C from 2012, and 2 more Prius V from the same year. Those were the first years of each of those models as well, just like the Tesla.

I think Teslas are shit though. They’re designer brand electric cars, poor quality, and they make zero financial sense at all compared to full EV models from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, or VW.

Also, like I said in an other comment, Taxis are not driven the same way that a regular person drives their car. Hybrids are absolutely perfect for the Taxi driving use case. They make almost no sense when used once a day to go to work, and then hit the grocery store and gym on the way home.

Cabs don’t drive like you do. Neither based on distance driven, nor the constant stop and go driving that optimizes hybrid use case.

Full electric is better for a lot of taxi locations, which is why a lot of Cab companies are now starting to switch their fleets over.

Even Uber ditched it’s Uber Green branding for Uber Electric.

Every single Waymo on the road is fully electric at this point after they phased out their hybrid units a couple years ago.

And then it will become more expensive to maintain than the gas version the year after, and worth less at resale because of a degraded battery or some shit.

Also, brakes are not a primary cost in ownership of a vehicle.

Math is fun, but you need to do a total cost of ownership calculation, not a cost to date calculation.

Full electric is simply better math.

If you’ve only had it three years, the expensive maintenance part hasn’t started yet, it’s probably still under warranty.

A) Your car is not an EV. It’s a Hybrid.

B) All hybrid cars were/are bad investments.

You take a car, make it more complicated by adding an entire second power and drive system, and then expect it to not cost a fortune to maintain later?

Fucking stupidity.

Welcome to the Matrix.

It won’t matter in the slightest.

So there’s an answer, and then there’s a problem.

The easy answer is that Home Assistant has Voice Assistants now, and you can use Ollama, Whisper, and Piper to do that all locally.

The problem is that it really only talks to Home Assistant, there’s no ability to have it search the web, or make a phone call, or really anything else outside of Home Assistant without significant addon stuffs.

It also requires a reasonably significant amount of RAM on your computer to run the VM for Home Assistant while supporting Whisper and Piper and Ollama.

Agent voice response

It’s even mostly open source.

On one hand, you’re right.

On the other hand, you’re missing the point.

Jobs aren’t the the goal of life. People need to remember that. Our current system of distributing resources is broken if we don’t have enough jobs, but we could change the system rather than forcing everyone to work when it’s not needed.

British Columbia, $0.12 canadian dollars for Tier1 rates

The simple answer is most desktop PCs will not come even close to that at idle. Even just having a few case fans may draw more than that, without involving the CPU at all.

Laptop devices can do that in some cases with their extra power management features.

That being said, do the math to see if it matters. The difference between 10w and 40w is 0.7kwh per day, at least where I live that’s about 7 cents or about $25 per year.

In my case it would be more expensive to purchase a dedicated low power device than it will save me in 4-5 years compared to just using something I already have laying around.