qurren
99% of the time I'm asking the AI medical advice questions because (1) there is no specialist available on short notice (2) most specialists I actually see do not give me the sense they take things seriously enough (3) a lot of specialists are just incompetent.
Heck, as an engineer even I don't get them. What ever happened to password + yubikey?
Simple answer: The makers of 3 largest browsers by market share (collectively 90%+) are buddies with the people who want to fingerprint you. Only the 4th largest gives a shit.
For example, on multiple instances, my spouse declined "location permissions" an app designed to work with a piece of Bluetooth-connected hardware, and would blame the hardware as being crappy.
"This smart lock app doesn't work."
"You need to enable this permission."
"Why do I need to give the smart lock app location permissions?"
It's not obvious to people that "Bluetooth can be used sneakily by big-enough companies as a makeshift GPS" even if the app needing Bluetooth access doesn't actually need a GPS location.
We specifically want to prevent scenarios like: you take a leak, the leak turns into a shitting session or a phone call, you forgot you left the burner on.
2. Most of the time my wife and I make food together so if one person needs to take a leak the other one is around anyway.
3. For long slow cooking, we have plenty of comfy seating in the kitchen/dining area where we can get work done while being in sight of pots.
4. We have 2 pets we'd need to locate in an emergency, and so we tend to put electrical and fire safety higher than most people.
Of course we can control it, it's all wired up via Home Assistant.
But they don't need to be cloud-connected through some big corp's cloud. I want them local and firewalled, ideally.
People are mostly objecting to government misuse of security tech to accelerate unconstitutional enforcement.
I just keep my offsite backup drives in my office drawer. There is a note on them that says they are personal backup and not to be plugged into company equipment. If you have an office this is probably the easiest solution.
If a disaster wipes out my home and my office then there are bigger things to worry about than my data.
* Latency: when you want to make a decision within 100ms
* Robotics: I want to try make a VLA version of it and see what happens
* Costs: For something that needs a yes/no answer every 10 seconds, it seems like it would be cheaper than an LLM API.
1. Trolleys actually don't usually have steering wheels.
2. People who actually hit trolley switches are not usually the ones at the driver's seat.
To be honest, China is fairly predictable. If you're doing certain shit, you're going to get arrested. If you don't do said shit, you're not going to get arrested.
If you honestly and truly unintentionally do something they don't like, they'll make it abundantly clear to you what they want you to do instead, try to de-escalate you and give you a chance to change what you're doing. The people in the news who got treated badly were persistent.
Whether said shit should be constitionally allowed is another story, but at least the rules and enforcement are predictable and there aren't really any surprises.
Meh (a) I want security and cat-monitoring cameras anyway (b) I'm willing to take the effort to install cameras neatly since they're capable of serving as 100 different sensors
> constantly sending images of one's private space to a cloud LLM is Orwellian
I agree. I have a local server with a GPU. The security side of things records to a local NVR. Nothing goes to the cloud.
> IP cameras are flaky, too
haven't had nearly as many problems here
> are you polling your LLM minutewise "Did the cat vomit on the floor"?
Kind of, but it only re-polls if the camera detected motion, and then every 15 minutes as a catch-all.
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
My first gut reaction to this was: Have you tried using a vision-language model?
I used to have an elaborate Home Assistant setup with tons of zigbee sensors here and there telling me if front door is not closed properly, if the rice cooker is left on (via current monitoring), if the garage door is left open (with a magnetic contact sensor), if window is left open, if the soil is dry, etc. I had to keep changing batteries of all these things and manage flaky Zigbee connections in the past.
More recently, I've found the absolute most reliable, ~zero-maintainence solution to be an LLM. Home Assistant already has an LLM plugin, you can wire it up to a local LLM if you want, and you can just feed it an image and ask "Is this garage door open or closed" and I found that to be much better for my sanity than changing batteries every 6 months and dealing with flaky sensors sending me false alerts.
I even found it useful for "Did the cat vomit on the floor" (if so notify me and pause the cleaning robot schedule) and "Do any plants look like they need attention"
For TFA's use case, if you already have a security camera facing front, you can just feed it that image and ask "Are the garbage bins out"
Also, if you're worried about cameras sending home images to the cloud, there are non-cloud options. (I use Unifi cameras and Home Assistant gets a RTSP stream over LAN.)
What are they going to do? They have no jurisdiction over me.
Unless you're planning on quitting jobs mid year every year I wouldn't really call that an advantage. On all other years you either end up buying piles of shit you don't need just to not lose your FSA dollars you gambled that you would use but didn't, or end up underestimating your medical bills. It's such a broken system that one even has to make guesses like this. There is no need to make people guess.
> funds being available on day 1
Most people with FSAs have higher disposable income so this isn't really an advantage either. Lower income folks typically have HSAs instead.
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
The showers usually pluck them out and show them, and look like constant success to the public.
> has been criticized even in the ImageNet days as a shower than a doer
When has the world ever rewarded doers? It has almost always rewarded the showers. If it rewarded the doers:
* CTOs would be regarded more highly than CEOs
* A few key Apple engineers would be more well known than Steve Jobs
* Nikola Tesla would be more famous than Edison
> this was just a financial maneuver
I mean, if you could have a couple billion dollars now OR possibly $0 when OpenAI/Anthropic's models can eventually do what yours can do, I wouldn't blame you for taking the former.
I mean, the head of the FAA and the head of the DOT can have a coffee chat with the president and get an executive order then? Anything is possible to do, apparently.