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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Nice! Hadn’t heard of this project. The old chromebooks are easy to find in e-waste lots, mostly from schools. Hardware’s not ancient. Presumably optimized for web services. Just a lot of broken screens and keyboards.

    But if you stack ‘em like server blades in a beowulf cluster you might have a decently power-efficient and scalable host for microservices, web apps, lemmy instances, whatever. With UPS for each node lol. Basically free.

    I dunno, could be a fun class project for the kids to learn on with a minimal budget?





  • 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.









  • And for others the daily recommended has been considered far too low for a long time (US example).

    Last I checked the consensus is to skip the multi. A fistful of kale, spinach, arugula, or similar dark leaves will tend to have a more balanced profile and far lower risk of trace heavy metals and other contaminants.

    TLDR: Popeye was right. Want to be strong to the finish? Eat dat spinach!