The home assistant voice is the mic and speaker but isn’t a system itself. You attach it to your existing home assistant. If you don’t have home assistant set up you’ll want to look into that first.

I know people who are 45 and have never had a job and just been taken care of by their parents their whole lives. If their parents were gone, they would not survive. Because they are a child who can’t take care of themselves.

The cause and effect are backwards in most of the scenarios you provided though. Living with your parents doesn’t mean you can’t take care of yourself, but not being able to take care of yourself means you need to live with your parents. So yes, when you see an adult child, they almost 100% of the time live with their parents, but that doesn’t mean all people living with their parents are adult children. To me, “child” reflects your ability to take care of yourself, not where you live.

You have a job and pay for things yourself. That’s not a child. There may be other complications in your situation, and I’m not going to say everything is perfect, but it sounds like “incapable child” isn’t specifically one of the problems.

I’m aware. Those cases all extend though. Because a lot of times the decision isn’t intended to be a concrete answer.

I just had to conduct an interview. I got to talk to the person for a whole hour. And now I need to determine if we should hire this person.

I definitely have insufficient information. No interview process has ever finished with an abundance of complete information (well, if the candidate is bad enough or just screaming slurs the whole time, that’s pretty complete). And yet I have to make a serious decision that has real consequences for my company AND for the candidate.

I don’t get the option to gather more information. I get it. This case is not fun to deal with.

But regardless of what the company says, the question isn’t “do I think this person will without a doubt be our top employee” or “WILL this person succeed” … the question is “Given the information at hand, do I think there is a higher likelihood of the person succeeding or struggling?” I can make a decision based on “given the information at hand” … and when I do, I always qualify it as such.

If I say yes, and they hire the person, and they don’t fit at the company, I can still just point to “they answered all the interview questions properly” and it’s not my fault things went poorly. I may also say no to amazing candidates who just didn’t represent themselves well in the interview. Even if I cannot make a sound decision, I have to make one though.

And maybe I’m just unlucky in life, but I feel like I face a lot of situations where I need to make decisions with incomplete information just because more information isn’t available, or time is truly a factor in the decision. Some of life is always going to require some guesswork. And we can just try our best to make educated guesses. There is no such thing as “complete” information.

But I fully agree with you that there are situations where some people are just impatient, and corners are cut. But a lot of neurotypicals often don’t like those people too. That’s not just “neurotypicals do this” … that’s “lazy/impatient people do this” and I guess I’m lucky in the sense that I rarely have to deal with this, but then again, I work in a field where basically everyone is on the spectrum.

There are 3 things possibly at play here.

Are you trying to make decisions about the same question? If the top score in a game is currently 87 out of 100, and the last player takes their turn. The announcer says the player scored “Ninety…” they won. It doesn’t matter if the complete information is “Ninety-five”, “Ninety-nine” or even “Ninety… just flat ninety” … the final player is the winner. You dont need the second digit. Knowing the score is in the range of 90-99 isn’t COMPLETE information, but it is ENOUGH information… To answer “did this player win” … if you wanted to know if they beat the world record score of 97, then you’d need the second digit. You only need fully complete information if you need a fully complete answer.

Another option is that you already have complete information. “I tossed a coin 10 times and 8 times it landed on heads” – what happened the other 2 times? You already know. Just because no one said it doesnt mean you don’t have it. Not everything needs to be said explicitly for it to be true. “There’s 2 types of people in the world: those that can derive missing data.”

The third option is just that it truly doesn’t matter, usually because of the rule of the first point. How long it takes to get to the destination, whether 3 hours or 4 hours, or 3.5 hours… doesnt matter if the destination closes in 2 hours. “More than 2” is complete enough. Some things are ok with vague answers because the question was vague. Someone may have said “how long does it take to get there” but that truly doesnt matter, because the secret real question was “Can we arrive before the store closes”

thanks Daniel Stenberg!

That makes sense. I have no idea if I have a ground. If I don’t I assume I need a battery powered thermostat, which I would then need to periodically change batteries on or externally power?

The fact that I don’t know what I have, means I dont know what I need, means I need to bring an electrician or someone who knows what is going on, and suddenly the project becomes more work.

I could totally handle the “build a HA dashboard” part of things… it’s the physically setting up devices part that gets me every time.

I was under the impression that some smart thermostats need batteries because the “power to the thermostat” wire was designed for super low power devices, or is otherwise not there at all (thus the different number of wires). So “already wired with everything you need” varies from house to house.

This sounds a lot like what I want to have done. my biggest issue has been figuring out which thermostat to buy? Finding a zigbee vs zwave vs wifi model. Do I need to have 4, 5 or 6 wires or something? Do I need to re-run wires in my wall if I have the wrong number available?

Even just having a manual read-out and the ability to remotely manually change settings would be a win. Everything about this dashboard looks cool to me, but even without the smart auto changing of settings, I want this, but just dont want to spend money and buy the wrong thing.

it confuses me because I have my own internal model of what i was trying to do. I know what I’m capable of. Executing on my capabilities doesn’t seem praiseworthy.

If I’m capable of 95%, and I only execute at 90%, then I feel like I’ve done poorly. But if everyone else is only executing at 75% then just because my model says “I could have done better” it can still feel weird getting praise, even if it is “justified”

Add a clause that says an equivalent federal tax would nullify this tax. And then use this until the national one passes. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough for now

Remember ALF? He’s back. In pog form.

Rule #1 of shipping code: never be around for the fallout. Do not stick around after clicking deploy.

I’ve never gotten any automated locks because I’ve always been concerned about security around them, but also, Ive had too many warped doors in my life where I have to lean on the door to get the deadbolt to properly set. Which means that there is no way an automated lock would be able to automatically set itself.

Is the answer here: “there are just some doors this won’t work on” or do the smart locks have some way of working around that?

“Set and forget” time based thermostat programming only works if your daily routine doesn’t change daily or weekly or have outliers. The ability to change manually, or add other factors (is anyone home? let it get a bit colder, since it doesn’t matter) is pretty great.

But I would still advocate for no internet connected thermostats from the OP. Your thermostat should be isolated to your home network (via zigbee/zwave or a quality VLAN) connecting to a server/hub you control. And your app should be communicating to your server/hub. Your thermostat shouldn’t be able to report back to google whether or not you are home.

If you don’t understand the desire then you don’t have a use case. And that’s ok. But that doesn’t mean other people don’t have a use case.

Properly set up home automation can reduce your energy usage. Track temperature throughout your house and open blinds, only direct heat/cooling to rooms that need it, etc. Sure a thermostat is programmable but it’s limited by the ability to just turn on/off heat and a few temperature sensors. You can drastically expand what your thermostat can do (ie motorized blinds) and information it has access to (temperature outside, current weather, etc).

Or maybe someone is the type to have panic attacks about forgetting to turn the oven off. Having the ability to see oven status on the go is nice.

Or maybe someone has a larger house than you and the journey to the thermostat is more arduous than yours. Or the journey to the dishwasher or clothes dryer to see if it’s done is arduous.

Or maybe someone has a disability and having quick access to various things is a huge time saver.

Maybe someone has a sensory issue and loud buzzing from a dryer finishing is problematic, so they want to disable the “finished” alert from the device and just receive a notification on their phone.

but if youre gathering that much data and making decisions with it, then from the OP “no internet connected thermostats” is a must. None of your smart home stuff should be able to phone home. Basically the openWRT argument but also for smart home. Use zigbee or zwave so devices can’t just directly phone home and must simply connect through a hub (that you should control).

tl;dr - plenty of reasons to want these things, they just may not apply to you.

Nice! Then you get none of the relaxation and rejuvenation of time off, and got nothing done.

This is also what I do.

https://cherryxtrfy.com/mice/mz1-wireless/

This mouse is designed to be extremely light weight. So the battery is small (500 mAh is less than half a AAA battery).

And it’s designed to handle up to 50g of acceleration (ie, fast FPS twitch movements), so it has to be doing a lot of tracking.

So between higher power consumption than normal mice and a smaller battery than normal mice, it only advertises 75* hours of use (* Depending on Hz, lighting on/off and playstyle).

I could absolutely get a mouse that lasts much longer. But not one that meets all the other criteria I have for a performance gaming mouse. I wasn’t attempting to come in hot about “wireless bad” or anything, just sharing my experience.

The batteries are my main issue.

12 hour battery? I charge every night.

4 day battery life? I forget to charge until it dies, and then it dies in the middle of using it.

The mouse I have is only wireless for the “less drag while gaming” aspect but the cable is actually super nice, so I dont even mind the cable… I just leave it plugged in now.

NFTs are basically Bitcoin and fall under fake money for criminals.

I had to have a friend help me because a company I bought from only did customer support through Instagram.