• 10 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2025

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  • Honestly, it varies. Businesses are starting to get wise to DNS adblockers, and are serving more ads from their primary domain (this is part of why you can’t block YouTube ads with a DNS blocker anymore - you can’t block them at the DNS level without blocking all of YouTube).

    You’ll see a noticeable downtick in phone ads from web browsing and ad-sponsored games, but something like a TV or fridge will probably be unaffected because the ads will be served directly from the same host as the content. You’ll see fewer ads but far from zero.

    Also why are you connecting your smart fridge to a travel router? Do you travel with a smart fridge?








  • They’re all generally fine. WiFi thermostats open up more security holes than the others because they are designed to be chatty. I have an ecobee WiFi thermostat that’s isolated to only talking to HA locally using the HomeKit integration, which is fine, but I can’t say I’d recommend it.

    When I set up my thermostat the ZigBee/Z-Wave options were quite frankly ugly and had limited wiring compatibility. Nowadays there’s a bunch more options on the market - you should be fine finding what you need anywhere.

    ZigBee/Z-Wave/Thread are all pretty comparable, so I’d go with whatever you already have on your network - me personally I’m all in on ZigBee right now so I’d probably get one of those.

    If you’re undecided, HA newest official hardware supports ZigBee & Thread so I’d go with one of those.


  • It may not be “speaking” but it is communicating (relatively) complex concepts.

    Dogs with buttons can associate them with people, actions, locations, and emotions, and use those buttons to express those connections, which is by definition communication.

    Any dog owner knows they also communicate these things non-verbally by nosing at their leash, pawing at the door, wagging their tail, or dropping a ball in your lap.

    What’s extra interesting about the dogs with buttons is they will sometimes clearly and communicate emotional ideas without expectation of reward, like FIDO, HAPPY or MOM, GOOD before just laying down to mind their own business.

    Sure, they dont understand the context of the Latin root of the word your saying, and they can’t read Shakespeare, but they can still communicate ideas, and respond to your actions, like someone learning Chinese for the first time and only picking up every 12th word and relying on context clues.

    Their capacity for vocabulary isn’t infinite, but it’s clearly there.

    If the buttons didn’t make any sounds at all he could develop the same associations.

    By that logic would you say deaf people communicating in sign language are not speaking?

    How about Stephen Hawking? You could swap all of the buttons on his computer with Japanese, or a series of beeps and he would eventually figure out how to get the same message across, does that invalidate him using English as his main language of communication?