Make sure that if you buy such a device it doesn’t do over the air upgrades. I bought a smart baby monitor (miku) that promised no monthly fees. Then they went bankrupt. A new company was formed that bought the assets. They disabled most functionality via forced over the air update then added a fee to enable the previously free functionality.
Louis Rossman would love to hear from you. Here's a recent video where he covers the exact same situation as you with another company where the purchasing company disables functionality behind a subscription.
And is actively trying to prevent hackers from running stuff locally.
Nest itself did this too. My gen 1 (pre-Google) Nest did forced OTA updates. Once or twice it bricked itself; fortunately it was still able to receive updates and Nest corrected the problem.
Then they couldn't resist fiddling with the UI. Every new update changed the UI such that I had to relearn how to operate it.
That was the last straw, so I disconnected it from my wifi and just used it as a standalone thermostat.
Not the person you are asking. I'm partial to all Shelly stuff. So far very reliable and the price is ok. They do have a cloud but it is entirely optional.
What are the best ways of finding such devices? Almost all the time when I look into some product it ends up being connected to some random cloud service with its own login.
HomeAssistant supports a bunch of home automation systems, including local-only ones like ZWave and Zigbee*. A search for "zwave thermostat" comes up with a lot of results, though I couldn't say how difficult it might be to configure them (I'm only using simpler devices like switches and sensors).
* There are internet-connected controllers and local controllers so you'd also want a local controller. I've used an Aeotec Z-Stick for ZWave devices for around a decade, it plugs into USB, HomeAssistant accesses it directly, and the ZWave network itself is connections between the Z-Stick and the devices without the internet.
One way is to look for devices that have unofficial firmware available, so you can just overwrite the included software for something more under your control. For example, check out Tasmota, "an open source firmware for Espressif ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S or ESP32-C3 chipset based devices": https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
> the US essentially subsidizes the entire drug research industry
This isn’t entirely true. The US does pay more for drugs but a lot of this money isn’t spent on research. In fact pharmaceutical companies spend far more on advertising than research:
Nutritional studies are notoriously difficult to conduct. You either have to isolate subjects and monitor everything they eat and when. Or you have to rely on self reported data and people do an atrocious job of tracking food, estimating portion size, etc.
This study did the former:
> The duration of the study is 7 days including 3 days with controlled diet and 4 days (including 5 nights) in a metabolic chamber at the Institute of Nutritional Medicine at the University of Hohenheim.
I imagine it was prohibitively expensive to have more participants.
With the way that Apple prevents you from reusing Apple IDs, does it mean that if my Apple ID is blah@mydomainname.com and I migrate mydomainname.com (currently using G Suite free) over to iCloud that I can't set up blah@mydomainname.com?
You can. However, if you switch your Apple ID to a different address before you set up both the domain and the blah@mydomainname.com address to route to your account, you won't be able to set up blah@mydomainname.com for any account under your iCloud subscription for a year.
There are a bunch of mypy configuration options to disallow certain things like --disallow-untyped-defs. There’s also --strict which forces typing on everything.
Man, developing python with pydantic and "mypy --strict" (I follow pydantic's config [0] where I can) is such Type 2 Fun. It feels like a totally different language. Yeah it takes a little more time at first but then type inference and autocomplete starts to kick in and then you're screaming fast. And you "compile" it and everything just works. No hunting down edge cases or tracebacks cause you forgot to catch a None. I find it super satisfying. Much easier to stay in flow state when you aren't having to stop every few minutes to test stuff and dig through tracebacks.
It's comparing apples and oranges. Presumably the OP is not using premium concrete (terracotta) tiles on his roof. Tesla is cheaper than a premium roof with solar panels and the details of said comparison are laid out on their site.
The comparison on Tesla's site still looks misleading.
"comparable price of a typical roof + solar panels"
Having premium concrete shingles isn't a "typical roof". They also use small greyed out text to say they are comparing it to concrete shingles, but use big black text for the higher price, and hide the fact that the Solar Roof is only cheaper because of tax breaks behind a "See More" button.
For a ~10kW (AC) system you're going to pay about that much, I just had it done.
It's misleading to look at the price of the panels alone. You also need (micro) inverters, you need to have it hooked up to the the grid, you need several inspections (construction + electrical). Getting all those panels installed on your roof and wired up is quite labor intensive as well. The installation cost is significant.
