I really wasn’t with the initial comment elsewhere. Oldish brain full of too much stuff shortcutted a real vague memory straight to “yeah that guy Tim Apple” lol

Not quite invisible but you could also splash and wade into a pool of strong acid thinking it was water, during what first seemed like a somewhat routine FUBAR maintenance situation…filling your boots etc.

Hmm nah, “Tim Cook”? I don’t think that’s right, pretty sure it’s Tim Apple…

(tries to save face by pretending to double down on the “silly joke”)

Thanks, really worried for a few there that I was cracking up

Wait a minute…

The one saving grace is that their one-off custom damn shit always feels well designed, and they move a lotta units (which helps with repairs when everything is GD custom). Dunno if that’s changed in recent years.

With that said I avoid them for personal use usually for the same reason, why have a desktop if you don’t get the benefit of parts compatibility?!

Crap DOUBLE WAIT I’m now realizing Tim Apple wasn’t a real guy’s name, dammit RIP my other comment

Wait is “Tim Onion” a silly joke riffing on Tim Apple (think that’s his name) at Apple?

But don’t you see?! Those increased expenses will just be passed along to the scammed!

(No actual point here just thought it was funny to compare to the logic we hear for not punishing other abusive businesses)

Blech, I’ve heard stories in my industrial automation days of people being clipped by invisible high pressure steam leaks. No frickin thank you, regular stovetop steam jacks me up frequently enough.

More gut bacteria for the rest of us, that’s what I say!

Argh, okay gotcha. Someone needs to start a Framework, but for IoT devices. This is bullshit lol

I do understand what you mean, but I think you’re probably significantly overestimating the difficulty of using the tool. One of its major strengths is its ability to just understand you, like you’d talk to anyone human, with the benefit that you can even instruct it to use a style you prefer. Just say “I’d like your answer to be terse, let’s see if we’re on the right track before getting into details”. Just as an example.

With all that said you know what you want and need better than anyone else, that’s all I’ve got to say on it, cheers!

Just throwing this out there, but the problem you’re describing sounds like a good fit for an LLM I’ve been using for similar purposes, Claude.

I’ve found it to be really good at helping me slog through what would be a burdensome and wasteful amount of reading, in order to answer specific questions OR to get a baseline understanding of a thing.

It’s a bit hard to know how much value comes from my engineering background and my tendency to “know what I don’t know” and thereby ask focused questions, but it’s definitely worth a shot. I have found it to be surprisingly sophisticated and much better than slogging through the wasteland of bad search results + too much unrelated but real info.

A topic like this where there’s a tremendous amount of legit docs, articles, and forum activity - it’s really the exact use case where it’s very difficult for a human, and very easy for an LLM to effectively digest that info.

Some caveats I’ve noticed:

• it sometimes is overly agreeable / “friendly” when it should be more direct
• it does sometimes hallucinate or say BS with casual confidence, which sucks because the more you need the info the less well you can spot that. It hasn’t hampered usefulness too much for me, but then again I’m usually able to spot the mistakes even in ~unfamiliar subjects
• they’ve moved the free tier back to a less capable model at the moment…most of my good experiences are with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but Claude 3 Haiku (present free tier) is still good

If you’re really curious but the volume of reading and documentation to get started is presenting a big barrier, try using Claude to see how quickly you might be able to clear that obstacle. It’s been removing those exact barriers for me very effectively lately.

Edit to add: a particularly useful way I can imagine folks in your shoes using this - as a “companion” while you try to follow a guide in an article somewhere. It can answer questions about terms you don’t understand, even reasoning behind doing certain steps or what to do if it goes wrong. In fact, you could almost certainly just feed it the written procedure itself (telling it that you’re doing so) and really get it to reason about the process with you. Just help get you through whatever implementation.

Argh, this is exactly the scenario that I’ve anticipated and has kept me away from similar (home automation as well).

That’s what I want, high reliability, local only storage, remote view of some kind, and minimal (ongoing) fuss. Sounds like you did not quite land on that if the thing you bought grosses you out? Or do you mean something different?

Oh man, that’s hilarious. “Our business model doesn’t actually even work where we live. But I know what we’ll do about that, we’re going to do it exactly the same in a place we don’t have a clue about!”

The hubris, lol. It’s delicious.

Edit: misunderstood the comment I was replying to

That’s a bummer. Frankly most creative (or other) genius tends to come with a LOT of downsides from everything I’ve seen, so not too surprising. A creative legacy like his is not built on reasonable takes, lol. That’s no excuse for being a jerk of course, I don’t like jerks.

Holy crap haha! What a quote. Certainly made his point of view clear lol

You’re right, but I will say the federal govt has a sometimes magic way of greasing certain wheels and getting things done in a hurry, if the right person is pushing on it.