I'm using NextDNS for DNS level ad blocking as well as iOS built in tools, and I get ads for women's hygiene products (I'm male), travel, dining, server parts, cars, and everything in between.

The main difference between Android and iOS is (or used to be?) that Android typically phones home with everything, frequently visited locations, calendar appointments, voice commands. On iOS most of that runs on-device. Siri voice to text/text to voice runs on device, various "ai" things in photos runs on-device, frequently visited locations are device local.

I migrated from Homey to HA, and with 2500+ entities across some 250-300 devices the HA Green performed well. It would sit at about 55% RAM usage with 5-7% CPU load, so in no way resource strained.

My storage however was not exactly doing well. I frequently hit 80% or more storage used (of the 32GB eMMC). The HA Green uses USB2 and has no connectors for adding more storage like the M.2 slot on the HA Yellow, so there was no easy upgrade path.

Compute wise and RAM wise the device did well. I ran HA, Mosquito, ESPHome Device Builder, Matter Server, OpenThread Border Router, Piper, Speech to Phrase and a couple other add-ons, and besides the speech stuff it worked well and responded fast to almost everything.

Speech in any other language than English is slow at best. English is a little better, but don't expect to have long conversations with it in realtime. For my use case, of making one way announcements, it didn't matter much if it spent 3 or 30 seconds preparing the announcement, it would arrive when it arrived.

The HA Green lives on in my summerhouse which has around 900 entities and maybe 50 devices. It works well there, sits at 2% CPU, 39% RAM, and 45% storage, so I guess it depends on the "size" of your installation.

At home I'm monitoring "all the things", EV stats, EV Charger stats, heat pump stats, TRVs, smart electricity meter, room level presence detection (Bluetooth LE), mmWave presence detection, Smart Switches, Smart TVs, Apple TVs, Sonos Speakers, everything. I also have around 100 automations dealing with various house states, like when the heat pump and EV charger both kick in at full power, an automation will tell the EV charger to chill a bit before it blows the main fuse, and once the heat pump finishes its cycle, ramp up the EV charger again.

The summerhouse, on account of being smaller, naturally has less stuff going on. It's a place for relaxation, and most automations and sensors there are targeted at detecting stuff when we're not around like water leaks, temperature drops, heating anomalies, motion detection by the cameras, etc.

So yeah, the RPi5 has gotten prohibitively expensive, at least to the point where a chinesium mini pc is cheaper, has better performance, and about the same power consumption.

I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter.

Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.

In a software house with 1000+ developer, we're using AI everywhere. We have plenty of skilled engineers to validate the output of LLMs, but instead of spending 3 weeks developing a new feature, they can now spend a couple of hours or days.

We absolutely still need skill engineers for keeping track of what goes on, but their productivity has skyrocketed when they no longer have to obsess over details for a long time.

You still need skilled engineers to "operate" the AIs and to verify the results, but why on earth would you spend 3 weeks coding something by hand that Codex or Claude can spit out in a couple of hours.

For reference, at my employer we have so far in 2026 (1500+ developers) created 75% more code by AI this year compared to all of last year. Features are being delivered faster than ever, in a quality as good or better than before. As another advantage, we can now use skills to guarantee that the code that is created follows best practices, architecture patters, local governance and compliance. The "big thing" right now for us is providing guardrails and governance for agentic AI.

I've long since thrown everything with a user count > 1 out.

Claude Code, Codex or something else running on your laptop could also have done that, and with Claude Cowork / Dispatch you could leave Claude running on your laptop at home, using your phone to have it do the work.

I have no doubt agentic AI exists in our future, I'm just no so sure about needing openclaw.

Thanks for making me a decade younger :)

When rebooting a FileVault encrypted machine, where it normally "hangs" asking for a user to unlock it, you can now SSH into the machine, but instead of getting a prompt it interprets your SSH login as a user logging in, hangs up, and proceeds to booting up.

I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years.

I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

Not suggesting anyone tries it, but modern warfare has evolved. Just like the tanks changed warfare in WW1, and tanks/planes changed warfare in WW2, drones are changing warfare once more.

a $10000 drone took out a multi million dollar Russian warship, and while not exactly 3D printed (at least not all of it), drones are cheap enough to manufacture to be expandable, especially if they can target and destroy things that are not that.

For comparison, a single cannon/mortar shell fired on the Ukrainian front costs €3500, and they fire up to 10000 of them per day. Making a few hundred $10000 drones is cheap compared to that, and while they likely don't hold the same "barrage level" destructive power, they are focused weapons and can destroy much more with less.

I'll add that this being an older house (1970s) we have "other issues" that causes heat loss, so we usually run the log burner for supplementary heat during those few days of -20C. The heat pump can keep the house warm, but you can feel the cold "pushing in" from walls and windows (dual pane).

Sadly the heat pump has also kinda voided all attempts to renovate for saving energy. Our yearly heat cost (heating and warm water) is around €750, and adding insulation would cost around €3500, for a potential saving of around 10-20%, so a total of 20-30 years to earn itself back again.

My experience may have been different as Linux was less mature back then, but ultimately i had a lot of "issues" that required Linux knowledge to fix, so while it was "fine" for me, i wouldn't push it to my family for day to day usage.

Since then i've moved pretty much everyone to Mac. My parents, my in-laws, wife, kids, all use Macs, and the number of "support" calls have fallen from weekly to "once or twice per year", and that's compared to when they ran Windows.

Linux on the desktop is certainly better than it was a decade ago (i still lurk and install new releases from time to time), but it's still a far cry from being optimized for the average user that just needs things to work. Not saying it won't ever get there, but it will take some effort to make it frictionless.

My cheap air to air heat pump in the summerhouse (Panasonic HZ25ZKE) is effective down to -25C and has a COP of 2.22 there. Even at -25C it still delivers twice as much heat energy as the electricity consumed.

https://www.aircon.panasonic.eu/DK_da/product/panasonic-hz25...

Cancelled Netflix for the same reason, as well as their draconian attitude towards "account sharing" meaning I have to authenticate every. god. damned. time. I login from my summerhouse. So yeah, i cancelled and dug out the old eye patch.

I did the exact same thing when CDs began to have sadistic levels of "anti piracy". The fact that I could download a DRM free copy of just about any CD, but the one I just bought would only play in my car kinda settled the deal. I pay for a product, fail to deliver that, and there's no benefit to me buying said product any more.

I doubt my quitting made any difference, but the government deciding that the "state tax on blank media" was going away (was going straight to the record companies pockets) as CDs had sufficient protection anyway, made copy protection completely go away.

Said blank media tax is still there. It's on everything containing storage, even smartphones, where a new iPhone 17 base model includes ~$10 in "blank media tax".