- Wake word detection isn't as good as the Google Homes (more false positives, more false negatives - so I can't just tune sensitivity).

- Mic and speakers are both of poor quality in comparison to Google Home devices.

- Flow is awkward. On a Google Home device, you can say "Okay Google, turn on the lights" with no pause. On the Voice PE, you have to say "Hey Mycroft [awkward pause while you wait for the acknowledgement noise] turn on the lights" - it seems like the Google Home devices start buffering immediately after the wake word, but the Voice PE doesn't.

- Voice fingerprints don't exist, so this prevents the device from figuring out that two separate people are talking, or who is talking to it.

- The device has poor identification of background noise, so if you talk to it while there is a TV playing speech in the background, it will continue to listen to the speech from the TV. It will eventually transcribe everything you said + everything from the TV and get confused. (This probably folds into the voice print thing as well.)

On the upside, though:

- Setting it up was really easy.

- All of the entities I want to control with it are already available, without needing to export them or set them up separately in Google Home.

- Despite all of the above complaints, the device is probably 80-90% of what I realistically need to use it day-to-day. If they throw a better speaker and mic array in, I'd likely be comfortable replacing all of my Google Homes.

Every Samsung phone I've ever owned - great hardware, but the software is a mess, especially with all of the Samsung apps that duplicate the Google apps.

Sony smart TV - was excited about running Android TV apps, but the onboard hardware is so bad that everything lags, and I actually ran out of space after installing 10-20 apps (it only has 4GB of flash storage). Also, its Ethernet adapter has a hardware bug that occasionally freezes up my entire network by spamming it with flow control frames.

1: https://github.com/SwiCago/HeatPump

2: https://github.com/echavet/MitsubishiCN105Esphome

I've got this running on several units and it works great. If you buy ESP32 development boards with pre-soldered pins, you can even build the boards without soldering.

We are hiring systems engineers experienced in C++ to work on the game engine that powers our platform, supporting extensive user-generated content from 2M+ developers. We have three roles we're actively hiring for:

Senior/Principal Software Engineer - Network Transport: https://careers.roblox.com/jobs/5499152

The Engine Networking Team pulls the players together by ensuring the communication of the game state to all. You will help the players experience the game as a nearly synchronous world.

Senior Software Engineer - Foundation: https://careers.roblox.com/jobs/5377484

The Foundation team works on the building blocks of Roblox itself -- core C++ libraries. Your work will touch every part of the engine, from threading and memory management to physics and scripting.

Senior Software Engineer - Engine Reliability: https://careers.roblox.com/jobs/5555964

The Reliability team works to ensure that the Roblox Engine is as stable, reliable, and debuggable as possible. You will work to ensure that Roblox delivers world-class user experience while also supporting internal developers to root-cause issues and prevent recurrence.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

[0]: https://www.metahvac.com/

I think this might eventually become a thing once science gets us far enough that there's an "obvious" refrigerant choice for most applications, but we definitely aren't there yet. There are hundreds of different kinds that perform better or worse in different applications.

AFAIK all of the big commercial systems that do multiple different types of heat transfer use water to do it, thus bypassing the entire refrigerant selection issue. Right now the most advanced we can do is VRF ("Variable Refrigerant Flow") systems that can individually select air handlers for cooling or heating (i.e. move the heat from one room to another). These are still commercial units and not really available for residential installs.

No idea if it's any good though, and I don't really like the big logo and big black IR receiver.

This is a legislation problem IMO: companies need to be held to reasonable expectations when they sell a product. My ink cartridge shouldn't say it's "empty" when the page counter reaches 100 [and it's still actually full]. Neither should cloud devices go to the landfill because the company selling them decided that they don't want to support them anymore.

Companies foisting negative externalities on us (like more e-waste) in exchange for more profit are a blight and should be treated (and prevented) as such.

Unfortunately, at least on my current model, the UX to access this feature is very bad: repeatedly pressing the "power" button until it reaches the desired level. I've had other microwaves where you just key in the desired power after pressing "power", and much prefer that method.

I don't know whether Panasonic has licensed this to any other manufacturer.

Last year, after receiving several spam texts from numbers that were registered to Bandwidth.com (which was already difficult to discover), I sent an abuse report. I was not only told that Bandwidth.com couldn't do anything about it (other than forward the report to the reseller), but also they couldn't even tell me who they were reselling services to due to privacy reasons, and did not even know who the end customer was. They advised me to contact the police... To report text message spam.

That said, I've got no idea if they actually do anything actionable with this data. It certainly doesn't seem to have reduced my spam volume. Now I just let Android Messages filter the spam out.