I personally like the Shelly switches. They're just WiFi relays, so you can control them remotely, but also use a normal wall switch to control them.

I like shelly for their openness, but I still find them a bit less reliable than some more premium things like Plejd. Unfortunately Plejd isn't very open. It's doable (e.g. using with HA) but not pleasant yet. Hopefully that might change though

The best part is you get to choose from wide variety of normal looking switches, not some designers coffee break sketch of "advanced and futuristic".

Shelly seems to be more US-centric, over on EU side I've had good experiences with Sonoff ZBMINI relays - same idea, only on Zigbee connection instead of WiFi.

I like Shelly devices a lot.

Plenty of musicians have created music using randomised generators since forever. Using AI doesn't have to make the art less meaningful, it depends on what you do with said output.

Plenty of "low effort" art gets valued at arguably ridiculous prices, purely due to the name of the artist. Is suspending buckets of paint on a pendulum to let physics do the work worth more than providing an AI with a prompt?

In the end, the value of a piece of work is in the eye of the beholder.

It is the same stupid arguments from 50 years ago that the electric guitar is just noise.

These people that are so offended by AI art and music I suspect are the type of people who would NEVER go to an art gallery anyway. They don't even know what you are referring to with buckets of paint.

AI Art is just a topic to be pissed off about and generate sentences about online to them.

Randomized generators are not the same as AI models built on the back of other artists who will never be paid for their contribution to the model.

You never paid the inventor of the English language you're using.

Or the ideas in your head that are really just part of a prediction model that is a function of the inputs you surround yourself with.

Every art student copies. Voraciously. Every engineer. Every musician.

Babies and toddlers are learning machines. They soak in the world around them. For free.

Yes, but the English Language isn't sold back to me at a premium. Also, it wasn't developed by a private company, its evolved over time through the effort of many generations of people.

Human learning is not the same thing as building a for-profit computer model. And making this comparison is part of my problem with the industry.

And none of that music has been good

We've already seen Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok steal content from each other all the time.

Content is a commodity that's losing value, fast. Blogs regularly post meaningless content for the sake of keeping up a regular schedule. I've seen this start years ago when junior devs got recommended to keep up blogs for their resume. The amount of blogposts I've seen documenting basic syntax of programming languages is insane. Or clickbait posts telling you "why you shouldn't use Typescript".

The trend where you need to actively push content for traffic is a bubble that's gonna burst. You're already seeing it happen with streaming services, they're culling their content because it's just becoming way too much.

It's essentially the extension of the arms race between writers and plagiarism detectors.

I've definitely used AI generated text to help me out with suggestions. It's pretty nice when you have a bit of writers block. All the important stuff like facts, numbers, and code examples should be written by yourself in my opinion.

It makes me think of the Google phone bot talking to other automated phone systems.

Buzzfeed has been pumping out so much meaningless content that I doubt it changes much. They already scrape so much content from /r/askreddit that it might as well be automated already, now they can auto generate the fluff text between citations.

Blogs have been becoming less and less relevant to me over the years as companies shifted to creating content for the sake of traffic. Some tech blogs have some really interesting posts, hidden in a sea of glorified Getting Started tutorials.

In BuzzFeeds case this might actually improve the quality.

I've been looking into Go, but two old colleagues of mine that use it basically turned me off on it. The amount of complaints I hear about quirks and things that take more time than other languages make me not want to pick it up.

Eh, it's also because the British royal family is basically a reality show.

The Dutch royal family, by contrast, have a bit more privacy.