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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

    What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

    Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.


  • I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

    Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)















  • Prescriptive vs. descriptive is different in colloquial language than in science.

    If my data logger captures 1kB/km, how many bytes/meter is that? In every other quantitative unit I can think of, the k should cancel out; but if you want computers to be special, that’s your preference.

    Metric sucks. Powers of ten are arbitrary, a fluke of biology. Powers of two are the only sensible way to make a system of measurements.

    Then why are you trying to shoehorn binary into decimal? As in: why are you using decimal prefixes in the first place? Answer is probably that most people have intuition behind powers of ten. You can easily express in log2-bytes instead (a GiB is 30, a TiB is 33…etc.). Be the change you want to see!

    I’m born and raised in the USA, and while imperial units can be handy for a few every day tasks, there’s a reason why the sciences in the US tend to use metric.

    Regarding cooking, I’ll stick to metric, measured by weight. I can double, halve, or multiply my recipe by pi, and all I have to do is look for a different number on my scale.


  • Giga, Mega, Kilo…these are all SI prefixes; they differ by a factor of one thousand, which is very clean in base ten.

    Ten in binary systems isn’t special, but two is; and two to the ten is very nearly a thousand, and a thousand separates the major SI prefixes. This is a neat coincidence, but should not IMHO change the meaning of the prefix.

    Metric units are awesome in large part because of the use of prefixes; messing up the meaning of prefixes is a disservice to the SI/metric system. Giga == billion independent of the context. A light-year is close to 10 petameters, but no one would claim it’s exactly 10Pm.

    Now, if you want to call it an “imperial gigabyte,” by all means…