To me, it seems like most of Lemmy consists of users who are older millennials (born at some point in the 80s), male, and about 50/50 split between living in North America or the EU.

Do you fit this demographic?

At least in this post, I'm not advocating for any particular political position; I mean for this to be a more generalized discussion.

I have never understood what prompts people to attend political rallies. None of the current US political candidates 100% align with my views, but I am very confident that I made the right choice in who I voted for. That is to say, I'd consider myself a strong supporter of [name here].

To me, it feels like attending a political rally is like attending a college lecture. You have a person giving you information, but you don't gain anything by hearing it in-person as opposed to reading it or watching a recording. If I want to learn something, it's much more comfortable for me to read and article or watch a video in the comfort of my own home. If I want to understand what a political candidate stands for, I'd much rather watch a recording of a town-hall meeting or read something she (oops) wrote rather than taking the time to drive to a rally, get packed in with a bunch of other people, and simply stand and listen.

I understand concerts. Hearing live music sounds vastly different than listening to a recording. Same with movies; most of us don't have an IMAX theater at home. When you're trying to gather information, though, what's the draw in standing outside in a crowd at listening to it in person?

I generally try to stay informed on current events. With the exception of what gets posted here, I normally get my news from CNN. I tend to lean left politically, but not always.

The problem I always run into is that every news site I read, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, is always filled with pointless bullshit. Specifically, sports, celebrity news, and product placement. "Some shitty pop singer is dating some shitty actor" or "These are our recommendations for the best mass-produced garbage-quality fast fashion from Temu" or "Some overpaid dickhead threw a ball faster than some other overpaid dickhead."

What I'd love to find is a news source that's just news that matters. No celebrity gossip, sports, opinion pieces, etc. Just real events that have an impact on some part of the world. Legislation, natural events, economic changes, wars, political changes, that kind of thing.

Does this exist, or is all journalism just entertainment?

I have been using the BlueIris NVR integration (from HACS) for quite some time, and it works great for triggering BI from HA. I've trying to do the opposite now: Fire off automations in HA whenever BI detects motion on one of my cameras.

I've never used MQTT before, so I'm learning as I go, but I think I have most of my setup configured properly. I've installed Mosquitto and the MQTT integration in HA. I've configured BI to connect to HA, and running "Test" in the "Edit MQTT Server" menu in BI shows a good connection and no errors. I've set my cameras to post an MQTT event when the alert is triggered (and I've verified that the alerts are in fact being triggered).

Nothing happens in HA, though. The "Motion" sensor for my camera in HA stays at "Clear." In fact, the history shows no change at all, ever.

I have the events in BI set up as follows: On Alert: MQTT Topic - BlueIris/&CAM/Status and Payload - { "type": "&TYPE", "trigger": "ON" } On Reset: Exactly the same, but change ON to OFF.

I've tried change the MQTT autodiscovery header in HA from "homeassistant" to "BlueIris," and it made no difference. The Mosquitto logs show a login from HA, so I feel like I'm close, but I'm not sure where else to look.

Edit: I installed MQTT explorer, and I've verified that the messages are making it to Mosquitto, and they appear to be correctly formatted.

UPDATE: I set the MQTT integration to listen to the MQTT messages coming from BI, and sure enough, they were coming through just fine. For some reason, the BI integration just wasn't seeing them. Digging through the system logs, I saw some errors "creating a binary sensor" coming from the BI integration. The only thing I can think is that because I didn't have MQTT set up when I first installed the BI integration, something went wrong with the config (although I had already rebooted the system several times). I re-downloaded the BI integration and re-installed it, and now everything works perfectly.

I'm looking for a portable air conditioner (the kind with 1 or 2 hoses that go to outside air). The problem I'm running into is that every single one I find has some kind of "smart" controller built in. The ones with no WiFi connectivity still have buttons to start/stop the AC, meaning that a simple Zigbee outlet switch won't work. I could switch the AC off, but it would require a button-press to switch it back on. The ones with WiFi connectivity all require "cloud" access; my IoT devices all connect to a VLAN with no internet access, and I plan to keep it that way.

I suppose I could hack a relay in place of the "start" button, but I'd really rather just have something I can plug in and use.

I can't use a window AC; the room has no windows. I'll need to route intake/exhaust through the wall. So far, I can't find any "portable" AC that will work for me.

What I'm looking for is a portable AC that either:

• Connects to WiFi and integrates with HA locally.
• Has no connectivity but uses "dumb" controls so I can switch it with a Zigbee outlet switch.

Any ideas?

Yesterday, Brian Dorsey was executed for a crime he committed in 2006. By all accounts, during his time in prison, he became remorseful for his actions and was a "model prisoner," to the point that multiple corrections officers backed his petition for clemency.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/us/brian-dorsey-missouri-execution-tuesday/index.html

In general, the media is painting him as the victim of a justice system that fails to recognize rehabilitation. I find this idea disgusting. Brian Dorsey, in a drug-induced stupor, murdered the people who gave him shelter. He brutally ended the life of a woman and her husband, and (allegedly) sexually assaulted her corpse. There is an argument that he had ineffective legal representation, but that doesn't negate the fact that he is guilty.

While I do believe that he could have been released or had his sentence converted to life in prison, and he could have potentially been a model citizen, this would have been a perversion of justice. Actions that someone takes after committing a barbaric act do not undo the damage that was done. Those two individuals are still dead, and he needed to face the ramifications for his actions.

Rehabilitation should not be an option for someone who committed crimes as depraved as he did. Quite frankly, a lethal injection was far less than what he deserved, given the horror he inflicted on others. If the punishment should fit the crime, then he was given far more leniency than was warranted.

I just set up a local instance of Invidious. I created an account, exported my YouTube subscriptions, and imported them into Invidious. The first time I tried, it imported 5 subscriptions out of 50 or so. The second time I tried, it imported 9.

Thinking there might be a problem with the import function, I decided to manually add each subscription. Every time I click "Subscribe," the button will switch to "Unsubscribe," then immediately switch back to "Subscribe." If I look at my subscriptions, it was never added.

My first thought was a problem with the PostgreSQL database, but that wouldn't explain why some subscriptions work when I import them.

I tried rebooting the container, and it made no difference. I'm running Invidious in a Ubuntu 22.04 LXC container in Proxmox. I installed it manually (not with Docker). It has 100GB of HDD space, 4 CPU cores, and 8GB of memory.

What the hell is going on?

As is stands, parents are able to claim their children as dependents on their tax returns, which lowers their overall tax liability and in effect means that the parents either pay less in taxes or receive a higher return at the end of each year.

Until they reach the age at which they can work, children are a drain on society. They receive public schooling and receive the same benefit from public services that adults do, yet they contribute nothing in return. At the point that they reach maturity and are gainfully employed and paying taxes, they become a functioning member of society.

If a parent decides to have a child, they are making a conscious decision to produce another human being. They could choose to get a sterilization surgery, use birth control, or abort the pregnancy (assuming they don't live in a backwards state that's banned it). Yet even if they decide to have 15 children, the rest of society has to foot the bill for their poor decisions until the child reaches adulthood.

By increasing taxes on parents instead of reducing them, you not only incentivize safe sex and abortion, but you shift the burden of raising a child solely to the individuals who are responsible for the fact that that child exists.

I am a strong advocate for social programs: Single-payer healthcare, welfare programs, low-income housing, etc, but for adults who in turn contribute what they can. A child should only be supported by the individuals who created it.

I've been running HA for a while, and it's been working well; I haven't had to change much in a few months. That being said, it's fun to tinker with it, and I'm curious to hear what kind of automations the rest of the community is using. What automations are you most proud of? What are your favorite? What kind of interesting automations have you written?

My personal favorite is an automation that displays the current "apparent" temperature on a Hue bulb. It takes an average of the temperature, humidity, and luminance around my property and uses the average to compute an "apparent" (feels like) temperature. Then it applies a cosine function to the apparent temperature (to approximate how people feel temperature change), uses the resulting value to calculate a level between blue and red in CIELAB (a perceptually uniform color space), converts the results to RGB, and sets the color value of the hue bulb. The result is a bulb that changes color so that the change in color (as perceived by the eye) mirrors how the temperature "feels" outside. Ultimately what that means is that we can look at a small lamp with the hue bulb and say "It feels cold outside; we should put on a coat." It's probably overkill, but it was a fun programming exercise. We've started saying things like "It's really blue today, I don't feel like going out."

I'd really enjoy reading what kind of interesting automations everyone else has written.

I have a decent amount of video footage that I'd like to share with friends and family. My first thought was Youtube, but this is all home videos that I really don't want to share publicly.

A large portion of my video footage is 4k/60, so I'm ideally looking for a solution where I can send somebody a link, and it gives a "similar to Youtube" experience when they click on the link. And by "similar to Youtube," I mean that the player automatically adjusts the video bitrate and resolution based on their internet speed. Trying to explain to extended family how to lower the bitrate if the video starts buffering isn't really an option. It needs to "just work" as soon as the link is clicked; some of the individuals I'd like to share video with are very much not technically inclined.

I'd like to host it on my homelab, but my internet connection only has a 4Mbit upload, which is orders of magnitude lower than my video bitrate, so I'm assuming I would need to either use a 3rd-party video hosting service or set up a VPS with my hosting software of choice.

Any suggestions? I prefer open-source self-hosted software, but I'm willing to pay for convenience.

I've been going through my system logs and working on resolving the miscellaneous errors; mostly it's just due to poorly-written automations where the automation would be called while it was still running. Easy fix.

What I can't seem to fix is a constant stream of "Unknown cluster command" errors on cluster 0xef00 coming from ZHA. I've discovered that the 0xef00 cluster is a manufacturer-specific cluster. All of my errors come from Tuya mmWave sensors; apparently Tuya uses this cluster for inter-device communication.

All of my devices work, but this error is polluting the logs to a large degree; right now it's showing over 100k instances of this error. Is there a way to have HA just ignore this cluster completely? It's not causing any issues with functionality, but I would rather the logs just show actual errors so I can more easily identify problems and fix them.

I've read that Z2MQTT doesn't have this issue, but swapping from ZHA to Z2MQTT is not an option for me, especially for what amounts to a logging issue. It would require re-pairing almost 100 Zigbee devices and modifying nearly every single automation.

I upgraded the head unit in my car recently. The head unit itself runs Android, and it supports Android Auto. So far, I've been using Android Auto via bluetooth, and it works great. I have no complaints.

I started using Android Auto just because it seemed logical, but I'm not understanding exactly what the benefits are. Since the head unit runs Android, couldn't I just install the apps I need on the head unit itself and just tether my phone for internet access? It also supports a 5G connection, so if I installed a SIM card, I don't think I'd need my phone at all. To be honest, I'm leading toward that; it just seems easier and a lot more straightforward.

I have no complaints about Android Auto, I just don't really see what it brings to the table other than a layer of abstraction over the head unit's native interface. It might be worth mentioning that the only thing I do in my car is streaming music and navigation.

What features am I missing? Surely there is a compelling reason for Android Auto to exist.