Congrats! Check hop water if you haven't already!

I got LASIK earlier this year. It's an expensive solution to the many small inconveniences that glasses have, but totally worth it imo.

I went from -5.25 with mild astigmatism to 20/15 eagle vision basically overnight.

Ah, for some reason I thought you were referring to a Roku stick/box, not a smart TV, my mistake 👍.

Not trying to defend Jeff here, but generally these kind of space megaprojects rely on manufacturing materials in space. I.e. capture an asteroid and use its material as the radiation shielding. Not that that's currently anywhere near feasible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My business daddy pays for my Apple machine and it's great for ssh-ing into various cloud-based Linux boxes.

The grain pattern looks like veneer instead of solid wood.

I used to work in a brewery and we used hot caustic followed by acid for cleaning most things but some pneumatic (spent) grain systems got pigged in freezing weather to avoid the wet grain freezing into a plug.

The article says the founders are trying to restart it, so they're probably not going to give up that IP to sell to an investor.

Even still, what's the timeline for a company trying to restart itself before the better move is to open it up? Should there be some timeline like 6-12 months of being defunct before whoever owns it is compelled to make it open? They're going to lost a bunch of momentum being shut down anyways, so maybe it's better for them to make it open so that their community sticks around while they figure out how to get back in business?

That said, even if it's opened up, it still might not fit in with the ecosystem of normal bicycle parts and therefore be mostly worthless/only relevant for an enthusiast. I doubt that whatever features they've got are that much better than what the cycling community can come up with in an open standardized way in the next couple years anyways.

Whatever happens, it kinda sucks for the people who bought into the proprietary system, but I hope they will have learned their lesson and know better for next time :)

Zigbee mostly uses 2.4Ghz, so it's not helping remove congestion from that band anyways but I guess the other protocols do. Can't the devices phone home as soon as they're connected to a hub that's internet connected? Even if the hub has to cooperate with the device, they're made by the same manufacturers so I wouldn't trust tleither of them.

With wifi I can spin up a separate iot vlan that cannot access the internet. That vlan doesn't require my ISP, it's entirely local. I get to control exactly who connects and even who they connect with. I don't see that same control with the alternatives.

I guess I do see an argument for very low power devices using a lower power protocol, but I guess I just don't have any of those devices so it hasn't been an issue for me. And like you said traffic congestion is a valid problem, I've just never experienced it.

I don't understand why smart devices don't all just use wifi. What problems are these competing standards solving?

Cats are variable the same as dogs. Maybe I got lucky but my cat doesn't have any of those problems. On the other hand, my sister's cats do all of the things you described.