Used to own an orange pop-top VW Camper bus. Have been drooling after the VW ID.Buzz since the announcement. Would make an amazing roving office.

This Kia ups the stakes. One configuration is as a camper. Waiting to see it in action.

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So… if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That’s how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you’ve installed. It does a match against the phrase ‘slots’ and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it’s all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don’t be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don’t like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you’ll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it’s shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There’s no free lunch.

This shows how one company (li-cycle) that claims they recycle 95% of the lithium does it: https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ

99.99% doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Not a formal audit, but a more recent review of the protocol: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/

My kid was told to fill one out, even though we knew we didn’t qualify. After a LOT of paperwork, it came back with an offer of a $2K loan.

If you right-click and View Source, it all fits on one screen.

I use the same tool. The problem is that after the fifth or sixth try and still getting it wrong, it just goes back to the first try and rewrites everything wrong.

Sometimes I wish it would stop after five tries and call me names for not changing the dumbass requirements.

Most IoT devices that died did so because the vendor went out of business and had to shut off the servers. Most lived in hope that a last minute investment would keep them afloat. In a few other cases, it was the middleware software provider (like Google IoT) that shut down and bricked a device.

This legislation might apply to a big company that decides to discontinue a product line and could then send notices out, but most startups won’t know (or admit defeat) till the last possible moment. By then it’s too late.

That headlamp washer looks like it will gum up with dead bugs in a few years. Also, all the gimmicky internal and external lighting features… pass.

The tunnel is the only feature that is remotely useful.

I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.

The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.

None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.

So many ways…