Wow, not sure how to interpret your experience that a RPi wasn't powerful enough to manage watering a few plants. I can only suspect the overall software setup is massively bloated.
If you want to run EspHome inside HA, and you recompile the devices (every release of EH), you want a decent processor/disk. The ESP stuff is a surprisingly heavy compile for a puny microcontroller.
A recent RPi is sufficient to handle a few plants - though, yes, recompilation will take time. The ESP is a beautiful piece of software, hence I highly recommend it. My native language has an expression that describes this situation perfectly: the appetite grows with eating. Next thing you know you have 2k or more entities, and your HA even handles some video feeds.
The important thing is that it's pretty much always easy to make an upgrade thanks to the good design of the backup system. Don't forget to set up backups in either case, it's a sin to not use such a complete system :)
Recompilation has nothing, or should have nothing, to do with the requirements to run the system. If that is indeed a requirement then the system is indeed bonkers.
For a system handling sensors and actuators you should be able to run a farm off a RPi in terms of compute power. Quad-core at 2.4 GHz and up to 16 GiB RAM on a RPi 5, that's a crazy amount of compute for the use-case.
The way ESPHome works is that your device configuration is a yaml file that produces a compiled binary artifact and it can be updated OTA with wifi. The downside of this is that these updates are pushed via the device you are running HAOS and hence compiling can take a while.
HAOS is quite bloated but it's also very versatile and FOSS
There's no reason you have to run ESPHome on your Home Assistant server.
It's offered as a HA a̵d̵d̵o̵n̵ app for ease of use (makes it a one-click install), but you can also just `pip install esphome` or use the provided Docker image and get the exact same UI, but with everything (including compilation) running on your much beefier laptop.
So your binaries get compiled quickly and you can still do the OTAs directly from your laptop. HA needn't be involved.
Every time you make a change to your yaml it requires a recompile. I think now ESP Home allows you to change configurations and upload a bin compiled on your main machine so it's really not a limitation at all. Plus, once it recompiles it automagically uploads so just make your changes and forget about it
Home Assistant is indeed a massive pile of software, mostly Python. I couldn’t get it to work reliably (or, at least, usably - the web interface was painful to use) on a Pi Zero because of memory requirements and disk access speed.
…having said that, as the other poster alludes to, it’s peak requirements that are problematic. If your device can handle them, it’s not a massive power suck because idle requirmements are low.
The 'issue' here is that China has good relations with Iran and in talks to guarantee safe passage for their ships, like they had previously with respect to attacks off Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis.
Anything that has only kept up with inflation over the last 50 years is cheaper today than it was 50 years ago relative to people's incomes, which is the relevant definition of "cheaper".
Not sure exactly how Lego prices have evolved but, as others have said, Lego is a brand and is unique. Their sale prices have little to do with their costs.
For most people anything that has only kept up with inflation over the last 50 years is more expense today than it was 50 years ago because wages have stagnated while prices have soared.
For instance, the median household income in the United States in 1976 was $12,686. That's $72,857.55 today based on inflation (Google/Census Bureau Data + online inflation calculator).
However, Google's AI overview says "As of early 2026, the median household income in the United States is estimated to be approximately $84,000."
So the the median household income in the US today is about $11,000 ahead of inflation since 1976. People in the US are richer now that they were then.
I remember reading in a personal finance book, it's not about what you earn, it's about what you keep. I think the concept applies here too, even if the context is slightly different.
Ok, but, what about median household size? Shouldn't we calculate the "richness" based not on how much each household makes but how much each member of a household gets from it? My guess is that households are smaller these days, but don't know.
I'd be curious to know if in '76, most households were dual income or single. My intuition is that many families could afford to have a parent stay at home with the kids back then.
Additionally, let's not ignore the fact that housing appears to have gotten more expensive disproportionately to income rising. And if two parents are working they often have to pay $1000+ for daycare
Most replies don't like my comment because it hurts the narrative that people want to believe even after I quoted hard data. Especially since the 70s in the US were rife with economic and social issues. Very interesting how the mind works.
I wouldn't say people didn't like your comment. You don't seem to have been downvoted as far as I can tell. You did cite hard data but multiple other commenters explained why the data you provided doesn't tell the whole story. Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they don't like your comment. They're just trying to understand more.
> The consultation says that instead, employers will have to carry out digital right-to-work checks, but may use passports or eVisas as well as digital identities.
Yes they were, but the key difference is that North Korea is not actually a threat and its nuclear weapons program is obviously purely a deterrent.
The track record of Iran is very different. Even if nuclear weapons were only a deterrent they would likely embolden them to be more aggressive abroad.
The whole point of the article is that the lesson from North Korea is get yourself a nuclear weapon. If you choose to give up that ambition, you can expect to be punished. If you realize that ambition, you may survive.
It has nothing to do with the particular behavior of the country outside of their ability to achieve a nuclear deterrent. The plain lesson is deterrence works if the country you’re trying to deter is the United States.
Just so that people disagreeing with you can understand: Iran is, as I type this, sending bombs banned by 120 countries (cluster bombs, and they're banned because for they indiscriminately target civilians) on Israel. They also send their islamist guards, a few weeks ago, to finish the job inside hospitals: to slaughter the wounded. As part of tens of thousands executions.
Anyone who thinks the current iranian regime with the atomic bomb wouldn't nuke Israel is out of its mind.
In practice, Iran posed a local threat. It wasn't Iran that exported Wahabism around the globe. Iran didn't fund the Mujahedeen, nor was it the source of IS. It wasn't Persians flying the jets of 911 nor were any Iranians or their allies tied to any terrorist attacks in Europe in my lifetime.
I find the Iranian regime despicable, as frankly any decent human should, and I am glad they don't have nukes.
But I do not see them as the international turbo villains they've been painted as.
> But I do not see them as the international turbo villains they've been painted as.
Iran founded Hizbalah in Lebanon. You can read what Hizb had done to Lebanon on the internet. Iran exported its ideology all over the Middle East right now: Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, etc. It is a mistake to thing about Islamic Revolution as something not interested in spreading itself.
> nor were any Iranians or their allies tied to any terrorist attacks in Europe in my lifetime.
Your lifetime is a fuzzy reference that possibly works because your are relatively young.
Iram carried out terrorist attacks in Europe in the 80s that left tens of people dead. Iran has been linked to an infamous bombing in Argentina in the 90s.
Iran has been linked to other attacks since.
Recently, the war in Yemen and attacks on shipping routes has also links to Iran.
> You can watch as much as you like on Youtube or Netflix or whatever without paying it.
Careful here because there is live TV on Youtube and a valid licence is required to watch that. There are also live shows on Netflix, which may count as "live TV programmes" so requiring a licence.
Yes, you highlight that a TV livence may be required for some content on Youtube. It is apparently also required for some content (live) on Netflix [1]. For example it seems that WWE Raw, which is live and on Netflix is deemed "live TV" [1]:
"Services include YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Now, Sky Go, BBC iPlayer, ITVX and more. Live TV or events can include:
Champions League matches or live channels on Amazon Prime Video
The UK law is specifically designed to cover this. It's not some weird thing. Any "live TV" requires a license even if you watch it via streaming services.
The law did not really intend this as it was written when "live TV" meant sitting in front of an actual TV. Since then it has been interpreted as covering everything, I think to protect revenues and deter even more people from ditching their TV licence.
Tracking and actuation is nothing new or particularly challenging, IMHO. It's the laser/optical part combined with throughput at that distance that is the main area of R&D, I think.
> Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation).
I don't think that the second sentence is a valid claim per se, it depends on what this "rewritten code" actually looks like (IANAL).
Edit: my understanding of "clean room implementation" is that it is a good defence to a copyright infrigement claim because there cannot be infringement if you don't know the original work. However it does not mean that NOT "clean room implementation" implies infrigement, it's just that it is potentially harder to defend against a claim if the original work was known.
I agree that (while the ethics of this are a different issue) the copyright question is not obviously clear-cut. Though IANAL.
As the LGPL says:
> A "work based on the Library" means either the Library or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Library or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".)
Is v7.0.0 a [derivative work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work)? It seems to depend on the details of the source code (implementing the same API is not copyright infringement).
I was wondering how the existing case law of translated works, from one language to an other works here. It would at suggest that this is an infringement of the license especially because of the lack of creativity. But IANAL and of course no idea of applicable case law.
the ai copy pasted the existing project. How can such a procedure not fall under copyright?
Especially now that ai can do this for any kind of intellectual property, like images, books or sourcecode. If judges would allow an ai rewrite to count as an original creation, copyright as we know it completely ends world wide.
Instead whats more likely is that no one is gonna buy that shit
It's up to them to prove that a) the original implementation was not part of whatever data set said AI used and b) that the engineers in question did not use the original as a basis.
No, that's not how copyright laws work. Especially in a world where the starting point is the accused making something and marketing it as someone else's IP with a license change.
It's still on the claimant to establish copying, which usually involves showing that the two works are substantially similar in protected elements. That the defendants had access to the original helps establish copying, but isn't on its own sufficient.
Only after that would the burden be on the defendants, such as to give a defense that their usage is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use.
I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice, I’m not sure it’s wrong. A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know.
I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ approach was just invented as a plausible-sounding story to head off gratuitous lawsuits. This doesn’t look as defensible against the threat of a lawsuit, but it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t win that lawsuit (I’m not saying it would, I haven’t read or compared the code vs its original). Google copied the entire API of the Java language, and got away with it when Oracle sued. Things in a courtroom can often go in surprising ways…
[edit: negative votes, huh, that’s a first for a while… looks like Reddit/Slashdot-style “downvote if you don’t like what is being said” is alive and well on HN]
I spent like two minutes looking at the diff between the original and the supposed "clean room" implementation [1] and already found identical classes, variable names, methods, and parameters. It looks like there was no actual attempt at clean-rooming this, regardless of whether that "counts".
Lol at the statement that "clean room" would have been invented to scare people from suing. It's the opposite: clean room is a fairly-desperate attempt to pre-empt accusations in court when it is expected that the "derivative" argument will be very strong, in order to then piggyback on the doctrine about interoperability. Sometimes it works, but it's a very high bar to clear.
It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to prevent, it’s not a case of which incantation or secret sentence you should utter to free the work of its existing license.
> “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite”
This is not a good analogy.
A "rewrite" in context here is not a reproduction of the original work but a different work that is functionally equivalent, or at least that is the claim.
Possibly important is that it’s largely api compatible but it’s not functionally equivalent in that its performance (as accuracy not just speed) is different.
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