I’d make sure there’s an officially supported integration, or one that’s 100% local (no cloud needed).

It’d be frustrating to spend money and get everything set up only for Bryant/Carrier to decide that they don’t like Home Assistant any more and block an unofficial integration.

Maybe someone else has better advice for your particular setup.

For my house, it had central heating so I ended up replacing that with a central heat pump HVAC system that uses a regular thermostat (Gree Flexx with an Ecobee). I didn’t want to deal with anything proprietary. The Ecobee supports local control via HomeKit, which Home Assistant supports natively (no Apple device needed).

CNBC syndicated link (same article), in case you hit the Reuters paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/spacex-blocked-from-early-us-benchmark-index-entry-as-sp-reaffirms-existing-rules.html

This misses the most important quote - what the rule actually is.

To ​be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as ​well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.

SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025, even as revenue rose 33% to $18.67 billion

Which is a completely reasonable rule.

Ahh, that’s not great. I’ve only ever used it for free since I get the $10/month plan for free as an open-source maintainer (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-on-github/set-up-copilot/enable-copilot/set-up-for-teachers-and-os-maintainers) so I’ve never had to deal with the billing side.

The amount of value they used to provide with the $10 plan felt too good to be true.

There might continue to be flat monthly fees with some providers, but I can imagine the prices growing to at least 10x the current prices. At the moment, a $200/month plan with Anthropic or OpenAI lets you use thousands of dollars worth of tokens per month (and even that price might currently be subsidized) which isn’t sustainable.

They switched from heavily subsidizing it, to subsidizing it less. That’s going to happen with the other providers, too.

I’m not sure why anyone is surprised. The new pricing is closer to what it actually costs to provide the service.

They can’t keep subsidizing AI forever. The same thing is going to happen to other providers too.

different counts of processing, cache etc

Don’t all the providers do this, though? Anthropic/Claude has different pricing based on if you’re caching for five mins vs one hour (which are the only two options for cache TTL). https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

Huh, interesting. I didn’t know that. I thought it was similar to Australia, where the betting services do advertise.

“legitimate interest” is a sketchy, unclear term. It’s not defined by any legislation.

There’s a type of cookie called “strictly necessary”. These are things that the site needs to work - for example, to keep you logged in, to remember your shopping cart, etc. Sites do NOT need to offer a opt out from these, and if they’re the only cookies the site uses, they don’t have to show a banner or cookie consent notice.

I think “legitimate interest” is really trying to trick people into thinking the cookies are “strictly necessary”, when in reality there’s some non-necessary tracking cookies lumped into the “legitimate interest” category.

Those two links are talking about fingerprinting.

Cookies can contain fingerprints, but they’re also used for a bunch of other things, like keeping you logged in, remembering your shopping cart rather than clearing it every page load, storing preferences, remembering if your device has a high DPI screen (so a fresh page load knows to serve higher quality images), etc. Anything where small amounts of data have to be persisted and shared across both the client-side and server-side. They’re not always evil.

Give a pigeon a button that when pressed gives sometimes nothin or some food and they go haywire and become addicted to pressing the button.

My dog goes nuts when I’m in one particular part of the kitchen because her treats are in one of the drawers, even though 9/10 times I’m doing something other than getting a treat for her. The payout is often enough that she puts on a show to try and get a treat out of me lol

Sports betting is huge in the UK though.

pro consumer policies

What pro-consumer policies does Steam have? They still have a lot of games with DRM, although I guess that’s the publisher’s choice, not theirs.

Their refund policies aren’t great. Not being able to get a refund if you encounter a game-breaking bug just because you’ve played the game for more than 2 hours isn’t a good policy. Thankfully it’s been ruled illegal in some countries like Australia - in those regions, you can get a refund for major issues regardless of how much you’ve played or how long you’ve had the game for.

I agree that they’re better than some of the competition, but at the end of the day they’re still giving you a license that they can revoke at any time. GOG gives you actual ownership.

You don’t absolutely need a central repository for Git. It’s decentralized. You can learn the basics (committing, branching, rebasing, amending, merging, resolving merge conflicts) entirely on your computer.

My advice would be to get familiar with using Git locally first. Simulate things like merge conflicts - have two branches that both change the same line in a text file, then merge them together and resolve the conflict.

Once you’re more comfortable with using it locally, learn about code forges like Github or Forgejo.

It’s called a “merge request” in Gitlab, which is a much better name.

yeah I want a top 50 for regular people that don’t spend $500 on a tiny meal.

At least it’s open source so anyone can look at the code and figure out why it asks for the permissions.

Oops! You’re right!

You’re thinking of apt full-upgrade. dist-upgrade is the old name for it.

The only difference between upgrade and full-upgrade is that full-upgrade will delete packages if necessary (like if you have a program installed that conflicts with a new version of another program), whereas upgrade will never do that. upgrade is safer for day-to-day updates.

If you do an upgrade and there’s packages that need you to run full-upgrade, you’ll see a message saying that some packages have been held back.

full-upgrade is mostly safe. You just need to read the output carefully before continuing.