If you like this stuff, you should check out what the guys at Mythic Beasts are doing. They’re squeezing a ton of Raspberry Pi’s into racks. They also host the Raspberry Pi website on pi’s.
Sure, it's possible. But how is this different than the SEO landscape of the last 15 years? If anything, the bar is higher to succeed here as you need to trick multiple LLM/algos rather than just gamify your Google SEO game.
> But what really disappoints me and leaves me feeling hopeless for the future is how people like the author are either completely oblivious (or worse, don’t care) about the possibility and probability of such blatant manipulation.
That's a rather naive narrative. ChatGPT (in particular o3/o3-pro) is great at product research. I've found great deals on products that beats what I would find using a regular search engine.
Google research are largely SEO bloat these days. LLMs are pretty good at looking past that. Yes, sometimes it get it wrong, but more often than not it gets it right. In my research I did manually spot check things and found it to be on track.
Could I have found a better camera (and possibly a better price) if I poured hours of my time into research? Possibly. Is it worth my time? No. Just the same reason as I go to Amazon for my purchases rather than spending hours navigating shitty e-commerce sites (which btw ChatGPT will do for me).
All things considered, the agentic web will indeed change the landscape, but I for the better.
I wouldn't trust any of the baby monitors. Even some of the "best" ones, like the Owlet are questionable. You might want to get one of the smaller Unifi cameras and use their Protect product to access it remotely. Cloud accessible but all stored locally.
Shameless self-plug: I had Ken Munro from PTP on my podcast [1] in the episode 'Hacking airplanes, ships and IoT devices with Ken Munro' where we dove into GPS hacking and spoofing at length.
People who suggest updating individual packages (or even worse, individual deb packages for instance) have never deployed any large scale IoT/Embedded projects. These devices are very different than servers/desktops and will break in ways you can't imagine. We started out using deb packages at Screenly before moving to Ubuntu Core, and the amount of error/recovery logic we had written to recover from broken deb package state was insane at that point.
I would look at Balena if you are already using Raspberry Pi’s and docker. Alternatively maybe look into ROAC but don’t know if it supports docker. The SD cards will be your biggest failure point, so select them wisely.
I’ve deployed Ubuntu Core at scale. It’s great but does have its learning curve. Theirs is also somewhat of a lock in, even if you can run everting yourself. However, their security is really good.
> As for lighting, I use "Circadian Lighting" which _does_ allow light groups, so I just specify the groups in yaml and it takes care of the group as a whole. I think it's probably lacking some functionality of the Adaptive Lighting plugin, but I haven't had to worry about differences in bulb types, I have a mix of Hue (80% of my bulbs) and IKEA (white only and colour).
Author here. Interesting. I wasn't able to make the groups work either with Flux or with Adaptive Lighting. Not sure why, but I didn't spend too many cycles on it tbh.
Also, good ideas on the heating. Will look at that.
Author here. The problem with SQLite is when you start having a lot of sensors. That's when SQLite failed to keep up on a Pi. Mind you, this was back on Pi 3s. It might be better today, and I know there has been performance improvements to SQLite, but for me moving to Influx for time series and MySQL for the database solved things.
Also, even on the best SD cards, you will eventually break them if you write this much.
We used them for a while and there are some photos here https://www.screenly.io/blog/2023/05/25/updated-qc-rig/