It really just helps in cases where you get hacked, but the hacker doesn’t have continued access. Say someone physically penetrates into your building, grabs the key through an unlocked station, and leaves.

That being said, like you mentioned, if someone is going through this effort, 45 days vs 90 days likely won’t matter. They’ll probably have the data they need after a week anyways.

Encryption key theft really requires a secondary attack afterwards to get the encrypted data by getting into the middle and either decrypting or redirecting traffic. It’s very much a state level/high-corporate attack, not some random group trying to make a few bucks.

So there’s an answer, and then there’s a problem.

The easy answer is that Home Assistant has Voice Assistants now, and you can use Ollama, Whisper, and Piper to do that all locally.

The problem is that it really only talks to Home Assistant, there’s no ability to have it search the web, or make a phone call, or really anything else outside of Home Assistant without significant addon stuffs.

It also requires a reasonably significant amount of RAM on your computer to run the VM for Home Assistant while supporting Whisper and Piper and Ollama.

Agent voice response

It’s even mostly open source.

British Columbia, $0.12 canadian dollars for Tier1 rates

The simple answer is most desktop PCs will not come even close to that at idle. Even just having a few case fans may draw more than that, without involving the CPU at all.

Laptop devices can do that in some cases with their extra power management features.

That being said, do the math to see if it matters. The difference between 10w and 40w is 0.7kwh per day, at least where I live that’s about 7 cents or about $25 per year.

In my case it would be more expensive to purchase a dedicated low power device than it will save me in 4-5 years compared to just using something I already have laying around.

I have a couple Tapo cameras set up with HA, I had to use the tapo app initially to set up but once they’re set up you can ditch it and run the system entirely locally. I saw someone had a way to configure them locally too, but it wasn’t simple enough for me to bother and I was fine with the one time step.

If that’s all you want to do, one of the cheaper Ubiquiti managed gateways would probably work and not break the bank.

If you want to tinker even harder, an open source router running https://openwrt.org/ (or even their own device) may be a good option.

Why?

You aren’t going to find a useful AI system for personal use in Finance, you simply don’t have the scale needed to benefit from it. You don’t make enough transactions per month that looking over it yourself is going to be any slower than reading the AI summary.

The question as with most process optimization and data analysis is, what’s the actual result you’re hoping for? If you want it to be able to summarize WALMART, WAL-MART and WMART so you can see those numbers added together, you already know you spent a lot at Walmart. Whare are you going to actually do with that information?

Saving money doesn’t really need an AI, there really aren’t many ways to cut budgets down short of paying attention to the most obvious spending problems (Too much housing, too much vehicle, too much food (especially eating out), and too much entertainment(too many subscription platforms))

It’s usually a far better investment of time to improve your earning power (upskill, change jobs, add hours, etc.)

Cutting $40 per month from your budget by not going to the movies every week just isn’t going to have the impact you need in your life.

Even if you could shave off 50% at idle, you’re talking about like $0.10 per day in power savings. Is it really worth spending any time on that?

You should post the comic to mildly infuriating too.

LLMs

For example if I need to generate a long formula for excel or power apps, I could write it myself or I can just tell the LLM the parameters and it will do it in 1/10th of time.

If I need to create course material, I can shove in bullet points for my key topics and have it expand it into a first draft for me. This concept I actually use a lot more than just for course material. It’s great at generating drafts of everything from statements of work and quotes to presentations (Co-Pilot in 365)

I know how to do the job without it, so hallucinations are easily caught and cleaned up. It’s a tool to speed me up, not replace me.

Business process automation. I use it for everything from communications to programming.

I automate office processes, improving productivity. So literally the opposite of a bullshit job.

If it’s so useless, why am I using it all the time for my job to speed up my work?

Still considered a laptop, they have low power modes for unplugged use.

The only problem I have with this is that USB-C PD can only go to 240w, which is fine for most laptops but my current gaming laptop has a 240w power brick and it only has a 3060 in it. The 3080 and 3090 variants had 300w+ bricks IIRC.

I don’t live in India, but I hope gaming laptops get some sort of exception if their power draw can exceed the specification limits.

I’m going to be the odd one out on this.

I prefer ultra customized recommendations, I wish they were even smarter. Especially if I’ve already bought something, I want them to know so they stop advertising that product to me.

I’d rather see ads for products that I may actually buy rather than for shit I don’t have the slightest interest in.

I rarely buy products without significant research, so ads aren’t likely to trick me into buying something of poor quality. I just need to have awareness of things I don’t even know exist.

I don’t think a lot of people actually understand the concept of how big the Chinese population is today.

They could lose a billion people, and still have more people than the US.

There are more licensed medical doctors in China than there are people in the state of Oregon.

Now that being said, China’s going to collapse. It’s population tree currently looks like a nuclear cloud, and they have next to zero immigration to deal with that situation. Their population started declining two years ago, and the next 40 years are going to be rough as they are expected have a net loss of 400+ million people.