[thewebguyd]

Same, but for "smart" anything in the home that requires an internet connection and does not let me set it up or run it LAN only.

People forget the reasons TVs got cheaper is because smart TVs are heavily subsidized with ads and your watch data.

I have the most "low tech" home of any of my peers, intentionally.

[drnick1]

This. The only "smart" things allowed in my home are those under my control. This means devices that work over Zigbee, or that that run free firmware natively (like ESP32-based devices), or that can be hacked to run free firmware. Everything is orchestrated via Home Assistant and in its own VLAN. It's surprising how far you can get. For example, I recently set up a voice assistant by wiring together a few Home Assistant components and a small local LLM (Qwen 4B). Response times are basically on par with commercial solutions like Alexa, and all processing is done locally.

[microcode]

The experience with this is so much better. Hacking most Tuya based devices has become extremely easy when you use https://docs.libretiny.eu/ Replacing MyQ with ratgdo was one of the best IoT decisions I have ever made.