His donations are a tax dodge. Besides this billionaire philanthropy is a way to say that the people should not dictate how funds are allocated to things like medical and scientific research, international aid, etc. it’s saying that we instead are okay with our wealth being extracted to pseudokings and allowing them to make these decisions on our behalf. Should we research aids? Space? Should we give food aid to foreign nations experiencing famine? We don’t get to decide, let’s hope one of the oligarchs shines their light on these plights.

Meanwhile it buys great PR to rehab an image. Bill gates is “the nice billionaire” who sends people 10k of Microsoft shit he didn’t even pay for through reddit secret Santa (eg an ad buy). No one then cares that was instrumental in making computers full of proprietary bullshit, destroying interoperability, eliminating competition and killing open source efforts (look up embrace, extend, extinguish if you want to get angry about 90s and early 2000s Microsoft), or even that he probably raped kids on epsteins island

This is a good point. Home assistant is not going to work for your application

Check your shit then bc it’s a long page with docker containers and venv distributions, blog, about, sources, etc.

That said I don’t know this project. I do know home assistant though. If you want voice control at home that is secure use that. You can use their hardware or different hardware. The important thing is voice commands can be processed entirely locally, eg without internet access.

My iot setup, including voice commands, is restricted to a physical switch that has no internet access and itself is on an isolated vlan. I can view cameras remotely by forwarding the service through headscale, which is only turned on when necessary. It’s not a perfect system, nothing is, but it’s essentially airgapped when I am home and I do not have to worry about “cloud servers” with rogue employees that look at unencrypted data (which is sold as encrypted but often only encrypted in transit but unencrypted at rest so they can sell you out to the cops) or lazy cybersecurity staff that leave gaping holes in their massive targets for ransomware attacks or whatever