Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

posted this note on and tagged it with DIY Narrating my work Smart Home

With inspiration from the excellent The Stock Pot, and in particular the full tutorial for how to Make Your Own Universal Remote (ESPHome + Home Assistant), I’m slowly starting to wrap my head around Home Assistant and ESP8266/ESP32. I’ve managed to wire up a button to my ESP8266 and I can register single, double, or long presses on said button in Home Assistant.

There is a lot more work to be done in Home Assistant itself before I can get anything proper out of this, but I’m making progress and having fun.

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posted this note on and tagged it with Andor Star Wars TV shows

Here’s a thought on season two of Andor. SPOILERS AHEAD

The empire’s plan for Ghorman is to provoke the people to the point where they counteract in such a way as to ”forcing” the empire to invade fully. That’s a really neat mirror to how Luthen works as a whole, and to the arc he takes Mon Mothma on.

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posted this note on and tagged it with Andor Star Wars The Last of Us TV shows

I just finished Andor season two the other day and Linn and I are making our way through season two of The Last of Us. Both shows are amazing and I have a strong feeling that this is peak tv for a while and things will only get worse.

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posted this note on and tagged it with DIY Narrating my work Smart Home

I’ve recently gotten myself a Home Assistant Green. Up until now I haven’t used it for anything in particular. My smart home consists almost exclusively of IKEA stuff at the moment and as long as I keep it that way the Ikea’s own app works fine. I would like to be able to add stuff from other manufacturers though, so that is why I got the Home Assistant and will slowly migrate over to using it instead.

Right now I’m reading up on some ESP32/ESP8266. I would like to make my own simple home automation hardware and this seems like the way to go. I bought a cheap ESP8266 board the other day and I think I’ve managed to install ESPHome on it. It shows up in my network logs so it seems to be connecting to wifi. I’m considering this a successful first test and I’ll keep playing with this more in the future.

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posted this note on and tagged it with AI

I’m skeptical about OpenAI in general, because while I think AI is so powerful that aspects of it will legitimately change the world, I also think it has been overhyped more than just about anything I’ve seen in my three decades of writing about technology. Sam Altman strikes me as being a drinker of his own Kool-Aid, but it’s also his job to make everyone in the world think that AI is inevitable and amazing and that his company is the unassailable leader while it’s bleeding cash.

– Jason Snell: Sam and Jony and skepticism

This paragraph from Jason Snell perfectly encapsulates my feeling about OpenAI, and so many other ”AI Companies”.

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posted this note on and tagged it with AI

It’s getting increasingly hard to use Office365 without being forced to interact with Copilot. If Microsoft love AI, good for them I guess, but I just want to read an e-mail or create a form or something similar. Don’t put your prompt in the way of me getting my job done.

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posted this note on and tagged it with Slice of life

I’m taking it reaaaaaaaally slow this morning. Listening to music by the album, reading up on my local paper and articles and blogposts, drinking coffee. So far I’m managing to keep my calm and just enjoying a day off.

The playlist thus far

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posted this note on and tagged it with AI

[LLMs are] not search engines, and it doesn’t matter how much Google tries to force AI into its search, it’s not going to deliver what we need. LLMs are NOT answer machines. They’re guessing machines. And any guess has the potential to be wrong.

– AI in search is a trap: it’ll ruin trust

Spot on!

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posted this note on

Benn Jordan’s latest video, ”You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism (YouTube)”, is a depressing but very important watch. It makes a nice double-feature with Technology Connections’ ”Algorithms are breaking how we think (YouTube)”. I would argue anyone, anyone, to watch them.

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posted this note on and tagged it with Content Small habits

Another small adjustments to my habits that will hopefully result in a much happier me is to use the menu to open YouTube directly to my subscriptions, rather than to the algorithmic feed. It’s a hard habit to make, but I’m trying my best.

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