I remember when "cloud computing" was stuff like SETI@Home where a bunch of decentralized, distributed nodes all contributed computing power. But I think that's called the Blockchain now?

I don't know. I usually live under a rock.

"Cloud" today is typically used with a more specific meaning, to refer to services such as IaaS or PaaS, which didn't exist in the 90s.

I don't remember encountering the word "cloud" in the 90s used in the way you describe. The cloud could be a symbol for a telephone network, a packet-switched network (including the internet), a company WAN, etc. Typically you'd refer to whatever the cloud symbol was supposed to represent, it wouldn't be called "the cloud" unless I suppose you were discussing the diagram itself.

These days if you build it with a central policy engine, e.g. on top of Open Policy Agent with Rego as a policy language, and stick to a (actor, object, action) triple system, you can build an extensible and powerful authorization system that usually also is less polluting to the codebase as many other approaches. For HA specifically, where you have a quite low numbers of actors and objects, most of the headaches that could come with such a system in terms of scaling also fall away.

In the age of agents everywhere this is no longer true or viable.

It's going to be hard for them to do it, for historic and legacy code reasons. But it's long past being a choice and now becoming a need.

Many, going back years.

This thread is relevant. Their permissions system is just on entities, and isn't a real EBAC system.

I do think the maintainers are getting better about it. The releases over the past year have reworked a lot of things to be more intuitive for casual users while also being more flexible for power users, but there is still a lot of ground left to cover.

I think with the growing popularity, and expansion of fields of use, this is something they'll ultimately have to reckon with. I've seen quite a few posts on the the HA subreddit, where it's being used for controls in e.g. hotels or other bigger buildings, because it has a great feature set and prevents vendor lock-in. There is no harm in also catering to those people & organizations.

I don't see HA as a consumer established product, as much as Nabu Kasa would like otherwise.

Then again, this is just my guesswork. I have 0 clue the demographics of Home Assistant users

and a really obscure and clearly vibe-designed one (that still works fine) that only fired off a single Firebase call noting an install: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mimiapp.mi...

one caveat is that I haven't done anything like longterm use testing - just account setup and a handful of inputs like a specific feed time and amount, etc. if these apps are firing off data with delayed intervals, I wouldn't have captured it

re Nanit, yes, it sent a request to https://r.clarity.ms/collect with a 1.1KB payload after only a few seconds of use. everything I've read about MS Clarity and MS in general around their data practices makes me extremely wary that such a popular app collects this much data