One of the reasons illegal drugs are as dangerous as they are is because they are illegal. Their illicit nature means they are manufactured and distributed without any proper oversight or regulation, leading to dangerous lack of quality control.

If recreational drugs could be purchased with proper standards for purity, dosage etc they would be much safer for their users.

Home Assistant and its developers may not be perfect, but at least the imperfections are out in the open. We can’t comment on the quality of the commercial black boxes because we can’t see it.

I think that quote is a bit harsh, JavaScript is not inherently bad, or at least no worse than the people writing it. Install script piping is not an officially recommended installation method by HA. Both are also found in projects far more critical than HA.

Giving a kneejerk rejection to Home Assistant to instead adopt another proprietary hub a bit earlier in the enshittification pipeline doesn’t seem a great plan to me.

What a waste. Although considering the amount of corner cutting on the building’s appearance and features, I’m not sure I’d trust the structural integrity either.

The apartments are occupied too so demolishing them is could leave people homeless.

I would hope lessons will be learned from this, plenty more rogue developments could slip through if we are ever going to ramp up house building to the needed levels without proper oversight.

Yes, the section to Manchester is being cancelled.

Historically horse-drawn railways were a thing. Perhaps we could revive that as a sort of compromise, build the track but save money on not buying any trains.

Philips are providing another demonstration of the dangers of using proprietary smart home platforms. If you don't control the platform, you don't control your home. The only way to avoid this is to use an open platform such as Home Assistant, which just celebrated it's 10th birthday and continues to go from strength to strength.