Server hardware isn’t free. At the end of the day, SOMEONE has to pay the bills. Either you are the customer, or the product. If you insist on being the product, you don’t get to be surprised when platforms focus on the actual customers that actually pay the bills, by enshittifying the platform.

Zigbee devices are a pretty small minority of the larger IoT landscape. Most consumers are likely to have more wifi or bluetooth only devices than zigbee (at this point in time). The notable exception being Hue bulbs.

Apple is pretty much the only company in the smart home space right now that not only allows, but requires that devices be able to function locally, without having to call home. They CAN call home, but they continue to work just fine locally if say, the internet is down. It’s a central tenant of their homekit standard.

Well it has to go somewhere, you can’t just take in water forever with nowhere for it to go. So either it’s non-potable water being returned to its source, or it’s closed loop. In either case, it’s not really a problem.

It doesn’t use water in the sense that it is consuming it. It “uses” water in the sense that it is temporarily in a datacenter, gets a little hot, and then leaves the datacenter. I don’t even think a lot of datacenters use actual drinking water, instead taking water directly from a river, warming it slightly, and putting it back in said river.

Not to say I like AI, or think it’s a good thing. But this phrase that’s been going around just bugs me, because it’s really misleading. We should be focused on the ridiculous amount of energy it consumes, not the water it temporarily uses.