If you have a eufy scale, you can do this with no LLM needed - just set up an esp32 Bluetooth proxy, add it to home assistant, and then use the EufyLife integration someone already made. I did this recently with my scale to avoid having to sync it to my phone, go to the cloud, fetch data from the cloud, etc., and it's working fantastically. I have a little Home Assistant integration that pokes scale updates to a Python script running locally that provides a UI I like.
Huge fan of running it this way.
(Yesterday I ordered a more commercial, polished-looking esp32 Bluetooth proxy integrated into a smart plug - athome brand - but it's the same functionality, just in a nicer package than having a USB thing dangling from my outlet)
I actually found this out by accident. I set up a BT proxy to capture my combustion thermometers and saw eufy show up as an option and was like wait what? Honestly surprised how open it is.
I'm just using a cheap ESP-WROOM-32 but the recommended way to do it is with an wired ethernet-based ESP32 so you don't have interference with the wifi and btle. For a scale this works well enough. I haven't yet received the athom smart plug so I can't recommend it yet. Should be here in a week or so.
To setup the esphome bluetooth proxy you install esphome, and then create a yaml file that you'll use to configure the board, like this:
esphome:
name: bluetooth-proxy
esp32:
board: esp32dev
framework:
type: esp-idf
# Enable logging
logger:
# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
encryption:
key: "YOUR_KEY_HERE"
# Enable OTA updates
ota:
- platform: esphome
# WiFi configuration (matching the settings from your other devices)
wifi:
ssid: "YOUR_WIFI_SSID"
password: "YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD"
# Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails
ap:
ssid: "Bluetooth Proxy Fallback"
password: "proxyfallback"
captive_portal:
# Enable ESP32 BLE Tracker
esp32_ble_tracker:
scan_parameters:
active: true
# Enable Bluetooth Proxy
bluetooth_proxy:
active: true
Once that's done, plug in your board to your system and use esphome run bluetooth-proxy.yaml (you might have to find the device it's showing up as in tty.usbserial or whatever).
Thanks so much, I appreciate the time you put into this comment. It is highly relevant to a project I’m currently working on, and has saved me at least a day of time.
I quite wish they'd move to terminal bench 4.0. 2.1 is saturated - there is no world in which Gemini 3.8 Flash is producing better code than Astra or Fable, as the 2.1 results might suggest. The 4.0 results differentiate these models much more effectively.
(2.1 is useful for knowing they can all one-shot straightforward scripts, of course.)
It does and that one also feels kind of saturated for measuring the most advanced models - opus, Gemini, astra, sol, fable, glm, kimi all scoring within statistical noise of each other. (74 +-3% down to 69% +-5% for kimi).
It's still providing strong discrimination between weaker models.
When I was in the final year of college in 04-05 my dream would be to work at IBM. It still had the kind of prestige of R&D in the world. Fast forward a couple of years to 08-09, I don’t recall the event but IBM perception went down and a stone. Was that when they sold the hardware business and became fully consultant?
I think they started on a long slide starting in the late 90s when they tried to couple research more and more tightly to product deliverables, and then as they pivoted to being a services company, including selling off non-mainframe hardware to Lenovo, to coupling r&d to, uh, I guess services revenue, whatever that means. They had some research layoffs in 2008, at the same time that MSR and Google were really blossoming in research spend and perception, and I think they kind of got left behind.
I had a former student go there around 2008 and it seemed like the vibes were starting to sour around then. They maintained some awesome researchers in, e.g., databases, but I think the "make sure you are showing closely how your research directly contributes to services revenue" thing was strong by then and somewhat ruinous for how pleasant a work experience it was for many.
Same. My first real job out of college was at IBM 2004 to 2005. I was so proud to be an IBMer. Hated it. Lots of good people, but the bureaucracy, the pace, the whole thing, not fun.
Alphabet is operating and expanding the only fleet of fully autonomous vehicles in the world, to rave reviews.
The first contact with AI most people have is Gemini. And their net income went from $74B to $100B to $132B in 3 years and profit margin from 24% to 32%.
Mediocrity and irrelevant are hardly how I would describe them.
You could interpret the comment as a prediction based on the same pattern of overwhelming internal bureaucracy impacting engineering innovation. Control swinging entirely over to finance and legal. Focused entirely on rent seeking and protecting monopolies.
It doesn't, really - this is a known hazard. You want fish that was flash-frozen very rapidly after harvesting. It's tastier and it kills (these types of) parasites. Which is basically what you're going to get at any decent sushi place.
Never too old to try something that is incredibly delicious. :-) My mom (born 1943) introduced me to sushi. Can't blame generation there.
> The fallout from the saga is likely to continue. Simonsohn and several of Gino’s co-authors last year launched a project to assess the reliability of her past papers. So far, this has led to a further retraction in February and a correction in July. Science reported in April that Gino also appeared to have plagiarized passages of text in some of her publications.
It’s also hilarious how the judge let her continue the suit against Harvard. Like “hey I plagiarized fine, but you focused on my plagiarism more than others’ that not fair”. Even as more retractions due to plagiarism kept coming…
I think we've seen recently that it is a dark kind of funny. When your standards for catching fraud are as low as top academia, and expectations might be beyond the probable without it, it creates a conundrum when someone with a prejudice starts to pick targets to actually investigate.
Those not familiar with it might find the history of the Cod Wars interesting (and very relevant to this discussion): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars
(literally, Iceland having several decades of slightly-military-involved conflict with the UK about fishing near Iceland. Iceland won.)
That's only half the problem. OpenAI is contractually obligated, if you will, to believe that models will continue improving at an impressive rate for the foreseeable future (otherwise their valuation makes no sense).
If you believe that, then you should expect to get Sol-level performance out of a Luna-cost model within six months or a year. If you have a system with the weights baked in, that means you're going to end up serving that Sol-class model several times more expensively than it will take someone who comes along a few months later. (such as what recently happened with DeepSeek's update.)
And under that assumption of continuing advancement, baking things in doesn't make sense in general - it's a play you'd make if you think things are slowing down a lot. Which may be right but it's not OpenAI or anthropic's play.
Assume a $800 billion valuation. $100 billion ad network. $30 billion op income. 26x price to op income ratio. It's right there for them to grab, or someone else to grab.
Their valuation does make sense if you believe: 1) they can retain a massive user base and 2) a massive user base can be monetized. Future value is almost always pulled forward these days for high growth tech companies.
An LLM the size of Google search in users is even more valuable than Google search. The ad market for LLMs will be even larger than search was (no matter what HN prefers).
The monetization part is the easier part. Silicon Valley understands extraordinarily well how to build ad networks. If OpenAI maintain their gigantic user base, a $100 billion ad network is a given bolt-on. They'd have to screw that up in an epic way to not get there.
Facebook - Insta - WhatsApp is an absolute dogshit tandem with a gigantic user base. $228 billion in ad sales and still expanding 10% per year.
Google knows this is what's happening, that's why they don't care about chasing Anthropic very much. They're busy completely remaking how their core search business works.
If a strange and quirky architecture can increase their margins, they could start becoming so wildly profitable that they don't care about their investor driven valuation anymore.
I don't think he's mocking at all - the Pittsburgh scrapping culture is fascinating. (I've lived here for 20+ years now). I throw stuff on the curb all the time and like magic, it disappears before trash day. I've also picked up a bunch of stuff from neighbors - office chairs, desks, a really nice stash of PVC pipe I used to build a grey water system for my washing machine, etc. it's like a weird little no-internet freecycle. Everyone just knows it often works and goes along with it. There are people who focus on higher value items, people who grab metals, you name it
Huge fan of running it this way.
(Yesterday I ordered a more commercial, polished-looking esp32 Bluetooth proxy integrated into a smart plug - athome brand - but it's the same functionality, just in a nicer package than having a USB thing dangling from my outlet)