Car talk is one of the most broadly relatable topics available for men to talk about, man. It’s right up there with sports, stuff blowing up, and attractive women. There’s something else to it if you can’t find someone that will chitchat about cars. I’m not even a car guy but I’d happily talk to someone passionate about restoring classics or something. I mean this sincerely and not to be snide, you might find that some personal growth unlocks a lot for you when it comes to socializing and community. Don’t throw your humanity away to become some chat bot gargoyle.

Really? I mean this might just be a function of your friend group. I have some long time friends and we'll talk about that weird stuff for hours. Probably going to be hard with new friends or people you don't have a good relationship with but these are very human things. We all have cars so those conversations come up. Similarly things like dealing with investments, 401ks, health plans, relationships, or fucking petty shit like if In-N-Out is better than Five Guys or not (it is, and I'll fight you over this).

Not every friend group is like that. Different friends offer different things. We're all people though. I mean you can't have a relationship around just talking to people over something like that because that is dehumanizing, but I disagree that you can't talk about that stuff with people. Frankly, I think what's more common is that people are just afraid of opening those subjects. Like we've all had that experience in school where the teacher is talking about something and everybody is confused but nobody speaks up because they're afraid to look dumb or feel like they're disrupting. That class of situations doesn't just go away lol.

I'm not saying don't use the LLMs. Hell, it's like saying don't use Reddit. Reddit will often give you bad advice too, but that doesn't mean it can't also be helpful. But my concern is really that you feel like you can't talk to people about those types of things. We're social creatures. There's no "atomised individual". You can't make it through this world without reliance upon others. Unless you're doing literally everything by yourself from scratch, you're an active part of society. The only difference is your interpretation.

So with that, let me say too that there's a lot of advantages to humans and conversations with them. Not being available 24/7 can be advantageous. Forces you to think on your own and helps facilitate better conversations when they do become available. Sometimes you need answers immediately, but that's rare and often decisions are better informed after thinking rather than through reliance on others. The latter only works if there's non-nuanced objective answers. I'm also someone who makes a lot of obscure references. But that's okay if others don't pick up on them. The rarity of that happening actually is a good thing and helps form relationships, as it is a strong signal we have some common ground. When it is rare it is special. And when not recognized I have the opportunity to share things I enjoy with others. Then they also have the opportunity to share things with me! I don't want clones of me, that provides no opportunity for growth, it only leads to a narrower view (which is the opposite of growth!). Also, humans can be rude, mean, push back, and be confrontational. It always sucks but it isn't always wrong either. I'm assuming you're human (hell, it'll be true even if you're machine lol), so you're not perfect. Sometimes our own egos get in the way and that confrontation is necessary. In fact, this is an aspect that is related to the psychosis/danger igleria mentioned. You can't just wrap yourself up in safety blankets and avoid confrontation. As much as we should try to make life more enjoyable and better the unfortunate truth is that often that requires temporary discomfort. If everything was easy everyone would do it. So even in the times where that discomfort doesn't directly lead to future "rewards" it still provides learning experiences that allow you to be more equipped for the (more frequently occurring) times where it does. It is only your perspective/interpretation.

> Also, why make the ESP32 the the hotspot? Why not just connect to the same network? Then you're not really range limited.

Because then they don't have to include the ability to configure wifi, which (while not that hard) is one more thing to do and for a hackathon that's not really contributing to the end goal.

I thought about your comment a lot. I worry that most people just say nice things (but think the opposite) so I appreciate you being direct.

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I don't expect you to know anything about me. It made me feel like you have written me off/dismissed me when you mention HomeAssistant + WebRTC. HomeAssistant uses Go2RTC and the WebRTC library it uses is Pion[0]. I created that and maintain it. Getting WebRTC on tiny devices is something I have been working on for years and always doing it Open Source/making it best for users.

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> comes off as doing things that have already been done before but presenting as if something novel was done.

I don't think 'Hardware AI Assistant' is a novel idea. What I hoped was a novel idea was putting it in an easy to use package for others to build upon and use. WebRTC + Hardware is something I have been trying to make easier for a long time https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr... [1] I wrote this code, but things still felt too difficult.

When ESP32s got powerful enough to do WebRTC I wrote [2]. Reflect inherits from that. So I am proud of that. I have been on this journey to make RTC + cheap hardware possible so that others can build upon that.

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Again I really appreciate your comment, and sorry to be so defensive. Someone I really respected (and I thought they respected me) said the same thing about my work not being novel. They said people have been building security cameras for years that use WebRTC, you are over inflating what you are doing. That has stuck with me. So part of me does fear that I am wasting my time trying to solve these problems.

I don't think what I am doing is novel. I do think that I am solving it differently because I make it accessible/Open Source. Most people solving these problems/building it just keep their code at work and don't try to help others use it.

If you are up for it shoot me an email sean@pion.ly and https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-dubois/ I would love to have a friend that calls me out/is honest whats good work and what is just BS :)

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[0] https://github.com/pion/webrtc

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr...

[2] https://github.com/Sean-Der/embedded-sdk