I ended up getting a bunch of zooz 800 zen76s on/off switches since it was on sale on thesmartesthouse.com and the reviews on other sites are mostly positive. So far no complaints. They work and the click isn’t very loud. There was some drama about connecting them to smartthings but i blame the smartthings app for that one. It would just hang on the connecting screen for a few minutes but would eventually connect. I was going to get dimmers but ended up not going down that rabbithole for the reasons you stated. Also i rarely dim my lights so i’m not going to miss that.

+1 for bitwarden. I use the desktop app + browser extension + Android app. I have to manually hit the sync button on the android app every so often but other than that it just works.

I feel like this is common practice. Synergy between company’s product is very common. There are alternatives you can use instead of outlook (ex. thunderbird, mailbird, etc). If you don’t like Microsoft practices then you can opt out and find an alternative. But speaking on behalf of the less techy savvy consumer i would be pissed off about this.

I’m new to Lemmy and how it works so please correct me if I’m misinterpreting how Lemmy works. In this example, if i spin up lemmy.fyi in France and the France government blocked lemmy.world. Doesn’t that mean that my instance (lemmy.fyi) would lose access to communities and posts on lemmy.world? OR would that mean instead of going directly to lemmy.world i would need to find an alternate route to get to that information? such as my instance would goto lemmy.org which then picks up the data from lemmy.world then come back to my instance?

Giving big tech access to E2E encrypted messages will give consumers a false sense of security while still selling their data. This has been discussed in the whole chrome incognito article (link). I cannot imagine a world in which big tech won’t use this data to try to sell more. Big tech will always be a business and a business’s goal is to make money in anyway possible. Governments on the other hand can use this to fight crime and stop abusers… but we would need to trust the government to do this appropriately and safely… me as an American have been fooled by this one too many times to trust the government to act appropriately with this data.