Notes on local-first AI, smart-home protocols, privacy, and the work behind Nexop.
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Matter was supposed to make every smart device work with everything. Four years on, here's what it delivers, what it still doesn't, and whether the logo should change what you buy.
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What a home can infer from ordinary sensors, why seven days, how confidence is decided, and, more usefully, the things this approach can't learn at all.
Read articleThe hub was free, the app is free, and the hardware was discounted. So where does the money actually come from? Not subscriptions. The answer is switching costs.
Read articleNot the usual warning about cameras. The revealing data in a smart home is the boring data, timestamps and state changes, and it leaks even when everything is encrypted.
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KNX hardware routinely outlasts the software written to control it. The bus isn't the problem. The layer on top of it is, and that layer can be replaced without touching a single wire.
Read articleHome Assistant can already run a local LLM as its conversation agent, and it works better than most people expect. Here's what that gets you, what it doesn't, and where the remaining gap really is.
Read articleEvery smart home can be told what to do. Almost none can work out what you'd probably want. Here's what proactive automation means, why suggestion beats action, and where it goes wrong.
Read articleForget privacy for a moment. The strongest argument against cloud-dependent smart homes is that they break in ways ordinary appliances never do, and you can audit your own home for it in an afternoon.
Read articleMost guides line these up as four competing options. They aren't. One of them isn't even the same kind of thing, and once you see why, the buying decisions get much easier.
Read articleThe hardware is cheap because the software is rented. Here's what gets locked behind a monthly fee, which of those fees are fair, and how to build a home that doesn't have any.
Read articleHub, bridge, controller, assistant: the words have blurred to the point of being useless. Here's what a local AI hub is, and how to tell whether you need one.
Read articleSmart homes today are either too dumb to be useful, too cloud-locked to be private, or too expensive to be worth it. We're trying for a fourth option.
Read articleIf your home needs the cloud to know what room you're in, it isn't really your home. Local-first AI changes where the intelligence lives.
Read articleNexop is a Maajtek product, built around one belief: the intelligent home should still belong to the people living in it.
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