@jensorensen@mastodon.social Technology needs to exist to serve people, not be an excuse to charge a subscription. I think that is the fundamental issue at hand here. The older technology just focused on the basics: we replaced a hot water system here, the old one was a gas unit from the mid 90s… the only thing "electric" in it was the piezo starter. It got replaced by a heat pump which came with a fancy "cloud" service. Spent much of yesterday installing a WiFi access point right beside it because the genius designers decided to put the WiFi module right at the bottom of the tank. I question why an Internet connection is needed, but penny pinchers at the manufacturer decided having a front panel that conveyed the same information was too expensive: better to blow it on a $50/month AWS instance and hire a dev/ops dev team instead. 🙄