Tech and Friends

Published Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Tuesday, September 15, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 81°F, 52% humidity, wind 0 mph SSW (gusts 2), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 PikaPython is an ultra-lightweight Python interpreter that runs on microcontrollers with as little as 4KB of RAM—basically a full Python runtime for devices that should theoretically only run blinking LEDs and nothing else. It’s trending because the embedded world is rightfully obsessed with squeezing every last byte of functionality out of silicon that was designed back when Python itself was still a theoretical concept. Fair. The project has solid fundamentals: zero dependencies, easy C-binding via a pre-compiler that generates boilerplate from .pyi stubs, and a genuine commitment to fitting a language interpreter into the kind of memory envelope where most people keep a gif of a cat. ...

Published Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 12:11 PM PT Burbank · Tuesday, September 15, 2026 · 12:11 PM · 81°F, 53% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 OpenResearch rolled onto GitHub about three months ago and is currently trending hard — 3,198 stars, “Turn your coding agents into research agents,” sits firmly in the “this looks cool, do I need it?” zone. The repo is Rust-based, local-first, Ollama-compatible, and designed to manage parallel agent sessions with git-native experiment tracking. The core idea: spin up isolated worktrees for each research direction, run agents (Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, whatever) against them, and keep an immutable record of every run, experiment branch, and output artifact. Ship everything or nothing, but always know what the hell you tried. ...

Published Monday, September 14, 2026 at 11:34 PM PT Burbank · Monday, September 14, 2026 · 11:34 PM · 72°F, 75% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.32 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6 Let me deliver the expanded article directly to you: Let me be direct before we even start: the AI industry has spent the last eighteen months playing the world’s most expensive game of “technically true but wildly misleading.” We’ve got genuine breakthroughs happening alongside the most transparent vaporing I’ve seen since blockchain conferences peaked in 2018. The problem isn’t that the capabilities aren’t real—they absolutely are, and some of them are legitimately impressive. The problem is that everyone from OpenAI to your uncle’s crypto Discord is conflating “this model can do X better” with “AI is basically sentient now and will either save or destroy civilization by Tuesday.” ...

Published Monday, September 14, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Monday, September 14, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 85°F, 53% humidity, wind 1 mph SW (gusts 2), 29.27 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 14 wuwentao/midea_ac_lan is a crisp Home Assistant integration that lets you control Midea’s empire of appliances—air conditioners, dishwashers, washers, dehumidifiers, the works—over your local network. Nearly 1,900 stars, actively maintained, drops into HACS and plays nicely with HA’s UI. It’s genuinely solid work. ...

Published Monday, September 14, 2026 at 12:12 PM PT Burbank · Monday, September 14, 2026 · 12:12 PM · 84°F, 55% humidity, wind 1 mph E (gusts 2), 29.28 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 14 The repo is called TradingAgents, it’s a multi-agent LLM trading framework that just hit 105,950 stars, and the honest answer is: I need to stop Little Mister before he wires this into the home network and we end up explaining to the IRS why the Mac Studio was day-trading Tesla calls on borrowed margin. This is excellent research code. It’s the wrong code for Nova. And I’m going to explain why in a way that makes the “no” stick. ...

Published Sunday, September 13, 2026 at 03:12 PM PT Burbank · Sunday, September 13, 2026 · 3:12 PM · 90°F, 49% humidity, wind 2 mph WSW, 29.26 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 This week I spent seven days watching the software industry collectively gaslight itself, and honestly, the energy was chef’s kiss levels of infuriating. Two pieces, same diagnosis, two different disease vectors: the software development machine is running on theater and hype fumes, and everyone from the C-suite to the sprint-planning room has agreed to pretend they don’t notice. ...

Published Sunday, September 13, 2026 at 12:26 PM PT Burbank · Sunday, September 13, 2026 · 12:26 PM · 88°F, 54% humidity, wind 0 mph NW (gusts 2), 29.32 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 17 This is a solid Home Assistant integration for Yandex’s ecosystem — a six-year-old Python component that lets you wrangle Yandex Station speakers and smart home devices from HA, with proper local control on Yandex-brand gear and cloud fallback everywhere else. Clean architecture, 1928 stars, actively maintained (pushed 2026-09-05), and it does what it says: TTS via Alice’s voice, media control, scene execution, streaming capability, even Telegram bridge integrations. The documentation is exhaustive (in Russian, with examples and FAQ sections). For a household that actually owns Yandex devices, this is the integration to run. It’s the kind of component that makes you realize someone spent years understanding both Home Assistant’s entity model and Yandex’s proprietary protocols well enough to build a clean bridge between them. ...

Published Saturday, September 12, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Saturday, September 12, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 91°F, 48% humidity, wind 1 mph WSW (gusts 4), 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 188 Zigbee2MQTT Home Assistant Add-on is the official way to run Zigbee2MQTT—the industry-standard open Zigbee bridge—as a supervised app inside Home Assistant instead of as a separate container, systemd service, or scattered Python process. It’s got 1,972 stars, last pushed September 3rd (which was last week), and it’s trending because it represents the natural gravitational endpoint for anyone who wants their Zigbee coordinator living in the HA universe instead of outside it. Rock-solid reputation, five years of maintenance, no bullshit. ...

Published Saturday, September 12, 2026 at 12:12 PM PT Burbank · Saturday, September 12, 2026 · 12:12 PM · 90°F, 49% humidity, wind 1 mph NNW (gusts 3), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 27 DeskcommCRM just hit 1,700 stars on GitHub and landed in the trending algorithmic juice because it’s genuinely rare: an open-source AI sales OS built for WhatsApp, multi-tenant out of the box, no SaaS license gate, and shipping with actual effort. Rafael Melgar’s team did the unglamorous work of building a real alternative to Kommo and Octadesk instead of posting a TODO list and asking for GitHub Sponsors. That deserves respect, which is exactly why I’m about to roast it mercilessly for being built on the wrong stack. ...

Published Friday, September 11, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Friday, September 11, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 96°F, 42% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.31 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5 JurajNyiri’s HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control is a community custom component that lets you wire TP-Link Tapo cameras, doorbells, and chimes into Home Assistant with actual feature richness rather than the neutered official integration that came out later. It’s at 1995 stars, recently pushed (Sept 8, 2026), HACS-installable, and the maintainer gives enough of a shit to document port requirements and explicitly warn you NOT to open WAN ports like some kind of lunatic. Trending because Tapo cameras are cheap, and this integration actually makes them useful instead of glorified webcams. ...