Zigbee, Zwave, and Bluetooth (although a bit to a lesser extent) are easy mode of you want local only. They're not IP-based networks so no Internet access to begin with.
Bluetooth--local only but setup can be a bit trickier since they don't automatically form a mesh. You may need to configure relays if your existing devices have that capability or buy dedicated relays
My kids love something like this we see every year at the traveling fair. It's the same idea but with rubber duckies floating around and having to catch them with a small pole with a hook attached. It's €20 for 2 kids to have 2 minutes of fun and the payoff is a €1 Aliexpress/Temu pollution generator disguised as a toy. They play with it for a day before it ends up in the trash.
The first few years I hated this for exactly the reasons you mention, but now I'm just happy they are happy. I think I have a few more years left before they don't want to go rubber ducky fishing with their dad no more and I doubt by then €20 gets me 2 minutes of joy with them.
In fact it's the same thing. I said fish by mistake (probably because my mind made an association with the fishing rod and what it's usually used for) but they're ducks. I have edited the comment now.
Local Qwen3.8 27B pointed to my local Silverbullet wiki coupled with a harness makes it so smart in my environment. It knows my network and homelab better than me. It can find things in an instant, troubleshoot problems on its own. Magic.
How do you deal with security issues? Up until now, I've only run agents on a separate machine on its own physical subnet. (Admittedly this is paranoid and I could probably run it on a VM.)
I would love to give a local-LLM agent full access to my (very modest) homelab, but can't trust it not to delete my files or do something crazy. Maybe giving it its own non-root username, and therefore read access, allowing diagnosis but not fixing. But even a non-root user can do some damage, or exfiltrate system info just by using curl.
I worry about this myself but find some solace and peace in my backup strategy. I treat the harness as a user and set permissive authorizations where needed. I even let it suggest why and which permissions it would need for specific items and note these down in the wiki as well. The idea is that the LLMs takes into consideration why it has the permissions it has and doesn't try and work around them.
Deus Ex is such a sad story though. I really loved the first one but then was dissapointed by Invisible War. Fast forward a decade and there is Deus Ex Human Revolution which hit all the right notes for me. Fell in love with the series all over again. Mankind Divided was everything I wanted from the sequel until it just stopped. Read all the novels, even played The Fall and love everything about the universe. Shame how it died without a resolution to the Jensen story.
This is how it starts my friend. Before you know it you have a lot of projects 90% done and living in production without ever getting the last 10% before you think of something new! Currently I'm refactoring a lot of homebrew ESPhome devices to use the ESP32-H2 as it supports Thread. This allows me to remove weak IoT SSIDs while expanding my Thread network node count for better mesh.
Ah I picked the C6 for it's Zigbee support, I've completely avoided WiFi IoT devices where I can in my apartment. I haven't explored thread at all yet though. Thread / Matter seems like it's going to be more open than zigbee, and potentially easier to develop for?
Wow, I remember specifically buying a sound card and CD-rom drive for my 486 so I could run the GB emulator. It wouldn't boot without a sound card and I really wanted to play the non-translated version of Pokemon Gold. People wouldn't believe me when I told them I had a newer Pokemon game than Red/Blue/Yellow.
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