Look around better? It's easier than ever to use technologies to accomplish my goals, and the ratio of usefullness/effort was never that high. Back in 2000's,

Look around better? It's easier than ever to use technologies to accomplish my goals, and the ratio of usefullness/effort was never that high. Back in 2000's, if I wanted to design something as simple as "warn me if my basement gets cold", It'd be a complex design, likely requiring a spare PC and custom protocol. Today, it's one evening project using $10 worth of parts (ESP32 + CircuitPython). If you spend a second evening, you can set up fully self-hosted hub for it, independent of any corporation (HomeAssistant).