Resido - the app for honeywell smart thermostats - requires notifications to be enabled to view or manage your thermostat settings or run time history. This is relatively recent because I had disabled notifications over a year ago due to it pushing ads to me.
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.
What an awful app too. It doesn't refresh the current temperature without force-quitting and restarting. Not as bad as my water heater app though. Couldn't get it to pair after 30 mins of headbanging, finally got through to their support who told me that the app usually doesn't work and they don't know why, and that I shouldn't bother trying.
It was annoying because my previous house had some z-wave enabled thermostats I could manage through the alarm system without any of that BS, I thought the honeywell in this rental would be nicer but all it's done is confirm I'll be using something other than honeywell controls in my next house.
Unfortunate, the whole landscape on this is littered with mines and finding truly knowledgeable help is difficult, most seem to just push their favourite flavour, regardless of the patient.
Any successful form of trauma treatment will first make it worse, because you open the can of worms and begin to go deep. Unfortunately, many therapists are not very good at explaining that up front. If you only have a few sessions, it is basically guaranteed to make matters worse. That's a sign that it is working (but maybe a sign to switch therapist if it wasn't explained well and cautioned about; making sure the environment and person is ready for it should happen first...).
When I worked for a certain large telco, we used to get emails from our "CEO of {State Name}" asking us to support their lobbying efforts to shut down community ISP initiatives by donating to their PAC and contacting our legislators trying to make it look like there was grassroots support. These state level CEOs were strictly lobbyists.
Considering the company I worked for didn't even serve the community I lived in but multiple startups wanted to provide us fiber service but ran into all the road blocks my telco and others pushed, I was less than thrilled knowing the company i worked for was actively trying to block providing better internet to older neighborhoods.
Some, the majority didn't care and of course we had the unfortunate few that were more than happy to help the company because they thought it would help earn them brownie points. We all got laid off the same in the end.
I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.
Email has the stigma of all the junk/grey mail, spam and scam attempts that come in via it - people want to not have to filter through as much of that and for the most part these chat apps solve that problem.
It doesn't help that Outlook's search capabilities have gotten effectively useless - I can type in search terms that I'm literally looking at in my inbox and have it return no results, or have it return dozens of hits without the search terms involved at all. I don't have that problem with Slack or Teams.
However, I think you are right overall on email being better overall for what people end up using chat apps for.
NC DMV replaced their regular forms with a chat bot and it's horrible. Takes forever to complete tasks that used to take less than a minute because of the fake interaction and fake typing. Just give me a damn form to pay my taxes or request a custom plate.
Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Trump/Vance and I'm deeply uncomfortable with the stuff happening with DOGE in particular.
All the republicans have to do for the 2026 midterms and Vance for 2028 is play clips from the DNC Officer election process that took place over the weekend as campaign ads.
Many of my friends can only perceive the election outcome and the actions currently taking place from a place of identity based policies. Virtually everyone I know outside of that circle and many inside that circle who keep their mouths shut are tired of that being THE focus.
This is some of the out of touch stuff that comes from the DNC that is toxic to a large part of America.
“Our rules specify that when we have a non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six offices must be gender balanced with the results of the previous four elections. Our elected officers are currently two male and two female. In order to be gender balanced… we must elect one male, one female, and one person of any gender."
I am the furthest thing from an “aggrieved Rural Christian Evangelical Conservative” - none of those adjectives apply to me.
They also said “So, I’m going to have a show of hands. How many of you believe that racism and misogyny played a role in Vice President Harris”. Did it play role? Yes. I’m a Black guy and I know a few Black men that didn’t vote for her just because of that.
But just like Christians and traditional Republicans held their nose and voted for Trump the first time.
Enough of America voted for Obama twice. Obama never made it about race. But then again, we had decent Republican candidates like Romney and McCain (who shut it down anytime it came up).
Harris lost because she was a continuation of Biden and was complicit in hiding the fact that Biden was losing his mental faculties
Telcos I've touched have used Tandems for E911, SMS processing, Device authorization, and automated tariff negotiation between CLEC/ILEC, but FTP server is a new one!
HP BladeSystem p-series chassis were all DC bus bar powered back in the mid 2000s. You had a power enclosure which provided DC output to one or more chassis in a rack over the bus bar. We were glad to be rid of those blades but it wasn't because of their power configuration.
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.