Community Views

HACS, the community store for unofficial Home Assistant integrations, cards and themes, has been merged into Home Assistant's development branch as a built-in component called Marketplace, targeting the 2026.11 release, Matter Alpha reports. Listings stay community-maintained, and installing one shows a warning first. The top reply welcomes it but worries new users will confuse "Marketplace" with official integrations; another says the name sounds like paid add-ons are coming.

Developer Wes Bos shared how he rooted inexpensive Android photo frames from Amazon, installed a modern browser and turned them into Home Assistant dashboards, with scripts and notes on GitHub. Commenters asked whether the frames' old Android 6 is a security concern compared with an ESP32-based display.

A poster says they bought an abandoned crypto-mining rig on Avito (a Russian classifieds site) for about $35, negotiated down from $60, and found nine working 6 GB GPUs, 54 GB of VRAM in all, with only an SSD missing. The top reply teases them for haggling: "Bro has no conscience negotiating 54GB VRAM down from $60 to $35 in 2026."

A post in r/LocalLLaMA says PewDiePie used OpenAI's API to build training data for a local model, was banned for using its outputs to train another model, won an appeal, did it again and was banned a second time, then switched to open-source tools to build a fully local agent. Those details are the poster's account. The top reply, with about 1,600 upvotes: "Especially because he paid them. They paid no one." Other replies point to OpenAI's own data scraping and to how expensive the hardware for local models still is.

It scored highest of any thread in our sweep relative to its subreddit's size (about 4,300 upvotes in a 329,000-member community).

A poster asked, sincerely, who Arab and Middle Eastern men in the U.S. are talking to on the phone all day. The thread (about 11,000 upvotes) answered: family. Replies describe long-running group calls with relatives abroad, "like a Discord voice channel," where people drop in and out all day, and shopkeepers whose families back home now know their regular customers.

r/baseball's post announcing that the New York Yankees were eliminated from 2026 World Series contention drew about 18,000 upvotes and 1,600 comments, mostly memes. One of the most-upvoted text replies: "Really impressive of the Rays to win 3 straight road games."

A YouTuber built a system modeled on Flock-style license-plate readers and pointed it at police vehicles; according to his video, officers then visited to ask what he planned to do with the data, GadgetReview reports. The creator's identity and the department involved have not been independently verified. The top reply, with about 7,500 upvotes: "Rules for thee but not for me."

Fortune reports Google cofounder Sergey Brin has given $102 million to a group opposing Proposition 40, a November ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on California's roughly 200 billionaires, with most of the money going to the state's health care program. Brin could owe about $13 billion if it passes. Opponents have raised more than $187 million and supporters about $32 million. The r/technology thread (about 38,000 upvotes) is overwhelmingly critical of Brin.

A highlight clip of Rays star Junior Caminero taunting Yankees fans after the series ("Let the Yankees fans talk now... Daaaa Yankees lose") drew about 10,000 upvotes. The top reply credits David Ortiz with the line; others debate whether baseball needs more of this kind of rivalry.

A poster asked why pirating a movie is a crime while AI companies can use the whole internet for profit. The top answer (about 3,600 upvotes): AI companies have billions of dollars to fight legal battles. Other replies note that a California court found Anthropic infringed copyright by downloading works without authorization, leading to a settlement paid per work.