I'll never give up my smart home devices. You'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands (or house). I have smart plugs hooked up to Alexa that'll shut everything off without me lifting a finger. All I do is ask Alexa to do it from anywhere in my house. And if somehow I forget to turn things off they all turn off automatically by 3am. My mom is in her 70s and lives alone. I bought her a connected camera for outside her house and not only can she see who is out there from her phone, but I can see as well.
Privacy concerns are a real issue but this isn't a fad that'll simple come and go. It's here to stay!
Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
311–320 of 378 posts
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's cumulative.
Turning off the lights is negligible to your overall health. Automating it (or not) will not affect your obesity or other health outcomes. There are lots of reasonable arguments against IoT switches; this is not one of them. Let's move on.
Assertions dressed as facts are not very useful either.
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's something magical about walking into the living room and saying "Hey Siri, good morning" and having your TV kick on, automatically start streaming the morning news Magical in the sense that hell is magical?
I would say the TV example isn't really a great example from the perspective of utility. In the dead of winter, it's still pitch black out when I take my dogs out first thing in the AM. The temperature can fluctuate quite a lot where I live, so I usually have two different winter coats. My winter "good morning" routine turns on my main floor lights and announces the outside temperature so I know whether or not to wea…
My former flatmate had some smart lights, and I wrote a little script that rigged them up to display the weather on a scale from deep blue to bright orange.
The city I live in has very erratic weather, and my apartment stays pretty temperate regardless of the outside weather. This makes it fairly easy to absent-mindedly dress inappropriately and end up sweating or shivering on the walk to work. I generally get in the habit of checking the weather, but after a week of warm weather it's easy to forget, and the weather here is such that it might suddenly drop 15 degrees from day to day. Having this information in bright visual form makes it easy to notice when the weather is suddenly unexpectedly hotter or colder: It took me about ten minutes to set up, and is a small improvement to my life that's tailored to exactly how I live it.
This, to me, is the advantage of the current era of smart home technology: incremental changes that can make little improvements to your day to day workflow. This thread is infested with an unfortunate combination of ignorance and lack of imagination (par for the course with HN...), where any evidence that smart devices don't fit into one commenter's workflow is evidence that it's useless for everyone (as the topvoted comment says, "smart people don't buy smart devices").
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being sustainable does not mean being a unicorn. As said the issue is that the aim always to exit. And also that they approach this as a Silicon Valley tech company and not as a "standard" company... So spending goes out of hands and it's a billion dollars or nothing.
Personally, at this point I refuse to use products and services made by startups unless I have no other choice. Seeking "an exit" is startup code word for "we don't give a flying fuck about customers and our products; it's only a vehicle to get us rich".
From a B2B side. I’ve been on both sides of a startup.
On one side we were a small company with a large company as a customer who demanded that our code be put in escrow in the case we went out of business. The company did, but the customer hired me as a contractor because I was one of a few people in the world who knew how to develop on the proprietary platform. Even better, I was one of only three people in the world who knew how to modify the C++/MFC platform itself.
On the other side, I was the dev lead for a company and our business consisted of 60-70% of the vendors revenue. We had them put the code in escrow as part of our contract.
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sad because the concept of IoT in the home has such great potential, but the execution so far has just been atrocious. https://twitter.com/internetofshit
I just can't see the potential. Increase the complexity of the system and you increase the risk of failure, and when things are failing at home, that means you've got more housework to do. Who wants that? I spent a bunch of money replacing every light bulb in my house with an LED so that I'd never have to deal with burnt-out light bulbs again. That was a use of improved technology that simplified my life. If you hook…
Yeah, the first mistake was _and make them dependent on external services_. An internet-connected light bulb's failure mode should be "temporarily become a regular light bulb".
"I like an escalator, man, because an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs." --Mitch Hedberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1ryH3igKc
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#316Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…
> Smart people don't buy smart home devices. Insulting everyone you presumably intend to convince with your argument is not a smart move.
Convince? This is just posturing for karma from the other low-effort kneejerk contrarians on HN
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like “victim preparation” to me. How about a deterrent? My neighborhood has had thefts too. I assume my two dogs barking have been enough to keep them at bay. It wouldn’t surprise me if statistically this holds true elsewhere. Low hanging fruit and all. Have you considered a motion sensor tied to a speaker that plays dogs barking/rustling?
Dogs quiet up as soon as you feed them some tasty treats. We already have a couple fake cameras on the property as deterrents that were installed by the landlord. I just happened to install a real one because I wanted a little evidence collection since I've been a victim of theft more than once in the bay area.
Option 1: Two dogs barking and a doormat that reads “You better have a warrant”.
Thief thought bubble “this might hurt / don’t forget tasty treats”
Option 2: A half dozen visible cameras
Thief thought bubble “Good stuff inside / don’t forget hat and glasses”
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even a matter of "safe". I live in a neighborhood that is seen as very safe. Yet, we had a burglary two houses down not too long ago. And they happen frequently enough to myself. I've had plenty stolen. Without a camera, there's ~0% chance of anyone being caught. I ended up buying a camera for peace of mind and for checking in on my place to see who's entering my residence area. Sometimes it's genuinely help…
With a camera, there's a ~0% chance of anyone getting caught.
Depends where you are. I would agree in most cities, but in a lot of rural areas, Fred is going to get thrown in jail.
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I buy only Apple devices. It's true that they're mostly proprietary, and Apple runs its own services, and I hate iTunes these days. But—and I realize not everyone feels the same way—but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy. They feel to me—and again, not everyone agrees—they feel to me like the only hardware company that thinks of their users as their customers,…
>but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy I can think of a few: Purism, System76, OSMC, Mycroft... they're smaller and less well-known than the big players of course, and they're not all perfect, but they treat their users as customers unlike many companies these days.
Thank you!
Busy at work, but when I have a chance I'm going to do some DuckDuckGo-ing of these names.
And since were mentioning smaller but still highly useful vendors who treat their users with respect, DuckDuckGo.
Re: Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019
#320Smart people don't buy smart home devices. My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago. Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million man…
This is the exact kind of comment that would make it to the top because it just empowered everyone that DOESN'T have one such system. It's filled with finger pointing. Most of the replies basically point out yeah, I hate IoT lights, but this use case is good... It's not genuine to dismiss the entire enchilada because YOU don't have it. In 5 years when all the crap is worked out and you eventually buy a system with ex…
So you're defending companies selling shitty products with the excuse of "in several years it won't be all garbage!"? Fuck that. For the price this iot garbage goes for I'd better damn well have a functional product for several years. Corporate shilling. I'll never understand it.