The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

My experience with Lutron's smart switches and blinds has been great. For any new home construction, I would wholeheartedly recommend adding a lot more LED lights than any builder would normally put in, wiring in smart+motorized blinds, and using smart dimmer light switches. The way to avoid fussiness from smart home devices is to choose ones that are controllable in both the classic ways, like with a switch on the wall and/or remote control - and also through an app or by voice with your preferred device from Amazon, Apple, or Google.

With Lutron, beyond the things you mentioned, two more of my unexpectedly favorite features have been:

1) being able to add additional wall switches anywhere and program them to control any set of lights, without any extra electrical wiring (for 3-way or 4-way switches, or controlling multiple lighting circuits with one switch)

2) range-based programming (e.g. automatically turning on lights for rooms from the garage to kitchen when you're arriving home)

Other devices like smart locks, smart garage doors, water leak alarm sensors, and AV equipment have all been useful and generally worked well for me. Some of them have been slightly fussy, but not as a general rule and certainly not to an "unbearable" extent. Overall, they really do make things significantly better, at a surprisingly low cost compared to the rest of home construction.

> Did the company just not test their product sufficiently?

Almost nobody in the software industry does. Quality is hard. Testing to high quality makes testing take 70% of the time budget - most places want to ship yesterday. Google and Amazon have popularized push to production, which is a stupid idea. (Note that Google and Amazon have invested a ton into fast automatic rollback which most people miss, even so Google regularly breaks features people depend on)

There are things we can do. Automated tests are a good thing, you should have an extensive suite. My company has a suite that takes 3 hours when running on 40 machines in parallel. That just assures things aren't completely broken before the humans testers start their 1000 hour test starts [not the real number but the right magnitude]. While we are looking to move more of that 1000 hour test to automated systems, much of it is about proving that our simulation matches the real world and so cannot be automated.

We have had good luck with static and dynamic analysis tools. They pick up a lot of errors that are hard to find manually, and make the code more maintainable.

The above still doesn't meet my quality standards. I'm looking for anything that will make things better. (So far I've only heard of formal proofs, which I've also heard is hard)

Ask yourself what the value is of all this additional complexity and additional “features” relative to the end sought. Do you need the damn router to be on for the stupid “smart” lightbulb to turn on? When you need the lights on to get something done, do you really want to be distracted by some undependable piece of shit doing is little smart jig? It’s like living in some absurdust play.

The market demand of a lot of these things is driven by a kind of monkey-loves-shiny-things syndrome and herd thinking. Maybe enui and idleness because anyone that truly values their short life won’t waste it on tinkering with a bunch of pointless devices that contribute no real value to his life. May his tombstone read “He tinkered with his smart devices. Then he died.”

Interestingly, a mature software engineer hates complexity. He loves to trim the fat from his code base. He hates pissing away his life dicking around and maintaining stuff that had no reason for being there in the first place. He has better things to do with his time than jerking off some code he doesn’t need.

Maybe smart devices are a distraction for nihilists. Maybe it’s like alcohol. Maybe Idiocracy II will feature a populace spending half their days trying to turn the lights on.

And nevermind the dystopian contribution these things are to the surveillance state.

  > I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches

Sure, but how do you turn the lights on when the power's out and the router is down?

Lrf, V'z wbxvat.

Because in the movies it actually works 100% of the time (unless the hero is exploiting a bug to take down the villain)