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I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

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Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#291

Post by nbzso »

meindnoch wrote: post #131
nbzso wrote: post #96

The biggest unanswered question for me in recent years is how educated people with a tech background have trusted a big corporation which publicly stated years ago that they existence goal is to build the digital GOD (AGI). It's beyond my imagination. The same with OpenAI craze now. Why I would give my personal or corporate information to them or Microsoft? To learn more about my process patterns and RLHF their model…

Maybe "educated people with a tech background" aren't as intelligent as you thought?

Uncomfortably, after leading several teams I lean to this direction, but I never forget that I am biased too.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#292

Post by knolan »

katbyte wrote: post #165
knolan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my Time Capsule. It worked flawlessly for a nearly a decade when the disk inevitably failed. I still use it in my office for backups with a new disk. I wish Apple still made them and made swapping disks tool free.

Is time capsule any different the Time Machine backups to networked eogtage?

No, but the hardware was neat.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#293

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

grepfru_it wrote: post #264
SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully respect when anyone decides they don't want smart devices, but all of your bullet points are quite easy to accomplish with off the shelf devices these days ("unnecessarily complicated" will always be debatable though). All of my lights, outlets, and dozens of other niche things, never connect to the internet, and everything is fully functional when there's no internet connection. Home Assistant with Zigbee de…

Personally think zwave to be the most entrenched (commercial real estate relies heavily on zwave). The “cool” smart products typically exist as Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and zigbee devices (in that order). The requirements for those turn me off but I have been very successful with zwave. It powers everything from locks and lights to doors gates and my sprinkler system. HVAC is controlled by zwave and I even have a keychain s…

Personally, I've found Zigbee devices to be much easier to find, much more reliable than Bluetooth, and the entire sector seems to be heading towards Matter, Thread, and Zigbee anyways.

My battery powered Zigbee devices last at least a year without needing a recharge/replacement, which was a huge selling point (door/vibration sensors, temperature, etc), although zwave is similar if I understand correctly. Most of mine are on year 3 now and probably need new batteries soon.

My order of preference would be Matter, Zigbee, Wifi, and Bluetooth being a last resort option. Z-wave isn't on the list only because I decided against getting a controller for it.

I love that we have options like this.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#294

Post by acheron »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #293
grepfru_it wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally think zwave to be the most entrenched (commercial real estate relies heavily on zwave). The “cool” smart products typically exist as Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and zigbee devices (in that order). The requirements for those turn me off but I have been very successful with zwave. It powers everything from locks and lights to doors gates and my sprinkler system. HVAC is controlled by zwave and I even have a keychain s…

Personally, I've found Zigbee devices to be much easier to find, much more reliable than Bluetooth, and the entire sector seems to be heading towards Matter, Thread, and Zigbee anyways. My battery powered Zigbee devices last at least a year without needing a recharge/replacement, which was a huge selling point (door/vibration sensors, temperature, etc), although zwave is similar if I understand correctly. Most of min…

I got a Hubitat box that has both Zwave and Zigbee. I've only ever used Zwave devices and they all work very well but I guess I have the option of Zigbee if I need it. I've avoided anything Wifi or Bluetooth. I don't really know what "Matter" is but I had thought it was a Google thing, which I would certainly avoid at all costs. Maybe I misunderstood it though.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#295

Post by grepfru_it »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #293
grepfru_it wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally think zwave to be the most entrenched (commercial real estate relies heavily on zwave). The “cool” smart products typically exist as Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and zigbee devices (in that order). The requirements for those turn me off but I have been very successful with zwave. It powers everything from locks and lights to doors gates and my sprinkler system. HVAC is controlled by zwave and I even have a keychain s…

Personally, I've found Zigbee devices to be much easier to find, much more reliable than Bluetooth, and the entire sector seems to be heading towards Matter, Thread, and Zigbee anyways. My battery powered Zigbee devices last at least a year without needing a recharge/replacement, which was a huge selling point (door/vibration sensors, temperature, etc), although zwave is similar if I understand correctly. Most of min…

That’s the thing you need four different methods to access the protocols you describe. Of those protocols you listed, zwave operates at the lowest frequency giving you the best coverage. And has all the same benefits of zigbee (auto healing, mesh network). So yeah there are options but some of them just make no sense (as you pointed out)

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#296

Post by c0wb0yc0d3r »

jasonjayr wrote: post #124
briHass wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the HA voice assistant support require HA Cloud or whatever they're calling it? The price for that $6/m felt a bit steep for what it provided, though supporting HA development is appealing. When I started to read through the non-cloud option, I saw some analog telephone and POTS modem requirements and my eyes glazed over.

Where did you see anything about POTS?

They're talking about this: https://www.home-assistant.io/projects/worlds-most-private-v...

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#297

Post by c0wb0yc0d3r »

blue_cookeh wrote: post #107
briHass wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the HA voice assistant support require HA Cloud or whatever they're calling it? The price for that $6/m felt a bit steep for what it provided, though supporting HA development is appealing. When I started to read through the non-cloud option, I saw some analog telephone and POTS modem requirements and my eyes glazed over.

> When I started to read through the non-cloud option, I saw some analog telephone and POTS modem requirements and my eyes glazed over. Confused on that one. You can expose Home Assistant to the internet (preferably using a reverse proxy like Traefik or Nginx, which is basically what your $6 gets you anyway) to make Google Assistant work properly with it.

They're talking about this: https://www.home-assistant.io/projects/worlds-most-private-v...

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#298

Post by jiggawatts »

solatic wrote: post #261
osigurdson wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting, I thought GCP might be a good alternative - at least for managed Kubernetes.

GKE is an abomination. Its reputation is completely undeserved. Sure there's some nice things out of the box, like authenticating to clusters with your Google/GCP account, but day 2 operations are a constant frustration. What sucks? 1. The Kubernetes Pod garbage collector is configured to be abominally slow, keeping terminated pods in the API server for far too long. This interferes with cluster monitoring by making…

A lot of this criticism could also be levelled at Azure’s AKS service.

IPv6 is broken there as well, and they similarly overcharge for logging. However, instead of 50c per GB, they charge $2.75 per GB, which is highway robbery. That’s more than 5x what GCP or AWS charge.

I swear Microsoft must have been aiming for “half price to be competitive” and then accidentally put the decimal point in the wrong place.

Let this sink in: they charge the price of a serviceable used car or a decent gaming PC to store 1 TB of text for a month!

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#299

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

behnamoh wrote: post #239
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we could wield regulation to discourage products that phone home without also providing the ability to: - install a cert so we can MITM the traffic and see what they're phoning home about - turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality - configure a different address for cloud I/O, such that I can run the "cloud" part on my own infra if I want those features

> - turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality Start with Windows, iOS (Siri), and pretty much any updateable software.

There's updatable software that only updates when you tell it, and only to the version you tell it to, but it's certainly not the norm.

Let's change that. Anything less is a RCE vulnerability.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#300

Post by indeyets »

c0wb0yc0d3r wrote: post #296
jasonjayr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you see anything about POTS?

They're talking about this: https://www.home-assistant.io/projects/worlds-most-private-v...

That is an art-project, not the only option. Normal options work just fine too :)
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