I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by 13of40 » Sun, May 07, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

pmcjones wrote: post #283

13of40 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, but I want to say some bad things about old thermostats. My first house had propane heating, in a big tank that they would periodically come by and fill, so I had a visceral connection to how much fuel I was using. The previous owner had left the original 1960s mercury thermostats running the place, which meant that barring any initiative on my end the temperature was the same no matter if I was sleeping,…

Setback thermostats were invented a century ago — not digital.

You're correct. I poked around to see what they were like and found this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/134131981597

Adjusted for inflation this would cost almost $500. Probably explains why the ones in my bungalow starter home were just bimetallic coils with mercury switches.

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

#302

Post by wlonkly » Sun, May 07, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

matteoraso wrote: post #285

cabalamat wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are - unnecessarily complicated - privacy destroying - overpriced - vendor lock-in - often infected with online ads you can't get rid of - likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" devic…

Adding to this, I just don't see the use case for "smart" devices. The difference between me getting up and checking the thermometer vs checking the thermometer using my phone is 10 seconds, max.

For me it's metrics.

We have a heat pump, so we change the temperature roughly twice a year: heating temperature in winter, air conditioning temperature in summer.

But my Ecobee reports the temperature in three rooms (and occupancy, which I tie into automating lights), outside temperature, outside and inside humidity, fan/heat/cool start/stop times, and some other more obscure metrics up to the mothership, and the excellent third-party website Beestat[1] tracks all of those using Ecobee's well-documented API. It lets me spot anomalies, and helps me understand if I've got the resistive heating configured to come on at the best time.

If we had time-of-day rates for electricity, it would optimize for those, but we don't have time-of-day-rates.

(If I had gas heat, or if I didn't work from home, I'd at least schedule temperature changes to set things cooler at night or when we're away -- maybe driven by the occupancy sensors! -- but apparently that's not effective with heat pumps.

[1] https://beestat.io/

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

#303

Post by wlonkly » Sun, May 07, 2023, 10:35 PM UTC

throwaway049 wrote: post #207

13of40 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, but I want to say some bad things about old thermostats. My first house had propane heating, in a big tank that they would periodically come by and fill, so I had a visceral connection to how much fuel I was using. The previous owner had left the original 1960s mercury thermostats running the place, which meant that barring any initiative on my end the temperature was the same no matter if I was sleeping,…

Are you not free to adjust the old thermostat when you leave for work or go to bed?

GP specifically said that they found that "also dumb".

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

#304

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn » Sun, May 07, 2023, 11:38 PM UTC

acheron wrote: post #294

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Matter was founded by Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee alliance. Apache-2 licensed. HA seems to embracing Matter/Thread pretty heavily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)

https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip

https://www.home-assistant.io/skyconnect/

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

#305

Post by osigurdson » Sun, May 07, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #298

solatic wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the sad reality of the cloud currently, it is. It not remotely a commodity. Eventually it certainly will be.

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

#306

Post by grrdotcloud » Sun, May 07, 2023, 11:58 PM UTC

Corrado wrote: post #269

sagarpatil wrote: post #241

Alexa isn’t any better either. I had Alexa’s in each room and when I used to ask her to start the AC, it would start AC in some other room (this is after assigning the Alexa and AC to that particular room). That right there is a deal breaker for me, I can’t keep telling my guests every time what’s the room called and have them remember it.

Alexa is weird this way. It has the ability to assign things to certain areas, it's just hard to figure out how to make it happen. For example, I have Alexa controlled lights in my basement and it knows what to turn on when I say "Turn on the lights" while in my basement. I also have Alexa controlled lights in my garage, and until recently I specifically had to tell it "Turn on the garage lights" while standing in my…

Every device in each room has a different trigger wake word. That eliminated them being triggered by proximity.

Then each smart device has a unique name based upon their function. Dog names or primary user.

Echo/Computer/Alexia, turn on Fido (outdoor lights)

Pairing by voice is also helpful.

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

#307

Post by amf12 » Mon, May 08, 2023, 12:28 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #50

indeyets wrote: post #17

The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once https://www.home-assistant.io/

I have a Google Hub and 2 Minis , would I be able to repurpose them for HA or do I have to start from scratch...? If they can't be reused, I might as well stick to Google until they get bricked (which I'm sure will happen at some point).

Yep, HA has a lot of integrations to connect to different ecosystems. Fair warning though, setting it up and making it work requires good amount of work. I spent way too much time for on it for my basic needs and eventually gave up.

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

#308

Post by vineyardmike » Mon, May 08, 2023, 12:41 AM UTC

ssbash wrote: post #104

account-5 wrote: post #86

This sort of shit is the reason they will never get me to use their passkey implementation. The sooner there's a truly portable open source offline version of passkeys I'm all in. Until then I'm sticking with my password manager. I do feel the only thing you can really trust from Google are the things that make them money. Chrome, and any software that allows them to hook into for advertising money. It makes me worry…

I believe security keys are the offline version of passkeys you're looking for. I am afraid that websites will somehow disable support security keys and only support passkey implementations from big tech (similar to how websites only offer signin with google, fb , etc). Can someone clarify if WebAuthn protocol allows for this filtering against hardware authenticators?

I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right, but I think it’s not all bad to only use auth from big tech - I don’t know if I trust most small companies to implement uname/password auth correctly. Most users recycle passwords too so a leak is really bad.

I think the reason to only support big tech passkey auth is because users (at scale) can’t be trusted to keep track of their hardware keys.

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

#309

Post by amf12 » Mon, May 08, 2023, 12:44 AM UTC

ilayn wrote: post #6

If only the author knew to what level Home Assistant reached, they would not even bother with google or alexa.

Here's me trying to install HA a few months ago on an old Windows laptop:

"Oh, the HA OS requires a VM? Let me create one. But now, my bluetooth isn't accessible to HA. Oh well let me try Core. Great, but now I can't do automatic updates, or restore from backups. Ugh fine. I'll do it manually.

Some integrations needs setting up APIs? Well the documentation doesn't explain much. Oh this one needs me to setup external access using their service or set up a cert. Man this is a lot of work for some automation to turn on my lights or connect to the services I need.

Fuck, let me just do this all in Google Home."

Has Home Assistant reached Google or Alexa in setup?

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

#310

Post by vineyardmike » Mon, May 08, 2023, 12:44 AM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #23

I recently went and got a couple of Lenovo ThinkSmart View displays off eBay and re-purposed them: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330 The reason I got them was that I wanted small desktop displays to both replace my “now playing” Raspberry Pi display and act as smart speakers, and there didn’t seem to be anything event in the market (there are plenty of cheap Chinese tablets, but I wanted something with…

> I honestly don’t see the point of nerfing them with fancy “home” UIs that do absolutely nothing useful.

A big reason for the home UIs is to optimize for a different use case. I never use my home displays as a tablet and just use them for smart home stuff. An app launcher or generic tablet UX would just slow down a voice-forward interaction.