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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#541

Post by TeMPOraL »

NavinF wrote: post #540
TeMPOraL wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to counter it, but I guess same-day delivery is what makes this different from my experience. As a buyer, I'm incentivized to not miss packages, because I've already waited between 2 to 7 days for it, and I don't fancy doubling that time over a delivery dispute. But if my packages were all same-day delivered, I suppose I would give less of a damn.

Well not all of them, but I'd say half my packages are delivered same-day in the bay area and most of the rest are 1 day. It depends on your shopping habits and what products are popular in your area. "essentials" like cables, snacks, batteries, hot sauce, etc are always same-day while large items like microscopes can take 2 days Regarding missed packages, are you talking about stolen packages? I've had a few cases w…

By missing here I meant missing the delivery, and having the package returned to sender, and/or stashed at the logistics center somewhere in the ass-end of a gravel road far out of town.

I've had a single-digit number of packages never delivered, most of them years ago, from Aliexpress (which, at least back then, had a very buyer-favoring dispute process, so I would get my money back with three clicks or so).

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#542

Post by godelski »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #526
godelski wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I keep stuff (bikes) in the garage that I don't want stolen. Most people keep cars in their garage. Which last I checked were usually more expensive than bikes. Joke aside, people keep a lot of valuable stuff in garages. Hell, tool chests can easily be worth thousands of dollars and are easy to pawn.

This makes me feel like the whole thing is, in large part, meant as complementary product to security cameras. For example Ring cameras, oh so conveniently owned by Amazon.

Yeah I think people just aren't getting it and don't understand what all the data does and means. More importantly, I think they can't see that there are other options, which in some/many cases there realistically isn't (hacking your own solution doesn't count. Needs to be unskilled)

I've been thinking lately about how quickly the world has changed and I think it's a bit underappreciated. I mean cellphones only became a household item 20 years ago, smart phones about 15. Or closer to home, at least for me, generative models went from barely making small black and white human faces (Goodfellow invented GANs mid 2014) to being able to create some fucking good quality images on consumer hardware in a few minutes (not counting all the prompt engineering required. But unconditional is still pretty good). Not to mention that access to these things isn't homogeneously distributed and so rural and poorer regions tend to get thrown into the deep end rather than wade their way in. I think from that perspective a lot of drama makes sense. Especially when we're talking about how people are not very tech literate. Hell, I have a hard time convincing people in my CS PhD department that hate Facebook's spying to switch to Signal or even switch to FF (we see the same stuff here on HN. More excuses than explanations). If the "friction" (even if 90+% mental) is high among tech experts idk how novices can handle all this. At least with my family they're more willing to believe Facebook's app uses an always listening microphone rather than believe me when I explain that they can figure out you're friends and interested in gardening if you just stand next to someone or walk around with them for 30 minutes in the gardening section of Home Depot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (sorry, this took a tangent, but I know you think about some of these things too)

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#543

Post by NavinF »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #541
NavinF wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not all of them, but I'd say half my packages are delivered same-day in the bay area and most of the rest are 1 day. It depends on your shopping habits and what products are popular in your area. "essentials" like cables, snacks, batteries, hot sauce, etc are always same-day while large items like microscopes can take 2 days Regarding missed packages, are you talking about stolen packages? I've had a few cases w…

By missing here I meant missing the delivery, and having the package returned to sender, and/or stashed at the logistics center somewhere in the ass-end of a gravel road far out of town. I've had a single-digit number of packages never delivered, most of them years ago, from Aliexpress (which, at least back then, had a very buyer-favoring dispute process, so I would get my money back with three clicks or so).

Wait you have to be home for every delivery? How would someone with an on-site day job receive packages?

In the US all carriers drop packages at door (or in the building's locker if you live in an apartment complex). Some packages need to be signed (alcohol, nicotine, gun ammo, etc) but the vast majority of deliveries involve zero human interaction

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#544

Post by godelski »

ethbr1 wrote: post #504
godelski wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find a bit of irony given how much fraud there is on Amazon's own website. There's got to be far cheaper solutions that result in far higher revenues. Of course Chamberlain doesn't have access to this revenue stream, but I'm sure there are other things that they can do like charging for an API key or better yet, charging Amazon for an enterprise token (which users can disable!). Since it seems they're willing…

> But [online retail] seems to be a generally sucky space and I don't understand why. Because the margins are incredibly low (thanks, Walmart and Amazon?), which means you need capital-heavy hyperefficient warehousing/distribution to even compete, which means you need scale, which means there's little competition to make things better.

Oh I 100% agree. Natural monopolies are real things, and things I wish we would discuss a bit more seriously. Especially with their growing prevalence in the modern age. We still seem to be caught up in this dream that small startups can displace giants in every market. But you can't in things like online marketplaces, social media, ISPs, insurance (of any form), cell phones, streaming services, etc. Because when the product is the network, natural monopolies are going to rise and you can't really go around monopoly busting without just destroying the product itself. We've used monopolies in the past (e.g. AT&T gave us Bell Labs due to this deal), but we don't seem to take this seriously anymore and idk if we just don't have the energy or attention span to get even a little bit nuanced (which to be fair, we're often arguing before we can even introduce nuance despite that being needed to not fight). I mean to me it even seems like politics get shittier with scale due to natural monopolies (I don't want to hear how Europe has "multiple parties" they still only have 2 coalitions which is what US parties are actually closer to).

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#545

Post by makr17 »

I don't have an automated garage door opener. The only "garage" is as old as our historic house, and is a glorified shed. I would never put a car I cared about in it.

That said, I _do_ have an automated gate controller. The installer wanted some insane amount to connect it to wifi. Politely no. An esp32, a couple of relays, some reading in the installation manual about control circuits and a bit of custom code... And now the gate is on local wifi, easily integrated with HA, and nothing opaque about it.

Do garage door openers have the same sort of control circuits?

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#546

Post by xp84 »

dheera wrote: post #481
traviswingo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Delivery drivers consistently deliver to my neighbor instead of myself. The last three digits of our addresses are 885 and 855, and they consistently confuse the two. They’re tired, overworked, underpaid, and I honestly don’t blame them. But I wouldn’t trust anyone in my garage/home when I’m not home. Not sure why these companies think that will actually work.

Why not you and your neigbor just give your address as Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5) or Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5) or whatever colors they are? If they are the same color, repaint one of them. As a bonus, this will completely throw off all the automated data brokers, idiots that use "KYC" as an excuse to want to know where you sleep, etc. Alternatively put an apartment number on your ho…

This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack.

This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, there is zero point in ever using it unless one is literally doing metered US Mail.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#547

Post by TeMPOraL »

NavinF wrote: post #543
TeMPOraL wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By missing here I meant missing the delivery, and having the package returned to sender, and/or stashed at the logistics center somewhere in the ass-end of a gravel road far out of town. I've had a single-digit number of packages never delivered, most of them years ago, from Aliexpress (which, at least back then, had a very buyer-favoring dispute process, so I would get my money back with three clicks or so).

Wait you have to be home for every delivery? How would someone with an on-site day job receive packages? In the US all carriers drop packages at door (or in the building's locker if you live in an apartment complex). Some packages need to be signed (alcohol, nicotine, gun ammo, etc) but the vast majority of deliveries involve zero human interaction

> Wait you have to be home for every delivery? How would someone with an on-site day job receive packages?

Sort of. Note that I'm a city dweller, living in a flat in an apartment block.

This is a real problem; classical solutions involve having another household member receive the parcel, asking the delivery person to deliver to a neighbor who you know is OK with it (since I started working remotely, I frequently am that neighbor), having them drop the package in front of your door (undesirable, but works in case where there's an extra door between your flat and the staircase), or putting your place of work as delivery address (if your company is happy about it; some are not). Dedicated "package send/receive" stores became a thing, then started disappearing as grocery store chains became package drop points. And then came the parcel lockers.

I imagine this problem was the primary driver of mass, enthusiastic adoption of parcel lockers - for the last decade, I've had at least one within 5 minutes of home, and this let me pick the parcel up at my leisure.

These days, most packages we order go through lockers; the ones are don't are usually medical or plain heavy (10-20kg worth of cat litter, soft drinks, etc.). This works because I work remotely, and my wife is yet to return to work after post-partum period.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#548

Post by ethbr1 »

godelski wrote: post #544
ethbr1 wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But [online retail] seems to be a generally sucky space and I don't understand why. Because the margins are incredibly low (thanks, Walmart and Amazon?), which means you need capital-heavy hyperefficient warehousing/distribution to even compete, which means you need scale, which means there's little competition to make things better.

Oh I 100% agree. Natural monopolies are real things, and things I wish we would discuss a bit more seriously. Especially with their growing prevalence in the modern age. We still seem to be caught up in this dream that small startups can displace giants in every market. But you can't in things like online marketplaces, social media, ISPs, insurance (of any form), cell phones, streaming services, etc. Because when the…

I'd love to see logistics shorn off from point of sale.

I think there'd be a lot of room for innovation if you turned Amazon/Walmart/Home Depot's logistics into their own companies, then allowed people to put whatever between that and the customer that they wanted to.

Which is essentially what Amazon does now... the only difference is they get to control that link and the revenue flow from it.

Segregating market functions forevermore would go a long way towards returning competition to marketplaces, imho. (E.g. logistics|retail, advertising|everything, etc.)

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#549

Post by ranting-moth »

blitz_skull wrote: post #497
ranting-moth wrote: post #70

> We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, ... Wow, what a contemptuous statement. I have news for you, Chamberlain Group. You are not only alienating, being hostile and losing a "Small percentage of users" (most companies would prefer to call them "valued customers", but I get it). You are causing an enormous permanent damage to your own brand.

Yeah, fuck these guys big time. I'm literally going to sell my garage door opener and buy a new because of this.

I'm going to read this as an attempt at sarcasm.

That doesn't need to happen for the Charlatan Group to struggle. Most current hardware companies are dependent on the customer to renew their hardware every 5 years.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#550

Post by dheera »

xp84 wrote: post #546
dheera wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not you and your neigbor just give your address as Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5) or Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5) or whatever colors they are? If they are the same color, repaint one of them. As a bonus, this will completely throw off all the automated data brokers, idiots that use "KYC" as an excuse to want to know where you sleep, etc. Alternatively put an apartment number on your ho…

This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack. This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, ther…

The trick is if your address is unreadable by the standardizers it gets printed as-is and it ends up with humans processing it.

If you write "885 Foo St. (blue house)" it will get standardized to "885 Foo St."

If you write "Blue house on Foo St. (eight eight five)" the standardizers will choke and it will be printed as-is.

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