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I built an offline smart home

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Re: I built an offline smart home

#181

Post by godelski »

moandcompany wrote: post #176
godelski wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. But I really hope that they can learn this concept and understand that it is generalizable and need but require a system that is critical nor dangerous. That the same ideas are essential for simply designing good user experiences. It's really frustrating that this isn't understood well in ML where people end up talking past one another and therefore the extreme ends of the spectrum end up dominating the convers…

Beyond confusion matricies, with ML classification, there should also be deep discussion and consideration of the actual costs (consequences) of false positives, negatives to the end users and operators.

If you want to know the state of things, I was once told that my ethics section (which is requested by the conference) was unnecessary and overly verbose. This was an image generation paper and the section was only like a 4-5 sentence paragraph. I've shifted to throwing them into my appendix because I find readers look at the appendix but reviewers don't and I care more about communicating to the readers.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#182

Post by syndicatedjelly »

godelski wrote: post #175
syndicatedjelly wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why are people surprised then that in most software the process is not as thorough as in aerospace or elsewhere with physical things. Outside of engineering, few people have ever even heard the phrase “risk management”, let alone understand the theory behind it. It’s really hard to argue that a developer can consider themself an engineer, when they don’t bother understanding what happens when the thing they “en…

Thanks for this comment. Clearly in my original comment I made I failed to articulate how useful failure analysis is for even highly mundane things. So if we take this as a post mortum then I think we can see the failure mode of my language. The big question though is if this is within reasonable bounds of noise as over emphasizing mundane examples may result in the concept not making an adequate impression on the im…

> so now I'm asking a third party consultant if they have any thoughts on how I can improve my communication.

Hope this isn't too blunt, but I find your writing style to be a bit "chatty". I think you must have got the same advice I did, which is "write like you speak".

For most people, the vast majority of our verbal communications are highly informal, filled with lots of slang. Verbal phrases and euphemisms don't translate very well to writing sometimes.

If I were to offer advice, I'd say write shorter sentences and use simpler words. It should feel a bit uncomfortable to write like this. I feel slightly uncomfortable writing this even.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#183

Post by syndicatedjelly »

godelski wrote: post #175
syndicatedjelly wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why are people surprised then that in most software the process is not as thorough as in aerospace or elsewhere with physical things. Outside of engineering, few people have ever even heard the phrase “risk management”, let alone understand the theory behind it. It’s really hard to argue that a developer can consider themself an engineer, when they don’t bother understanding what happens when the thing they “en…

Thanks for this comment. Clearly in my original comment I made I failed to articulate how useful failure analysis is for even highly mundane things. So if we take this as a post mortum then I think we can see the failure mode of my language. The big question though is if this is within reasonable bounds of noise as over emphasizing mundane examples may result in the concept not making an adequate impression on the im…

> My impression is that this is because when software harms it is often less tangible and less direct than in other engineering disciplines

You're certainly on to something here. It feels easier to disassociate oneself from an ephemeral codebase whose existence vanishes entirely from your life as soon as you leave a company. Compare that with someone working on an airplane that a family member may rely on to safely transit.

That's what makes it even more sad that computer science majors are shielded from all those concerns in engineering. There really should be a "software engineering" minor that delves into what the rest of the engineering world contends with.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#184

Post by j45 »

smeej wrote: post #138
j45 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very worth motorized blinds especially if you have a lot of windows. Every setting you do manually throughout a day or season can be automated. Tie it in with movie mode to close everything, etc. Luvolite and their rebranded partners is a decent bang for the buck: https://www.louvolite.com/ I hear Ikea is worth looking at too.

One of the things I'm actually worried about is that there are several things in my house that I don't think could be automated, at least not within the parameters available to me as a renter. I do have two accordion blinds I raise and lower daily, but only two. One wall of my house is a giant sliding glass door with floor-length curtains, though, which are as manual as it gets. They don't even have a stick to guide…

It sounds like your setup works for you.

In other cases a room can't keep it's temperature stable and might need the blinds open or closed to help regulate the temperature.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#185

Post by j45 »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #85
j45 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with the microphone switch turned off?

With the microphone switch turned off they don't send audio to the cloud but they're also no longer smart devices. The only words they can detect using local processing are their limited set of wake-words. But using Alexa or Google Home is literally the opposite of an offline smart home system if that's your goal. Even if you create tasks that can function through a button press or something they still rely on the cl…

They are still smart to the extent you can schedule things to play on it at certain time from another device.

I didn't really value voice control until I had young kids.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#186

Post by ChainOfFools »

FriedPickles wrote: post #109
efitz wrote: post #29

Smart Home has kind of been my hobby for the last 7-8 years. I have well over 100 devices controlled by my smart home setup. Before I installed the first smart device in my home, however, I had a single requirement: EVERYTHING MUST FAIL NORMAL. By this I mean that if the internet went out or a vendor went out of business or I rage quit a vendor, then the device in question had to act like it was a normal non-smart de…

I so badly want an old school flippy light switch that physically flips when toggled by the smart home. IMO that would be the first smart home product strictly superior to its analog counterpart.

fingerbot. yes, a real thing

Re: I built an offline smart home

#187

Post by godelski »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #182
godelski wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this comment. Clearly in my original comment I made I failed to articulate how useful failure analysis is for even highly mundane things. So if we take this as a post mortum then I think we can see the failure mode of my language. The big question though is if this is within reasonable bounds of noise as over emphasizing mundane examples may result in the concept not making an adequate impression on the im…

> so now I'm asking a third party consultant if they have any thoughts on how I can improve my communication. Hope this isn't too blunt, but I find your writing style to be a bit "chatty". I think you must have got the same advice I did, which is "write like you speak". For most people, the vast majority of our verbal communications are highly informal, filled with lots of slang. Verbal phrases and euphemisms don't t…

On forums I write like I speak but I write differently for blogs, lectures, and papers. I appreciate the advice and know I'm often verbose. I love nuance, so I tend to write like a misattributed Mark Twain quote. I am working on it. I'm not as concerned with verbiage as the reason I come to HN is a typically higher... quality, but it's a bit noisy, I'm okay if that only filters.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#188

Post by efitz »

hasoleju wrote: post #99
efitz wrote: post #29

Smart Home has kind of been my hobby for the last 7-8 years. I have well over 100 devices controlled by my smart home setup. Before I installed the first smart device in my home, however, I had a single requirement: EVERYTHING MUST FAIL NORMAL. By this I mean that if the internet went out or a vendor went out of business or I rage quit a vendor, then the device in question had to act like it was a normal non-smart de…

Can you explain the steps you have to take if you want to move through your house without the lights? Is the switch always "on" and the sensor then turns on the light and you just have to turn the switch "off"? And then if the switch is turned "off" will you need to first turn it "on" again in order to make the automation work properly again?

I bought Eve brand motion/occupancy/illuminance sensors for high traffic areas. I run them in Matter mode so everything is local and vendor neutral. I use an Apple TV as a controller and I use HomeKit automation to create rules to turn lights on and off.

By using occupancy and time of day conditions I can have multiple rules to turn on lights to different brightnesses at different times of day. I turn on sets of lights vs individual lights so it’s not the absolute most efficient in terms of power but on the other hand having lights turn off automatically is a good saver when you have kids.

I use Lutron Caseta wall dimmers and dimmable LEDs everywhere so they already have a nice fade-off effect. I once tried to code a fade-on effect but it turns out that instant on is preferable so I gave up on that (it was unreliable anyway).

For low traffic areas like closets I use Lutron Caseta motion sensors; they work great and have very little configuration.

One note of advice - there is a lot of grey market Lutron stuff on Amazon; you can get burned by clones or up-labeled stuff that doesn’t function exactly as advertised. I would stick to buying at a home store or buying from the Lutron store on Amazon.

Re: I built an offline smart home

#190

Post by averageRoyalty »

blagie wrote: post #139
j45 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really helpful to know - Zigbee for a while was a premium compared to other protocols and it's nice to discover that has drastically changed.

It's still often double the price. * Wifi spy-on-you-compromise-your-network version: $2 * Zigbee version: $4. I can spare the extra two bucks, though.

Or buy the wifi one and flash with esphome or similar.
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