71–80 of 107 posts
Oldie but goldie: Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
For me, they just never did anything useful. I have light switches that work nicely. If voice transcription + LLMs + conversational AI had been good in 2017 I might have used my google home speaker, but the quality of the interactions was so extremely awful that I couldn't even get my google home to play music consistently.
You'd think the tech would have matured by now.
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability. Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly s…
Not only that, but within a few years they all stop functioning and now all you have is a collection of expensive paper weights.
The greed of the manufacturers made "smart home" a predictably dumb proposition.
Plus most people who use hue aren’t even aware of the Lutron aurora.
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability. Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly s…
With each manufacturer doing their own thing, you’re also dependent upon each company keeping their servers online for X years. And when they inevitably decide that this isn’t the market for them (eg Belkin Wemo), you’re stuck with switches or plugs that potentially don’t work at all. Smart home items should have lifespans on the order of decades. But companies treat the products as something that is obsolete after a…
Or at least only trade away long term reliability when there are useful features being gained.
Eternally relevant rant about smart product solutioneering: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HcXu4_K1tMQ&t=45s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PIN number lock boxes are pretty unsafe, one could consider 2 simple solutions to stop someone trivially determining your PIN: 1) after closing the box, randomize the digits: humans are pretty bad at randomization, imagine modeling the randomization delta it won't be perfectly uniform, and the different discs would display similar distributions of rotation. Suppose spinning a disc to randomize it, one might have a pe…
I mean, they could also just saw open the box or rip it off whatever mounting brackets it's on. At some point you have to acknowledge you're making unauthorized access inconvenient rather than impossible.
The reason really is the extreme arrogance of every single manufacturer that wants you to install their app and use their ecosystem. That might have worked if one of them became super dominant and pushed everyone else out. But because that didn't happen, now I have to install 20 apps for 20 different manufacturers with no guarantees of interoperability. Instead of that I'm choosing to vote with my wallet and mostly s…
That's good. I don't want a single company to control everything in my house. Having multiple vendors with different implementations is healthy for the industry.
The real problem is there's nothing "smart" about those "smart home devices" to begin with. They are just remotely controlled devices. Technically, someone or something still has to control them because these devices can't really make decisions on their own. And then, to make those decisions remotely (either in the cloud or in a home local controller), every home installation needs to be highly customized. There are several light switches in my house that I never need to touch -- their states are automatically shifted based on like ~15 conditions: time of day, light conditions, occupancy, human activities(iOS focus modes). Non technical people can't do that.
I would want those devices to make simple decisions on their own (I have a few "dumb" light switches with motion+light sensors and they are pretty good already), and for complex decisions, they expose some APIs for other devices/controllers to call. Matter seems to be the right direction, but it is still controlled by a handful powerful players.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus, their apps insist on advertising their other crap to you at every opportunity. Stop pestering me because you think I haven't given you enough money yet. Go away.
It also wants all three of wifi, Bluetooth, and location on, otherwise it provides a reminder that you have them switched off - even though it works just with wifi on.