I’m glad I read this. I think a lot about the dystopias in sci fi books and movies. A few scenes in particular in “Minority Report”: One where the main character walks into a clothing store and...
I’m glad I read this.
I think a lot about the dystopias in sci fi books and movies. A few scenes in particular in “Minority Report”: One where the main character walks into a clothing store and there are ad displays that recognize him and talk about his previous purchases. And another where the police send in robot drones which force each person in a building to submit to a retinal scan.
We are in this dystopia now. We have been for at least a decade. People aren’t recognizing it or aren’t caring. And politicians are bought and regulation captured.
It’s too bad that we’ve been warned about this shit since the 1940s and we’re just sleepwalking into hell.
I'm in agreement that we are currently living in the dystopian world of the SciFi stories but I guess they don't have the aesthetic that we have come to expect so don't realise it. Also its hella...
I'm in agreement that we are currently living in the dystopian world of the SciFi stories but I guess they don't have the aesthetic that we have come to expect so don't realise it.
Also its hella convenient which is what people care more about.
I know I’m talking a little past the point of the article, but in my experience firmware flashed and self hosted smart home hardware isn’t even dumber - it’s often way more capable than it was out...
I know I’m talking a little past the point of the article, but in my experience firmware flashed and self hosted smart home hardware isn’t even dumber - it’s often way more capable than it was out of the box.
Not to suggest it isn’t sometimes worth making sacrifices in pursuit of privacy and control, just to say that in a lot of cases it’s more of a win win.
The best way is to just get devices that support local control. Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are the main protocols to look out for which don't require internet access, or even a Wi-Fi...
The best way is to just get devices that support local control. Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are the main protocols to look out for which don't require internet access, or even a Wi-Fi connection.
On the automation side of things, Home Assistant is open source and supports a vast amount of devices. They offer an overview of officially supported integrations, where one can also look up the IoT class of the devices. "Local polling" and "local push" are the ones to look out for.
If a device isn't listed, then there is still a chance someone has done the leg work, and made an unofficial integration. In general, a basic google search for the device with "home assistant" appended will often result in other users experiences with them.
If you start getting into community integrations do yourself a favor and install the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) It makes most community addons a one-click install inside the Home...
Besides Valetudo for robot vacuums, GrapheneOS is a great example for smartphones. OpenWRT is another one for networking devices. Using a Kobo offline with KoReader basically replaces the OS....
Besides Valetudo for robot vacuums, GrapheneOS is a great example for smartphones.
OpenWRT is another one for networking devices.
Using a Kobo offline with KoReader basically replaces the OS.
Those are not necessarily smart appliances, but still allow to regain control over connected devices.
The two great answers above pretty much cover what I would've said! The Home Assistant ecosystem is the big thing for smart home hardware: it pulls together devices and automations in a much more...
The two great answers above pretty much cover what I would've said!
The Home Assistant ecosystem is the big thing for smart home hardware: it pulls together devices and automations in a much more coherent way than any of the siloed proprietary apps I've seen from the actual device manufacturers, and I'd say that local HA compatibility with a well maintained integration is table stakes for a smart home product to be worth buying.
I probably should've said "firmware flashed and/or self hosted", to be honest - most of the time just skipping the manufacturer's proprietary Zigbee hub and associated janky app, and communicating directly with the devices over a Zigbee USB dongle instead via Home Assistant is enough to get full plug and play local functionality out of the box. You can go deeper with custom firmwares like tasmota or ZigbeeTLc that actually run on the device chipsets, but 99% of the time that's overkill nowadays.
Very much relatedly, when I bought a new TV a little while ago, I found that there were nearly no options that didn’t come with some sort of Internet-connected, “smart” operating system installed....
Very much relatedly, when I bought a new TV a little while ago, I found that there were nearly no options that didn’t come with some sort of Internet-connected, “smart” operating system installed. This is immensely frustrating to me, especially given the abysmal track record of these systems, spying on local devices and recording what’s being played to build profiles for advertisers. I ended up buying a Sony TV with GoogleTV installed, disabling the WiFi, and building my own fanless HTPC from scratch.
Our clothes washer and oven (!!!) also inexplicably have Internet-connected features, which I will absolutely never enable. I’ve gone out of my way to ensure that all none of our home automation tech uses WiFi or supports Internet connection, using a combination of Hubitat and Home Assistant to manage everything on my own hardware. I went through a lot of effort to find what seems to be one of the only “smart” lock offerings that doesn’t use WiFi (and also has a quality physical lock), the Ultraloq U Bolt Pro.
I feel very similarly to this person. I wish that when I was looking for baby monitors, I didn’t have to pour over tech specs and privacy policies to ensure that nothing requires an internet connection to work. I wish that it wasn’t nearly impossible to find a pregnancy tracker that didn’t just outright sell all data it could glean about you to the highest bidder. I wish that my first reaction to learning that our solar panels were directly Internet connected and monitorable by both the installer and the manufacturer wasn’t “shit, how big of a privacy risk is that? Are they allowed to sell that data?”
Re: TV, it sounds like you put more work into it than I did. How much of a privacy risk is it to just never connect the TV to the internet without doing the other things? I helped my brother move...
Re: TV, it sounds like you put more work into it than I did. How much of a privacy risk is it to just never connect the TV to the internet without doing the other things?
I helped my brother move this fall. He got a new "it was on sale at Target" grade TV, and it wouldn't play anything without connecting to his wifi. It wouldn't let us use the antenna or HDMI inputs without "completing setup." I'm sure there's some jumble of buttons that a technician could press to get around it, but it blew my mind as someone who doesn't use the smart part of my TV.
This is, in effect, what I did. I disabled the Wi-Fi in the TV's settings, and then I built myself a little computer that sits under the TV and plugged it in with an HDMI port. I just use that...
How much of a privacy risk is it to just never connect the TV to the internet without doing the other things?
This is, in effect, what I did. I disabled the Wi-Fi in the TV's settings, and then I built myself a little computer that sits under the TV and plugged it in with an HDMI port. I just use that computer (running Ubuntu) as my “smart TV”. Happy to chat more about it if you like! I'm quite happy with it.
It's still conceivably possible that the actual television has some 3g radio or something, the way modern cars do, to try to work around not being connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, but I’m banking on that being more effort than it's worth for the manufacturers, since most people just connect it to Wi-Fi right away.
It wouldn't let us use the antenna or HDMI inputs without "completing setup."
That is… horrifying. Is it at least possible to disable the Wi-Fi after setting up the TV?
Ah, okay. I must have read too much into what you said and imagined a more complex setup. On my TV, there is no option to disable wifi entirely, but you are able to never connect it to a network....
Ah, okay. I must have read too much into what you said and imagined a more complex setup. On my TV, there is no option to disable wifi entirely, but you are able to never connect it to a network. I use it as a dumb TV with an antenna via coax and PS5 via HDMI.
I didn't fiddle with my brother's TV enough to see whether you could turn the wifi off after setup. He does use the smart part of the TV for Youtube, and he is much more lackadaisical about digital privacy in general, so once we got it up and running, we didn't mess with it too much. I wish I could remember the brand and model so I could know which company to never buy from.
On the subject of smart devices, is anyone here actively resisting the lure of them? I'll concede some are genuinely useful (e.g Thermostats), but by and large I don't need the time saving of...
On the subject of smart devices, is anyone here actively resisting the lure of them?
I'll concede some are genuinely useful (e.g
Thermostats), but by and large I don't need the time saving of vacuuming a little less frequently or having my lights on a timer so I don't have to flick a switch.
Not to mention the additional cost, ewaste when it breaks, or being one update away from being borked/a security hazard.
Am I just out of touch? I like the balance of simplicity vs capability to be favoured in the former, but I feel we've swung way too far in the other direction and we're uncritically adding software bloat to everything.
I think you’re looking at this from the standpoint of your capabilities and your own home. We tend to brush off “convenience” as something that only lazy people want, when small changes to some...
Exemplary
I think you’re looking at this from the standpoint of your capabilities and your own home. We tend to brush off “convenience” as something that only lazy people want, when small changes to some people can increase their independence or cut down on worry/stress.
If you were someone who had mobility issues, would it still be no big deal to vacuum? I’ve never tried to vacuum while using crotches or a wheelchair, but I doubt it’s trivial. Everyone not in that situation is a broken bone away from easy things becoming hard.
The first smart devices that I got were a smart light bulb and switch to go with it. Yes they cost more than a regular light bulb, but they cost less than rewiring that light would have. The room in question has a pull switch for a ceiling light far from the door and I was tired of tripping over my cats in the dark while trying to turn the light on. Sometimes I used the flashlight on my phone, but that meant I needed to make sure I had my phone or a flashlight on me before entering this room. In my opinion, turning on a light should not require pre planning.
The house I bought has a smart garage door. I’ve never had a garage before, I’m not used to having a room with expensive things visible in it open to the outside world. This has caused me some anxiety that I don’t enjoy. So if the door has been open for more than a half hour when it’s late enough that nobody in my household is likely to want the door open, it closes. I can also check and close it from places like the airport.
Something that would likely have zero impact on one person might result in a huge increase in quality of life for someone else.
"Convenience" is a euphemism for "quality" in software. I despise the term, it's too often used to paper over the fact that Free Software is shit, and avoid questioning why. Proprietary software...
I think you’re looking at this from the standpoint of your capabilities and your own home. We tend to brush off “convenience” as something that only lazy people want, when small changes to some people can increase their independence or cut down on worry/stress.
"Convenience" is a euphemism for "quality" in software. I despise the term, it's too often used to paper over the fact that Free Software is shit, and avoid questioning why.
Proprietary software is better because they pay designers to design on it, and because if users get pissed off and stop using it, they'll lose their job. They pay designers because they receive money from users. The solution to Free Software being worse is for users to pay for the Free Software.
Very good point and everyone will have their own point on that simplicity-capability spectrum. I'm not suggesting my position is superior, if you have use-cases that would never have been served...
If you were someone who had mobility issues, would it still be no big deal to vacuum? I’ve never tried to vacuum while using crotches or a wheelchair, but I doubt it’s trivial. Everyone not in that situation is a broken bone away from easy things becoming hard.
Very good point and everyone will have their own point on that simplicity-capability spectrum. I'm not suggesting my position is superior, if you have use-cases that would never have been served before and solving it outweighs the downsides - that's undeniably a good thing.
From my interactions in Tildes, it's clear that most people here do think carefully about tradeoffs, so in that sense I have less reason to be concerned - I'm happy to be wrong/less skeptical that there are more thoughtful people out there :)
Accessibility is why we have a few smart bulbs in lamps, a few Google minis, and a nest doorbell. My partner is a wheelchair user and is home alone most of the day when I'm at work (less so now...
Accessibility is why we have a few smart bulbs in lamps, a few Google minis, and a nest doorbell. My partner is a wheelchair user and is home alone most of the day when I'm at work (less so now that we have a PA again!) but he can set timers for cooking, set reminders to call his doctor, turn lights off that are out of easy reach, or ask me to do it from work and I can see who is at the door or if a package showed up from work, or he can check before going up to the door. Not having to maneuver up to things is very helpful for him. He can't reach the thermostat, but the app can.
Ironically we don't have a Roomba because he's more likely to murder it with the chair than not, but hes in a heavy duty power chair rather than a more agile manual.
The smart washer and dryer came with the house and it's less useful to us since they're not in a basement out of earshot. So not everything is as helpful, but all these bits and pieces are us trying to make our home actually accessible for him
Redundancy and simplicity are resilience. They are not efficient. Efficient systems lack resilience. Smart devices can make your life easier and better. Don't get it wrong. There are absolutely...
Redundancy and simplicity are resilience. They are not efficient. Efficient systems lack resilience.
Smart devices can make your life easier and better. Don't get it wrong. There are absolutely times when I think of the myriad of smart devices, even local hosted ones, that could make my life some small amount better.
That said, from the number of issues I have even trying to keep my dumb home alive, I need to add zero complexity into this system.
I'll even say this, it would be cool to have a little robot vacuum to get under the couch so I don't have to move it as much but not at the cost of it telling Amazon the layout of my house or the cost of when I'm inevitably the only one in the house responsible for all it's maintenance because it has a more complex function that a single switch. I swear, everything is like owning a dog. Everyone else wants it, I've gotta take care of it.
RC cars take some time don't they? I've been thinking about getting an RC crawler for years, finally biting the bullet about 3 weeks ago now and it's been such a blast. I've probably spent more...
RC cars take some time don't they? I've been thinking about getting an RC crawler for years, finally biting the bullet about 3 weeks ago now and it's been such a blast.
I've probably spent more time with it on my bench, swapping out parts and building my course in my backyard than I have actually driving the thing, but damn is driving it around what I've built and seeing it perform fun. Though I did snap a screw off into the servo mount the other day, but I guess hot glue has fixed it for now.
I spend many more hours building than I do driving them but they're great to sit on the coffee table and spend an hour building a diff or rebuilding the back half of a kit because I skipped a page...
I spend many more hours building than I do driving them but they're great to sit on the coffee table and spend an hour building a diff or rebuilding the back half of a kit because I skipped a page in the instructions!
Crawlers are great fun because they take so much effort to actually break them. Once you start playing with faster kits, you'll find out so many interesting ways to break things. Nothing beats charging your batteries and driving out to a field only to have your motor strip the main drive gear because your mesh was slightly off.
I often have a conversation with my colleague where he shows me another smart device and I'll just ask him... "Why"? He recently got a sensor that actively tracks his location in his room and...
I often have a conversation with my colleague where he shows me another smart device and I'll just ask him... "Why"? He recently got a sensor that actively tracks his location in his room and adjust the "scene" with adaptive lighting and such based on his position in the room. Why would you need this?
Besides it being a fun discussion, it also makes us both think about the reason for such a device. Often it boils down to a simple "because it's fun".
I'm not actively resisting smart devices but I also don't go overboard. I own a robot vac and a smart thermostat. The thermostat actively saves me money by allowing granular control per room, the vac is just ease of use and a higher standard of cleanliness because the effort is practically zero. My wife wasn't sure about the robo vac until the second we actually put it to use and now she's fully on board.
Long story short, I think it's a good idea to ask yourself if you really think the smart device is an added benefit or just smart for the sake of being smart.
I'm quite content with my lack of a Smart life. I've been offered, been given Smart items, but I'm those instances I've demanded a Dumb replacement (and received it) or sold the Smart device...
I'm quite content with my lack of a Smart life. I've been offered, been given Smart items, but I'm those instances I've demanded a Dumb replacement (and received it) or sold the Smart device without ever opening it.
I'm just not interested in what they have to offer and I'm not interested in trying to maintain our configure it. Sure, it would be nice to not to have to get up and turn a light on or off or be able to check what my fridge has in it when I'm thinking about what to make for dinner, but are any of those things that much of an imposition for me or that inconvenient that I need tech to solve that issue for me? Not really.
I'll continue to listen for my washing machine to jingle, setting timers to remember when my bake is finished or manually checking my locks on the rare occasion I'm not sure if I locked them or not. It doesn't bother me.
For over two years I've been aware my home network's master router (TP-Link) was mediocre, but I finally just caved and bought one that's good enough to isolate individual devices from the...
For over two years I've been aware my home network's master router (TP-Link) was mediocre, but I finally just caved and bought one that's good enough to isolate individual devices from the internet at large (I'll need it for the camera). The plan is to proxy any internet access I want them to have in a controlled manner.
(By the way, it should have arrived today! What the hell, UPS? You make me wait 13 hours and just don't show up? Not even a word?)
I suppose this marks a shift in my attitude toward smart devices in which I finally admitted (just last week!) that they are hostile to me and must be controlled from the outside. I just can't trust the buggers.
I dragged my feet as much as I possibly could. I could have had an adblocker in my smart TV if LG hadn't patched the bug that allowed people to install homebrew. Now if I want to use youtube on my TV I have to see an ad every three minutes in some videos. And I can't use my VR headset without an internet connection, because they patched it to force all store-bought apps (including Virtual Desktop) to require online validation. Isn't it great when paying customers are the most inconvenienced? And I still remember Daikin breaking the wifi on their AC units with a bugged patch (in 2023 I think?)
Replacing the firmware isn't always an option, either. Even assuming the device isn't capable of circumventing the firmware to phone home (like a smartphone's baseband chip might), brands tend to have fifty tiny regional variations of their models named according to some byzantine, opaque set of rules, and by definition most of them are not available everywhere, assuming the brand operates in my country at all. The intersection between the set of models available here and the set of models supported by custom firmware projects is much smaller, and might not overlap with the specs I need at all.
This is a problem I had when picking both the camera and the router (and believe me, I spent many hours researching this), so much so that I ended up giving up on running openwrt and just going with an asus router compatible with asuswrt-merlin...
Well, actually, I have a robot vacuum Roborock S5 that I flashed with Valetudo. I didn't even try original app (as it was used unit I got for 80€) and I specifically bought this model to flash...
Well, actually, I have a robot vacuum Roborock S5 that I flashed with Valetudo. I didn't even try original app (as it was used unit I got for 80€) and I specifically bought this model to flash Valetudo on it.
TL;DR: And they lived happily ever after.
When I did that, I sent the robot on discovery of our house. Then I made up rooms in the map and one virtual wall where there is a mirror (because the robot vacuum was seeing the room bwhind the mirror!). A few days later I got it integrated to Home Assistant with map and all the rooms and since then I can manage it from anywhere through my own VPN.
I love the idea of liberating products you paid for - I don't want to say "bought" as nowadays you don't really own it because without all the apps and terms you have to agree on, it won't do the stuff you got it for. Valetudo is perfect example of that - you get (almost) all the functionality (or maybe even more than was intended by its parent company).
I like the idea so much that I can step down from my requirements when buying new things and get something more in line with such ideas than it being the fastest/biggest/best etc.
I’m glad I read this.
I think a lot about the dystopias in sci fi books and movies. A few scenes in particular in “Minority Report”: One where the main character walks into a clothing store and there are ad displays that recognize him and talk about his previous purchases. And another where the police send in robot drones which force each person in a building to submit to a retinal scan.
We are in this dystopia now. We have been for at least a decade. People aren’t recognizing it or aren’t caring. And politicians are bought and regulation captured.
It’s too bad that we’ve been warned about this shit since the 1940s and we’re just sleepwalking into hell.
I'm in agreement that we are currently living in the dystopian world of the SciFi stories but I guess they don't have the aesthetic that we have come to expect so don't realise it.
Also its hella convenient which is what people care more about.
I know I’m talking a little past the point of the article, but in my experience firmware flashed and self hosted smart home hardware isn’t even dumber - it’s often way more capable than it was out of the box.
Not to suggest it isn’t sometimes worth making sacrifices in pursuit of privacy and control, just to say that in a lot of cases it’s more of a win win.
The best way is to just get devices that support local control. Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are the main protocols to look out for which don't require internet access, or even a Wi-Fi connection.
On the automation side of things, Home Assistant is open source and supports a vast amount of devices. They offer an overview of officially supported integrations, where one can also look up the IoT class of the devices. "Local polling" and "local push" are the ones to look out for.
If a device isn't listed, then there is still a chance someone has done the leg work, and made an unofficial integration. In general, a basic google search for the device with "home assistant" appended will often result in other users experiences with them.
If you start getting into community integrations do yourself a favor and install the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS)
It makes most community addons a one-click install inside the Home Assistant UI
Besides Valetudo for robot vacuums, GrapheneOS is a great example for smartphones.
OpenWRT is another one for networking devices.
Using a Kobo offline with KoReader basically replaces the OS.
Those are not necessarily smart appliances, but still allow to regain control over connected devices.
The two great answers above pretty much cover what I would've said!
The Home Assistant ecosystem is the big thing for smart home hardware: it pulls together devices and automations in a much more coherent way than any of the siloed proprietary apps I've seen from the actual device manufacturers, and I'd say that local HA compatibility with a well maintained integration is table stakes for a smart home product to be worth buying.
I probably should've said "firmware flashed and/or self hosted", to be honest - most of the time just skipping the manufacturer's proprietary Zigbee hub and associated janky app, and communicating directly with the devices over a Zigbee USB dongle instead via Home Assistant is enough to get full plug and play local functionality out of the box. You can go deeper with custom firmwares like tasmota or ZigbeeTLc that actually run on the device chipsets, but 99% of the time that's overkill nowadays.
Very much relatedly, when I bought a new TV a little while ago, I found that there were nearly no options that didn’t come with some sort of Internet-connected, “smart” operating system installed. This is immensely frustrating to me, especially given the abysmal track record of these systems, spying on local devices and recording what’s being played to build profiles for advertisers. I ended up buying a Sony TV with GoogleTV installed, disabling the WiFi, and building my own fanless HTPC from scratch.
Our clothes washer and oven (!!!) also inexplicably have Internet-connected features, which I will absolutely never enable. I’ve gone out of my way to ensure that all none of our home automation tech uses WiFi or supports Internet connection, using a combination of Hubitat and Home Assistant to manage everything on my own hardware. I went through a lot of effort to find what seems to be one of the only “smart” lock offerings that doesn’t use WiFi (and also has a quality physical lock), the Ultraloq U Bolt Pro.
I feel very similarly to this person. I wish that when I was looking for baby monitors, I didn’t have to pour over tech specs and privacy policies to ensure that nothing requires an internet connection to work. I wish that it wasn’t nearly impossible to find a pregnancy tracker that didn’t just outright sell all data it could glean about you to the highest bidder. I wish that my first reaction to learning that our solar panels were directly Internet connected and monitorable by both the installer and the manufacturer wasn’t “shit, how big of a privacy risk is that? Are they allowed to sell that data?”
It’s exhausting!
Re: TV, it sounds like you put more work into it than I did. How much of a privacy risk is it to just never connect the TV to the internet without doing the other things?
I helped my brother move this fall. He got a new "it was on sale at Target" grade TV, and it wouldn't play anything without connecting to his wifi. It wouldn't let us use the antenna or HDMI inputs without "completing setup." I'm sure there's some jumble of buttons that a technician could press to get around it, but it blew my mind as someone who doesn't use the smart part of my TV.
This is, in effect, what I did. I disabled the Wi-Fi in the TV's settings, and then I built myself a little computer that sits under the TV and plugged it in with an HDMI port. I just use that computer (running Ubuntu) as my “smart TV”. Happy to chat more about it if you like! I'm quite happy with it.
It's still conceivably possible that the actual television has some 3g radio or something, the way modern cars do, to try to work around not being connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, but I’m banking on that being more effort than it's worth for the manufacturers, since most people just connect it to Wi-Fi right away.
That is… horrifying. Is it at least possible to disable the Wi-Fi after setting up the TV?
Ah, okay. I must have read too much into what you said and imagined a more complex setup. On my TV, there is no option to disable wifi entirely, but you are able to never connect it to a network. I use it as a dumb TV with an antenna via coax and PS5 via HDMI.
I didn't fiddle with my brother's TV enough to see whether you could turn the wifi off after setup. He does use the smart part of the TV for Youtube, and he is much more lackadaisical about digital privacy in general, so once we got it up and running, we didn't mess with it too much. I wish I could remember the brand and model so I could know which company to never buy from.
On the subject of smart devices, is anyone here actively resisting the lure of them?
I'll concede some are genuinely useful (e.g
Thermostats), but by and large I don't need the time saving of vacuuming a little less frequently or having my lights on a timer so I don't have to flick a switch.
Not to mention the additional cost, ewaste when it breaks, or being one update away from being borked/a security hazard.
Am I just out of touch? I like the balance of simplicity vs capability to be favoured in the former, but I feel we've swung way too far in the other direction and we're uncritically adding software bloat to everything.
I think you’re looking at this from the standpoint of your capabilities and your own home. We tend to brush off “convenience” as something that only lazy people want, when small changes to some people can increase their independence or cut down on worry/stress.
If you were someone who had mobility issues, would it still be no big deal to vacuum? I’ve never tried to vacuum while using crotches or a wheelchair, but I doubt it’s trivial. Everyone not in that situation is a broken bone away from easy things becoming hard.
The first smart devices that I got were a smart light bulb and switch to go with it. Yes they cost more than a regular light bulb, but they cost less than rewiring that light would have. The room in question has a pull switch for a ceiling light far from the door and I was tired of tripping over my cats in the dark while trying to turn the light on. Sometimes I used the flashlight on my phone, but that meant I needed to make sure I had my phone or a flashlight on me before entering this room. In my opinion, turning on a light should not require pre planning.
The house I bought has a smart garage door. I’ve never had a garage before, I’m not used to having a room with expensive things visible in it open to the outside world. This has caused me some anxiety that I don’t enjoy. So if the door has been open for more than a half hour when it’s late enough that nobody in my household is likely to want the door open, it closes. I can also check and close it from places like the airport.
Something that would likely have zero impact on one person might result in a huge increase in quality of life for someone else.
"Convenience" is a euphemism for "quality" in software. I despise the term, it's too often used to paper over the fact that Free Software is shit, and avoid questioning why.
Proprietary software is better because they pay designers to design on it, and because if users get pissed off and stop using it, they'll lose their job. They pay designers because they receive money from users. The solution to Free Software being worse is for users to pay for the Free Software.
Very good point and everyone will have their own point on that simplicity-capability spectrum. I'm not suggesting my position is superior, if you have use-cases that would never have been served before and solving it outweighs the downsides - that's undeniably a good thing.
From my interactions in Tildes, it's clear that most people here do think carefully about tradeoffs, so in that sense I have less reason to be concerned - I'm happy to be wrong/less skeptical that there are more thoughtful people out there :)
Accessibility is why we have a few smart bulbs in lamps, a few Google minis, and a nest doorbell. My partner is a wheelchair user and is home alone most of the day when I'm at work (less so now that we have a PA again!) but he can set timers for cooking, set reminders to call his doctor, turn lights off that are out of easy reach, or ask me to do it from work and I can see who is at the door or if a package showed up from work, or he can check before going up to the door. Not having to maneuver up to things is very helpful for him. He can't reach the thermostat, but the app can.
Ironically we don't have a Roomba because he's more likely to murder it with the chair than not, but hes in a heavy duty power chair rather than a more agile manual.
The smart washer and dryer came with the house and it's less useful to us since they're not in a basement out of earshot. So not everything is as helpful, but all these bits and pieces are us trying to make our home actually accessible for him
Redundancy and simplicity are resilience. They are not efficient. Efficient systems lack resilience.
Smart devices can make your life easier and better. Don't get it wrong. There are absolutely times when I think of the myriad of smart devices, even local hosted ones, that could make my life some small amount better.
That said, from the number of issues I have even trying to keep my dumb home alive, I need to add zero complexity into this system.
I'll even say this, it would be cool to have a little robot vacuum to get under the couch so I don't have to move it as much but not at the cost of it telling Amazon the layout of my house or the cost of when I'm inevitably the only one in the house responsible for all it's maintenance because it has a more complex function that a single switch. I swear, everything is like owning a dog. Everyone else wants it, I've gotta take care of it.
I want to work on my RC cars, not the RC vacuum.
I could ask for the details but my husband rigged the robot vacuum so it doesn't phone home.
RC cars take some time don't they? I've been thinking about getting an RC crawler for years, finally biting the bullet about 3 weeks ago now and it's been such a blast.
I've probably spent more time with it on my bench, swapping out parts and building my course in my backyard than I have actually driving the thing, but damn is driving it around what I've built and seeing it perform fun. Though I did snap a screw off into the servo mount the other day, but I guess hot glue has fixed it for now.
I spend many more hours building than I do driving them but they're great to sit on the coffee table and spend an hour building a diff or rebuilding the back half of a kit because I skipped a page in the instructions!
Crawlers are great fun because they take so much effort to actually break them. Once you start playing with faster kits, you'll find out so many interesting ways to break things. Nothing beats charging your batteries and driving out to a field only to have your motor strip the main drive gear because your mesh was slightly off.
I often have a conversation with my colleague where he shows me another smart device and I'll just ask him... "Why"? He recently got a sensor that actively tracks his location in his room and adjust the "scene" with adaptive lighting and such based on his position in the room. Why would you need this?
Besides it being a fun discussion, it also makes us both think about the reason for such a device. Often it boils down to a simple "because it's fun".
I'm not actively resisting smart devices but I also don't go overboard. I own a robot vac and a smart thermostat. The thermostat actively saves me money by allowing granular control per room, the vac is just ease of use and a higher standard of cleanliness because the effort is practically zero. My wife wasn't sure about the robo vac until the second we actually put it to use and now she's fully on board.
Long story short, I think it's a good idea to ask yourself if you really think the smart device is an added benefit or just smart for the sake of being smart.
I'm quite content with my lack of a Smart life. I've been offered, been given Smart items, but I'm those instances I've demanded a Dumb replacement (and received it) or sold the Smart device without ever opening it.
I'm just not interested in what they have to offer and I'm not interested in trying to maintain our configure it. Sure, it would be nice to not to have to get up and turn a light on or off or be able to check what my fridge has in it when I'm thinking about what to make for dinner, but are any of those things that much of an imposition for me or that inconvenient that I need tech to solve that issue for me? Not really.
I'll continue to listen for my washing machine to jingle, setting timers to remember when my bake is finished or manually checking my locks on the rare occasion I'm not sure if I locked them or not. It doesn't bother me.
For over two years I've been aware my home network's master router (TP-Link) was mediocre, but I finally just caved and bought one that's good enough to isolate individual devices from the internet at large (I'll need it for the camera). The plan is to proxy any internet access I want them to have in a controlled manner.
(By the way, it should have arrived today! What the hell, UPS? You make me wait 13 hours and just don't show up? Not even a word?)
I suppose this marks a shift in my attitude toward smart devices in which I finally admitted (just last week!) that they are hostile to me and must be controlled from the outside. I just can't trust the buggers.
I dragged my feet as much as I possibly could. I could have had an adblocker in my smart TV if LG hadn't patched the bug that allowed people to install homebrew. Now if I want to use youtube on my TV I have to see an ad every three minutes in some videos. And I can't use my VR headset without an internet connection, because they patched it to force all store-bought apps (including Virtual Desktop) to require online validation. Isn't it great when paying customers are the most inconvenienced? And I still remember Daikin breaking the wifi on their AC units with a bugged patch (in 2023 I think?)
Replacing the firmware isn't always an option, either. Even assuming the device isn't capable of circumventing the firmware to phone home (like a smartphone's baseband chip might), brands tend to have fifty tiny regional variations of their models named according to some byzantine, opaque set of rules, and by definition most of them are not available everywhere, assuming the brand operates in my country at all. The intersection between the set of models available here and the set of models supported by custom firmware projects is much smaller, and might not overlap with the specs I need at all.
This is a problem I had when picking both the camera and the router (and believe me, I spent many hours researching this), so much so that I ended up giving up on running openwrt and just going with an asus router compatible with asuswrt-merlin...
Well, actually, I have a robot vacuum Roborock S5 that I flashed with Valetudo. I didn't even try original app (as it was used unit I got for 80€) and I specifically bought this model to flash Valetudo on it.
TL;DR: And they lived happily ever after.
When I did that, I sent the robot on discovery of our house. Then I made up rooms in the map and one virtual wall where there is a mirror (because the robot vacuum was seeing the room bwhind the mirror!). A few days later I got it integrated to Home Assistant with map and all the rooms and since then I can manage it from anywhere through my own VPN.
I love the idea of liberating products you paid for - I don't want to say "bought" as nowadays you don't really own it because without all the apps and terms you have to agree on, it won't do the stuff you got it for. Valetudo is perfect example of that - you get (almost) all the functionality (or maybe even more than was intended by its parent company).
I like the idea so much that I can step down from my requirements when buying new things and get something more in line with such ideas than it being the fastest/biggest/best etc.