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The midwit home

(dynomight.substack.com)
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wmsmith ◴[] No.37860529[source]
While I believe that HA is very cool and many vendors provide valuable solutions, we must consider what happens when we die.

This is just one anecdote, but I believe the problem is more pervasive.

I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home.

She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year.

She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift.

I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.

When choosing technology -- any technology, it's important to consider the life of that device and the people impacted far in the future.

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AtlasBarfed ◴[] No.37866526[source]
Yeah HN is generally young people and early adopters. Most HA stuff is part of a "generation" of tech. What people don't realize is that in about 15-20 years, all buzzwords/acronyms/techstacks will likely be completely different.

Home stuff needs to generally work for 20 years, and lot of things (light switches, etc) will be even longer. Tech has no conception or demonstrated discipline for functioning that long.

HA/IOT is an interop disaster currently, and the current cacaphony of standards/acronymns guarantees it will be cycled/replaced in a decade's time.

The INTER-NET of Things doesn't have a functional INTER, nor a NET.

Inter is software, which should be mathematically doable but historically improbable.

The ubiquitous NET part basically means you buy the device, and it will work with zero-config networking that means you can find it.

And the final issue is the interface. Interfaces do NOT age gracefully either. Perhaps voice interfaces are what is needed.

Consumer IOT is yet another 10 years away.

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1. mrmlz ◴[] No.37867879[source]
You are absolutely correct. It is a horrible mess.

Which is why Homeassistant is a godsend - you can add the mess and present it in a sensible way. As long as you stay the fuck away from anything cloud you are pretty much golden no matter what the parent company decides to do.

E.g. Telldus had a huge range of 433mhz things that still work IF you avoided their TelldusNet or whatever.