7 ms·
Who is all this engineering effort for? How many people live in fortresses of solitude where they need to automatically track the cars that come down the drive
by jpm_sd 9y ago
Who is all this engineering effort for?
How many people live in fortresses of solitude where they need to automatically track the cars that come down the driveway?
How many Silicon Valley billionaires need a computer to tell them what to wear today? (t-shirt and jeans again?)
Why is it useful to have automated control of the lights in every room? Turning lights on and off, using a plain old mechanical switch, is about the easiest, most mindless task I perform on any given day.
- riku_iki 9y agoLooks like good tech for very automated jail.
- digi_owl 9y agoBrave New World for corporations, 1984 for governments?
- yters 9y agoOr mass housing.
- stephengillie 9y agoA jail with bars made out of numbers is still a jail.
- Jyaif 9y agoLight is not just on/off, it's a million different shades and intensities, some more appropriate depending on the time of day. > Who is all this engineering effort for Everybody. Sure right now philips hue cost hundreds of dollars, but that price is going to drop seriously. The price of smart-everything is going to drop. Try to imagine a house where there's a thousand different machines just there to make your life nicer.
- leeoniya 9y ago> Light is not just on/off, it's a million different shades and intensities, some more appropriate depending on the time of day. remarkable! how did people ever live without this before? but i'd still be stuck having to chew my own food? oh wait, soylent!
- oh_sigh 9y agoYou're confusing niceties with necessities, and in not a very productive manner.
- CardenB 9y agoWow this is seriously not constructive at all.
- booleandilemma 9y agoI'll bet in the 90s you were saying what's the purpose of sending email from your phone if you can already send email from your computer.
- ue_ 9y agoBeing able to change your light intensity a few shades (more than a manual light intensity switch) is a far cry from being able to send e-mail in critical situations from your phone. Even then I'd say e-mail on your phone just isn't that useful; your example to show "this totally isn't a gimmick" could have been much better.
- leeoniya 9y ago
- LeoPanthera 9y agoWhat exactly is your point? That he shouldn't be inventing all this stuff? Why not? As the article says, he's ahead of the curve. The next generation will consider all this stuff normal, and just the way the world works. But if we didn't have people making stuff just because they wanted it, nothing would ever happen.
- jpm_sd 9y agoMy point is that people probably don't want this stuff.
- maxerickson 9y agoIt really depends on how much it costs and how well it works. The bigger market for vehicle monitoring is probably second homes though.
- Semaphor 9y agoBut people generally don't know what they want. Just yesterday I talked with my mom about how in j2me times I worked to set up sync'd calendars, mails, notes, etc. Back then people told me no one needs it. Nowadays everyone is used to exactly that and loves it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mathattack 9y agoWho would weigh themselves down with a high cost phone in your pocket when there's one on the wall? Who needs a website showing pictures of goldfish when you can interact on a bulletin board? Hard to predict which technologies get adopted.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> Who would weigh themselves down with a high cost phone in your pocket when there's one on the wall? This was correct. People aren't carrying their high-cost phones everywhere because they want to make telephone calls. They're just called "phones" by coincidence.
- vasilipupkin 9y agoI assure you, turning lights on and off by hand in a large house full of kids is a royal pain in the ass. If you live in a half a room size appt in SF, not so much
- 8ytecoder 9y agoWhy is a connected light better than a simple motion activated one?
- ghettoimp 9y agoAnecdotally, fwiw. We installed a motion activated light in our laundry room, years ago, since the switch was not in any convenient/sensible location. It worked for awhile, but eventually would turn on, if at all, for like 3 seconds (even when the switch inside was set to 10 minutes). Probably it was just a cheap, crappy fixture. But I don't think I'll ever try to use a "simple" motion activated light again. Of course, connected lights, whatever that means, are probably even buggier...
- hinkley 9y agoIn my old house, not a single light switch is where you'd expect it to be, and a number of the rooms are byways between other rooms. So being able to turn the light on when you walked in was no guarantee you'd be able to do the same when you walked out again.
- chaostheory 9y agoNo one needs it, just as no one needs online video streaming To better understand, the movie Her is good for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) - everything is seemless and automatic, like having an omniscient butler As others have mentioned, China and Singapore are also other motivations ie. 'automated jails', especially since western governments are moving closer to their philsophy of control while they simultaneously criticize it.
- hinkley 9y agoSo your parents never yelled at you about leaving the lights on when you were a kid? And you never yell at anyone you know about doing the same?
- georgemcbay 9y agoI'm not at all against people automating the hell out of their homes, so I'm on "your side" as it were, but this isn't the greatest argument in favor. People yelling at family members over leaving the lights are essentially "penny pinching" fractional cents of energy costs. I'm sure all the computers, sensors, networking gear, etc, that make this all work consume significantly more power than if you were just to leave every light in your house on 100% of the time, especially if we're talking about LED bulbs.
- dingo_bat 9y agoIt's interesting that people are real sticklers about turning off unnecessary lights. As you said, the electricity costs are negligible. Today's "bulbs" are either CFL or LED and they consume virtually zero electricity. But I still have this itch to turn each one of before going to sleep.
- hinkley 9y agoYou're going to need 10 watts to light even a tiny room with a single bulb. You can run a raspberry Pi (not even really designed to be low power) on half of that. If your house is so small you only need one bulb per room and has a couple of rooms (i.e., you live in an apartment), where the light is fove feet from you, nobody is going to market a product for that. As the other responder said, you're still in for at a minimum 20 watts in a room for an actual house. Further, you pay for those watts again if there is AC (so more like 25-30 watts), the lights might not all be tied to the light switch, and they may not all be rooms you frequent. And then add on that rooms you don't frequent may still have incandescent bulbs in them because you stopped, like me, after replacing 20 or 30 bulbs and you're replacing the rest as they burn out.
- 9y ago
- bsder 9y ago> Turning lights on and off, using a plain old mechanical switch, is about the easiest, most mindless task I perform on any given day. Agreed, but ... The switch and light are where the original house owner wanted them. If I want to move either of them, I'm calling an electrician and tearing through walls. And, if you want to add a second switch that controls one light, good luck. Being able to wire the light and the switch separately is useful.