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The inconvenient truth about anything smart is that it actually takes a lot of caring and feeding from very few experts (expensive) who actually understand the

by js8 9y ago

The inconvenient truth about anything smart is that it actually takes a lot of caring and feeding from very few experts (expensive) who actually understand the technology. The end result is that economic laws put practical limit on what you can achieve with smart. The smart aspect of things needs to generate enough savings for the economic entity to be able to muster the experts to fix things, as they inevitably break in various ways. And it only happens if the entity is large enough. Every, say, home could be made smarter, and the total savings would be probably big. But we won't do that as individuals, because for each of us, the cost of the expert is scary compared to the tiny savings that we can individually achieve with it. If we would organize (that is, create a larger economic entity), then perhaps it would be possible. But organization causes additional costs, too.

expertentipp 9y ago
Had the same thought once I was looking at a smart system for recovering rain water in a standalone household. Complex and expensive to design, setup, maintain. Pipes, pumps, containers, filters - all these to obtain a miserable couple of hectolitres of undrinkable water. It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind.
- dctoedt 9y ago
  > It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind. That might be true in some cases. But the motive might be to provide epsilon demand to help develop a market for an embryonic product — in effect, making a small investment in which the hoped-for ROI in the long term is a "better" world — even though in the near term there might be less-costly options available. That's why, for example, for years my household has bought our electricity under Green Mountain's wind-and-solar option, even though it costs a few dollars more per month (although the delta has been dropping). Our choice of electricity providers isn't visible to others, and it's not a subject of everyday conversation for us, so it's difficult to see how there's any virtue-signaling going on. Ditto for why we bought a Prius years ago, even though economically a conventional vehicle made more sense notwithstanding the high gasoline prices back then. While we could be accused of virtue-signaling, I think it's more accurate to characterize it as signaling social acceptability, as in, "you won't be alone if you take the plunge and buy one of these cars instead of the usual [fill in the blank for your neighborhood]." In math terms, you could think of this as trying to help the market to seek a long-term global maximum as opposed to a near-term local one.
christophilus 9y ago
The smartest things I own are not digital at all. My plain old mechanical garden tools, my hammer, saw, mechanical kitchen equipment handed down to me from Grandma... The dumb things I have are all digital. They're finicky. They're unintuitive. They break in a few years, and it's almost always the electronics that are to blame. My dad spent his career as a general manager in manufacturing. He had some machines that were over 100 years old, still running like a champ. The newer ones caused nothing but headaches (but did run more efficiently when they were working). When someone came to him with a problem, the root of it was almost always TMDE (Too Much Damn Electronics). I used to make fun of him for being a stodgy old fart... But after spending ~20 years as a software engineer, I'm beginning to think he was right.
- skadamou 9y ago
  Sometimes I think that the Hacker News crowd overlooks how terribly fussy tech can be. For those with technical literacy, spare time, and a genuine interest in electronics, figuring out how to get their <insert smart device here> working again probably isn't that big of a deal. However, if you are not this person, you are probably better off sticking with the analog version. At least for now.
  - achamayou 9y ago
    There's mostly no way you're going to fix recent compact electronics with integrated SoC and fused screens at home. It would require absurdly sophisticated tooling, and would make no financial sense at all. Virtually nothing on sale these days has components far apart enough on the board for you to replace with a basic soldering iron. Not that the trend towards gluing everything together would let you access the boards easily in the first place.

by js8 9y ago

expertentipp 9y ago

Had the same thought once I was looking at a smart system for recovering rain water in a standalone household. Complex and expensive to design, setup, maintain. Pipes, pumps, containers, filters - all these to obtain a miserable couple of hectolitres of undrinkable water. It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind.

dctoedt 9y ago
> It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind. That might be true in some cases. But the motive might be to provide epsilon demand to help develop a market for an embryonic product — in effect, making a small investment in which the hoped-for ROI in the long term is a "better" world — even though in the near term there might be less-costly options available. That's why, for example, for years my household has bought our electricity under Green Mountain's wind-and-solar option, even though it costs a few dollars more per month (although the delta has been dropping). Our choice of electricity providers isn't visible to others, and it's not a subject of everyday conversation for us, so it's difficult to see how there's any virtue-signaling going on. Ditto for why we bought a Prius years ago, even though economically a conventional vehicle made more sense notwithstanding the high gasoline prices back then. While we could be accused of virtue-signaling, I think it's more accurate to characterize it as signaling social acceptability, as in, "you won't be alone if you take the plunge and buy one of these cars instead of the usual [fill in the blank for your neighborhood]." In math terms, you could think of this as trying to help the market to seek a long-term global maximum as opposed to a near-term local one.

christophilus 9y ago

The smartest things I own are not digital at all. My plain old mechanical garden tools, my hammer, saw, mechanical kitchen equipment handed down to me from Grandma... The dumb things I have are all digital. They're finicky. They're unintuitive. They break in a few years, and it's almost always the electronics that are to blame. My dad spent his career as a general manager in manufacturing. He had some machines that were over 100 years old, still running like a champ. The newer ones caused nothing but headaches (but did run more efficiently when they were working). When someone came to him with a problem, the root of it was almost always TMDE (Too Much Damn Electronics). I used to make fun of him for being a stodgy old fart... But after spending ~20 years as a software engineer, I'm beginning to think he was right.

skadamou 9y ago
Sometimes I think that the Hacker News crowd overlooks how terribly fussy tech can be. For those with technical literacy, spare time, and a genuine interest in electronics, figuring out how to get their <insert smart device here> working again probably isn't that big of a deal. However, if you are not this person, you are probably better off sticking with the analog version. At least for now.
- achamayou 9y ago
  There's mostly no way you're going to fix recent compact electronics with integrated SoC and fused screens at home. It would require absurdly sophisticated tooling, and would make no financial sense at all. Virtually nothing on sale these days has components far apart enough on the board for you to replace with a basic soldering iron. Not that the trend towards gluing everything together would let you access the boards easily in the first place.