7 ms·

Smart homes and vegetable peelers

69 points by lpolovets 9y ago

alphaalpha101 9y ago
This is dystopian to me. I don't want to talk to a box recording everything I say. I don't want everything I say to be sent to some company in another country. I don't want Amazon involved in my life in any way. It's not just that though. It's also just useless. Why would you want a smart fridge? A fridge is already smart. It turns on when it's warm and off when it's cold. A smart dishwasher? What would that even do? A smart kettle would do what? Fill itself automatically? Make a cup of tea automatically? Not only is actually brewing the tea part of the point, but if I wanted a machine plumbed into my kitchen that made tea I could probably already get one. It would just cost thousands of dollars just like a pro coffee machine plumbed in costs that much. A smart door lock is just silly. I need keys when I go out anyway. Losing my smartphone would be shit already. Imagine if I couldn't get into my house or my car either if I lost it.
tjoff 9y ago
A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to run hundreds of homes. A simple service to route mobile apps through the potential NAT is the only thing the cloud should be needed for. Obviously downloading "drivers"/configurations are a valid user case but that's part of the setup-process. Not saying that everyone should tinkle with a RPI but it is trivial to create a more user friendly device. The fact that Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't even attempt this is just a consequence of them being hell bent on making money from crap.
- retube 9y ago
  > A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. You are completely correct. But 99% of people don't know / can't be bothered to host their own. Googlezonbook will create a near frictionless experience and suddenly you'll need an internet connection to open your front door.
  - tjoff 9y ago
    A self-hosted solution is easier to setup than a cloud-setup... The only difference is that you don't need internet access. You still need to connect the power cord and connect to ethernet or wifi (end regardless of whether it is a cloud device or self-hosted device you can configure wifi from your smartphone like the chromecast).
    - EADGBE 9y ago
      I've never seen a build-your-own solution be easier than "Register Here/Get Started".
      - tjoff 9y ago
        Build-your-own? A smart-home-controller is a physical device. You buy it, you provide power and connect ethernet and configure wifi. Now, either the controller relies on the cloud or it doesn't. If it is completely reliant on the cloud you will have to muck about with registering, if it is completely self-hosted you don't. Simple as that.
  - amygdyl 9y ago
    I keep thinking about a future retirement business: a mom and pop electronics hardware store, stocking the widest variety of maker goodies and serious bench tools, the kind that are very much try before you buy, if a private buyer - in my ideal world - and my USP would be providing a RPi distro I'll while away my final years polishing the autoconfig for all the home automation kit I can manage to disconnect from the cloud. EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did. This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year. About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?
- hollerith 9y ago
  No offense, but is a RPI reliable enough for this application?
  - liotier 9y ago
    Yes, but the SD card may have a short life if the system writes a lot on it - so far that is the common failure mode of RPi, which are otherwise reliable.
  - tjoff 9y ago
    I explicitly said that the RPI wasn't suitable... But listed it as an example of a way too powerful device that is still cheap. Just to emphasize that you don't need expensive hardware.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    What sort of reliability? Various smart features should fail safe anyway, if that is true then "reliable enough" doesn't have to be all that high a bar. Of course most people won't put up with rebooting their house once a week, so it isn't that low of a bar either.
- neikos 9y ago
  That sounds like it has been tried to be solved, a quick google gives me: https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/
- TheDong 9y ago
  Email that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. A raspberry pi has more processing power than's needed to search and store email. ... etc etc This trope is absolute bullshit. What people want is for stuff to work and, if stuff doesn't work, for it to be someone else's fault and/or be easy to fix. Self-hosting fails massively at the second criterion there. Right now, if a cellphone breaks, you can just get a new one and your contacts, messages, apps, etc all sync back to it. Done, you're back on your feet. If you have self-hosted email or smart-home-stuff, the failure modes are much worse, and you're far less likely to have someone else to blame. Also, a raspberry pi does not have enough power to do good voice recognition, not to the level of siri/alexa/google. It also doesn't have enough storage to cache all your music, videos you may wish to play on the TV, etc, so some external cloud integration will be needed regardless. Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. > it is trivial to create a more user friendly device This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success... but things like sandstorm.io, yunohost, and others have been incredibly complex projects and have not really succeeded. It's clearly not trivial since those people have collectively thrown millions of dollars and dozens of man-years at the problem with no glimmer of hope. The closest we have to success in this space, I'd say, is NASs which ship owncloud... and those have not caught in for the average household at all.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
    > Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks. Software update to Nest could have literally killed people and caused thousands of dollars of property damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g... Or maybe everything you say is being recorded and sent to Google all the time. http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fix/ http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fi... I'll stick with my dumb appliances thanks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- douglaswlance 9y ago
  Cloud IS dumb. That's why it works. Most people don't know how their toaster works, let alone a Raspberry Pi. They just want their home automation to work. You can't troubleshoot problems in every single person's home, but you can troubleshoot problems in the cloud.
- EADGBE 9y ago
  I think this is why we see hubs in this space. Like Insteon, etc. AFAIK, these allow for a local network to be created so that control/connection can still happen at a local level. If that's not the case then why the hell am I required to connect all my switches/outlets to a hub? It makes total sense to go with a local solution like yours, however when all the control is done through the cloud (http://home.nest.com http://home.nest.com, Siri, Alexa), it kinda negates the usefulness of it, except for momentary internet connection loss. And it makes it 12x more complicated for the Average Joe ("What's a Raspberry Pie?", "Local network configurations?", "I don't even know my router's password...").
- gumby 9y ago
  > A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. It probably already relies on the “electric cloud” and perhaps the “ gas cloud” already so what makes a dependency on a “computing cloud”any different?
  - kardos 9y ago
    If the electricity or gas has an outage, I'm not locked out (or in).
    - gumby 9y ago
      You can still get that hidden key and unlock the door, right? You can still press the light switch if the net goes out.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    Chance of my house having a working electricity supply for the next 10 years, free from major defects and security holes, given that I pay my bills and live in a major metropolitan area: 99.99% Chance of a Revolv IOT Home Hub working for the next 5 years: 0.000% this has literally already been shut down. Caveat emptor.
    - gumby 9y ago
      No disagreement with you, but note that electricity used to be that way everywhere and still is in some places. People adapt their level of technology dependence around it. Over time reliability increases dramatically. Likewise early smart phones used crummy network capabilities, but a feedback mechanism drove improvement in the network which drove increased dependence which drove improvements in the network... the same will happen on the home networks. It's not like we'll all wake up Jan 1 2019 and have nothing but cloud-connected home appliances. It'll be an iterative process, and slower than phone/VCR adoption because fridges and the like are slowly-replaced so-called "white goods".
- outworlder 9y ago
  > A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. As opposed to ordinary users running their own services? The only reason I don't see more routers with default passwords is that people will use whatever comcast and the like provide to them, and that provider will randomize passwords. If people cannot even configure their router, how are they going to configure self-hosted solutions?
chicob 9y ago
This is an interesting article in what respects the making of an important question: will this step simplify anything? I usually think that most "smart" solutions are gimmicks for true believers. I am not a technophobe or a luddite, but sometimes the old fashioned, manual solution is the best. Sometimes I think people confuse practical with lazy. For example, automating an irrigation/fertilization system in our small backyard garden for those summer days we're away seems a pretty good idea. But, at least for me, caring for a garden asks for a little more that keeping it alive automatically. Of course, that not maybe the case for many people and this is a grey area. But why automate, say, the toilet flush or soap dispenser unless you're in a hospital or such environment? Many of these solutions sound like the next startup pushing something in the hopes of leveraging a hype into profit. And I also find it a little uncanny that this kind of articles make no mention of security or privacy concerns.
pathsjs 9y ago
I find it weird that the metaphor here is that smart devices will become as ubiquituous as electric peelers, which I have never seen in my life :-? I still peel my fruit by hand - if that - and I have never seen anyone do otherwise
- jakobegger 9y ago
  The author never mentioned an electric peeler. The author talked about people using a peeler rather than a knife to peel fruit. (ie. the peeler is a "smart knife").
  - pathsjs 9y ago
    Thank you, I had completely misunderstood! :-D
lancebeet 9y ago
My issue with smart homes is that they seem to provide few tangible benefits compared to earlier inventions, such as those that are mentioned in the article. An electric whisk will save you several minutes if you're whipping up some cream (more if you're old or disabled), and there are practically no disadvantages. If it breaks, you can simply use a manual whisk. Smart locks, smart lighting, smart ovens etc may save you seconds at best, and redundancy (code/physical key access, backup light switches etc) are much less obvious, and may make the product less aesthetically appealing, not to mention the privacy/security issues that have been plaguing the IoT market. Perhaps we are, as the author suggests, yet to discover the areas where smart devices will eventually become successful and ubiquitous, but using his approach of finding such areas fails me.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  > Perhaps we are, as the author suggests, yet to discover the areas where smart devices will eventually become successful and ubiquitous, but using his approach of finding such areas fails me. IoT today is like the tablet market pre-Ipad. Eventually, a big company (maybe like Ikea, their new smart bulbs are very good and cheap) will figure out a proper skookum IoT thing that actually solves a real problem.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  An electric whisk isn't any faster than a good egg beater for whipping cream, in my experience. Another good example is electric windows in a car. They're slower than manual cranks, break down far more often, yet electric windows have become ubiquitous in cars.
  - xtreme 9y ago
    In my experience electric windows are rather useful to the driver because you can control the windows even if you don't have passengers.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      And when you have kids the utility of electric windows becomes obvious. But the point is that this is the same as the IOT market: at first glance the drawbacks seem to be worse than the benefits so there are lots of naysayers. Yet there are benefits, and stuff sells.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
"Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA" This has two causes: the prevalence of tea and the availability of 220V 10A kettles in the UK vs 115V 13A kettles in the States. Almost double the power means a boil in little more than half the time, making the electric kettle insanely useful. New kitchens in the States generally have 20A outlets[1] so why won't anybody sell me a 115V 18A kettle? Make one for me, I will give you lots of money! The fact that it will have a funny plug is a feature to help you sell it by emphasizing its uniqueness and help you sell it, not an obstacle! 1: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-20-Amp-Commercial-Grade-Duplex-Outlet-White-R62-CBR20-00W/202066702 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-20-Amp-Commercial-Grade-...
- gambiting 9y ago
  Maybe because 20A is absolutely nothing to fuck with and while it's great for an electric hob since it's probably hard wired by an electrician, the concept of a kettle using 20 amps is terrifying to me.
  - lozenge 9y ago
    I can't say I've ever heard of any issues. In a British plug, the contacts are mechanically hidden until the earth pin has already made contact. There's also a fuse in the plug itself that prevents each appliance from drawing too much power.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 220V_USKettle 9y ago
  I have read two anecdotes online, but would it be possible to order an outlet or 'socket' from the UK Amazon, along w/ a kettle, and wire it into its own dedicated 20A 220v US circuit?
  - thenewwazoo 9y ago
    Electrical code becomes an issue; afaik the NEC doesn't have provision for UK plugs, and you'd have to wire it up with both legs of your residential service. That's a layer cake of failed inspection. You may not care, but any future home buyer might, and your insurance company very well may too, should your house ever burn.
rwmj 9y ago
> [W]hen I go into my bathroom, do I want the light turned on? The answer is always yes, so why do I have to press the light switch? I have some battery-powered PIR LED lights in my bathroom that turn on automatically. Very useful (especially at night), they don't need to be connected to the internet, and you can buy them right now. Edit: These ones: https://www.mrbeams.co.uk/lights/universal-light/ https://www.mrbeams.co.uk/lights/universal-light/ (other brands are available)
- icebraining 9y ago
  You mean you have to flail your arms at home too? That sounds dreadful. I wonder why presence (as opposed to motion) detectors are not more common. Seems like a few ultrasonic distance sensors would do the trick.
  - rwmj 9y ago
    No, I walk into the room and the light turns on and stays on until I leave. No flailing is needed (with these ones at least).
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Even when you're still? OK, that sounds great, I can't say I ever experienced that with motion sensors.
gambiting 9y ago
"Samsung Group's strategy is very clear - it wants the fridge, the cooker, the AC unit and the dishwasher all to use the Samsung voice assistant, " You mean the voice assistant that literally failed 3 times during the live presentation? I cannot imagine many things that I would like less in my house than voice-assisted smart devices. Huge spiders, possibly.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Samsung makes all kinds of shitty apps, usually clones of better apps, that they try to push on you via modifications to the hardware.
jerf 9y ago
"Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again." There is a relevant difference though. The button to adjust the mirrors in my car carry no significant disadvantages, other than a very nebulous and easily-dischargeable moral hazard. (That is, even if you are worried about the "laziness" of using a button to set your mirrors, you can easily negate this simply by using the time or effort saved on some other worthy goal; even my great-grandpa couldn't really argue with that.) But a lot of these "smart" devices carry several non-trivial disadvantages: Almost every one of them is actively spying on you; a non-trivial number of them are smart for the sole purpose of spying on you because there is no other current economic reason for the device to be smart. They generally add a dependency to an external cloud service, which in many cases has a shorter expected life span than the device itself. I'd submit that corporations would be far less enthusiastic about "smart devices" if they were not planning on abandoning them after a couple of years, and instead had to book a 10-20 year liability on to the books to account for future support, even just security updates for any network-attached devices that don't hook to a "cloud". They add interface complexity to what is often a relatively simple device, at least prior to its smartification. Some people may love their "smart lightswitches" but there's just no way to beat the light switch in terms of complexity. I don't think the "you're just the old fogey of the future" argument here, along with frankly being a bit audience-hostile, works. I'd submit as further evidence for this that a lot of us who are most worried about all the smart devices and most resistant are the neophiles who have been surfing the cutting edge for a long time. I've been a neophile for a long time, and I can present evidence that I'm still a neophile in other contexts, but whoa, nelly, I'm not filling my house with this stuff. Even my phone and I have an uneasy relationship at times. (I used to be excited about the thought of having a home robot for various tasks. But now I can expect that home robot to be hooked to the cloud, and literally spying on everything its sensors can get at, which is everything in my house, and turning the full "nudging" power of every company involved into manipulating me and sucking dollars out of my wallet with every scuzzy trick anyone has ever thought up. It'll bring the non-ad-blocked browser experience into the real world. I'm much less excited now. Perhaps I'll be able to afford to pay extra for the ones that don't do that, but we're still talking a social problem here for those who can't.) Let me end with a re-iteration of the fact that the whole industry excitement about "smart" is almost certainly entirely predicated on those industry's fully-justified belief that they can toss a product out into the world, and abandon it the instant it ceases to be useful for milking their userbase of advertising dollars, which is "immediately" for some things like light bulbs. If the industry had to account for long-term support, the industries would be singing a completely different tune... how could a smart lightbulb carrying 10- or 20-year liabilities, often with a non-trivial black swan chance (think Mirai here) of requiring very swift and very serious reworking of the firmware, possibly compete with a dumb lightbulb where the companies only carry very calculable and relatively brief warrantee obligations? There's a non-trivial way in which this excitement about smart devices is predicated on screwing customers naive enough to buy these things.
stuaxo 9y ago
I got confused at the electric vegetable peeler, I've never seen such a thing, how often do you need to peel vegetables ?

69 points by lpolovets 9y ago

This is dystopian to me. I don't want to talk to a box recording everything I say. I don't want everything I say to be sent to some company in another country. I don't want Amazon involved in my life in any way. It's not just that though. It's also just useless. Why would you want a smart fridge? A fridge is already smart. It turns on when it's warm and off when it's cold. A smart dishwasher? What would that even do? A smart kettle would do what? Fill itself automatically? Make a cup of tea automatically? Not only is actually brewing the tea part of the point, but if I wanted a machine plumbed into my kitchen that made tea I could probably already get one. It would just cost thousands of dollars just like a pro coffee machine plumbed in costs that much. A smart door lock is just silly. I need keys when I go out anyway. Losing my smartphone would be shit already. Imagine if I couldn't get into my house or my car either if I lost it.

tjoff 9y ago

A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to run hundreds of homes. A simple service to route mobile apps through the potential NAT is the only thing the cloud should be needed for. Obviously downloading "drivers"/configurations are a valid user case but that's part of the setup-process. Not saying that everyone should tinkle with a RPI but it is trivial to create a more user friendly device. The fact that Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't even attempt this is just a consequence of them being hell bent on making money from crap.

retube 9y ago
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. You are completely correct. But 99% of people don't know / can't be bothered to host their own. Googlezonbook will create a near frictionless experience and suddenly you'll need an internet connection to open your front door.
- tjoff 9y ago
  A self-hosted solution is easier to setup than a cloud-setup... The only difference is that you don't need internet access. You still need to connect the power cord and connect to ethernet or wifi (end regardless of whether it is a cloud device or self-hosted device you can configure wifi from your smartphone like the chromecast).
  - EADGBE 9y ago
    I've never seen a build-your-own solution be easier than "Register Here/Get Started".
    - tjoff 9y ago
      Build-your-own? A smart-home-controller is a physical device. You buy it, you provide power and connect ethernet and configure wifi. Now, either the controller relies on the cloud or it doesn't. If it is completely reliant on the cloud you will have to muck about with registering, if it is completely self-hosted you don't. Simple as that.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  I keep thinking about a future retirement business: a mom and pop electronics hardware store, stocking the widest variety of maker goodies and serious bench tools, the kind that are very much try before you buy, if a private buyer - in my ideal world - and my USP would be providing a RPi distro I'll while away my final years polishing the autoconfig for all the home automation kit I can manage to disconnect from the cloud. EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did. This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year. About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?
hollerith 9y ago
No offense, but is a RPI reliable enough for this application?
- liotier 9y ago
  Yes, but the SD card may have a short life if the system writes a lot on it - so far that is the common failure mode of RPi, which are otherwise reliable.
- tjoff 9y ago
  I explicitly said that the RPI wasn't suitable... But listed it as an example of a way too powerful device that is still cheap. Just to emphasize that you don't need expensive hardware.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  What sort of reliability? Various smart features should fail safe anyway, if that is true then "reliable enough" doesn't have to be all that high a bar. Of course most people won't put up with rebooting their house once a week, so it isn't that low of a bar either.
neikos 9y ago
That sounds like it has been tried to be solved, a quick google gives me: https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/
TheDong 9y ago
Email that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. A raspberry pi has more processing power than's needed to search and store email. ... etc etc This trope is absolute bullshit. What people want is for stuff to work and, if stuff doesn't work, for it to be someone else's fault and/or be easy to fix. Self-hosting fails massively at the second criterion there. Right now, if a cellphone breaks, you can just get a new one and your contacts, messages, apps, etc all sync back to it. Done, you're back on your feet. If you have self-hosted email or smart-home-stuff, the failure modes are much worse, and you're far less likely to have someone else to blame. Also, a raspberry pi does not have enough power to do good voice recognition, not to the level of siri/alexa/google. It also doesn't have enough storage to cache all your music, videos you may wish to play on the TV, etc, so some external cloud integration will be needed regardless. Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. > it is trivial to create a more user friendly device This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success... but things like sandstorm.io, yunohost, and others have been incredibly complex projects and have not really succeeded. It's clearly not trivial since those people have collectively thrown millions of dollars and dozens of man-years at the problem with no glimmer of hope. The closest we have to success in this space, I'd say, is NASs which ship owncloud... and those have not caught in for the average household at all.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
  > Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora. None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks. Software update to Nest could have literally killed people and caused thousands of dollars of property damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g... Or maybe everything you say is being recorded and sent to Google all the time. http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fix/ http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fi... I'll stick with my dumb appliances thanks.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
douglaswlance 9y ago
Cloud IS dumb. That's why it works. Most people don't know how their toaster works, let alone a Raspberry Pi. They just want their home automation to work. You can't troubleshoot problems in every single person's home, but you can troubleshoot problems in the cloud.
EADGBE 9y ago
I think this is why we see hubs in this space. Like Insteon, etc. AFAIK, these allow for a local network to be created so that control/connection can still happen at a local level. If that's not the case then why the hell am I required to connect all my switches/outlets to a hub? It makes total sense to go with a local solution like yours, however when all the control is done through the cloud (http://home.nest.com http://home.nest.com, Siri, Alexa), it kinda negates the usefulness of it, except for momentary internet connection loss. And it makes it 12x more complicated for the Average Joe ("What's a Raspberry Pie?", "Local network configurations?", "I don't even know my router's password...").
gumby 9y ago
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. It probably already relies on the “electric cloud” and perhaps the “ gas cloud” already so what makes a dependency on a “computing cloud”any different?
- kardos 9y ago
  If the electricity or gas has an outage, I'm not locked out (or in).
  - gumby 9y ago
    You can still get that hidden key and unlock the door, right? You can still press the light switch if the net goes out.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Chance of my house having a working electricity supply for the next 10 years, free from major defects and security holes, given that I pay my bills and live in a major metropolitan area: 99.99% Chance of a Revolv IOT Home Hub working for the next 5 years: 0.000% this has literally already been shut down. Caveat emptor.
  - gumby 9y ago
    No disagreement with you, but note that electricity used to be that way everywhere and still is in some places. People adapt their level of technology dependence around it. Over time reliability increases dramatically. Likewise early smart phones used crummy network capabilities, but a feedback mechanism drove improvement in the network which drove increased dependence which drove improvements in the network... the same will happen on the home networks. It's not like we'll all wake up Jan 1 2019 and have nothing but cloud-connected home appliances. It'll be an iterative process, and slower than phone/VCR adoption because fridges and the like are slowly-replaced so-called "white goods".
outworlder 9y ago
> A smart home that is reliant on the cloud is dumb. As opposed to ordinary users running their own services? The only reason I don't see more routers with default passwords is that people will use whatever comcast and the like provide to them, and that provider will randomize passwords. If people cannot even configure their router, how are they going to configure self-hosted solutions?

chicob 9y ago

This is an interesting article in what respects the making of an important question: will this step simplify anything? I usually think that most "smart" solutions are gimmicks for true believers. I am not a technophobe or a luddite, but sometimes the old fashioned, manual solution is the best. Sometimes I think people confuse practical with lazy. For example, automating an irrigation/fertilization system in our small backyard garden for those summer days we're away seems a pretty good idea. But, at least for me, caring for a garden asks for a little more that keeping it alive automatically. Of course, that not maybe the case for many people and this is a grey area. But why automate, say, the toilet flush or soap dispenser unless you're in a hospital or such environment? Many of these solutions sound like the next startup pushing something in the hopes of leveraging a hype into profit. And I also find it a little uncanny that this kind of articles make no mention of security or privacy concerns.

pathsjs 9y ago

I find it weird that the metaphor here is that smart devices will become as ubiquituous as electric peelers, which I have never seen in my life :-? I still peel my fruit by hand - if that - and I have never seen anyone do otherwise

jakobegger 9y ago
The author never mentioned an electric peeler. The author talked about people using a peeler rather than a knife to peel fruit. (ie. the peeler is a "smart knife").
- pathsjs 9y ago
  Thank you, I had completely misunderstood! :-D

lancebeet 9y ago

My issue with smart homes is that they seem to provide few tangible benefits compared to earlier inventions, such as those that are mentioned in the article. An electric whisk will save you several minutes if you're whipping up some cream (more if you're old or disabled), and there are practically no disadvantages. If it breaks, you can simply use a manual whisk. Smart locks, smart lighting, smart ovens etc may save you seconds at best, and redundancy (code/physical key access, backup light switches etc) are much less obvious, and may make the product less aesthetically appealing, not to mention the privacy/security issues that have been plaguing the IoT market. Perhaps we are, as the author suggests, yet to discover the areas where smart devices will eventually become successful and ubiquitous, but using his approach of finding such areas fails me.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
> Perhaps we are, as the author suggests, yet to discover the areas where smart devices will eventually become successful and ubiquitous, but using his approach of finding such areas fails me. IoT today is like the tablet market pre-Ipad. Eventually, a big company (maybe like Ikea, their new smart bulbs are very good and cheap) will figure out a proper skookum IoT thing that actually solves a real problem.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
An electric whisk isn't any faster than a good egg beater for whipping cream, in my experience. Another good example is electric windows in a car. They're slower than manual cranks, break down far more often, yet electric windows have become ubiquitous in cars.
- xtreme 9y ago
  In my experience electric windows are rather useful to the driver because you can control the windows even if you don't have passengers.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    And when you have kids the utility of electric windows becomes obvious. But the point is that this is the same as the IOT market: at first glance the drawbacks seem to be worse than the benefits so there are lots of naysayers. Yet there are benefits, and stuff sells.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

"Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA" This has two causes: the prevalence of tea and the availability of 220V 10A kettles in the UK vs 115V 13A kettles in the States. Almost double the power means a boil in little more than half the time, making the electric kettle insanely useful. New kitchens in the States generally have 20A outlets[1] so why won't anybody sell me a 115V 18A kettle? Make one for me, I will give you lots of money! The fact that it will have a funny plug is a feature to help you sell it by emphasizing its uniqueness and help you sell it, not an obstacle! 1: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-20-Amp-Commercial-Grade-Duplex-Outlet-White-R62-CBR20-00W/202066702 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-20-Amp-Commercial-Grade-...

gambiting 9y ago
Maybe because 20A is absolutely nothing to fuck with and while it's great for an electric hob since it's probably hard wired by an electrician, the concept of a kettle using 20 amps is terrifying to me.
- lozenge 9y ago
  I can't say I've ever heard of any issues. In a British plug, the contacts are mechanically hidden until the earth pin has already made contact. There's also a fuse in the plug itself that prevents each appliance from drawing too much power.
deleted 9y ago
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220V_USKettle 9y ago
I have read two anecdotes online, but would it be possible to order an outlet or 'socket' from the UK Amazon, along w/ a kettle, and wire it into its own dedicated 20A 220v US circuit?
- thenewwazoo 9y ago
  Electrical code becomes an issue; afaik the NEC doesn't have provision for UK plugs, and you'd have to wire it up with both legs of your residential service. That's a layer cake of failed inspection. You may not care, but any future home buyer might, and your insurance company very well may too, should your house ever burn.

rwmj 9y ago

> [W]hen I go into my bathroom, do I want the light turned on? The answer is always yes, so why do I have to press the light switch? I have some battery-powered PIR LED lights in my bathroom that turn on automatically. Very useful (especially at night), they don't need to be connected to the internet, and you can buy them right now. Edit: These ones: https://www.mrbeams.co.uk/lights/universal-light/ https://www.mrbeams.co.uk/lights/universal-light/ (other brands are available)

icebraining 9y ago
You mean you have to flail your arms at home too? That sounds dreadful. I wonder why presence (as opposed to motion) detectors are not more common. Seems like a few ultrasonic distance sensors would do the trick.
- rwmj 9y ago
  No, I walk into the room and the light turns on and stays on until I leave. No flailing is needed (with these ones at least).
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Even when you're still? OK, that sounds great, I can't say I ever experienced that with motion sensors.

gambiting 9y ago

"Samsung Group's strategy is very clear - it wants the fridge, the cooker, the AC unit and the dishwasher all to use the Samsung voice assistant, " You mean the voice assistant that literally failed 3 times during the live presentation? I cannot imagine many things that I would like less in my house than voice-assisted smart devices. Huge spiders, possibly.

Chris2048 9y ago
Samsung makes all kinds of shitty apps, usually clones of better apps, that they try to push on you via modifications to the hardware.

jerf 9y ago

"Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again." There is a relevant difference though. The button to adjust the mirrors in my car carry no significant disadvantages, other than a very nebulous and easily-dischargeable moral hazard. (That is, even if you are worried about the "laziness" of using a button to set your mirrors, you can easily negate this simply by using the time or effort saved on some other worthy goal; even my great-grandpa couldn't really argue with that.) But a lot of these "smart" devices carry several non-trivial disadvantages: Almost every one of them is actively spying on you; a non-trivial number of them are smart for the sole purpose of spying on you because there is no other current economic reason for the device to be smart. They generally add a dependency to an external cloud service, which in many cases has a shorter expected life span than the device itself. I'd submit that corporations would be far less enthusiastic about "smart devices" if they were not planning on abandoning them after a couple of years, and instead had to book a 10-20 year liability on to the books to account for future support, even just security updates for any network-attached devices that don't hook to a "cloud". They add interface complexity to what is often a relatively simple device, at least prior to its smartification. Some people may love their "smart lightswitches" but there's just no way to beat the light switch in terms of complexity. I don't think the "you're just the old fogey of the future" argument here, along with frankly being a bit audience-hostile, works. I'd submit as further evidence for this that a lot of us who are most worried about all the smart devices and most resistant are the neophiles who have been surfing the cutting edge for a long time. I've been a neophile for a long time, and I can present evidence that I'm still a neophile in other contexts, but whoa, nelly, I'm not filling my house with this stuff. Even my phone and I have an uneasy relationship at times. (I used to be excited about the thought of having a home robot for various tasks. But now I can expect that home robot to be hooked to the cloud, and literally spying on everything its sensors can get at, which is everything in my house, and turning the full "nudging" power of every company involved into manipulating me and sucking dollars out of my wallet with every scuzzy trick anyone has ever thought up. It'll bring the non-ad-blocked browser experience into the real world. I'm much less excited now. Perhaps I'll be able to afford to pay extra for the ones that don't do that, but we're still talking a social problem here for those who can't.) Let me end with a re-iteration of the fact that the whole industry excitement about "smart" is almost certainly entirely predicated on those industry's fully-justified belief that they can toss a product out into the world, and abandon it the instant it ceases to be useful for milking their userbase of advertising dollars, which is "immediately" for some things like light bulbs. If the industry had to account for long-term support, the industries would be singing a completely different tune... how could a smart lightbulb carrying 10- or 20-year liabilities, often with a non-trivial black swan chance (think Mirai here) of requiring very swift and very serious reworking of the firmware, possibly compete with a dumb lightbulb where the companies only carry very calculable and relatively brief warrantee obligations? There's a non-trivial way in which this excitement about smart devices is predicated on screwing customers naive enough to buy these things.

stuaxo 9y ago

I got confused at the electric vegetable peeler, I've never seen such a thing, how often do you need to peel vegetables ?