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> there's something magical about walking into the living room and saying "Hey Siri, good morning" and having your TV kick on, automatically start streaming th

> there's something magical about walking into the living room and saying "Hey Siri, good morning" and having your TV kick on, automatically start streaming the morning news Magical in the sense that hell is magical?

chomp 7y ago
I don't understand. What is wrong with using technology to curate our experience in our homes? You can make a nice experience for yourself without throwing privacy and security out of the window. It does take some network design and careful selection of devices (e.g. shunning Alexa and Google Assistant), but with the right setup you can do some very cool things while staying safe and not giving up your right to privacy.
slantyyz 7y ago
I would say the TV example isn't really a great example from the perspective of utility. In the dead of winter, it's still pitch black out when I take my dogs out first thing in the AM. The temperature can fluctuate quite a lot where I live, so I usually have two different winter coats. My winter "good morning" routine turns on my main floor lights and announces the outside temperature so I know whether or not to wear my heaviest coat. While it sounds like a small benefit, I find it very useful considering how groggy I am at that time.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  My former flatmate had some smart lights, and I wrote a little script that rigged them up to display the weather on a scale from deep blue to bright orange. The city I live in has very erratic weather, and my apartment stays pretty temperate regardless of the outside weather. This makes it fairly easy to absent-mindedly dress inappropriately and end up sweating or shivering on the walk to work. I generally get in the habit of checking the weather, but after a week of warm weather it's easy to forget, and the weather here is such that it might suddenly drop 15 degrees from day to day. Having this information in bright visual form makes it easy to notice when the weather is suddenly unexpectedly hotter or colder: It took me about ten minutes to set up, and is a small improvement to my life that's tailored to exactly how I live it. This, to me, is the advantage of the current era of smart home technology: incremental changes that can make little improvements to your day to day workflow. This thread is infested with an unfortunate combination of ignorance and lack of imagination (par for the course with HN...), where any evidence that smart devices don't fit into one commenter's workflow is evidence that it's useless for everyone (as the topvoted comment says, "smart people don't buy smart devices").
  - slantyyz 7y ago
    Honestly, I was skeptical of smart home stuff for the longest time. I picked up some Wemos (a mistake, I am now primarily on ZWave) and used them mainly to turn lights on and off while on vacation to make it look like I was home. It wasn't until I got an Amazon Echo before I got any real value from my Wemos other than what I mentioned above. Since then, I've gotten into Zwave and invested more into smart home products. I admit that it's not life changing, but stuff like being able to check lock status, etc. has, as you say, made life incrementally better.

chomp 7y ago

I don't understand. What is wrong with using technology to curate our experience in our homes? You can make a nice experience for yourself without throwing privacy and security out of the window. It does take some network design and careful selection of devices (e.g. shunning Alexa and Google Assistant), but with the right setup you can do some very cool things while staying safe and not giving up your right to privacy.

slantyyz 7y ago

I would say the TV example isn't really a great example from the perspective of utility. In the dead of winter, it's still pitch black out when I take my dogs out first thing in the AM. The temperature can fluctuate quite a lot where I live, so I usually have two different winter coats. My winter "good morning" routine turns on my main floor lights and announces the outside temperature so I know whether or not to wear my heaviest coat. While it sounds like a small benefit, I find it very useful considering how groggy I am at that time.

wutbrodo 7y ago
My former flatmate had some smart lights, and I wrote a little script that rigged them up to display the weather on a scale from deep blue to bright orange. The city I live in has very erratic weather, and my apartment stays pretty temperate regardless of the outside weather. This makes it fairly easy to absent-mindedly dress inappropriately and end up sweating or shivering on the walk to work. I generally get in the habit of checking the weather, but after a week of warm weather it's easy to forget, and the weather here is such that it might suddenly drop 15 degrees from day to day. Having this information in bright visual form makes it easy to notice when the weather is suddenly unexpectedly hotter or colder: It took me about ten minutes to set up, and is a small improvement to my life that's tailored to exactly how I live it. This, to me, is the advantage of the current era of smart home technology: incremental changes that can make little improvements to your day to day workflow. This thread is infested with an unfortunate combination of ignorance and lack of imagination (par for the course with HN...), where any evidence that smart devices don't fit into one commenter's workflow is evidence that it's useless for everyone (as the topvoted comment says, "smart people don't buy smart devices").
- slantyyz 7y ago
  Honestly, I was skeptical of smart home stuff for the longest time. I picked up some Wemos (a mistake, I am now primarily on ZWave) and used them mainly to turn lights on and off while on vacation to make it look like I was home. It wasn't until I got an Amazon Echo before I got any real value from my Wemos other than what I mentioned above. Since then, I've gotten into Zwave and invested more into smart home products. I admit that it's not life changing, but stuff like being able to check lock status, etc. has, as you say, made life incrementally better.