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It goes both ways. I certainly hate un-needed complexity but somethings are just complex. Good examples are font rendering https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-ha

It goes both ways. I certainly hate un-needed complexity but somethings are just complex. Good examples are font rendering https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ and text input https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ You think it's going to be easy. It's not. It just isn't. Often software is too simple. I just recently got my first "Smart Lights" (my mistake). I'm using Apple Home to control them. I put 3 bulbs in a 3 bulb standing lamp. Home has no way to for me to designate those as a single lamp. To Home they are 3 lamps. The solution is supposed to be use normal bulbs and a smart switch. But that precludes being able to set the colors of the bulbs. In other words, they thought it was simple but it's not. It gets worse. At first I thought this would be cool, but now I realize if I have a house guest, they won't be able to turn on the lights if I left them off. Arguably, if the power is cut and comes back on, maybe the lights should default to full white? At least then, in an emergency they just work. But again, designing lights that do that would be more complexity, not less. I can even add another wrinkle. My Siri is set to Japanese. So, my English speaking house guests will not be able to ask for the lights to be turned on if I had a HomePod, which I don't. More complexity because the world is complex

dullgiulio 5y ago
No, a normal light switch on the wall is all you need.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  ^ The summarization of this entire discussion in one line is poetic.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    But it doesn’t replicate the actual features people want from smart lights which is 1. Turn them off and on from my phone, or voice assistant thing. 2. Changing the color and brightness of the lights. 3. Doing 1 and 2 automatically. Having lights change from white to yellow automatically based on the time is something I don’t want to give up now. It’s the switch that’s the real issue. If your switch was a panel with an on and off button that controlled the smart lights and your lights were plugged into a normal outlet there would be no problem. Consumer tech is trying to retrofit in an environment that hasn’t caught up to commercial lighting systems.
    - AdrianB1 5y ago
      Your requirements are an order of magnitude more complex than what most people expect from room lights: lights on lights off.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        When talking about smart lights? No. Your “solution” is simply ignoring the requirements.
poisonborz 5y ago
For the record, the above light problems are all solved within Philips's Hue - although they also needed many years and user complaints to irk out such cases.
KronisLV 5y ago
> It goes both ways. I certainly hate un-needed complexity but somethings are just complex. Good examples are font rendering https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ and text input https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ You think it's going to be easy. It's not. It just isn't. This reminds me of a talk by Venkat Subramaniam, called "Don't Walk Away from Complexity, Run", here's a recording of it: https://youtu.be/4MEKu2TcEHM?t=343 https://youtu.be/4MEKu2TcEHM?t=343 In it he talked about inherent complexity and accidental complexity, the former being a part of the domain that you're working in, while the latter is introduced accidentally and isn't actually necessary to address the problem at hand. Often people talk about managing and decreasing the accidental complexity, but what if instead you could reduce the inherent complexity by just trying to do less? For example, instead of trying to do advanced font rendering for almost every single language and writing style known to man, why not just limit yourself to ASCII, left to right typing and monospaced bitmap fonts in certain devices? I'd argue that in many cases, such as embedded devices, that's all that's actually worth doing, though seeking out ways to not drown yourself in complexity due to having limited resources to get stuff done applies elsewhere as well. As someone else pointed out, a light switch would suffice nicely, instead of trying to write software to handle every possible use case for smart lights. Alternatively, just have an API for them and allow the people to write whatever code that they want themselves, instead of having a closed, non-extensible solution. That said, i agree that oftentimes it's really easy to misunderstand how difficult something is, but also because you don't really care about many of the edge cases, such as right to left typing or handling kanji rendering etc.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  >For example, instead of trying to do advanced font rendering for almost every single language and writing style known to man, why not just limit yourself to ASCII, left to right typing and monospaced bitmap fonts in certain devices? That works wonderful if you never deal with peoples names and have no interest in making your device available in France, Germany (65 million and 80 million people), or Japan (100+). That is leaving a lot of money on the table.
  - 5y ago
Nextgrid 5y ago
Just FYI Apple Home does allow you to group accessories together.

dullgiulio 5y ago

No, a normal light switch on the wall is all you need.

runawaybottle 5y ago
^ The summarization of this entire discussion in one line is poetic.
- Spivak 5y ago
  But it doesn’t replicate the actual features people want from smart lights which is 1. Turn them off and on from my phone, or voice assistant thing. 2. Changing the color and brightness of the lights. 3. Doing 1 and 2 automatically. Having lights change from white to yellow automatically based on the time is something I don’t want to give up now. It’s the switch that’s the real issue. If your switch was a panel with an on and off button that controlled the smart lights and your lights were plugged into a normal outlet there would be no problem. Consumer tech is trying to retrofit in an environment that hasn’t caught up to commercial lighting systems.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    Your requirements are an order of magnitude more complex than what most people expect from room lights: lights on lights off.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      When talking about smart lights? No. Your “solution” is simply ignoring the requirements.

poisonborz 5y ago

For the record, the above light problems are all solved within Philips's Hue - although they also needed many years and user complaints to irk out such cases.

KronisLV 5y ago

> It goes both ways. I certainly hate un-needed complexity but somethings are just complex. Good examples are font rendering https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ and text input https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ You think it's going to be easy. It's not. It just isn't. This reminds me of a talk by Venkat Subramaniam, called "Don't Walk Away from Complexity, Run", here's a recording of it: https://youtu.be/4MEKu2TcEHM?t=343 https://youtu.be/4MEKu2TcEHM?t=343 In it he talked about inherent complexity and accidental complexity, the former being a part of the domain that you're working in, while the latter is introduced accidentally and isn't actually necessary to address the problem at hand. Often people talk about managing and decreasing the accidental complexity, but what if instead you could reduce the inherent complexity by just trying to do less? For example, instead of trying to do advanced font rendering for almost every single language and writing style known to man, why not just limit yourself to ASCII, left to right typing and monospaced bitmap fonts in certain devices? I'd argue that in many cases, such as embedded devices, that's all that's actually worth doing, though seeking out ways to not drown yourself in complexity due to having limited resources to get stuff done applies elsewhere as well. As someone else pointed out, a light switch would suffice nicely, instead of trying to write software to handle every possible use case for smart lights. Alternatively, just have an API for them and allow the people to write whatever code that they want themselves, instead of having a closed, non-extensible solution. That said, i agree that oftentimes it's really easy to misunderstand how difficult something is, but also because you don't really care about many of the edge cases, such as right to left typing or handling kanji rendering etc.

tomjen3 5y ago
>For example, instead of trying to do advanced font rendering for almost every single language and writing style known to man, why not just limit yourself to ASCII, left to right typing and monospaced bitmap fonts in certain devices? That works wonderful if you never deal with peoples names and have no interest in making your device available in France, Germany (65 million and 80 million people), or Japan (100+). That is leaving a lot of money on the table.
- 5y ago

Nextgrid 5y ago

Just FYI Apple Home does allow you to group accessories together.