4 ms·

I thought this article had a good rule on how to differentiate dead end "solution in search of a problem" inventions and ones that might be successful. > wheth

I thought this article had a good rule on how to differentiate dead end "solution in search of a problem" inventions and ones that might be successful. > whether the technology does something that would be useful if everyone had it, but is relatively useless at small scale I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems. It seems to ride this line. Probably why despite my protests we keep winding up with more and I have to yell at alexa more frequently

sokoloff 4y ago
What about smart home devices would be useful if everyone had them but useless if only at your house? (I’m a tinkerer but still reluctant to deploy most smart home solutions because they usually fail the household acceptance factor.)
- pornel 4y ago
  Mesh networks, maybe? I like smart homes in principle, but the current implementations are awful. I end up sitting in the dark because software on my lightbulbs locks up, and a robot tells me "Sorry, I can't find 'lights on dammit' in your music library".
- ulrikrasmussen 4y ago
  I think it's a false dichotomy. Supposedly the GP thinks that their smart home devices are already useful, so there is no need to consider whether they would be more useful if more people had them. I think the quote from the article is a bit strange, and the example of clocks is not very good because people still had a way to tell time before clocks were invented (e.g. looking at the sun), it was just not very precise. A clock is still useful for a single person because that person now has a faster and more reliable way of telling the time without having to look out the window.
  - pm215 4y ago
    Yes, but it's not as useful as it is to a modern person, because if you're the only person who owns a clock then your life will have very few situations where knowing the time exactly and reliably matters -- so you only own one if you have some specific use-case where you care about exact time. The benefit of owning a precise and accurate clock becomes much greater if you are frequently interacting with other people who also have precise and accurate clocks (such as operators of railways), and at the point where most people in a society have an accurate clock then it becomes a default assumption that scheduling can be done by time and you will find it increasingly difficult to be without one. (I think the smartphone is currently going through a similar transition -- right now it is definitely still possible to live without a smartphone, but an increasing number of organizations are now starting to act on the assumption that every person they deal with does have one.)
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I think the point of the analogy is that a clock isn't very useful for an individual, unless enough other people around you also have one. You don't gain much from being able to accurately tell the time down to minutes or seconds, because by far the biggest non-specialist use of clocks is synchronizing with other people. You'll come by the store at 08:00 sharp, and discover it's closed, because the day is cloudy and the storeowner's rooster overslept, so he still thinks it's early. Such fundamental technologies have also a perverse tipping point, a kind of strong network effect in disguise. Continuing with the analogy, once enough people have clocks and start coordinating with them, they'll start forcing their preference on others, and soon enough everyone has to get a clock, or else they won't be able to synchronize with the society around them. With timekeeping, this arguably happened before most of us were alive. But a more recent example, one that's being regularly lamented in bars and in press, is cellphones (and even more recently, smartphones): they went from a rich people's toy to being ubiquitous in ~decade, and these days there's a strong social expectation that you own one, and that through it, you're accessible during waking hours. People slightly older than I am call it an invisible chain/tether. Our children will probably call it "normal", just like my generation considers clocks normal.
- malfist 4y ago
  I think there's a lot to be said about smart home devices and accessibility. I could imagine voice assistants controlling devices for those with vision impairments or mobility impairments would be a huge boon.
adriancr 4y ago
> I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems "smart home" things are usually hobbies at small scale, and you never know if something ends up being useful/useless until you actually try it out
jchw 4y ago
I love smart home stuff, but greatly prefer open source compatible (Home Assistant etc), non-internet-connected smart home equipment that still has hardware switches. There's no good standard for RGBW addressability over wires here in the U.S. (that I'm aware of) so I do use some Philips Hue bulbs, but only accompanied by a hard-wired switch capable of associating directly with the bulb, so that all it needs to work is power. I will admit though that I still mostly just do it because it's fun. But hey, it's fun that comes in handy, too.
- makestuff 4y ago
  Yeah if someone came out with a piece of hardware that could run the an NLP model to detect the common phrases (turn lights on/off, play music, etc.) and then have it prepackaged with home assistant it would ruin a lot of these cloud connected devices.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  System like X10 or power line Ethernet that communicate over power lines have huge transformers and I think high power consumption. You’d think you could have power line Ethernet in your PC or X10 bulbs but it is not so practical.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Yeah, powerline data transmission seems impractical. It works, but reliability has always been a huge problem for me, even with the most expensive adapters. Now that I own instead of rent, I just run ethernet for my computers. For smart home, I don't really care for throwing RF at every single problem, but ZigBee and Zwave at least do work, so I am just doing that for now. What would be cool is just having something simple, like maybe one or two wire serial, at least between the switches and bulbs. Today, the best solution I'm aware of for smart bulbs is something like Inovelli Blue Series or Embrighten switches, which can associate with the bulbs directly. Even though in smart bulb it must use RF, it can at least skip the hub and work when everything else is down. (Though, I am a little disappointed that I had to bypass the power control for my Blue Series. I was hoping I could have it connected to measure power usage even in smart bulb mode, but it seems even in smart bulb mode where the power is passthru you still can't have an inductive load like a ceiling fan motor or it will cause problems. Bummer.)
PaulHoule 4y ago
My smart home gadgets are a common source of controversy in my house. I have some rooms with dimmable lights that work really well even if there is some latency. I have other ones where there are chronic reliability problems usually because I tried to get a Sengled switch to work a Hue light or something like that. I’d say my project success rate has been about 50%. Hue made a really great switch which is piezoelectric powered and doesn’t need a battery but these are now crazy expensive and hard to find. I think switches are affected by supply chain issues but might not be stocked at places like Best Guy because plenty of people seem to have a smartphone grafted to them and just use the phone as a switch.
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
I'm baffled at what purpose there is to voice-activated lights. Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. If I'm entering or exiting a room, I turn the light on or off as I pass the switch. This is going to be much faster than "Alexa, turn the computer room lights off" on my way out and then waiting to make sure it understood me. The only exception is my front porch light. I usually leave it off, but turn it on when I'm expecting a food delivery at night. Being able to turn it on from my computer room remotely could be nice, but I'm not going to begin investing into a "smart home" for that one purpose. My TV and clothes washer are both "smart", but I don't use any of the smart features, and neither have ever been connected to my WiFi. The only smart appliance I have is a thermostat, and even that one is pretty basic. It has an app that I can use to control it and create a schedule, but it doesn't try to learn when people are home.
- acdha 4y ago
  I think a lot of this comes back to the way everyone has been focused on building huge mainstream businesses for a long time. Many IoT devices are useful to many people but not at the scale companies like Amazon or Google want — people with vision or mobility impairments, for example, find voice control far more useful than other people but that isn’t a huge market and many of them are low income. Parents with babies probably use voice controls more than they used to but that only lasts so long and then becomes a problem until they protect the ability to have Alexa order more LEGO sets - and not anything people are jumping to subscribe to. There could probably be a medium-sized business model which works but not the kind of hyper-scale vision that SV has favored. Apple seems to have the best balance putting the smarts in devices you were already buying for other reasons, and being able to concentrate more than one promotion cycle out which Google struggles with.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  > Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. Not necessarily. Open layouts have taken the office and residential markets by storm over the last two decades. Many "rooms" don't have well-defined boundaries, so it's common not to have a switch everywhere someone might enter.
- malfist 4y ago

sokoloff 4y ago

What about smart home devices would be useful if everyone had them but useless if only at your house? (I’m a tinkerer but still reluctant to deploy most smart home solutions because they usually fail the household acceptance factor.)

pornel 4y ago
Mesh networks, maybe? I like smart homes in principle, but the current implementations are awful. I end up sitting in the dark because software on my lightbulbs locks up, and a robot tells me "Sorry, I can't find 'lights on dammit' in your music library".
ulrikrasmussen 4y ago
I think it's a false dichotomy. Supposedly the GP thinks that their smart home devices are already useful, so there is no need to consider whether they would be more useful if more people had them. I think the quote from the article is a bit strange, and the example of clocks is not very good because people still had a way to tell time before clocks were invented (e.g. looking at the sun), it was just not very precise. A clock is still useful for a single person because that person now has a faster and more reliable way of telling the time without having to look out the window.
- pm215 4y ago
  Yes, but it's not as useful as it is to a modern person, because if you're the only person who owns a clock then your life will have very few situations where knowing the time exactly and reliably matters -- so you only own one if you have some specific use-case where you care about exact time. The benefit of owning a precise and accurate clock becomes much greater if you are frequently interacting with other people who also have precise and accurate clocks (such as operators of railways), and at the point where most people in a society have an accurate clock then it becomes a default assumption that scheduling can be done by time and you will find it increasingly difficult to be without one. (I think the smartphone is currently going through a similar transition -- right now it is definitely still possible to live without a smartphone, but an increasing number of organizations are now starting to act on the assumption that every person they deal with does have one.)
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I think the point of the analogy is that a clock isn't very useful for an individual, unless enough other people around you also have one. You don't gain much from being able to accurately tell the time down to minutes or seconds, because by far the biggest non-specialist use of clocks is synchronizing with other people. You'll come by the store at 08:00 sharp, and discover it's closed, because the day is cloudy and the storeowner's rooster overslept, so he still thinks it's early. Such fundamental technologies have also a perverse tipping point, a kind of strong network effect in disguise. Continuing with the analogy, once enough people have clocks and start coordinating with them, they'll start forcing their preference on others, and soon enough everyone has to get a clock, or else they won't be able to synchronize with the society around them. With timekeeping, this arguably happened before most of us were alive. But a more recent example, one that's being regularly lamented in bars and in press, is cellphones (and even more recently, smartphones): they went from a rich people's toy to being ubiquitous in ~decade, and these days there's a strong social expectation that you own one, and that through it, you're accessible during waking hours. People slightly older than I am call it an invisible chain/tether. Our children will probably call it "normal", just like my generation considers clocks normal.
malfist 4y ago
I think there's a lot to be said about smart home devices and accessibility. I could imagine voice assistants controlling devices for those with vision impairments or mobility impairments would be a huge boon.

adriancr 4y ago

> I've often told my partner a lot of his "smart home" devices are solutions in search of problems "smart home" things are usually hobbies at small scale, and you never know if something ends up being useful/useless until you actually try it out

jchw 4y ago

I love smart home stuff, but greatly prefer open source compatible (Home Assistant etc), non-internet-connected smart home equipment that still has hardware switches. There's no good standard for RGBW addressability over wires here in the U.S. (that I'm aware of) so I do use some Philips Hue bulbs, but only accompanied by a hard-wired switch capable of associating directly with the bulb, so that all it needs to work is power. I will admit though that I still mostly just do it because it's fun. But hey, it's fun that comes in handy, too.

makestuff 4y ago
Yeah if someone came out with a piece of hardware that could run the an NLP model to detect the common phrases (turn lights on/off, play music, etc.) and then have it prepackaged with home assistant it would ruin a lot of these cloud connected devices.
PaulHoule 4y ago
System like X10 or power line Ethernet that communicate over power lines have huge transformers and I think high power consumption. You’d think you could have power line Ethernet in your PC or X10 bulbs but it is not so practical.
- jchw 4y ago
  Yeah, powerline data transmission seems impractical. It works, but reliability has always been a huge problem for me, even with the most expensive adapters. Now that I own instead of rent, I just run ethernet for my computers. For smart home, I don't really care for throwing RF at every single problem, but ZigBee and Zwave at least do work, so I am just doing that for now. What would be cool is just having something simple, like maybe one or two wire serial, at least between the switches and bulbs. Today, the best solution I'm aware of for smart bulbs is something like Inovelli Blue Series or Embrighten switches, which can associate with the bulbs directly. Even though in smart bulb it must use RF, it can at least skip the hub and work when everything else is down. (Though, I am a little disappointed that I had to bypass the power control for my Blue Series. I was hoping I could have it connected to measure power usage even in smart bulb mode, but it seems even in smart bulb mode where the power is passthru you still can't have an inductive load like a ceiling fan motor or it will cause problems. Bummer.)

PaulHoule 4y ago

My smart home gadgets are a common source of controversy in my house. I have some rooms with dimmable lights that work really well even if there is some latency. I have other ones where there are chronic reliability problems usually because I tried to get a Sengled switch to work a Hue light or something like that. I’d say my project success rate has been about 50%. Hue made a really great switch which is piezoelectric powered and doesn’t need a battery but these are now crazy expensive and hard to find. I think switches are affected by supply chain issues but might not be stocked at places like Best Guy because plenty of people seem to have a smartphone grafted to them and just use the phone as a switch.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

I'm baffled at what purpose there is to voice-activated lights. Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. If I'm entering or exiting a room, I turn the light on or off as I pass the switch. This is going to be much faster than "Alexa, turn the computer room lights off" on my way out and then waiting to make sure it understood me. The only exception is my front porch light. I usually leave it off, but turn it on when I'm expecting a food delivery at night. Being able to turn it on from my computer room remotely could be nice, but I'm not going to begin investing into a "smart home" for that one purpose. My TV and clothes washer are both "smart", but I don't use any of the smart features, and neither have ever been connected to my WiFi. The only smart appliance I have is a thermostat, and even that one is pretty basic. It has an app that I can use to control it and create a schedule, but it doesn't try to learn when people are home.

acdha 4y ago
I think a lot of this comes back to the way everyone has been focused on building huge mainstream businesses for a long time. Many IoT devices are useful to many people but not at the scale companies like Amazon or Google want — people with vision or mobility impairments, for example, find voice control far more useful than other people but that isn’t a huge market and many of them are low income. Parents with babies probably use voice controls more than they used to but that only lasts so long and then becomes a problem until they protect the ability to have Alexa order more LEGO sets - and not anything people are jumping to subscribe to. There could probably be a medium-sized business model which works but not the kind of hyper-scale vision that SV has favored. Apple seems to have the best balance putting the smarts in devices you were already buying for other reasons, and being able to concentrate more than one promotion cycle out which Google struggles with.
__derek__ 4y ago
> Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. Not necessarily. Open layouts have taken the office and residential markets by storm over the last two decades. Many "rooms" don't have well-defined boundaries, so it's common not to have a switch everywhere someone might enter.
malfist 4y ago