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I disagree. Replace 'smart home' with 'automated home' and then compare to the mature 'automated industry'. You can have a small basket of protocols, hardware v
by korse 3y ago
I disagree. Replace 'smart home' with 'automated home' and then compare to the mature 'automated industry'. You can have a small basket of protocols, hardware vendors and strategies which all do roughly the same thing. You pick a set which meets your budget and complexity requirements, install, tune and go. You've got some baseline 'standards' for control voltages, sensor types etc. and some real STANDARDS for safety, wiring and so on but everyone still has their proprietary sauce and attempts to keep people in their ecosystem. It makes money and gets things done anyway.
You know what makes industrial automation a pain in the ass in mid-sized businesses? People wanting the benefits of automation without the burden of fully quantifying the process to be automated.
This is the problem with 'automation' in the home. You need someone who can quantify the 'home process' and figure out what routines can be delegated to the automation in order to provide a tangible benefit. Some changes may need to made to human behavior for the automation to be beneficial. Which changes are acceptable, which not etc. This is hard enough to do in industry and expecting it in every home seems... optimistic. Until this gets sorted out, I don't expect to see anything other than the continuation of the 1950's 'labor saving appliance' revolution coupled with invasive home entertainment systems and the next wave of 'clap on, clap off' lights.
- rektide 3y agoYeah we are very differently aligned. To me, there's The Cluetrain Manifesto as gospel, preaching that giving people great capabilities & connectivity & letting us tinker & explore & meddle around unlocks all the interesting neat spaces & the invisible hand starts shuffling us towards optimal patterns, towards spaces which have been winning. "The street finds its own uses for thing", and exposing the things & making them flexible & malleable & observable, making them built on good open protocols accelerates the OODA spirals to each user finding their own great success greatly. By compare, I feel like you are preaching a delivered from on high careful slow growth, where every home needs weeks of consultants to come in & carefully outline the next 20 years of use cases & then carefully select & hardcode exacting picks for that home. Open source is already kicking ass. Home Assistant is the shit. We just need an ecosystem of devices that are even 1/2 as user-exposed as the software doing the driving is. We need to fuel what is possible with devices that are willing to meet us in finding out. Not more stodgy slow encumbered methodical processes.
- korse 3y agoI guess I haven't seen many people doing 'useful things' with home automation tools despite how they've proliferated. It all seems like change for the sake of itself, rather than for genuine benefit (aggregate time savings, less stress etc). Standard home tasks that take up the majority of time in my experience are (time quantity decreasing) cleaning, re-organization/shelving, cooking, laundry and managing maintenance. Flipping switches and queuing entertainment items are negligible. I have yet to see a 'smart home' system that changes this calculus (aside from the humble robot vacuum) and even then, I see very few people that are able to keep spaces uncluttered enough between 0 and 4 inches above the floor for a robot vacuum to actually do a better job than the human with a vacuum in any reasonable amount of time. I agree we don't need in-home consultants or a monolithic bureaucracy. I just don't think people are ready to hyper-optimize their existence enough for automation to be truly game-changing in the home. Maybe without kids or a partner, but definitely not with.