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Yeah we are very differently aligned. To me, there's The Cluetrain Manifesto as gospel, preaching that giving people great capabilities & connectivity & letting

Yeah 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 ago
I 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.

korse 3y ago

I 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.