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What amazes me is how many people (even here) will leap to their feet to defend an exponential increase in complexity to provide a minuscule improvement in conv

What amazes me is how many people (even here) will leap to their feet to defend an exponential increase in complexity to provide a minuscule improvement in convenience from putting their garage door/fridge/front door/etc. on the internet. I really hope the garage door opener bit is a joke (they come with radio remote controls!), but I have a bad feeling it's not. I can almost see how this sort of thing could work -- a secure LAN for the house with appliance controls based on open protocols driven by a local server. Your phone would talk to the server via a LAN (in-house) or a VPN (remotely), decoupling the connectivity from the actual control. Heck, while we're at it, drop IP from the appliances entirely and use some low-bandwidth power line communication system (X10?) -- no need for an OS at all. That would require a lot of industry coordination, though, and in an age of walled gardens and digital surveillance I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Semaphor 3y ago
I don't really see those comments, everyone usually talks about how people are stupid for getting cloud devices instead of going local with something like home assistant
- AdamH12113 3y ago
  Home Assistant looks like at least 80% of what I was imagining. Glad to see that some serious work is going into this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ryandrake 3y ago
Also, a lot of software developers will defend the exponential increase in complexity by pointing to developer comfort and speed. Building on top of these 40 layers of abstraction is easier and faster for the developer, so therefore it's always worth it. Binary/download size, performance, security issues, user experience... so much can get sacrificed at the altar of developer convenience if we let it. It gets defended because "developers are expensive" but nobody thinks of all the person-hours of our users' time lost because they are waiting for the code to execute up and down that class hierarchy...
ipsi 3y ago
That... pretty much already exists, in the form of Home Assistant + Zigbee and/or Thread? Though that's still wireless, and I haven't seen any focus on trying to connect everything with wires (not something I'd be keen on, personally, I'm quite happy with the wireless protocols).

Semaphor 3y ago

I don't really see those comments, everyone usually talks about how people are stupid for getting cloud devices instead of going local with something like home assistant

AdamH12113 3y ago
Home Assistant looks like at least 80% of what I was imagining. Glad to see that some serious work is going into this.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ryandrake 3y ago

Also, a lot of software developers will defend the exponential increase in complexity by pointing to developer comfort and speed. Building on top of these 40 layers of abstraction is easier and faster for the developer, so therefore it's always worth it. Binary/download size, performance, security issues, user experience... so much can get sacrificed at the altar of developer convenience if we let it. It gets defended because "developers are expensive" but nobody thinks of all the person-hours of our users' time lost because they are waiting for the code to execute up and down that class hierarchy...

ipsi 3y ago

That... pretty much already exists, in the form of Home Assistant + Zigbee and/or Thread? Though that's still wireless, and I haven't seen any focus on trying to connect everything with wires (not something I'd be keen on, personally, I'm quite happy with the wireless protocols).