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Your “modern and robust cloud” is my “why on Earth doesn’t this thing work offline”. The world is absolutely full of things that have worked for decades to cen
by amluto 2y ago
Your “modern and robust cloud” is my “why on Earth doesn’t this thing work offline”.
The world is absolutely full of things that have worked for decades to centuries without the Internet, are eventually more or less consistent (remember carbon paper credit card machines?), and did an amazing job of keeping the world running despite, wars, network partitions (the “network” would basically always be partitioned), mistakes, entire branches offline, etc.
Sure, a lot of things are easier when centralized, and “the cloud” is incredibly powerful. But it’s not necessarily more robust. Also, depending on any sort of cloud means you’re also depending on the network, and networks are far from infallable. There’s a reason that a lot of stored-value transit systems still track balances on the card and will let people in even if a fare gate cannot connect to a cloud service.
And CrowdStrike took out plenty of cloud instances, and recovering them can be worse than recovering physical hardware, as the “robust cloud” has an absolutely terrible ability to do anything outside the happy path of booting an instance normally.
- dailykoder 2y agoOkay this sounds all very reasonable, but how do you know when your washing machine is finished, when it's not connected to the cloud and you won't get notified in your app? It sure is not an easy thing and the cloud helps very much here
- rozenmd 2y agoI can't tell if this comment is sarcastic but maybe washing doesn't need to be hyperoptimised down to the instant the machine finished
- nihzm 2y agoI hope this is sarcasm, but if it isn't washing machine cycles have a fixed duration so a timer on your phone is more than enough, no cloud necessary.
- 4ad 2y agoI wish washing machines had a fixed cycle duration. When I start the cycle my washing machines tells me the same duration, always, but in actuality it takes different amounts of time every time. Madness. I've been told this is a feature.
- scrlk 2y agoDo you always load your machine up to the same level? A low load will trigger a shorter cycle time to save energy and water.
- krige 2y agoMy washing machine is kind enough to both indicate time to end in minutes, but also allows me to delay start so that the cycle is finished in [x] hours. It's not even that modern.
- broeng 2y agoMy modern dishwasher is also very kind, and displays the time to end in minutes throughout the wash. Counting down from an hour. But I don't know what kind of upbringing it had, for some reason, the sneaky bastard always adds another 25 minutes, when there is supposedly only 10 minutes left. I guess dishwasher years are like dog years. At least it definitely behaves like a teenager at 2 years old, finishing when it wants to finish. Estimates be damned.
- mschuster91 2y ago> Madness. I've been told this is a feature. It actually is. Fixed length cycles haven't been a thing for many years now - modern washing machines adjust the washing cycle length by the weight of the laundry and its behavior during spin-drying, both its vibration behavior aka weight distribution (that can have multiple adjustment cycles to achieve reasonably even distribution) and how much water it loses - when no more water comes out during spinning, it will cut the cycle short to save energy.
- 2y ago
- julian_t 2y agoWhen the noise from the white box stops, then I know. And if I'm not at home to hear it, I'm not quite sure why I'd need to know.
- mschuster91 2y agoWell, for people in an apartment it doesn't matter all that much, but if your laundry washer or dryer is in the basement, you don't necessarily hear it if you're out in the garden.
- dTP90pN 2y agoWhat happened to the good old tin can telephone down the side of the house to the washing room?
- dailykoder 2y agoSure, it might be a "nice to have" thing. But the machines usually show how long they'll take. And even if it's a newer one with sensors that make the whole process vary in time. I'd still be like "Oh, okay it'll take about 3 hours, so ill be back at 6pm". It doesn't really matter if the clothes chill out for about an hour, especially the newer machines don't stink that fast. And on top of that, I don't think that it has to go over the internet if you needed some sorta notification. Local would be suffiecient. If I buy something new like this and have a few choices, I intentionally pick the one with as few smart features as possible.
- baq 2y agoMy home assistant does approximately this without the cloud, but it isn't magic: cloud is just 'someone else's servers' and I just host it on my own raspberry pi.
- quectophoton 2y agoAt this point I'm tempted to start using "the ground" as the opposite of "the cloud". I'm already mentally replacing "cloud" with "clown" anyway, to the point I have to stop myself from accidentally saying "clown computing" out loud.
- __alexs 2y agoBTLE exists and is good and cheap.
- throw0101b 2y ago> Okay this sounds all very reasonable, but how do you know when your washing machine is finished 1. Check back in an hour (like my (grand)mother did—and she managed to do laundry without Wifi). 2. Or: have a washer that beeps. 3. Or: set a countdown kitchen timer (or a timer on my phone) that will beep if my washer does not have a washer. There are complicated situations in life: doing laundry is not one of them.
- belter 2y agoFirst I though you were joking, then got hit by the disbelief of realizing you were not...
- dailykoder 2y agoNah, you're good. I was joking.
- arminiusreturns 2y agoWait. They aren't being sarcastic? In all seriousness, I think never has there been a better time to educate people on the fundamental philosophy of computing freedom, and I usually start with Eben Moglen and RMS's talks with people. I don't know how much of this is generational, or how much of this is corporate sell out, or maybe even sockpuppetry for consensus cracking and other psyop techniques, but relearning the lessons of early computing (such as being able to do things offline, locally, as a core part of a functioning decentralized system), seems highly in order.
- geoduck14 2y agoI think you are joking, but I'll reply with a serious answer. Where I went to college, our dorms had (free) shared washing machines. This was "pre cloud", but wifi was throughout. One student rugged up a hall-effect sensor and attached it to each power cable. It could detect if the washers and driers were on. It sent this info to a specific website that the students could monitor to see if there were any available washers or driers.
- mmikeff 2y agoWasn't the first webcam setup to show whether a coffee pot was full?
- red-iron-pine 2y agoAlso the reason we got Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) in RFC 2324
- ds_opseeker 2y agoI'm really hoping your comment is sarcastic. If it is serious, you could always set a timer.
- amluto 2y agoWhat does this have to do with “the cloud?” If you want to make a washing machine robustly notify its user that it’s done, surely a message sent over the local network or even Bluetooth is a better start. Anything involving the Internet is only useful when the user is outside the house, and there are more robust solutions to that than a server in us-east-1 that you hope the manufacturer keeps paying for.