touchthebelly

It stinks! It stinks! It stinks!

First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:

Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard, and the first version only just launched a couple years ago. They’ve been continuously working on it and adding to it, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.

And that’s just the backbone. That’s like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we’re all going to use 120V, 60Hz AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.

The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.

Secondly, a bunch of the author’s complaints are nonsense / just badly designed versions of smart home products:

• Light switches without clear On/Off/Dim/Scene Select labels on the buttons, are again, bad design. It’s perfectly possible to have a smart switch that is very easy to understand.
  • You know what also sucks? Having to tear out an entire drywalled ceiling and do 120V electrical wiring just because you want your light switch in a different spot, or you want it to control other lights, or you want a three+ way switch.
  • You know what’s nice? Having a complete separation between powering the devices, and controling the devices. It’s nice to be able to turn individual lights on/off/to different colours and brightnesses depending on what you’re using the room for.
• Turning on the TV and it not turning on the streaming box, means it’s an old tv or someone disabled HDMI CEC. New TVs will synchronize with the streaming box and soundbar / receiver automatically.
  • And I would argue that just having it start playing a random commercial filled channel, is worse for your brain then intentionally picking something to watch, but maybe that’s generational.
• I don’t know how the author, their mom, or the rental supplied tech guy couldn’t figure out how to look up the instruction manual for the dishwasher, because literally zero models of Miele dishwasher require wifi for setup or use.
• Black glass oven buttons with opaque symbols have nothing to do with smart appliances, that’s just bad design, and the author chose and bought a badly designed dumb oven, then blamed smart homes for some reason.
• Programmable thermostats have been badly designed since the 90s, and yet, literally everyone uses them. Why? Because if it’s your home, you look up the instructions, program to a schedule that makes sense, and then you don’t have to go and adjust it multiple times a day. Modern smart Thermostats do the same thing but are usually more intuitive and nicer designed. This is because the author rented an AirBNB (i.e. a home designed for people to live in) rather then a hotel (a home designed for someone to temporarily stay in).
• The author seems to not like touch screen numpads on their alarm system instead of buttons, because they display the weather while idle. Like ok, again, it’s an AirBNB, not a hotel. The buttons are clear to someone who has literally never used them, but uglier for people who use them every day.
• And with lag, yes, there is inherently more lag in a digital control device then an analog one but there does not have to be lag to the UI, that’s just bad hardware / software, and as long as they’re wired, the actual control parts of modern control systems have literally imperceptible lag, on the basis of <100ms.

Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:

• We’re still in the infancy of smart home tech.
• A lot of minimalist high design home stuff is functionally terrible.
• Renting an AirBnB means dealing with a home designed for someone else.
• Owning a software company makes you stressed out and rage at every little thing that’s different.

I mean, when you could convert Xbox Live Gold credits to Gamepass and get it for like $60 a year, it was genuinely a great deal. And that lasted for like 4+ years.

Mass manufactured catcaves are inferior to artisanaly crafted cat forts.

Yup, and they’re still hard to find a reasonable priced replacement for, so still go for like double their original price on marketplace.

The only downside to them is that they struggle a little bit to playback lossless audio. So you can’t play Spotify lossless off them and I found that they would occasionally crash when streaming Tidal / Quobuz lossless. I’m pretty sure this is just a thermal constraint though and you can fix it by taking off their case (some people even add heatsinks to them).

I bought the 2019 one and ended up selling it for this reason.

Have never had CEC compatibility issues with anything else. I’ve rotated through Samsung and TCL TVs, Roku Boxes, Google TV Boxes, Chromecasts, Switches, Xboxes, Yamaha and Denon Amps, and Vizio Sound Bars, but the only showstopping CEC issue I’ve ever had was with the shield.

What on earth are you basing that on? Just blind faith in Nvidia?

Yeah, you can kind of tell, I think Chromecast Audios are the same thing.

Either one of the Google founders / board members still use them and love them and won’t let the company discontinue them, or one of the original engineers / PMs has risen up to the point where they can keep allocating support budget to it.

Damn, that sucks.

The studio head of Modern Warfare (all ghillied up), Titanfall / Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends. The guy clearly had an eye for talent and knew how to make a memorable game. RIP.

Bruh what the fuck are you talking about?

You think that a user being upset when they give an app full filesystem access to their phone, and then having that app be handed over to some shady new owner is entitlement?

Congratulations man, ‘skill issue’ people like you are why open source software rarely takes off. No one will use or trust any open source software if this happens. This just pushes people to use tech giants like Google and Microsoft because they’re big and stable and not about to change owners.

Don’t fucking publish your software for people to download if you’re going to pull the rug out from under them. Keep it on your local machine and jerk off to it if you don’t care about others using it.

I agree with everything you’re saying, but even speaking specialist to specialist, or say to a group of specialist colleagues who might not be working on exactly what you’re working on, you still often simplify away the technical parts that aren’t relevant to the specific conversation you’re having, and use specific language on the parts that are, because that inherently helps the listener to focus on the technical aspects you want them to focus on.

If you’re communicating with another scientist about the actual work you’re doing then sure there are times when you need to be specific.

If you’re publishing official documentation on something or writing contracts, then yes, you also need to be extremely speciific.

But if you’re just providing a description of your work to a non-specialist then no, there’s always a way of simplifying it for the appropriate context. Same thing goes for most of specialist to specialist communication. There are specific sentences and times you use the precision to distinguish between two different things, but if you insist on always speaking in maximum precision and accuracy then it is simply poor communication skills where you are over providing unnecessary detail that detracts from the actual point you’re trying to convey.

Their literal entire first paragraph is about scientists doing it.

No, I’m talking about engineers and scientists communicating with project managers, designers, lawyers, business people, and the many many other people who work in the same industry but do not have technical backgrounds.

It is for a white collar job where most people have degrees.

Eh I don’t really agree, depending on how simple you’re talking. Bags within bags, or dumbing things down to a grade school level, then sure, there are topics that can’t be described succinctly.

But if you’re talking about simplifying things down to the point that anyone who took a bit of undergrad math/science can understand, then pretty much everything can be described in simple and easy to understand ways.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen many people at the top who can’t, but in every case, it’s not because of the topics’ inherent complexity, but either because they don’t actually understand the topics as well as they may seem, or because they lack the social skills (or time / effort / setting) to properly analogize and adjust for the listener.

You’re literally just describing this meme.

When you don’t know shit you think it should be simpler, when you slightly understand it then you end up using technical terms because you know those terms apply and aren’t confident enough to replace them, and then once you know enough you get confident just describing everything as bags within bags.

I’m not saying they were, I’m saying you are.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod