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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.
- 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.
Mass manufactured catcaves are inferior to artisanaly crafted cat forts.
9·15 days agoI mean, in that case, this just feels like adulthood. I don’t sleep to stay healthy (even though I probably should), I have so much stuff to do that I sleep just enough so that I have enough energy to get everything done.
Does still be healthy include feeling rested?
If so, this has to be the craziest opinion I’ve ever heard. You’re trading 8 hours of time for the feeling of curling up in a bed, and for the feeling of waking up in the morning?
You can get that with a 15m nap, and I’d do that like once or twice a week. Life I way too short and there’s so much other shit I would do with an extra 8 hours in the day.
4·21 days agoNo shit sherlock.
It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.
The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction
Reflection doesn’t induce energy, it dissipates it because it does not reflect perfectly.
You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.
Go out to a field and try to produce an echo. They literally require walls to bounce off of.
Isn’t the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren’t you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?
You need some space yes, ideally the inside of your chamber needs to be mostly empty and insubstantive.
However, echo chambers can not be filled with too much space, because echoes don’t work at infinite scale. Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall. To be truly echoey and hear multiple echoes of the same sound bouncing back and forth on the walls in front of and behind you, you need those walls even closer together, for not just the extra distance travelled, but also how much energy is lost during each reflection.
An echo chamber is inherently a closed space because open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.
Echo Chambers’s defining characteristics are walls that cut them off from the outside world, being large voids with little substance inside, and hearing what you say repeated back to you.
Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.
Tehran has more than one suburb, and Tehran also isn’t the only city in Iran. If there are 400 bodies in one suburban morgue, and you extrapolate across the country, you’d hit 12,000 very fast.
I mean there’s the video of 400 bodies in one morgue. It could be fake, but the reporting is not based on vibes. Kind of sounds like you can’t accept that a religious fundamentalist dictatorship could murder its own citizens for thinking independently, despite that pattern repeating throughout history ad nauseum.
A single video shows ~400 bodies piled up in one Tehran suburb.
What the honest fuck are your talking about 600ish sounds more believable? More believable based on what? Based on you dick riding the Ayatollah?
55·1 month agoThis post should be removed for not being humor.
Adobe didn’t really lose millions, but that’s not really funny, just incorrect.
I think the English media is misreporting this somewhat. He’s been remanded to jail pending trial as a potential flight risk, but he can leave jail by posting a bond / bail.
I think Swiss media just reports it differently because it’s more common to be let go with a promise to reappear for your trial and no bail, so they report this as his being remanded as a flight risk, whereby in American and Britain the default is typically being released on bail, so reporting that they were remanded implies that bail was denied.
In English language news this is more commonly headlined as “judge sets bail for Swiss bar owner”.
I typically do too, or
userIndexor something for nested loops, but I will accept i and j for the first two levels of nesting when reviewing a PR because they’re such a convention. I wouldn’t accept variable names like that anywhere else though and try and avoid them myself.
Outside of the for loop counters i and j, short variable names are awful. Coming back to old code written with abr var nams is like talking to someone in the military who just constantly throws out jargon and acronyms that they know you don’t know.
But so are Java style ObserverFactoryManagerTemplateMachinistTemplater names.
There’s a sweet middle ground of short, but actually descriptive name. Sometimes it’s not possible but that’s usually a code organization / language / framework smell.
Too short variable names is usually a sign that you need to use a proper ide, with auto complete, or that you need to use a proper build process that will minify your code after the fact.
Too long names are usually a sign that your module of code (function, class, namespace, etc) is too large, or that your language/framework naming conventions are too strict, or the language doesn’t encapsulate scope properly.
They’re talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.
American judges have also been hobbled by decades of Republican legislation and judicial interpretations.
The American legal system has fucked itself into a corner where judges have to make these incredibly dumb technical rulings in specific interpretations and precedence, whereas as judges in many other western countries have much more freedom to look at the big picture or take into account systemic effects.