35 replies

1. Khalid ⚡ 10 min later

   @zachleat Personally, I’d like to see a law that says every hardware device company must plan for obsolescence and failure before releasing a product. This includes open-sourcing services in the case of failure.

   Also, they must account for the recycling or decommissioning of their products in terms of the price of their products.

   1. Zach Leatherman 14 min later

      @khalidabuhakmeh whew, yeah, there’s another one for sure: the amount of physical, software, labor, and efficiency wasted!

2. Eric A. Meyer 16 min later

   @zachleat Thank you for connecting the dots between my predilection for no-JS web dev and my staunch refusal to adopt home automation.

   1. Zach Leatherman 23 min later

      @Meyerweb how are you feeling about NFTs though eric

      1. Eric A. Meyer 26 min later

         @zachleat

         1. Zach Leatherman 27 min later

            @Meyerweb so… favorable?

            *hides*

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4. Tim Severien 32 min later

   @zachleat Most smart home tech is light bulbs so you can dim them from your sofa and go “RED LIGHT DISTRICT INIT” and impress guests for exactly once because you can tell they’re not impressed.

   1. Zach Leatherman 38 min later

      @timsev I mean, the keyword is all wrong. If you said RED ALERT I’d be really enjoying it

   2. Tim Severien 38 min later

      @zachleat That being said, I do have some smart stuff, but reject anything cloud-based, and only use them for optionalish stuff that needs power anyway. It’s a progressive enhancement!

      Basically, I dim lights from my sofa. And my partner trolls me by turning off the lights of the room I’m in.

5. Alex Russell 34 min later

   @zachleat Responsibility is always an option:

   https://sensorsandsensibility.com/posts/2016/1/20/progressively-enhanced-homes

   1. Zach Leatherman 37 min later

      @slightlyoff whew, the exact blog post that links these two niche things! and from a very credible author too 🏆

      1. Alex Russell 1 hr later

         @zachleat The​ framing of "guest friendly" really seals the deal: if you're making stuff nobody else will ever need to use, sure, go ham. But if other people will be using what you build, the bar goes *way* up.

6. Josh Wayne 43 min later

   @zachleat The parallels go even deeper because the solutions in home automation also look like the same we use for websites.

   Power goes out 👉 automated devices still have physical switches as falllbacks.

   Smart lock fails 👉 physical key backup + only ran it locally so it was less prone to failure in the first place (planned fallbacks)

   Company went out of business 👉 doesn't matter because I used an open source, local solution and never connected to their cloud anyway (reduced dependencies)

   1. Zach Leatherman 51 min later

      @joshwayne yeah! These things can be designed responsibly—but most often are not 😬

      1. Josh Wayne 1 hr later

         @zachleat Also a parallel!

         1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

            @joshwayne hahaha *cries*

7. Jason Petersen (he) 1 hr later

   @zachleat you mean internet outage, not power, right?

   I have a couple of UPSes in my house but I’m not sure what exactly my home automation is expected to do when the power’s out. Lights? HVAC? My coffee maker? They all don’t work without power.

   And yeah, don’t use devices that talk over the internet.

   1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

      @jason no I did not originally mean that but both failure modes are important!

      1. Jason Petersen (he) 1 hr later

         @zachleat I like your analogy. My automation use is in the “progressive enhancement” mode. Wall switches, thermostats, etc all just work with no automation. People come in and don’t even realize anything is automated, everything seems normal.

         I’ll have to keep this as a principle going forward (it always has been, because of guests and parents and such)

         1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

            @jason exactly, yes!

8. Chris Henrick 1 hr later

   @zachleat ditto with e-bikes, I’ve heard of manufacturers going under and then customers no longer can get their bike fixed or its software updated.

   1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

      @clhenrick woof, that’s an expensive brick

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10. Cory Birdsong 2 hr later

    @zachleat yeah, you gotta be extremely careful to buy “progressively enhanced” smart home stuff, and it's sometimes hard to tell how something is designed without just trying it out. It's ridiculous how many things flat out *need* to talk to a server instead of being able to send/receive commands on your local network if all the devices are on it.

11. Diligence Jones 4 hr later

    @zachleat

    I wanna know how you got inside your house.

    1. Zach Leatherman 4 hr later

       @DeliaChristina when the internet of things closes a door, you break a window

12. Francis 🏴‍☠️ Gulotta 5 hr later

    @zachleat this company got sold off and this random CDN I used for poly fills got sold off

13. Eaton 4 days later

    @zachleat Yeaaah. Like… I love home automation when it's like, ‘turn my xmas lights on and off for me," because the failure state is… I have to turn on my xmas lights manually. Not “I am stuck outside my own door in the cold and I can't reach tech support as the sun goes down and the ice weasels come”

    1. Zach Leatherman 5 days later

       @eaton the ice weasels are nothing if not terrifyingly consistent