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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough, possibly because I work on embedded software for automating random processes, and also from home, I don't feel the need to automate anything not work related.

When you spend most of your day stuck in front of a monitor, it feels good to get up and turn lights on/off.

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Me too, at work (PhD student) I take enormous pleasure in writing end to end fully automated pipelines. Nothing that needs to be done more than once isnt automated pretty much. At home, I would never buy or use an Alexa/Google assistant/use Siri or any 'smart' device, I simply don't want to bother with it.

Exactly. Anything that needs even very minimal human interaction like pressing a "y" key is not automated at all. It is very common to see in the corporate environment that scripts needs some editing in b/w to be done during its running with editor which can be easily automated using sed.

An interesting effect I have noted for me when doing research is that even if it only takes one extra click or changing one parameter to generate a plot, or run some extra analysis, I will only do it selectively and start rationalising it to myself that I know when a certain plot or analysis will help and when it won't.

This becomes especially egregious over month to year long experiments where I run the same experiment every day on end.

There was really no reason not to auto generate every possible plot, every possible analysis every time (and I cannot use ipython notebooks or things like that because it's many distributed things chained together with lots of scheduling).

The productivity gains have been enormous and are hard to overstate. I don't dread any experiment any more because even in a large complicated distributed setup, everything from initialising kerberos tickets to tons of config files, restarting services, running multiple experiments dependent on each other, and generating plots and summaries and committing them to a repo is one command. Anything that's analysed once is evaluated always.

I now almost look forward to setting up new experiments because of the pleasure I get from just chaining together calls from my control utilities.

All I have to do is pull on my laptop and I download a filter with all results pre-generated paper ready. I think a lot of people do this in experiments where everything is on a single machine, but I haven't seen it as excessive from other phd students doing complicated distributed stuff. There is always a lot of manual command line args passing, manually changing some config while instead of just creating dedicated scripts, etc.

And as an added bonus, your experiments are more reproducible. Kudos!

Same here. Only part of my work involves automation etc but indeed for some reason that took away the need/desire to automate more at home. Likewise when setting up the electricity in our house I specifically selected something based on teleruptors only without any programming/smart stuff. Just works, still some versatility since it's wired in a star, and I also just happen to like hardware switches and buttons vs touch screens.

I can relate to this. I would like some remote control features though but then I always consider what a hacker could do and what's the worst that could happen if the system malfunctions.

Quite often the worst-case scenario is a fire, so the little benefit is IMHO not worth the risk.

I'm talking about self-made hacks and cheap Chinese hardware here.

Or false positives that desensitize you. Cry wolf too many times and people tune out.

I got my parents a Nest smoke alarm (I can see the alarms too) but a year later it was being triggered by steam.

The folks at Nest actually sent a free new model that's better at not triggering for steam. But I have to wonder if my elderly parents trust it anymore.

So this. I’ve consciously refused to install irrigation so I’ll have to go out to the garden and hang around there.

I've often commented that I'm glad I have to water the garden because it's an excuse to just stand around looking at plants.

I don't like watering grass because grass is boring and requires a ton of water, so rather than install irrigation, I ripped out all the grass and planted more interesting plants. (Drought-tolerant xeriscaping is common in my area, so this isn't unusual.)

> just stand around looking at plants.

Hard to overstate how good this is for one's mental health.

When we bought a house with a pool, I did not keep the existing pool maintenance guy who'd come in every week for $100/month, and neither did I install a better pool vacuum robot.

I love the 30min when I come home after work where I scoop leaves and various kinds of debris out of the water. Very relaxing.

Hm, I had a pool once. Never again -- I felt like that's all I did was clean it, vacuum it, add chlorine tabs and clean the DE filter and destroy my lungs.

I also don't really like plants, or the outdoors. I'd much rather be inside in the A/C. Working on my own coding projects doesn't bother me, even after coding all day long.

Perhaps it's because I've been spending less time coding at work and more time managing...

I'm pretty sure the part of my eye that processes tall green things and wide blue things is wired directly into the happy spot in my brain.

> so rather than install irrigation, I ripped out all the grass and planted more interesting plants.

Nice. A lot of local plants too?

I don't think most of them are truly native to the area, but they're mostly cuttings of abuse-tolerant species that were growing well at friends' and neighbors' houses in the area.

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