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Comment by zachd1_618 | Hacker News Reader

Playing devils advocate here. My power goes out probably three times per year. Water stopped working in my building twice this year. I lost my physical house key last year. My WiFi has issues probably once a quarter and needs to be restarted. My brand new vehicle (automobiles generally have the highest requirements for reliability AFAIK) wont shift into 1st gear (manual transmission) once every thousand miles.

I feel like this community especially, but we in tech tend to forget that everything fails. It is inevitable. We get all riled up about “iot this” and “I never use connected devices that” but honestly I feel like our digital reliability is just as high as the “analog” tooling so many of us proudly retreat to.

Shit fails. Once a month when it happens in a manner like this the HN community gets up in arms like we are the sole arbiters of reason when it comes to technology.

Downvote away :-)

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It's not a question of perfect, it's a question of __unnecessary__ fragility/vulnerability. We all rely on electricity because the alternative is far more difficult. We drive despite the costs and problems because most places in the US have been designed entirely around driving and it's very difficult to survive otherwise.

Does my fridge actually need to talk to the internet? Do my lightbulbs? Are the gains from having an addressable coffee maker worth the downsides when things break (or are broken due to security being an afterthought at best) over having a coffee maker that's just a coffee maker?

It's not any different than any other code all of us write on a weekly basis, when you start tacking on unnecessary features and increasing the complexity you will inevitably compromise the stability and simplicity of the features it must have to do its job. It's why the Unix philosophy exists to begin with.

It's a fair point, and you're right. But there's one difference: when your power goes out, it affects your area. Amazon's server outage covers a much larger area. I won't claim "the whole world," since server outages often aren't global, but sometimes they are.

Good point! Impacts are more widespread

For the sake of not sounding just like I’m complaining, and to actually look for more discussion: do you disagree with the regularity and nature of outages being a constant in our lives, and that a server farm somewhere is just another dimension to the scenario we all accept as normal?

Do you think that big tech and any iot “utility provider” should be held to a higher standard? (Probably IMO)

PS. Didn’t mean to go on an anti HN rant. Love this place. Just seems extra negative to me lately.

A) I find utility outages are rather rare - I can't remember the last time power or water failed at my house (it's been some number of years at least).

B) Devices _need_ power and water (depending on the device). There's no reason my Dyson fan has to talk to an external server to be controlled by an app on my phone, but it does. It's an unnecessary dependency.

Apple to oranges.

Care to elaborate? My assertion is just that, in the end, I’ve had roughly the same experience due to different root causes more often this year due to old school problems than IOT and connectivity bugs. Just saying that random anomalies are the norm, not something (for me at least) to get worked up about

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