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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a compelling use of smart home technology, and I really don't want the continuing functionality my home to be dependent on the whims of some corporation.

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One day - not too long from now - you're going to sprain your back. Or twist your ankle. Or get a nasty cold. Or, maybe, just get old.

As you painfully shuffle towards your TV in order to increase the volume, you'll mutter to yourself "I've never seen a compelling use of remote control technology."

Once done, you notice it's getting late. Do you continue sitting in the dark or heave yourself up to reach the lightswitch? You smirk. "I'm glad that I'm not dependent on the whims of some corporation."

"Progress" and "better" aren't a straight drive down the road of convenience for a lot of us.

One of the things that helps prevent your body failing is using it. If you are injured, they tell you not to favor your injured limb. As we automate these little movements out of our life, are we doing ourselves a disservice by increasing our own body's atrophy?

To be clear, I like technology and automation. I want to automate dangerous tasks and things that cause repetitive stain. Maybe things that need improvement, home air filters for example are changed every 3 months. Is that ideal? Or by measuring the current draw from the blower fan you can see when the filter is getting clogged and change it when needed.

Having recovered from several injuries: No, we're not doing ourselves a disservice by increasing our body's atrophy, at least not in this particular case. We're getting a better chance at giving the injured limb a chance to rest.

You shouldn't favor your injured limb, but neither should you expose it to unnecessary stress. So if recovery requires parking yourself on the couch, those automations are nice. (Or, alternative, loving friends & family whom you can use to do these things for you :)

And as for the uninjured case: If light switches and TVs are the thing that keeps you from atrophying, you have a problem :)

I expect to die at approximately 94, all things being average. I also expect that I’ll be bedridden for the last three months, and that I’ll spend most of those three months fighting with technology and cursing its frustrating interfaces, not entirely missing the irony of the fact I spent most of my life avoiding anything IoT.

My last words before I die of frostbite will likely be ‘hey google please please switch the heating back on’, to which the reply will be, for the fifty-eighth time, an apology and an offer to give me web search results on ‘swift the heath in baton’

Which is exactly why Home Assistant and Matter exist... If you're not going to read the post why even bother commenting.

My Home Assistant instance has only a few devices that are in anyway linked to a third party but even then they have locally accessible API's. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread and Matter are all great solutions for this.

A fantastic drive-by comment that misses the point of both Home Assistant and Matter.

Does your household get mad when you forget to get up and stoke the fire?

Do you know what Home Assistant even is?

A home automation stack that alleges to be open source but can only deploy it the way they want.

What does the deployment have to do with whether or not the project is open source?

Stop hitting yourself, you're mad that someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, in fact, does not know what theyre talking about. Just keep walking.

The fundamental principles of FOSS are around freedom to use, redistribute and modify code. Many different things can weaken the freedom to use and modify. For example, if somebody gives you only binaries, or obfuscated sources, or only minified javascript.

Or projects with very difficult build process and no documentation, or unnecessarily complex deployment or too many functional dependencies. Or making the project not very modular, requiring people to deploy a whole VM or container with tenths or hundreds of dependencies bundled in.

The list goes on and on. For example a lot of commercial "open-core" products deploy a lot of tricks to make forks difficult to maintain in the long term.

Many are open source only strictly speaking aka legally, but they discourage REdistribution. Android is an extreme example of this and you can see how HA goes in that direction.

EDIT: There's a company funding HA development and profiting from it using a subscription model...

How does any of that apply to Home Assistant?

Probably referring to the NixOS packaging issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

I’m running it on a VM on a secondhand Intel NUC. A lot of people use an RPi. Some people do a Docker install.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

I will support these allegations of open sourceness as well.

IMO the only viable IoT is the one that can run completely isolated from the Internet, on a local network.

Home Assistant and Matter are a step toward this.

You would like home assistant then. It’s all local and open source. No whims.

Good thing then that those people are working in a way for you to not be dependent on their whims.

(I still don't like the details, but it's absolutely an improvement.)

After I buy a smart light switch that connects to my Home Assistance instance, how am I thereafter dependent on the whims of some corporation?

It’s admirable that you just leave this uninformed comment up instead of taking the easy way out and deleting it.

If only there were some open standard you could use...

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