People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
Tech worker here. I am this π€ fucking close to dragging every god damn thing designed to pass an electron out to the driveway and fucking hack it to bits with an axe (that I use for hewing and preparing lumber, so I can live in the wilderness when technology wins).
Haha, "hack to bits" haha. No pun intended.
I program for a living.
I can't stand all the smart shit people talk about. I hate installing software updates. I hate having to download an app just to use some shitty hardware. I hate needing an internet connection to use something. I hate having to charge yet another device.
I really hate software. I try to avoid it as much as possible.
There's an offshoot of smart device enthusiasts that insist everything is local and reproducible. But if you don't like software, it only makes it worse to try to keep things self-hosted, not to mention the learning curve is much, much steeper.
That's bullshit. No one really does keep a gun next to their printer to shoot it in an emergency, the notion is just ridicolus.
What if the printer grabs the gun first? You need to keep it out of reach of the printer.
My printer sits on an activated trapdoor above a shark tank. I've spent so much on printers trying to learn all the normal noises. Also sharks, turns out ink in the tank is not great for them.
Really, you should upgrade to laser sharks. Toner is so much cheaper than bullshit price gouging inkjet ink, and I hear brother makes some great sharklasers that take generic toner...
I live in an elevated house, straight out the window it shall sail
Personally I love the idea of a smart home only if its self hosted and running on fully open source software, also never put a gun near an unattended printer :3
And if anybody is wondering if that exists, it's called Home Assistant.
Never connect an unattended printer.
Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it's all controlled by a local server.
Cybersecurity tech worker here, and same. Even with the local server though, the one smart thing that I absolutely donβt fucks with is exterior door locks. I got one that does PIN entry, but absolutely no wireless or Bluetooth or anything. Other than that letβs fucking go itβs 2024 I canβt be bothered to open my window shades with my hands like Iβm living in the 1800s on a farm in the fucking prairie or some shit. They open on a schedule, synced at a slightly earlier offset to my wake up alarm.
Eh if they are savvy enough to unlock my door they are smart enough to break my window. Also if they can unlock my door I still have zwave open/close sensors that will trigger the alarm so I will take the convince of smart locks over non smart any day. I can keep the wandering bums out but remotely let family members in without having to give out my code or keys.
Dream: I will slowly wake up to gently increasing morning sun
Reality: my alarm clock sound is now just the buzzing and whirring of a motor that is starting to open my blinds. Just as I fall back asleep the whirring noise starts again to increase the light level.
Yep.
I love tech, as long as it's tech that I have full control over.
I'm paranoid at work because that's my job.
At home, I'm off the clock and my digital hygiene and organization is atrocious.
It's also the opposite! I do a lot of self hosting at home.
But at work... Hell yeah bro wire that shit through AWS with a Google login and Microsoft platform, I don't GAF.
The shoemaker's children oft go barefoot.
I'm horrified when I see someone with an Alexa in their home
Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don't want it anywhere near my home network.
One of these days I'll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.
With a bit of work homeassistant can be a quite good voice assistant.
You can either revive some old android device and use that, or get an ECHO M5 for ~13β¬ and hook that one up.
You can even run some local Ollama AI and use that for the voice assistant nowadays. It's quite useful and home assistant can be integrated into music / audiobooks aswell with something like Music Assistant 2.0
I refuse to buy products for my home that require an app. No, I am not signing your fucking privacy policy to use my lightbulbs.
When I had my bathroom done, they put some speakers in the ceiling I could connect to with bluetooth, but in order to activate that I need to use a crappy app to swap them to speaker mode and turn them on.
When I got a new phone, guess which app no longer works on versions of Android that Noah himself didn't use to track his fucking animals?
Bonus: Every power cut causes it to enter "detuned radio mode", requiring me to find my old phone, charge it up enough to power on, connect to the speakers and switch them off.
Never buy anything from EISSound.
Really need to get around to figuring out the spec of the speakers so I can replace the controller...
As a tech worker, I'd rather have a panicked skunk in my home than a printer.
In more civilized countries, we keep a sledgehammer read to bash the printer with, rather than a gun.
Real techies know that the only way to be sure is to use an EMP device.
Even if I wanted to smartify my home using open source and local servers. I wouldn't even know what to make smart.
Lights only ever need to be on when I am in the room, but every door has a switch that only requires my arm to lift a bit. So what is the point in powering electronics for that? Just wastes energy.
Anything with a lock is a no-go anyway.
I rarely close my curtains, and don't see why they should do so automatically in the off chance of it happening.
I don't need to touch my thermostat when I am not at home.
Can anyone tell me actual useful applications that aren't just a gimmick?
We only have two "smart* things: when we get up to pee at night, a motion sensor turns on a light in the living room. Much dimmer than those premade motion activated lights, so we don't wake each other. Returning to bed and triggering the sensor again turns it off.
And when it has been raining more than a certain threshold in the past 24h, the outlet into which the pump that feeds our drip irrigation is plugged turns off, and on again when it hasn't been raining for a while. Saves lots of water, especially when we are on vacation. (The rest of that system is " dumb", though.)
I could give you a bunch, but it would be missing the point: you should automate to fulfill a need. You don't need automation so there's no argument to make for it
Most rooms in my house each have at least a handful of different, indirect lighting solutions. I could pay an electrician to wire them all to a single mains switch, but then I would need them to come back whenever I want it changing. It would also be more complicated to have dimmers and set programs for different times of the day to to adjust the lighting to a number of presets.
I could just have the one or two overhead lights that these rooms came with, but that's just an unpleasant to look at experience to my eyes all of the overhead lights got replaced with ceiling fans that have no lighting that come on when the room is occupied and over a certain temp.
You walk in the room, a bunch of lights and may be a fan come on at the right lighting for that time of the day, then they go off at a suitable period of time. I even have all my garden lighting coming on via motion despite some of it being a separate 12v system that's battery and solar powered via a 12v zigabee multi channel relay.
Your entire house is ~~smart~~ hackable and tracks your every step for advertising revenue of big companies.
My smart home is Home Assistant hosted on a server in my house. It's fully open source and has gone through multiple paid audits to show its security is good too. The only non-local-only integrations are the weather api's and my thermostat (ecobee).
Iβm a tech worker, and Iβve got tons of smart things. Theyβre just all local. (Except my garage door opener. Man, fuck LiftMaster. Oh and my thermostat. Ecobee is ok, but I wish they would offer a local only option.)
RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.
this guy should check out c/selfhosted
I wish it was more common for printers to have or be supported by open source firmware. Maybe then I might start to trust them enough to buy one.
BRB, attaching a pen to my GRBL-based CNC and looking for a PostScript to G-Code converter...
This gives a new meaning to trouble shooting. π€
I'm starting to get old.
I can smart my house in a fully closed network and automate so much shit. But then I have to stay on top of it. I'm already at the point where it's becoming a chore to catch up on the industry for new hardware for my rigs and I've done it so many times; it's not fun anymore, it's a job... I'm tired.
Solace is found in my headphones and a fire pit. The day Steam becomes fuckery, I'm retiring from technology and fully absolving myself into disconnection.
Hell of a time to be born, but fatigue.
Edit: Ah, who amI kidding? I'm a career data analyst. I'll be chasing digital dragons until I die
As a tech worker, it's stunning how many of my colleagues have smart Amazon or Apple surveillance home
I usually keep a stuffed animal near my Brother printer
In case it makes a sound that's too cute to handle.
This is part of the reason I have no intention of having anything to do with IT once I retire.