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Comment by boxcardavin | Hacker News Reader

I'm always fascinated by people's fascination with smart mirrors. I don't get it myself, but I like their enthusiasm.

For me, the mirror aspect is a neat addition, but really I just like having an always-on screen that displays data at my slightest whim. It's a lower friction way of getting weather data than pulling out my phone and opening an app.

Other things I've thought about implementing or partially implemented:

- A CPU or memory graph for my servers (or real time Google Analytics data). - A graph of my WiFi's connection speed so I can tell when Comcast is dropping the ball. - A graph of the travel time with traffic for my commute so I can make decisions about when to leave for work.

Just for another perspective, I intentionally left voice commands off of my mirror because the last thing I wanted was another thing to interact with, mere feet away from my laptop, phone, tablet, etc.

Instead, I treat mine exactly like a clock. Had it up more than a year, still love it, but beyond glancing at it to see how the weather is or when my train comes, I never interact with it or give it a second thought.

Yea I spend, on average, maybe 5 seconds tops looking at myself in the mirror every day. Why would you build so much functionality into a display that only exists in one, usually very humid sometimes smelly room, and the only way to interact with it is to stand there shouting into the steamy air?

Check out the video in the post: I have the mirror in my bedroom, within view of my bed and my reading chair. And even if I only interact with it a couple times per day, I find it pretty useful.

I certainly wouldn't recommend putting this in a bathroom :) Some part of the system would eventually get water damage and Alexa would make more mistakes listening over fan/shower/faucet noise.

Well I'd say it's meant for a bedroom or living room mirror, not the bathroom mirror. Now in my house there's only two mirrors, one inside the wardrobe and the other in the bathroom, so I wouldn't get much of a Smart Mirror TM, but a few friends do have living room mirrors, so for them it could have a better use case than mine.

Well, there's the "mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men" angle ...

(Borges, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius , probably piling on the known historical puritan dislike of mirrors because of sinful vanity.)

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