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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

I don't want Elon Musk high on some substance, being able to control the car I drive. Or anyone, really. While it's arguably hard to make your own car, it's trivial to make an ebike, that nobody can control except you.

It's trivial to not rely on cloud providers for anything. I can store mp3s (or mkvs, etc.) on a NAS and play them from a computer or a Pi. I can certainly flip switches to turn lights on or off in my house.

In fact, most "home automation" sounds a little absurd. If you can program it yourself and you like it, good for you. But to rely on a remote provider that may or may not work when you most need it, or who may "discontinue" devices you rely on, is irrational.

It seems most people are willing to give away control for the smallest gain in convenience. We should resist more.

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What an asinine way to begin a comment attempting to explain your position. I think it’s safe to say that nobody wishes another human “high on some substance” has the ability to disrupt the control of their vehicle. Where did you even pull that from?

That being said, the people who “should resist more” are the ones don’t find it “trivial” to not rely on cloud service providers. They grab IoT products like a Ring doorbell off the shelf and install it one and done.

Elon Musk is often high and even when not, says things that are completely unacceptable. Look them up. He's loved here on HN. But even if you do love him you shouldn't give him control over your life.

Why does anyone need a Ring doorbell? Can't you just stand up and answer the door? I don't understand any of this (I do understand I'm in the wrong forum for saying so).

We can agree to disagree over Elon Musk, but I can give you a good use case for Ring off the top of my head:

My parents bought a Ring (I am heavily against it for every reason you wrote, plus I can’t stand the idea of a company owning my family’s video footage, I asked them to let me set up some sort of CCTV system but they just want the easy way)and it provides them with a quick, cheap motion activated video feed of their home straight to their phones from anywhere in the world. This isn’t even a doorbell function, the thing can be configured to detect motion over a selection of distances and send you a notification straight to a live video feed.

Sure that can be manually set up but for a lot of people who aren’t too tech savvy, grabbing something like a Ring from bestbuy is quick and easy to get running. Maybe the issue could be helped if a someone sold something like an arduino based doorbell / cam, with easy to use software or an app like Ring that didn’t call back home.

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