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Comment by mey | Hacker News Reader

I value privacy, my nest thermostat is the only IoT device in my house that talks to the internet or can be accessed remotely without a VPN. What I find most valuable is it programs itself. Am I cold? Turn it up a bit, hot? Turn it down a bit. Suddenly I have stopped having to adjust it at all. Even as life has changed. It has some nice other features, such as preheating/cooling, telling me how long it will take to get to temp, energy savings by allowing the electrical company to shift my cooling earlier before the afternoon rush.

I bought my Nest before Google bought the company, and I will switch brands instead of buying one of the Google built devices, again over privacy considerations. Hilariously enough, we entered the name of the thermostat as HAL.

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Ok, but what on this list actually requires an internet connection? I guess the integration with your power company. But aside from that?

You could put a local AI model into the Nest, and it shouldn't need to talk to the internet at all. It can keep the data locally, and be programmed to draw inferences without help from the mothership.

For some reason we've decided it's ok to gratuitously connect everything to the internet "just cause". Sort of like how data maximization has become a thing because the costs are low, so why not?

Posted elsewhere, but my A/C had a small leak and was slowly loosing efficiency. At peak heat it could not keep up, but I had no way of knowing that at work. My $99 Emerson Sensi messaged me that the cooling was not keeping up and there was a problem. I could turn off the unit remotely to prevent stress on the compressor and fixed the small leak well before I would have known without a internet enabled thermostat.

I did A/C repair in college, fixing it early more than paid for the maybe 50 extra bucks wifi cost. The thermostat itself is on an isolated wifi network,

Messaging you requires at best only enough Internet access to send a message. It doesn't require all other functionality to be Internet dependent.

Frankly, the way these IoT devices are designed to be just dumb terminals to some cloud on the other side of the world, it's just bad engineering, in service of anticonsumer business.

Perfect IoT device would include an internal scripting language (ideally standardized and easy to grasp, embedded python/js/lua etc) and API exposing all of gadgets hardware. This way user/owner/external service providers could supply their own script snippets implementing desired functionality. Aka general computing.

Imaging buying "smart light" thats actually smart enough to do what you want it to do.

That doesn't answer the question: why does that require internet access?

How else did you expect it to message him? Or let him turn it off remotely? Sure, could put a SIM in it and do an SMS that way, but then you have to pay for service for your thermostat, rather than just using the WIFI you already have.

Couldn’t it just have a lcd display with a scrolling alert message? Maybe even a red light that turns on to draw attention.

"I could turn off the unit remotely to prevent stress on the compressor"

Good point. In my experience an air conditioner is something that you use when you're home, so turning it off remotely doesn't make any sense, but I suppose other people might AC their house while they're gone all day?

If you live somwhere that might be >100 degrees, you can't just turn the AC off all day

>Ok, but what on this list actually requires an internet connection

I have a somewhat irregular work schedule, and on hot days was lifechanging to be able to turn the A/C on before I got home. Similarly, if you're on vacation and go "oh shit I forgot to turn the A/C off" it's nice to be able to do that remotely. The Nest has a motion detector but it's not 100% accurate. Maybe some non internet connected thermostats also detect presence, but it's nice to be able to confirm the state of the A/C remotely. I also like being able to graph the temperature/humidity of my place over time.

That said, my next thermostat will probably be an Ecobee because I'm pissed off about a number of decisions Nest has made lately (e.g. removing access to their API)

> You could put a local AI model into the Nest

Why do you even need AI for this? This kind of task is solvable pretty easily and is really only an ML task in the most broad of senses.

You can control it from anywhere so if you're coming home earlier than normal or know you need to pre-cool the house because you're having a party later you can do it from your phone. Or just being able to control it from anywhere in the house, this can be done with X10 or something but that requires additional hardware to bridge between the X10 network and the internet. Most IoT devices are similar and use wifi and a central server because it's the most convenient option for configuration, with both sides hitting a central API you don't have to worry about ensuring clients discover all the devices on the home network and it's then trivial to allow control from outside the home.

How much would a localized AI cost to implement, and would you pay it for a thermostat? As a result, you're lowering your one-time capital cost by connecting to the internet instead, perhaps?

I like that I can check on the house from my phone if one travels for multiple weeks at a time. I also like warming up the house before I get home late in the evening. Granted, I've now got a VPN / firewall setup that would do this without an internet connection, but I'd still need some form of wireless connectivity to execute the changes from my mobile device.

> How much would a localized AI cost to implement

Not much, because you're probably doing regression and I doubt this tasks needs neural nets. Well, it is definitely solvable without NNs at the very least.

Don't you need data aggregation to build the model though? I think that's part of the problem, but I could be wrong.

No. You could do this with any model that has feedback built in. I don't think you'd even need something as complicated as Q-learning but any type of reinforcement "learning" method would work. You're basically teaching a PID that has a clock.

Just taking a guess...besides integration with the power company, an internet connection can be useful for plenty of things. Weather forecasts and aggregating local user behavior to improve predictions of how to adjust settings more accurately over time. Talk to your mobile device to know when you're getting near home to pop out of an eco mode. A heartbeat to the cloud so it can notify you when the power is out. Lots of possibilities you wouldn't get with a local-only mode.

That sounds like a startup opportunity there :)

To be fair, most of that doesn't require the internet— it would be perfectly possible to build a simple learning thermostat that was offline, or perhaps was only periodically online (eg, dumping a compact data log while it's connected to your laptop for its yearly firmware update).

I feel the same way about voice assistants. Recognition can be done locally— playing your playlists or turning the lights on and off should require no internet connection. Updating a todo list or calendar, maybe, but then it should be an API call to that service provider, indistinguishable from an action originating in any other third-party app.

Eons ago Nokia phones were able to learn "voice commands" tied to certain numbers. This was in the dumbphone era.

My limited interaction with those was that they were pretty universally terrible and would not be acceptable today (and were bad enough to be annoying then even).

Sure, they were. But it was a Symbian, with memory measured in KB, not in GB, CPU in low MHz range, not GHz. I only wanted to point it out that even though it was bad, it was possible, and with phones today, it's not only still possible, but maybe even possible and reasonably good. All that offline, of course.

>What I find most valuable is it programs itself. Am I cold? Turn it up a bit, hot? Turn it down a bit. Suddenly I have stopped having to adjust it at all.

Is that a problem most people have? I bought my house a few years ago and haven't touched my thermostat since I originally set it up years ago

Do you live alone? And are you or do live with a girl? Because when I was single, I never touched the thermostat. Now that I am, it has to be constantly adjusted.

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