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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Sure it's a pain in the ass, but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control. Outsourcing monitoring of cameras, control of doors, monitoring of occupancy, and related is a bad move. Especially when homes are designed to last many decades if not centuries and should work even when the internet is out or some random company dies, is acquired, gets bored with a product, decides to monetizing a service in annoying ways, or to increase the API costs to unreasonable rates.

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> but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control

Alternatively, you could simply not have a "smart home" in the first place, saving money, hassle, and having to worry about issues like this.

Which, ironically, is a pretty smart choice.

This is the correct answer.

A smart home is technology for the sake of technology, not solving a need as such.

I'm incredibly resistant to adding complexity to my home unnecessarily (I debug stuff at work all day, can't be bothered at home), but I am slowly adding things because they are useful.

Mostly they're smart because they save on wiring. For a while I've had all of my living room lighting (ceiling, as well as standard lamps and a table lamp) all Hue so they get turned on and off together. Standalone and useful. I've been experimenting with HA running on a Pi because I want to do a slightly complicated combination of PIR and timing for some outside security lights and it'll be trivial with HA.

That sounds like you're not resistant to adding complexity to your home.

My Philips Hue bulb was replaced with a dumb one when it crapped out and I turn it on and off with a telescoping pointy finger that lives next to my bed ;)

I like some things reasonably smart (boiler, ventilation), devices that learn from the occupant’s behaviour in order to be more economical with energy for instance. I'm not a fan of other "smart" tech, like lights, stoves, ovens, fridges, etc.

My heating is demand based and my ventilation is measurement based. There is no real need for smart there past a set point and some hysteresis. An analogue comparator is enough tech there!

The moment you make it clever past this you incur the overheads of the whole system production in the efficiency cycle. That means the manufacture and distribution of a complex computer system.

you never know how culture shifts. Remember when it was unheard of to pay for things over the internet? What about the times where you could be solicited off the street for an interview and you freely give your address for potential mail from strangers?

Never know what will be normalized in the next generation. Or what will be considered crazy later on.

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