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Comment by hn_throw2025 | Hacker News Reader

hn_throw2025

I’m more positive about shortcuts and looking for ways to integrate it with my home automation.

I think it’s pretty cool that I can make a shortcut connect to a host on my home network via ssh and execute a command. To just trigger that using my voice and Siri when my phone is nearby.

I live in a country with stupidly expensive electricity, so have my home media center connected to a smart switch, which I switch off last thing at night. I am thinking of moving my Pi mini NAS setup with it’s various drives into that media center setup, so last thing at night I can get a shortcut to SSH to that host, do a clean shutdown, wait a short while, and then use the Hue connector in Shortcuts to cut the power. I couldn’t do all that with either Amazon Echo or the Hue app.

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> I couldn't do all that with.. Amazon Echo

The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.

Users can now escape walled gardens, at the cost of multiple middlemen. If Alexa and Apple had allowed users to access other ecosystems, there would now be thriving customer communities with proven open workflows that could be sherlocked into commercial success by the platform owners. Instead, that value will accrue to foundation model companies.

Very true.

I could probably do much of this stuff with Home Assistant, but it’s always a bit too far down the todo list. One day…

Is there any reason people won't just use the MCP server without an LLM?

T-that's illegal!

> The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.

That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago, when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary, until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.

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