Why is there smoke from the boiler room? – Botanical Garden using Home Assistant | Hacker News Reader

Why is there smoke from the boiler room? – Botanical Garden using Home Assistant

vooijs.eu

14 pointsBaardappel14 comments

I had a "similar" situation that also prompted me to take back my data.

My heat pump had also thrown an error, but because it sits in a closet (the indoor part anyway), and we don't use its tiny screen for slow TV, nobody noticed until it started getting cold. To make things even worse, the heat pump resets its error messages every 24 hours and retries, removing the error message in the process, so you may check on the heat pump and it shows zero error, yet 30 minutes later it calls for technical service.

I ended up installing an eBus shield in mine. It is a €50 ESP32 device that reports data to MQTT, and HA can pick it up [1] from there.

Things went a little overboard from there, so there's smart electricity meter monitoring, water meter monitoring, automatic valve controllers on main valves, basically anything "house" can be monitored and controlled from HA.

On the bright side I have very few smart light installations. Lights are more or less a solved problem in my book. 100+ years of electricity has pretty much revealed the optimal placement for light switches, and while some lights truly benefit from smart bulbs or relays, the majority doesn't (in my home).

5-10 years ago I didn't care if smart technology had local control, today I won't purchase anything that doesn't allow me to control it locally in some fashion. I don't mind having to tinker a bit with ESPHome or MQTT, that's fine, and for the vast majority of people, a cloud integration is probably the right solution, but I want the ability to operate my devices completely off grid if need be.

[1] https://adapter.ebusd.eu/v5-c6/index.en.html

> This is not bad luck. It’s a structure.

Either AI wrote this, or the author thinks this is what humans sound like now.

At this point it might be easier to point out articles not written by LLM. Most of them are, I just can't bring myself to read them anymore, it feels like a waste of time. I want to read original thoughts and it's almost impossible to know if this kind of content contains any. I'm tired.

It’s the wonders of the modern world. People use LLMs to write longer posts, and the readers use LLMs to summarize them.

>"And notice what that question actually is: not an accusation, but a catch."

>"This is not bad luck. It’s a structure."

>"We just don’t control it. The vendor does."

Clearly written by an LLM, so many tells.

I actually find it hard to read. Something about it is hard to follow, and I have to think very hard to keep the ‘story’ straight in my head. I keep having to re-read sections, which it not normal for me.

This doesn’t make much intuitive sense to me because shouldn’t output based on statistics have a very strong through line?

This is where I really first got lost:

“You can’t run a greenhouse without gas unless you can see the moments it slips — a fault, a silent fallback — and close them one at a time. The monitoring doesn’t undermine the gas-free promise. It’s what makes the promise keepable.”

100% this came out of an LLM-debugging session, reformatted by LLM into an article.

Instant turn-off, couldn't finish it. The moment I sense this style, now, I have to close the tab

I was growing suspicious when I was four paragraphs in with about one sentence of content, but that phrase sealed it for me.

The empty phrases are one thing, but LLM articles like this seem almost perversely designed to take longer to read then they did to write.

Possibly a case of a non-native English speaker using AI to translate or help them do their write up. In either case, it sadly makes the reading experience less enjoyable.

Those whole article is very interesting, but it’s AI-slop writing. It’s very off putting, like reading LinkedIn self promoting wankery.

It kinda worries me that one of the big points here is that you can give non-technically-inclined users power by allowing them to build Home Assistant interfaces using Claude.

In my experience (and one look at the Home Assistant forums shows I’m not alone), allowing AI to write Home Assistant configs is a questionable activity.

There’s so much old, wrong information out there that it regularly uses (or tries to use) deprecated or removed features, and often even hallucinates config fields if you ask it to do something that is unsupported (and, of course, the user doesn’t know beforehand what’s supported). And you better have backups, because once it’s inserted unparsable nonsense or messed up the white space in the YAML config files, Home Assistant just won’t work.

Admittedly, my experience here is six months old, and I was talking to Claude not using an agent - but still…

I am a recently retired control systems engineer in the US with 45 years experience. In every project we worked on we made sure the end user owned the custom programming, system configuration, and all the process data. I think it is a mistake for a customer to accept anything less.

> The same plain-language interface that answers questions is the interface that changes the system.

Surely nothing will go wrong with this.

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