- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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“oNe dAy wE wiLL aLL livE iN a sMaRt hOmE. tEcHnOLoGy aLwAyS iMpRoVeS”
Well, shit.
Well put.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Apple.
Adams’s law.
Day 3,801 of thanking God I was born a Luddite
Anyone who thought their toilet would be improved by having an internet connection deserves this
Sure but I’m also all for innovating and watching these things fail. Isn’t there a value in letting dumb rich people with money waste their wealth on dumb ideas. It keeps them from doing things like buying Twitter
I mean, it could be. Imagine getting a push notification when it overflows. The lowest pipe in my house is a toilet. Luckily my wife was nearby but it could’ve gone worse if we didn’t see for a bit.
This is a job for water detectors, which I have no qualms about connecting to the internet. They have the added benefit of detecting leaky pipes as well
I’m not a Luddite, shit just has to be reliable and actually useful without violating my privacy. Wait a minute…
I’m kind of far away fyom being a luddite, senior software developer, codes for fun, builds electronic stuff with wifi etc.
My toilet was built and installed before internet was invented and will not be changed for anything smart, neither is my toaster, dish washer, stove, locks, etc. etc. Ever. Over my dead body (if you want to be disinherited).
I can consider acceptable for the kettles to be connected to the internet if, and only if, they answer always with a 418 status code.
But… Teapot!
There’s nearly as much reason for those to be internet-connected.
I’m perfectly fine with enabling a connection, just not requiring one.
For example - my lights are automated. They have a switch though. If they went offline (or my server does), I can press the entirely local switch and have light.
As a reminder though, 418 is supposed to be the response for requests of the teapot to brew coffee.
I can press the entirely local switch and have light.
Are you sure about that? Is it a local connected smart switch (still fancy electronics, just local) or a plain old power switch?
If it’s a power switch, and If you turned your lights off by app over the internet, and then the internet went out, then your lights’ ability to come back on when you flick the physical switch depends on somebody having thought about this need and programmed a “oh, the switch was flicked so I better ignore the internet settings” mode.
And if they did that, it also probably means your lights all turn on after a power outage since the light can’t tell the difference between power outage and light switch flipped off.
Any smart lights I’ve seen always turn on when going from no power to power. It’s a little annoying when the power blinks and half the house lights up, but it means physical switches always work.
Smart lights should be used rarely because they have a failure state. Smart switches are the answer here for most lighting. These are light switches that also have radios in them to connect to zigbee/zwave/matter/whatever to control the switch if the connection is available.
Lutreon sells high quality, but somewhat expensive ones that work flawlessly.
I like the color temperature and brightness of my lights responding to the time of day too much in order to go with smart switches over smart lights
Are you sure about that?
Lol yes. Its a relay with a secondary control via mqtt with intermittent status reporting.
it also probably means your lights all turn on after a power outage since the light can’t tell the difference between power outage and light switch flipped off.
Not how that works.
I don’t think any of these people know what “smart” is supposed to mean cause these must be the dumbest ideas for any product I’ve heard so far.
‘Smart’ means it can send your lifestyle data to the company, and make you dependent on their services.
You want to change your toilet provider? Best of luck holding your poo in for three days while the transfer is processed.
Mostly to be more efficient and save water, though I couldn’t fathom how that would work with a toilet. Perhaps it’s part of a system to monitor your water usage to help you reduce your use? Maybe the app suggests to let it mellow when it’s yellow?
Okay, I get the idea of smart AC for example - be elsewhere, turn it on remotely so that it’s comfortable when you get home. Fine. But a toilet? You are physically present there, you can push a button to flush. Or are you telling me that you’re shitting remotely now too?
Hans free means you don’t have to touch the handle with dirty hands, but you can do that with a motion sensor too.
Personally I would much rather touch my phone with my dirty hands than a toilet handle
We’ve been ready for pedal activated toilets for decades now
you’re shitting remotely now too?
Do we tell them about the remote shit technology that just landed from Uranus?
It’s not that great anyway. Your local toilet will surreptitiously grab and analyze your poop, dispose of it so you don’t need to flush, and have the remote toilet extrude an identical copy someone else has to flush.
Wait, so you’re not subscribed to shitme™? For a low monthly subscription they send you a sealed, self-addressed and postage-paid container to deposit your feces in, it gets sent to a sorting facility and distributed via drones or delivery drivers directly to your home toilet, where the feces are flushed in the privacy and safety of your own home! The peace-of-mind alone is worth the $39.98 a month. Up until now, the only challenge has been flushing the toilet while you’re still at the office, this way you NEVER have to go home!
Shit like a world leader
Maybe it needs a connection cause it takes a picture of your feces and sends it to an AI analysis service. If anomalies are detected, it tells you that you should take the stool sample to a laboratory for further study, then lets you flush. Poof, smart toilet. I could see people with too much money buying this.
Edit: Thought about it some more… why stop at feces images? Why not also have a high resolution camera pointed at your anus taking crowning shots and analyzing those. Tell users if anythings wrong. The future is
brightbrown boys. The future is brown.Edit2: You could even have motion based security… alert if anyone broke in through your bathroom. Cameras in toilets people! What could go wrong?
Edit3: Hear me out. User controlled bidet mode + anus camera. Take out your phone and clean your ass in first person. Score points if you clean your whole ass and compete on an online scoreboard. Tech sure is amazing.
Why not just have a small aliquot of each stool deposit diverted into an HPLC/UPLC with AI checking the chromatogram?
a little bit like this?
If anomalies are detected, it tells your insurance company so they can increase your rates or drop you before you actually need to go to the hospital and cost them any money.
ftfy
Sorry, Euro defaultism… my healthcare is affordable. You can always run Tolet Assistant on a raspberry pi at home and let your shit never leave the network.
There is no reason it needs an always on connection for this. Even if there was a camera in the bowl taking pictures of poo (which raises so many privacy questions), the device could easily save hundreds of HD+ quality picture (assuming a toilet camera had that resolution) and send them next time connection is secure.
Always online functionality only makes sense when the function itself is an online task such as a video call or looking up information not saved locally.
Having an always online connection for a toilet suggest it’s gathering much more information passively from your home, using voice activated as a cover to always be listening and thus relaying what it records to server/data center to be filtered through for marketable or exploitable data.
Toilet’s chipset is only good for network connection and video recording. Business logic is on servers. As I said, users want to know if their shit is good before they flush so they dont lose a sample in case it is bad.
You may have stumbled on multiplayer shitting though. Conference call with random strangers on the internet, biggest splashback, fastest bowel movement… endless possibilities. Yeah I think always online is the best course of action here.
The only thing smart I want is a faucet that activates with button OR the knee / foot sensor, and gives water always with a precise programmed temperature and flow.
That and a temperature and timer controlled frying pan.
Well an incinerating toilet that just dries burns my shit using a 340W solar panel would be cool too.
For that last one, why not shit in your microwave and set it to 340W. That would easily allow you to test the system without buying any new appliance, except for a microwave if you don’t have one.
Imagine cleaning the splatter after all the corn boils and pops in there
Well an incinerating toilet that just dries burns my shit using a 340W solar panel would be cool too.
Gonna smell real bad
Nah you’d have a chimney. The main reason I want a “separating drying toilet” is that it would have a fan and wouldn’t smell at all in your bathroom. And you’d probably also have a separating toilet as first step, then dehydration which can be closed cycle, and then either burning or compositing. And with that and biodegradable soap and detergents, sanitation becomes much less infrastructure intensive.
So it’ll just smell of burning feces outside of your home. Got it.
I’m just busting your chops, I think it’s a great idea.
“Ok, so what you can see in the logs?”
“Sweetcorn.”
Must be a kernel issue
Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow
deleted by creator
That printer is a 2000’s HP LaserJet
Is there a community for those of us with late 90s early 2000 HP laserjets? Somewhere we can discuss maintenance, feeding, and overall care?
There used to be but the moderators forgot to sign up for HP Smart® Instant Ink™ and used non-authorized ink (first party ink ordered directly from HPs website) so it got shut down 😔
FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS
I will bulk purchase grey-market bootleg toner from shady overseas websites before I go back to a inkjet…
If you’re lucky it might be cut with something cheaper like pure cocaine
It’s fine, you only ever need to replace it like once a decade or so
Don’t put the gun within reach of the printer, come on
Recipe for disaster
I keep it in a voice activated safe plugged into the 110
I’m sure Canon has snuck in code that can replay your voice…
Hey now, don’t bring a gun into a Canon fight!
There’s one guy in my department who does all the smart home shit, but I absolutely don’t see the point in it. Didn’t even connect the washing machine to the wi-fi as you can’t set it going without having loaded it first anyway.
I could see having lights on a somewhat sophisticated timer. Like having bedroom lighting that simulates dawn, fades on etc. Maybe making a thermostat a little bit more sophisticated. I’d like to live in a world where I could trust the power company to tell me when electricity is abundant and scarce but we’re gonna have to win Civil War 2 before we get that. My toilet and faucets do not need any digital technology at all.
The more I hear from big tech companies the more I want to reject it. I don’t even own a printer.
Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.
Why would I get a laser printer? I don’t want a printer.
Because they are like two fifty on the flea market and will run on one cartridge for 10 years. I print all my tickets everytime, I’m that old
How else will I print out MapQuest directions?
Because it shoots lasers
literally so you can leave it unplugged in a box, and drag it out once a year to print a tax form or something. Toner should be shelf stable.
You guys have to print out tax forms?
I have a 70+ year old friend that paper files. She doesn’t trust the free file places available here (USA). I don’t blame her.
Ysk - You can order the forms for free on the IRS (& state) websites.
I print things for her on my 1999 laser jet if she needs something printed.
Many years I paper filed just to inconvenience them slightly for not offering free file.
I am British, most people don’t need to even think about taxes here as its all automatic. Only really something you might need to look at if you are self employed or its your job to deal with it.
No, printed just to keep a hard copy
What is the point of that?
build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.
…why? CUPS is print server. You don’t need anything else.
He’s talking about the hardware and you’re talking about the software.
Bulletproof? Sounds dangerous. What do I do if it makes a weird noise?
Keep a cannon by the canon.
Can confirm. I’m a tech worker. No smart devices. Laser printer. Very close to going back to a flip phone.
I am looking at some smart locks, but they’re able to be used as dumb locks with PIN code and physical key also. And they have a usb power port on the outside you could plug a battery into.
I’ve gone down the smart home route a decade ago and only did non-cloud integrated devices with physical controls also. But it’s a part time hobby to maintain it.
flip phone
Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.
I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.
If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.
I had a Sharp SH-03L for a while, it’s a business version of one of their flip phones that didn’t even have a camera.
The OS was actually android 8.0 but really stripped down to basically only do the whatever apps a flip phone has.
I was able to sideload apks through ADB, but ironically, I actually wanted the google stuff to work since a lot of the apps required it to log in and other things.
The thing was pretty cheap though, paid like $15 for it
Go check in Aliexpress: there are tons of non-smart phones, especially the stuff marked as “senior phone”, and they’re pretty cheap too (like $15 for a mobile phone that just does calls and SMS).
If you want the stuff that’s not glitzy and heavy on marketing you need to get it from where the factories are, not were the brands are - basic mobile phone tech is a thoroughly solved problem and highly integrated nowadays and well within range for even smallish electronics manufacturers to design themselves.
Also check HMD, the Finnish mobile maker who bought Nokia’s mobile business, who also have several non-smart models (including old Nokia models).
Edit:
No idea if any are flip-phones though.Here’s an example flip phone
usb power port on the outside you could plug a battery into.
Until someone with a flipper figures out that port transfers data too, lmao.
Ha yeah. I would absolutely confirm there is no data connection
Tell me you’re a NRA fan without telling me you’re a NRA fan.
About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.
Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.
The only upside to this state of things is that it keeps alive my fantasies of one day being a Watchdogs-style techno-sorcerer that can wirelessly hack anything that runs on electrons and a WiFi signal.
… Although the nightmare is that people far more evil can probably already do that.
ZigBee and Z-wave create their own network not connected to the internet, pair that with Home Assistant 🇪🇺 and done, sane smart home implementation.
Will have to look into that, thanks.
One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.
Remember, the “s” in IoT stands for “security”.
And the ‘p’ for privacy.
I worked for Cisco during the time IoT was being pushed into everything. You don’t want to know how bad it is. If I was malicious I could have easily written several backdoors into their products without anyone knowing. I wrote kernel code in their IOS operating system. There are no checks on that shit and the entire switching team does next to zero peer review on kernel security.
Yes, there products that (at the time) touched upwards of 95% of all packets sent over the Internet.
Terminally online, even for #2
Because most people are not online while pooping, right?
Right?
What’s “Skynet” mode, lol?
They have knives, and you didn’t put them there
Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.
Footage from a robot in skynet mode:
!it’s from the movie Runaway 1984!<
Sounds like the beginning of the Cory Doctorow novella “Unauthorized Bread.” Cloud service goes down and the main character’s toaster won’t work without them.
Baps? Bagels? Baguettes?
I’ve put a few smart lights/switches/sensors/power points in at home. Definitely helps mum as we can have wireless switches for the lights, and motion sensors to turn the hallway lights on automatically as well.
For ALL of them, I make sure there is a manual control that will work as a backup regardless. Even if a smart light is “off” due to the motion sensor not detecting movement, all you need to do is turn the old regular light switch off then back on and the light will default to being back on.
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Ye. I have all Ikea smart stuff, by default everything is running a local mesh network with physical remotes and that light switch backup.
You don’t even need to connect any of it to the net, buying a hub to get app & google home/alexa/etc control is entirely optional with the exception of a few sensors, like the moisture/water leak one. And even then, the app & hub work on local wifi with no internet anyway.
