We really do live in a boring dystopia
I work in IT and I keep a baseball bat handy in case I suspect a device has gone online.
However what a ridiculous situation on Amazon’s part and it raises a bigger question. Even if this guy was 100% a racist shitbag, should he have had his Amazon account suspended unilaterally in the first place? Should someone have their bank account closed too then? How about utilities? I obviously am not agreeing with someone being racist but think that allowing corporations to impulsively take punitive actions is a slippery slope. Next thing we know, Amazon will be offering capital punishment as a service.
I’m of the opinion the “smart” home thing was just unintentional secondary, I can’t imagine them being smart enough to do so on purpose.
This sounds like it leads to the capitalist version of social credit scores.
I feel like just regular credit scores are already 100% the capitalist version of the CCP social credit score in the most borlngly dystopian way possible.
No better reason to ditch the internet of things.
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Yeah, IoT is pretty nice. But proprietary stuff can be very annoying and a huge security risk.
My bedroom lighting setup doesn’t even use ZigBee
Its all theatre DMX lighting > ola (open lighting architecture) > ArtNet > home assistant.
It’s slightly jankier than if I had built a direct ola > Hass plugin but it works quite well
I also only run lighting, and control my Chromecast on my Home assistant - and both are turned off at the power supply when I’m not home, it isn’t accessible outside the LAN (except through a zerotier VPN, though I probably should turn that off as I don’t use it much)
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Even if the accusation had been true, Amazon shouldn’t have this ability.
Am I the only one who can be bothered to get up off my ass to flip a fucking light switch?
Not everyone has the same level of mobility that you do.
Incidentally, do you get off your arse to change the volume on your TV?
I got a family that likes to leave the damn light switches all on at night, I’m no longer going around and shutting them all off when everyone is in bed. Also, they are tied to my alarm, when I disarm the alarm or it goes off, they all come on.
But I’m doing all this through Home Assistant, a local open source automation server, not any of this cloud bullshit.
That sounds more like a social problem than a technical one…
Some fights are just not worth the hassle tho, you got to pick your battles.
And it’s not like there is anyone factually “right” or “wrong”, it’s mostly a matter of opinions/priorities.Another example, different expectations w.r.t. to cleaning. Either try to convince the other person to clean more, even if they don’t see the need, or be always the one cleaning and build up frustration. Or: Get a roomba.
This is dystopian. Amazon should be crushed and split into hundreds smaller companies.
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People have this idea that I’m either too paranoid or I might do things “better”, but it’s so arcane and confusing that they never could manage.
Of course the truth is that it might be a bit arcane to initially set up, but actually using it isn’t any more complicated than the commercial ones, except that you actually control what it does.
Then again, I don’t see why anyone would want lots of these things anyway - even if it was all selfhosted, do you really need a videocamera doorbell or app controlled lights? Some of these things just scream to me actually slower and more troublesome than just doing it the old fashioned way. Then again, I still like desktops with wired keyboards and mice, and I still prefer them to voice control or touch screens.
We had a Google speaker thing. Got rid of it because it was crap. All we could reliably use it for was asking it to play a radio station or play Spotify, but frankly it even got that wrong enough that grabbing my phone and connecting to the Bluetooth speaker was easier.
Even privacy invading problems aside they’re just a little bit rubbish.
I have found that their killer app is natural language alarm-setting. something like, “google, set a timer for 30 minutes”, and having that timer appear on your phone is handy in the kitchen.
