I use Arch BTW.

Like just huge arches instead of windows or even doors, Arch is all you need.

I am more of a hydraulic Linux person myself

Is that the same thing? The impression I get is that OPs post is about the IT worker actively distrusting smart tech. While I assume your example is more that the blacksmith doesn't bother with making metal spoons for himself and using what ever he had already, which would be more comparable to a network engineer still using the ISPs shitty router.

"The cobbler's kids have no shoes" in English.

But this guy is saying he doesn't trust technology not to spy or be vulnerable.

Yeah but I doubt that saying has ever been used to mean the blacksmith thinks metal spoons are bad. Right?

It's worth sharing but this post is more about the software engineer knows how much shit is spying on you.

That ks for sharing this, this is fascinating.

Maybe the underlying rule is: the more you know about something, the more you are aware of its flaws, making the alternatives you know less about more attractive?

None of the devices I bought for it talk to the internet! Home assistant can control and even update the Shellys completely over the local network.

Yeah home built and programmed smart devices are the way to go. I'm addicted to the rush of making dumb appliances automated.

The smartphone controlled aircon for $150 extra? Slap a $4 Esp in that. $400 to get sleek control of your central heating? $4 Esp. Turn on the ice maker on the commute home? You guessed it, $4 Esp.

At first I read "heat pump" as "heart pump" and I thought "what is this crazy fucker doing?"

Well, you shouldn't keep a gun next to it, unless you want the printer to take ahold of it and rob you.

Why On Earth would you keep a gun NEXT to it!? That's just asking for problems. That printer knows if it gets a hold of that gun, it'll look like a suicide, not a murder.

You can tell it’s an IT guy’s home assistant if there’s no hardware that requires someone else’s cloud.

My home automation philosophy is that everything in the house should work with or without internet. It’s going well so far.

Home Assistant and local, cloud-free protocols and devices are great

Boom. Exactly. Self hosted solutions are amazing. We have choices about this stuff.

I have an apartment and it is dumb

For real! HA* & Zigbee or I seriously doubt the credibility of any „I work in IT“-claim.

*one of OSS contenders is fine.

Zwave is also great, but typically more expensive.

It should be regulated similar to how cars are regulated - with mandatory service and spare parts for many years.

Exactly why WAPs, Switches, Firewalls, and Modems should all be separate devices

There's also a big company called Ubiquiti that sells overly expensive trash.

Their switches don't even mirror more than a single port.

As plenty people already said here, I don't see any problems if it's staying in your local network, selfhosted

If you don't understand the desire then you don't have a use case. And that's ok. But that doesn't mean other people don't have a use case.

Properly set up home automation can reduce your energy usage. Track temperature throughout your house and open blinds, only direct heat/cooling to rooms that need it, etc. Sure a thermostat is programmable but it's limited by the ability to just turn on/off heat and a few temperature sensors. You can drastically expand what your thermostat can do (ie motorized blinds) and information it has access to (temperature outside, current weather, etc).

Or maybe someone is the type to have panic attacks about forgetting to turn the oven off. Having the ability to see oven status on the go is nice.

Or maybe someone has a larger house than you and the journey to the thermostat is more arduous than yours. Or the journey to the dishwasher or clothes dryer to see if it's done is arduous.

Or maybe someone has a disability and having quick access to various things is a huge time saver.

Maybe someone has a sensory issue and loud buzzing from a dryer finishing is problematic, so they want to disable the "finished" alert from the device and just receive a notification on their phone.

but if youre gathering that much data and making decisions with it, then from the OP "no internet connected thermostats" is a must. None of your smart home stuff should be able to phone home. Basically the openWRT argument but also for smart home. Use zigbee or zwave so devices can't just directly phone home and must simply connect through a hub (that you should control).

tl;dr - plenty of reasons to want these things, they just may not apply to you.

I work every 3rd day, so for an odd schedule it's nice. I set up Home Assistant to look at my calendar.

I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.

Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I'd much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor's worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.

Yeah, i think its all about use cases.

I use home assistant in a tablet on the kitchen wall, for light control, ev charging and battery level monitoring for mine and my wife's car which is not intuitive or easy in the official app. I use it for our shared calendar. Amd weather updates as well as for monitoring my 3d printer and cctv cameras. I host everything locally. Nothing is in the cloud except for the API i need to monitor the EVs and the weather server. I keep finding new things to use it for. I dont do much automation with it. But i find it very useful overall.

Personally, the vast majority of my smart home stuff is light automation. It's nice having a selection of lights automatically turn on half an hour before sunset, and it's nice having a button next to my bed that either turns on the reading lamps, or turns off all the lights in the house depending on how long I press it.

Though in fairness, I am drifting back towards having my lights controlled by buttons, because voice control is mostly bollocks. But now the lights font have to be the ones wired in to the house. It can be any that I can add to Home Assistant.

Having kids makes a big difference. It's very useful to be able to shut off all the lights in the common areas and turn off the lights in their bedroom when they fall asleep. It's also nice to be able to push a button to start a song on the speaker for musical routines (like cleaning up breakfast to Blue Danube or running to bed to Night Comes from Pikmin).

We also have a TON of lamps, and their switches are not always easily accessible (especially because our house is a perpetual mess).

The smart lock is because my wife always used to ask me if I locked the door after I got into bed, and I never remembered because ADHD.

Nor is the journey to the thermostat so arduous that I can’t get up and walk over to it if I should ever feel the need. Maybe I’m just too old to get it.

I live in a three story house, and sometimes only notice when what the thermostat is set to when I'm tired and ready for bed. Climbing a flight of stairs after going down and changing the thermostat doesn't appeal much. I also got it on sale, which was nice.

I also didn't get Internet connected thermostats until the utility company added demand response discounts. It's really a smart grid technology. This does mean that it should be secured as such, otherwise it's another vector to attack the power grid (set all thermostats to maximum and cause blackouts). Regulations haven't caught up.

I have some lights and speakers, that's it. I like some automation things like speakers get set to X volume at 7pm, you can say "goodnight" and it has a list of items it does, asks for alarm, turns off all Lights, set speaker volumes lower, sets music in the living room for the doggo.

I have my network locked down and and IoT ssid. I like a few of the conveniences and I watch my network and traffic like a hawk.

Ive been gifted a few IoT things over the years. They stay on their own network / VLAN or are unplugged entierly when not in use. The meme about keeping the firearm near the one thing I cant reasonably make myself is not innacurate. Tech workers are aware of the vulnerabilities and issues with cheap insecure IoT nonsense. As part of one of my nerds cyber security learning we hacked a smart cat feeder to snoop on wireless networks and allow a back door (we had their permission, it was a gift that was unneeded so they let us take it apart).

Edit: also a ton of that junk phones back to AWS, and usually pretty lazilly, if your learning pen testing or cyber security its a fun exercise to get this cheap crap and find out how it works.

I work in IT, been a software developer for decades.

I have a full on smart home, all the smart tech you can imagine. All connected and running locally via home assistant.

Smart tech isn't bad, shitty tech is.

As they should be.

none of the "smart" devices are actually smart. in my experience they're really fucking dumb

i once bought a "smart" electric kettle because i thought it'd be nice to boil my water to exact temperatures for my teas. it had a little button on a little screen to turn it on

and of course the screen stopped working, and that was the singular thing that broke. if the kettle had a physical switch i'd have only lost the ability to boil to exact temperatures instead of becoming fully useless

a similar thing happened with my Quest VR. a singular smart thing broke (the proximity sensor) and it bricked the whole thing (the proximity sensor deteced, well, proximity, and input from that decided if the screen inside was turned on. when it broke, the screen never turned on. the proximity sensor could be disabled - but only from within the settings menu that required the screen to be on in the first place. there was no other way to disable it, and that setting reset every full shut down)

never had that happen with my non smart devices, never had a non-critical feature failing bricked my "dumb" machine. oh the proper graphics card melted in my laptop? whatever i just disabled it, it might not perform as it used to but it's still functional and perfect for just browsing the internet or watching youtube

my dumb printer never just stopped for no reason, my dumb kettle with a physical toggle has been working perfectly for 3 years now, my dumb light bulbs only stop working when they've reached the end of their ability to make light, my dumb devices never refuse to work even when what they can do isn't perfect anymore

i was already annoyed by so many devices being labelled as "smart" when they're not, and now they're also adding "AI" to those things... i hate it here

I hacked this guy's fish tanks, I reprogrammed the lights and I'm currently training his fish through EMDR to memorize all his passwords. In about six months time I'll break into his house, interrogate his fish and clean out all his bank accounts.

Dude's never heard of fishing attacks.

My trick with family is I tell them "Well, I can do it, try harder." It's my little way to show them how much I appreciate how often they told me I was mentally handicapped growing up.

I just started writing up invoices for my side hustle and quoting prices to fix their shit.

I do that for a day job, so I have no interest in working more for free. Putting a price tag on the help definitely helped cut down how much bullshit they tried to get me to do

The only people I do this stuff for is my parents, because they certainly did a lot for me over the decades. Also, if I don't do these things for them, some asshole will drain their bank accounts because their passwords would be the names of their children.

I will trust people using their IT experience as a reason to avoid something, though

It seems like half of the people claiming they work in this field actually struggle more than the average person

Another perspective. You got lucky that the dependencies you're working with haven't gotten as bad as the ones for Gmail and the like. Sure you've got a domain, but you've also got a domain registrar you're dependent on. Yeah, you've got your own email server, but it's dependent on open source software, and the monopolists allowing it to still connection, though that's getting iffy. You're also dependent on the kindness of a number of people continuing to contribute to Linux, and it not being compromised in some way.

I made a different choice 25 years ago, and went with Gmail, but the idea that you're smarter because your dependencies didn't turn to sh*t is as much luck as skill. 25 years is several eternities in tech, and there are no guaranteed outcomes.

Pretty much anyone who speaks of "tech" tends to have no idea of that they are talking about. Same applies to people using "cyber" as if it was a real word outside of Science Fiction, and a very niche niche branch of engineering that doesn't necessarily deal with computers.

Microsoft Windows

How about bio-windows?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing

it will be bitrotten within 5 years and dead with 10

Worse, it could get bought out and converted to a Meta, Google, or Amazon product.

It should be required that companies either maintain their services perpetual or release the software with a permissive license to allow users to maintain their own service.

Yeah. the SPIRIT of this meme is fine, but most of the tech I use I've BEEN happily using for almost 15 years. Good design and custom software without internet access run FOREVER.

I already do that crap all day at work. The last thing I want to do is do it to my coffee maker or something.

Yeah, he'd probably say "at least they aren't smart locks"

To be fair, that dude makes it look easy. Picking a quality lock you aren't familiar with is pretty tough.

Doesn't mean it needs Internet access tho

Every screen is watching you jack off to demon futa porn in this day and age. Well, at least they watch me watch that. They don't eveb need cameras; they can see through the pixels, dude.

Home assistant!

Also IT here. I've worked with these sorts of guys, also agree not my kind of IT person. Usually craps on anything and everything.

For some reason, I feel like you're the type of person who uses AI to write code.

Edit: lmao, seems that you don't like being called out.

Smart locks have got to be at least a slight improvent, right?

Yes.

With a heavy focus on "slight"...

Well that's the thing. You design around your needs.

We have leak sensors on the brew fridge downstairs and behind the washing machine so we catch issues before they become floods. Door sensors to assuage anxiety and handle ADHD. Smart sockets so we can turn on things like rope lights in the subfloor with a button we can place anywhere we like rather than groping twelve feet into the spider-filled space to find the GPO. A button where every single function is set to turn the fan on so the hubs can roll over and slap it on his bedside table when he wakes up too hot instead of reaching behind the fan half asleep and fumbling for knobs. A tea button so we don't forget the tea we have steeping. Tank overflow system that overrides the daily timer and pumps to a secondary reservoir system to maximise capture in high rainfall. Stuff like that

The speaker that plays "it's raining men" when his lordship comes home and the garage door sensors that scream "what is WRONG with you people???" If opened at 3am is just me having fun with it though

It's good if you have pets, being able to both keep an eye and control certain parts of the house for their benefit when you're not there.

There's also the first world problem of being too cold in bed but the thermostat is downstairs.

Oh no, google / alwxa should be shot in the face, don't mistake that.

And never trust any "smart" appliance that doesn't work without internet access.

Why would the IT help desk need to identify bass and treble?

The post in the screenshot just screams incompetent boomer at me.

Windows are even easier.

Digital locks that have a network connection are even easier to break into while on the other side of the planet.

Yes

Most of them. The up and down are buttons behind the normal looking switch. It works manually before pairing to the network.

Shelly also makes a small module that wires in with the existing switch. Up and down lose meaning and just signal to change state.

If my brief research for HA sometimes ago is correct many popular brand have it, at least for electrical switches like lamp, also garage door opener conversion but the few I watched looked like a pain to set up.

I'm using Sonoff switches. They work very well with HA but they also operate independently if it's down. So I always install the behind a physical switch, that way I always have a backup in case something's wrong (and I know it will happen).

Yes, so they can change it while they are away from home ... for some reason.