Most tech these days, and especially most software and operating systems, are guilty of persistent sealioning.
Good tools don't sealion their owners.
@cstross I think the point is that if you ask "Do you want an upsell/AI/unnecessary feature?" enough times, the user will eventually accidentally press the wrong button and "consent" to whatever it is.
Happened to me last week. Opened the photos app on my phone because I needed to find a pic I took of a sign I urgently needed to ask an airport staffer about, and accidentally clicked the "Yes, store all my photos on your cloud" dialog I'd declined 5,000 times before.
@pluralistic @cstross I fucking hate that I have done this a few times. They ask every time when you say no, but only once if you say yes, and clawing any of it back is at best difficult, arguably impossible.
@Oggie @pluralistic Yeah, but you can at least see the business model at work there ("store photos in the cloud" = "pay us rent for cloud storage") and there *is* a tenuous value proposition ("make it easy to share photos with other cloud-connected devices"). Whereas the AI-with-everything is transparently a grift. And most of the sealioning devices are pitching for permission to do something you didn't buy them for (your smart fridge wants to subscribe to the weather channel).
Honestly, I can't understand "smart appliances". Other than the home thermostat, I just don't get the appeal. I want to run a load of dishes, why do I need to do some status upgrade? I just wanna put the veggies away, or get some out to cut up... the doors open and close and it keeps the food cold. It's smart enough, honestly. A post-it note and paper work fine if I need a shopping list to work from. And i have stainless steel doors on my fridge, dry-erase markers work fine on the surface for reminder notes or the menu for the week (except for green, it doesn't show up well enough).
That's "smart" enough for me. Just another costly thing to break down and replace, having all that extra crap in there.
@CaffeinatedBookDragon @cstross @Oggie @pluralistic I don’t even understand smart thermostats. The number of times I’ve needed to remove the batteries from a Hive thermostat to reboot it doesn’t bare thinking about. Give me a dumb wired one any day.
@gavin57 @CaffeinatedBookDragon @cstross @Oggie @pluralistic Thing about a dumb wired thermostat is that you can't turn the temperature up remotely a day or two before you return home.
I've wired a smart relay in parallel with the dumb thermostat so that I can do that. We'll see if it works in a couple of weeks.
@TimWardCam @gavin57 @CaffeinatedBookDragon @cstross @Oggie @pluralistic The other thing about dumb thermostats is that they have hysteresis and no prediction. Say you set it at 20 degrees C. It waits until the temp is 19 before turning on. Then it stays on until the temp is 21. But the radiators are still hot so your house heats up to around 22. A 3 degree temperature swing is pretty uncomfortable.
Our smart thermostat now keeps the temp within 1/2 a degree C of what we set.
@tokensane @gavin57 @CaffeinatedBookDragon @cstross @Oggie @pluralistic My dumb thermostat has a prediction feature! - there's a resistor in it which heats up faster than the radiator and turns the heating off before the radiators overheat. Unbelievably crude, but they've been making the same device for several decades so someone must think it works.
This resistor is however the reason that someone bothered to run a neutral wire to the thermostat, so there was a neutral available where I tapped into the cable, which is good because the smart relay needs a neutral.
I'm controlling the smart relay with a #HomeAssistant virtual thermostat run from a temperature sensor in the living room (as compared to the dumb thermostat which is in the hall, which we have no particular desire to heat). Left to itself it keeps the temperature to within 0.1°C. But it's not always left to itself, eg if the cooker is on the temperature overshoots.
@TimWardCam @tokensane @gavin57 @CaffeinatedBookDragon @cstross @Oggie @pluralistic now, if only thermostats also had a "cold anticipator" for the summertime.
@rotopenguin @tokensane @gavin57 @CaffeinatedBookDragon @cstross @Oggie @pluralistic Not a problem in the UK - we don't need AC.
@TimWardCam @rotopenguin @tokensane @gavin57 @CaffeinatedBookDragon @Oggie @pluralistic We increasingly do need a/c, but here in Edinburgh it's still for maybe one week a year. London and parts south are getting a bit muggy in summer these days, though.