Also, "box office earnings" is a patently stupid way to judge customer demand for a movie.

Okay that's fair - the North American card payment processing system is actually kind of a disaster. I still tend to view high tech payment alternatives skeptically, but CCS/NACS payment negotiation is way less customer hostile than "sign into our app".

The freedom to just *not* update things that are correctly performing all of their desired functions is the biggest appeal of self-hosting stuff to me.

I try to keep in mind that what I've set up in my home is a project of passion, not a means of simplification. It is possible to make things "smart" without opting into surveillance or even using the Internet, but it's an uphill battle in the current landscape.

Virtually everything that falls under the umbrella of "appliance control loop" could trivially be handled by a commodity microcontroller. That we've normalized the idea of it requiring a subscription to a datacenter-hosted service is utterly insane.

Agreed. I'm an enthusiast of the curiosity, but selling energy-monitoring as a gateway to money-saving is disingenuous at best.

I think its healthy for people to be skeptical of the surveillance, and I'll qualify my "I just think its neat!" stance on home data collection being predicated on it being fully local...which is still the exception, rather than the rule.

For me, "ooh, can I get data from that? And can I do it without the cloud?" is kind of a fun and satisfying hobby, but I don't think you're wrong that we sometimes convince people they need this data as a way of selling them the means to collect it.

I will wholeheartedly admit that I love to collect data that I simply don't need. I've installed a home energy monitoring system. It ultimately informs very few decisions, but provides some satisfying context for how much things cost.

Omg I just looked this up...wtf?

Briefly, I played with the idea of loading my smart dishwasher, and then using home automation to automatically start it when I went to bed or left the house. But even this is just as effectively served by a basic "delay start" feature. Plus, it precludes running the water hot first.

I don't have any major issue with the automatic payment gimmick - the underlying technology is actually quite secure - I mostly just don't care that much about it. The margin of convenience is quite small, and credit cards are already a solved problem.

It you made it my job to invent some problems for a wifi enabled dishwasher to solve, I could actually come up with some bullet points: Tell me when to change the filter, add more rinse aid, measure how much water and energy I'm using... It does none of these things.

My place came with one! I set it up because "it was there, why not?", but it really has been the most nonsensically unnecessary cloud-connected thing I've ever interacted with. Mercifully, it has inoffensive regular controls.

Easily my greatest frustration with early EV ownership was the app-ification of charging infrastructure. There's nothing intrinsic to EVs that demands a different kind of payment processing.

Ironically, I'm actually a pretty big enthusiast of home automation, but I think this is too often seen as interchangeable with "connect everything to the Internet and then figure out how that's useful later". "Smart" has to begin with a use case, not a technology.

There might be some self-selection bias, but I've noticed a shift in the zeitgeist from "Oh, it has an app!" to "Fuck, I need to use an app?" The profound unevenness of the cloud-connectivity bargain is starting to wear people's patience thin.

It's more like heirloom china, where its implied function is mostly tradition, and you're not actually expected to eat from it. It should be displayed in a glass hutch in your (formal) dining room with the rest of your collectable popcorn bucket collection, to someday pass on to your grandchildren.

Orb