the ironic thing with Teams is that the one thing on the label - managing teams- is AWFUL. I'm sure company culture comes into this, but for an app that sells itself on the idea that it makes little teams for people to join, it's awful at letting you manage the teams. i'm a member of like 80 some odd teams and maybe 3 of them give updates. All the rest are silent.
it's a disaster. it's fine for voice/video calls, but it's slow and not fun to use in the app on my dev machine (i7/32GB RAM)
This is entirely on the author. Sure these vendors make awful products and poorly maintain them - but nobody is forcing anyone to buy them or integrate them into their house. I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.
I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at
Good technology gets out of the way and let’s the user do or be or experience something. This is the opposite
> I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.
Let's fix that, shall we? I have a Philips Hue system and also a physical switch[0] that I can move around. In my hallway and my kitchen (high traffic rooms) lights turn on via motion detection, making it absolutely unnecessary to ever turn touch a physical plug (with my wet hands after washing the dishes for example). I'm also not blinded by the lights when going to the toilet in the middle of the night. I sync them to my TV (and two LED strips on its sides) while watching a movie for a more immersive experience. And I also gradually dim the lights and shut them down in the evenings if tomorrow is a work day, giving me a visual cue that I should go to bed. And it works via local network, flaky Internet doesn't affect a thing. I've never plugged a mic/speaker to it and I still absolutely love it.
Don't get me wrong, I've been definitely burned by other types of IoT appliances, but smart lights are awesome. More expensive investment than non-smart ones for sure and whether that price is justified is up to you, but in my 3-4 years of using them I have yet to change a single bulb or a battery in a motion detector / switch.
But how do you turn the lights off again? Timeout? Not detecting any motion? Also, do you have any pets?
As for dimming the lights, I'm sure it looks impressive and also dramatic. But I've been able to go to bed in time for more than 40 years just fine. Also, what if you do want to stay up later?
Which, I think, is the gist of the first comment: You can do all these things, but they don't improve the current status and thus mostly serve as recreational activity.
Turning off the lights is a big problem. You need to introduce presence detection, which is more than motion - people are very still when watching a movie or reading a book or working at their desk. That's when you have to introduce phone detection or heat detection or other sensors that need to be processed and integrated exploding the complexity.
[0] is an electronic switch, not a physical switch. A physical switch is hard-wired into the wall and you physically switch the circuit open or closed.
> I never think about light in my home, I flip the switch if I need it - lights seem like such a chore to my friends who have to issue commands to a speaker and that’s one of the few things this tech is supposed to be good at
Pre-covid we used to leave the dog at home during the day (I now WFH so not an issue), but it gets dark at 3:30 here during the winter, meaning the dog is stuck sitting in the dark for 2 hours. Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes before sunset meaning the dog gets to chill out and stare out the window for an hour longer. The bulbs also sync with TVs and devices that will adjust the lighting for tasks/bedtime/movie time.
We use hue bulbs in our bedside lamps, and they sync (pretty much out of the box) to alarms in google calendar so 30 minutes before "up" time the lamps come on and fade up to full brightness when my alarm goes off. It happens 5 days a week, and correctly knows when I'm OOO to not bother waking me. The lights can also do holiday modes so no more giving keys to my neighbour to ask them to turn on lights for me.
Heating is even more key - ever go away for a week and forget to turn down the thermostat? I know I have, and we've just wasted a weeks worth of heating the house to comfortable human temperature rather than just keeping it from freezing. Modern smart heating systems have thermostats in each TRV so you can adjust the temperature in one room rather than the entire house (where right now I am using one room), and can be controlled on timers, and deactivated remotely.
EDIT: I do want to say that the devices (particularly the voice interface to them) is not perfect, however I would estimate our failure rate at once every couple of days rather than every time we try to turn on the lights, and as others have mentioned here it needs to have "dumb" fallbacks - I need to be able to turn off the lights with a switch, or walk to the thermostat and adjust it otherwise it just doesn't work.
> Philips Hue has routines for turning on lamps 30 minutes before sunset
FWIW, mechanical timers have been able to do this for decades.
20+ years ago I had a mechanical timer that turned on my porch lights at sunset and off at 11pm. You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.
I found a honeywell timer on amazon, which requires being hard wired. There is no way my landlord would have let me do electrical work in my previous property, and getting an electrician out for a "simple" job like that is ~$80 plus $75 for the timer. A hue bridge + bulb is ~$75 and I can use my existing lamps too.
> You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.
Having an electrician hard wire an extra switch for each lamp, configuring latitude and individual timers (presumably they don't all work off the same trigger so if you want to change them from 30m before to an hour before, or 15m after you have to update them all), managing DST... That doesn't sound massively simple to be be honest.
> mechanical timers have been able to do this for decades.
I don't think people are claiming that smart homes are allowing for things that were never physically possible before; I'm certainly not, but it is definitely more convenient.
You just needed to configure your latitude so it knew when sunset was.
Mechanical timers have never "been able to do this". Sunset time changes on a daily basis. In Seattle that can be anywhere from 4:15 to 9:30 p. m. That's fine if one finds +/- 2.5 hours acceptable. Others have more precise needs.
The flip side with the heat is that I can’t help but feel I’m introducing another failure mode into my heating system with an internet connected smart thermostat which is a whole lot more of a problem in a sub freezing area than forgetting to turn the thermostat down.
In fairness, the main living area light at my brother’s place are scattered across a bunch of switches in different places. I could see being tempted to have all on and all off voice commands or other central control.
My house is a lot simpler. I have voice command for one light that doesn’t have a switch. Used to use wireless X10.
I think most of the world is like this. New equipment means big CapEx asks. A lot of manufacturing runs on an old XP machine held together by ebay parts and duct tape
All the big machines with computers in them run really old hardware. Airplanes, trains, etc have lifetimes measured in decades. The manufacturers stockpile parts, because these old chips are no longer for sale.
In some industries the machines can be around a century old if not more, and were converted to computer control only "recently" (as in decades ago). From that perspective, the rapid change in computing is the anomaly.
That's the beauty of open source software and standard protocols like RS232. No matter how long ago the software has been developed you can port it to newer (and more mantainable) machines.
This is also going to be a big Charlie Foxtrot with today's equipment and mobile apps and web portals.
It doesn't matter that you have contemporary hardware to run it on, the developer is gone, their servers are gone, and the app isn't in the store anymore.
Except living in suburbia is a delight. I appreciate not everyone shares that perspective, but in my view everything from not sharing walls, to quiet streets for kids to ride bikes, to garages large enough for a boat or trailer, to large public parks. I think that's why you're seeing so many presently move in that direction. Densification is great, but for all the people. I lived in the city for ten years. I'll never do it again.
Personally I wouldn’t be against suburbia if people could work and shop nearby (as in 5 min drive / 20 min walk at most), and if there would be sufficient cheap public transit to the center for kids to attend cultural events like the cinema or sports. However that is usually not the case when suburbia is zoned and we end up with nightmare land use and traffic congestion as suburbia commutes to work + leisure.
Honestly, I think the pandemic is driving some of this. And if you have a family, it's a lot easier to find space to comfortably work from home in a 3000 square foot suburban home than it is a 1500 square foot flat in the city. And with less people driving downtown, taking your car into the city for the symphony or a game is less of a chore. At least in Portland, Oregon, traffic jams have eased considerably in the last year. We'll see whether that persists, but I know my company is adopting a policy that will accommodate a lot more working from home long term.
Getting rid of cars would solve that problem regardless of density.
> large public parks
Denser everything else frees up more space for parks. (I sometimes think of a "fractal density" which is high on average but has tons of variation to keep things beautiful.)
I wonder if people said something similar about horses back in the 1850s New York: “At best we breed horses with that don’t leave as much manure on the streets”, DVDs in the early 2000s “at best we make better recycling facilities and our landfills won’t be full of plastic” or oil lamps in the 1840s “at best we will be able to find a plentiful hunting grounds where we’ll never run out of whale oil”.
> At best, I think, we decrease emissions associated with them.
You are saying at best make them less bad, but used just as often? Forget other universe, what about the other countries that successfully do what I speak of?
Unless we want to accept some kind of extreme depopulation events (either by choice or by systemic failure) then we have to learn to live a lot more efficiently than we do now. And the long term costs of running suburbs are not fully internalized to the people choosing to live like that.
Having money has always and will always lead to a more comfortable life. Pollution is all a matter of degree, and cities produce plenty of it, even if per capita numbers are marginally less.
Energy = force * distance = mass * acceleration * distance .
I don’t think dense living energy usage is only marginally less due to the extra distance all the mass has to travel. And with current technology, the energy used is basically a proxy for pollution.
The more mass you move (water, sewage, gas, waste, supplies, people) longer distances, the more you pollute. I.e. the more space you use, the more you pollute. Just like using most other material resources.
I only mean “marginally” insofar as living in a cabin with no electricity and growing your own food would use even less. We are all living very high energy lifestyles. The difference, as always, is on the margin. Modern conveniences and comforts come at a price, both ecologically and economically. It’s just a question of whether that price is worth it.
It's not marginal at all, but a huge difference. Rich inner suburbs ("Democrat suburbs" you might say) are the worst polluters per capita, and urban and some truly rural areas the best, but the truly rural case absolutely doesn't scale.
I'm sorry, but your boats-the-shed fantasyland is slowly killing us all.
Are the Culture the good guys or the bad guys? I read Consider Phlebas first and felt such a whiplash moving into Player of Games or whatever the next one was. I want to like that series but I just can’t figure out if I’m rooting for bad guys or not.
The books are meant to make you question your own assumptions of what is good or right. I think what many people like about Banks is that he did not write simple morality plays. Iain Banks also wrote mainstream novels so you could say that he wasn't coming from the normal genre writer's perspective.
Wasn't banks pretty clear that the Culture was his attempt to come up with a society that is as "good" as possible - if nothing else to provide a suitable employer for his supreme military genius (who I shall avoid naming).
Edit:
CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture?
Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven….Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven’t done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It’s mine, I thought of it, and I’m going home with it — absolutely, it’s great.
By and large they're the good guys, or the least-worst guys anyway. Consider Phlebas is the weakest of the series IMO which is a shame as it's dealing with some interesting issues.
I interpret it as that they're mostly the good guys, but Consider Phlebas is written from the point of view of someone who opposes the Culture.
The main thing the Culture did that wasn't what I'd call a "good guy move" was destroying the orbital rather than allowing it to be used as a foothold by the Idirans. Basically, the Culture decided that winning was more important than holding the moral high ground.
it's a disaster. it's fine for voice/video calls, but it's slow and not fun to use in the app on my dev machine (i7/32GB RAM)