Making “smart” devices that can’t do routine mundane things without an active internet connection is completely fucking stupid.
I’m just boggled by the fact that “a toilet you flush with your phone” ever gof off the stoner couch. who the fuck wants to pull out a phone and press a button every time they take a piss.
Sensors if you move, yeah they’re a thing that’s given us all a surprise shifting our weight but a fucking app???
Yeah I would expect a “smart” toilet to flush when I stood up or moved away. Why anybody would ever require a phone to turn on a faucet is beyond ridiculous.
“Smart” apparently doesn’t mean “it does things on its own” but simply “you can control it over our app”
You not only can control it with our app, you have to - so when we start showing un-skippable ads on our app you can either watch them of buy a new faucet. Smart like a fox!
You have your phone in your hands anyway, admit it!
I ain’t tabbin’ out of lemmy for a courtesy flush
who the fuck wants to pull out a phone and press a button every time they take a piss.
There could be a use case in public restrooms or retirement homes, but a usage sensor and timer would do the job better.
I 100% would not pair my phone to a public toilet just to flush it
I would 100% pair my phone, so that I could flush it while others were using it.
Don’t put the gun within reach of the printer, come on
About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.
Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.
Remember, the “s” in IoT stands for “security”.
And the ‘p’ for privacy.
ZigBee and Z-wave create their own network not connected to the internet, pair that with Home Assistant 🇪🇺 and done, sane smart home implementation.
Will have to look into that, thanks.
One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.
It’s not easy to make it any simpler. You’ve got to control those devices somehow.
The more I hear from big tech companies the more I want to reject it. I don’t even own a printer.
Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.
Bulletproof? Sounds dangerous. What do I do if it makes a weird noise?
Keep a cannon by the canon.
“Ok, so what you can see in the logs?”
“Sweetcorn.”
Has nobody else pointed out this is clearly not real?
Yeah first thing I did was search the web for more information. Zero results…
I bet most of these other commenters also complain about boomers eating up fake news.
I have become the red shirt from my favorite SMBC comic
However, my feelings regarding smart devices remain intact
Just searching around got me their link: https://t.me/ctobtch , and their channel posted this post a few days ago.
Telegram messages won’t show up search results, but sure we may expect some news article about it. The message is here
I honestly could not tell. It’s completely believable that something this stupid would exist. Like I didn’t necessarily believe it was but I wasn’t confident in either direction.
I can consider acceptable for the kettles to be connected to the internet if, and only if, they answer always with a 418 status code.
I’m perfectly fine with enabling a connection, just not requiring one.
For example - my lights are automated. They have a switch though. If they went offline (or my server does), I can press the entirely local switch and have light.
As a reminder though, 418 is supposed to be the response for requests of the teapot to brew coffee.
I can press the entirely local switch and have light.
Are you sure about that? Is it a local connected smart switch (still fancy electronics, just local) or a plain old power switch?
If it’s a power switch, and If you turned your lights off by app over the internet, and then the internet went out, then your lights’ ability to come back on when you flick the physical switch depends on somebody having thought about this need and programmed a “oh, the switch was flicked so I better ignore the internet settings” mode.
And if they did that, it also probably means your lights all turn on after a power outage since the light can’t tell the difference between power outage and light switch flipped off.
Any smart lights I’ve seen always turn on when going from no power to power. It’s a little annoying when the power blinks and half the house lights up, but it means physical switches always work.
But… Teapot!
spinning up new tech startup: nah forget it. you don’t even have to watch videos
Maybe it needs a connection cause it takes a picture of your feces and sends it to an AI analysis service. If anomalies are detected, it tells you that you should take the stool sample to a laboratory for further study, then lets you flush. Poof, smart toilet. I could see people with too much money buying this.
Edit: Thought about it some more… why stop at feces images? Why not also have a high resolution camera pointed at your anus taking crowning shots and analyzing those. Tell users if anythings wrong. The future is
brightbrown boys. The future is brown.Edit2: You could even have motion based security… alert if anyone broke in through your bathroom. Cameras in toilets people! What could go wrong?
Edit3: Hear me out. User controlled bidet mode + anus camera. Take out your phone and clean your ass in first person. Score points if you clean your whole ass and compete on an online scoreboard. Tech sure is amazing.
If anomalies are detected, it tells your insurance company so they can increase your rates or drop you before you actually need to go to the hospital and cost them any money.
ftfy
There is no reason it needs an always on connection for this. Even if there was a camera in the bowl taking pictures of poo (which raises so many privacy questions), the device could easily save hundreds of HD+ quality picture (assuming a toilet camera had that resolution) and send them next time connection is secure.
Always online functionality only makes sense when the function itself is an online task such as a video call or looking up information not saved locally.
Having an always online connection for a toilet suggest it’s gathering much more information passively from your home, using voice activated as a cover to always be listening and thus relaying what it records to server/data center to be filtered through for marketable or exploitable data.
Toilet’s chipset is only good for network connection and video recording. Business logic is on servers. As I said, users want to know if their shit is good before they flush so they dont lose a sample in case it is bad.
You may have stumbled on multiplayer shitting though. Conference call with random strangers on the internet, biggest splashback, fastest bowel movement… endless possibilities. Yeah I think always online is the best course of action here.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Apple.
Adams’s law.
they can always ask chatgpt how to fix the problem
If it doesn’t work well without the Internet, it’s a bad investment. Features that require the Internet degrading a bit is one thing, but if a toilet or toaster can’t do its basic job offline, it was ewaste the second it rolled off the factory line.
Same goes for games BTW
Fuck online requirements
Except if the game is designed to be multiplayer-only, but even then we should be able to set up our own servers. If the original Half Life could do it in 1998 then why can’t we do it now?
If a multiplayer-only game turns down official servers, and you can’t self-host within the game, they should owe players a separate server binary they can run, or a partial refund for breaking the game. It should not be hard, especially if it’s a known constraint when they develop the game.
How TF you expect that to work with MMO style games that may have significantly complex server infrastructure & deployment environments?
that’s the company’s problem. They made it too complicated.
No it isn’t this is a crazy ignorant comment that just hand waves the problem I presented away because it’s not convenient enough for your stance.
If you’re going to comment don’t comment in bad faith, that’s not the kind of discussions we need on lemmy.
The problem begets the solution. And damn near every modern MMO has a significant set of challenges that they have built technological solutions for which drive more complicated infrastructure.
it’s a bit of a straw man from your side to act like the discussion is about multiplayer when we are discussing about single player campaign based RPGs or about multiplayer when the company deliberately shuts it down in favour of a new version that just milks players for more money; or about toasters that definitely don’t need internet connection to function.
Recently noticed how many of my “offline single player” games did not actually work offline, after moving and being without internet for a while.
To anyone reading this, try unplugging your PC and check what your options actually are. I was really disappointed about not being “allowed” to play Red Dead.
Why would you ever get a toilet that requires anything but the laws of physics to operate?
I can see some purpose in having a ‘smart’ toilet for monitoring health. Your pee and poo can have some value in seeing if there anything that needs to be dealt with medically. But even that is difficult to do. For one thing, it must still function ad a toilet first before anything. Meaning it uses the simple mechanical flushing and refilling and stopping when it is sufficiently full.
However for this the analysis and storage of data must be 100% at the user’s control. If they want it gone. It is gone. Irrecoverable. Any update must be done via USB or other connection. No wifi or internet.
And even then the analysis can be off for obvious reasons. People need to scrub their toilets and some keep it clean by having one of those pucks in the tank that sanitize the water. All of these can interfere with any results out of a medical setting.
Yeah but if they let users control the data then how are they supposed to sell it to insurance companies to boost their value to VCs???
How the fuck can a faucet be smart? It’s a valve! It turns one way, or it turns the other way! It is only slightly less dumb than the counter top!
Yeah but what if you could make it worse? What if you could add the garbage motion sensor that takes ten hand waves to get working? Or add a touch screen that showed you visually how hot or cold the water was and could also show you ads?
No, we sell water usage data to water companies, so they know when to put water in the pipes!
The only thing smart I want is a faucet that activates with button OR the knee / foot sensor, and gives water always with a precise programmed temperature and flow.
That and a temperature and timer controlled frying pan.
Well an incinerating toilet that just dries burns my shit using a 340W solar panel would be cool too.
Well an incinerating toilet that just dries burns my shit using a 340W solar panel would be cool too.
Gonna smell real bad
Nah you’d have a chimney. The main reason I want a “separating drying toilet” is that it would have a fan and wouldn’t smell at all in your bathroom. And you’d probably also have a separating toilet as first step, then dehydration which can be closed cycle, and then either burning or compositing. And with that and biodegradable soap and detergents, sanitation becomes much less infrastructure intensive.
So it’ll just smell of burning feces outside of your home. Got it.
I’m just busting your chops, I think it’s a great idea.
But that is a bonus, less people will bother me haha
Day 3,801 of thanking God I was born a Luddite
Anyone who thought their toilet would be improved by having an internet connection deserves this
I mean, it could be. Imagine getting a push notification when it overflows. The lowest pipe in my house is a toilet. Luckily my wife was nearby but it could’ve gone worse if we didn’t see for a bit.
This is a job for water detectors, which I have no qualms about connecting to the internet. They have the added benefit of detecting leaky pipes as well
I could also see push notifications about adding bleach tablets or whatever to it periodically if that’s your thing. I have a smart fridge (probably the dumbest smart fridge you can get feature wise, doesn’t do much). I can check and adjust the temperature from my phone and get filter replacement reminders. It can send push notifications if the door isn’t shut which would be more useful if I had kids. Just because you don’t think you’d have uses for it doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.
Again, with the huge caveat that the toilet be capable of manually flushing.
It’s like the forcefields in the brig on Star Trek. Extremely stupid to not also have bars as a backup in case they fail.
I don’t understand the idiots who insist on unredundant designs. Especially when it comes to handles. They’ve literally killed people with that decision.
