this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Privacy
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Some well-trained bootlickers showing up here.
When you blame exploited users for “volunteering to get exploited”, you’re doing free PR for the exploiters.
Gotta love Doctor Ow:
Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?
I think it's fear: in their hearts, people – especially techies – know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don't want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.
The Smart Home Trap: Is It Really Too Difficult To Use A Light Switch?
The Internet Person Challenge: imagine a context you haven't yet experienced.
Impossible.
The internet was supposed to open our minds by letting us see the incredible diversity of how other people live their lives, but all we do 90% of the time is try to dunk on complete strangers (often imaginary ones, at that!) for not living exactly the same way.
I’ve met enough people that need accommodations to know that I have a horrible intuition about what’s going to be easy or hard for someone to do, and what will help or not.
IMO just let people do their thing. They know themselves better than you do.
(And if you see a story about how they’re getting exploited by an evil megacorp, and you feel the impulse to victim-blame, you can always just hit yourself in the dick with a hammer instead.)
So many words to defend not wanting to flip a light switch. “Smart” stuff should still exist for accessibility purposes, it would be easier to strictly regulate it if it was used explicitly and exclusively as a medical device, but your average person in nearly all instances can and should be using a light switch manually. Making everything complex and eventually ewaste is trading our collective future for your temporary convenience.
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yes, actually.
the one of the switches in my office controls one of the only outlets, which has a pc plugged into it. so yes, a zigbee smart bulb is the better option than just flipping the switch. it's a single widget on my phone, and there's a remote, and i can control it from my pc. it just runs off home assistant, there's no internet involved, and i don't even have to use the wifi for it.
i swear you people just invent difficulty out of nothing.
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I think opening an app to turn on a lamp is more work than it’s worth. We actually avoid anything that requires an app at this point.
The key benefit of smart home tech isn't to control stuff with an app instead of a switch, it's to automate it so you don't have to do anything at all.
Other than the thermostat, I can't think of anything in my home that I want to change automatically without manual intervention.
I have a few “smart” plugs. I generally don’t use the app to turn them off or on, but being able to schedule them is what I think makes them valuable.
I bought the cheapest coffeemaker I could find that has a physical switch and plugged it into a smart switch so that it turns on every morning, Monday through Friday, at a specific time. On the weekends I do use the app because I can start the coffee brewing while I am still in bed and it will be ready when I get downstairs.
Could all of this be done without an IoT device? Yes, in college I had one of those old school mechanical timer switches to do the same thing. It is just that now I get more control over how it works.
The point of these isn’t just to “use an app” to do things you could easily do yourself, but to get additional functionality from an app that simply pushing a button couldn’t do.
I think you just described my coffee maker that I got from Costco. That’s a lot of extra steps to make a device that already exists.
I have that same Cuisinart from Costco, and the built-in program does just fine itself. There also must be a battery because the clock doesn't lose time when the power goes out
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The challenge is not the light switch. The challenge is not stubbing your toe on the way to the bed.
You tell that to my kids 😂
No, but app-controlled lights are probably also the least useful aspect of a smarthome setup.
I have lived in 2 locations with the light switch at the front door, doesn't control the entry lights. I was forced to use smart bulbs to keep from walking into a pitch black house.
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Home assistant and Zigbee or Z-Wave to the rescue
same
My smart plugs were carefully chosen so that I could immediately flash them with ESPHome, but that's because I am not normal. It shouldn't have to be that way.
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Not all of us 😏
Well I have one room where my budgies roam free. I use Airam programmable GU10 RGB lights to simulate day cycle. It's the only thing that's "calling home". Been too lazy to build a local solution. Everything else is run by ESP32 chips and bunch of raspberrys
I've always felt like the apps stuffed full of telemetry that have access to a lot of data on my phone are the most concerning part. It's annoying too that the devices themselves phone home.
GrapheneOS has a built in network "Kill Switch" for each app individually on your phone.
As soon as a app is installed it you are prompted to grant network access to the app, you can also choose to restrict it after the fact as well.
There are also some other apps on Android that do the same that I have come across, but I have gotten pretty used to what GrapheneOS offers me now built in.
This is useful for restricting network access for keyboard, galary, game, or emulator apps for example.
Downside is the apps need internet/network access to control the smart home devices.
I run pretty much all ESPHome or Tasmota devices since there's no app required, and it's all LAN based communication. But the complexity is certainly very high for those compared to off the shelf stuff.
complexity is certainly very high for those compared to off the shelf stuff.
but it tapers off very quickly, namely setting up the gateway might take half a day, pairing the first device might take an hour... but then the next 10 devices will probably take 10min.
Sorta, then ESPHome updates or something and everything breaks until fixes are made. It's certainly a lot more knowledge required to set up and manage them than most people have or care to learn about just for some smart devices.
I wanted to be able to turn a light off and on from two switches, in a room that only has one switch.
I was able to do this with wireless switches that don't connect to any server.
Besides the privacy malus, i don't need another hobby (home automation)
I was always tempted by the idea of controlling my house in a more convenient way. But every time I try and plan all the things I'd make smart, I always end up not doing anything because it's either all or nothing: when I imagine something I use regularly at home that is not "connected" while other stuff is, it frustrates me immensely.
There are some use cases for accessibility or for making a "dumb" appliance piece a bit smarter (like turning on an espresso machine to pre-heat it every workday morning). Or, like others noticed, fixing a very particular problem like turning on only one light bulb from a row at night.
Good to see some progress in this area though, but it's still the same shit most people don't really need. At least in a way it's implemented today. I want my stuff stupid and reliable.
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