It’s cool they hired an actual person but if I was so happy with their work to write-up a whole article about it, I’d be crediting them in a much more prominent way!
Gotta admit, pretty cool! I'm just like.. My interest in smart home stuff is near zero; am I alone?
I think it's just an extension of my not caring to "tinker" with my professional workspace. I have all stock OS backgrounds, always preferred a GUI editor/IDE. Barely any customizations that aren't tied to significant velocity improvements.. IDK. I'm not a "space" tinkerer; physical or digital.
I just like being able to control my lights and thermostat from my phone, I’ve never bothered with higher level automation outside of having a lamp turn on at dusk automatically lol
I have kids, and I have to leave the house quickly, so being able to set the house for "away" mode or make sure you shut off all the lights when you are all in bed is really nice.
Adding off-peak controls for electrical devices, water heaters, thermostats, EV charging, etc just makes sense so you don't have to think too hard about it.
I also really enjoy setting lighting for different moods - specifically when watching movies, and that's easy to do from the couch :)
I have a time of use electric plan and adjust load (grow lights, dehumidifier, AC, battery backups) at certain times to save money. Smart home can be pure tinkering but it can control some pretty practical things.
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".
I designed my basement renovation using a combination of image modelsand a 3D scanned Houzz Pro FloorPlan, and I gotta say it REALLY helped the contractor deliver on the vision that I had.
Decorating when you can easily swap out pieces and parts in images with realistic dimensions makes rapid iteration on physical things much faster and it's easy to figure out what "speaks" to you. Great use of these tools.
This is a common advice I'm not sure I've ever seen properly explained and proven. It's mostly "we asked the experts!" kind of 3min tidbits with a guy in a corporate polo shirt talking assertively to the camera.
Most people actually measuring it come up with more savings when cutting the AC during the longer spans when nobody's there (usually during the hottest part of the day).
In general using a large setback will save more energy by not constantly cooling the home than it costs to return the house to a desired setpoint later.
I used AI to get it draw it. What worked is giving floor plan I already had and putting some labels on it - brown dining table here, fridge here, etc.
What didn't work was giving it bunch of photos and asking it to just figure it out. For things it did figure out - it was nice, but it made way too make mistakes.
The entire point of it was to put light switches and heaters on the map so I don't have to fiddle with a number of toggles in a table/list.
p.s. I wish I had huge eink display for home assistant dashboards. Some concepts I made and seen online are glorious.
I've commissioned art before via the Krita web forum's job section. Lots of bright young artists, many of them students, that do great work for affordable prices to build their portfolios.
You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.
I'm not sure what that is supposed to convey. This person was able to scrape together a couple bucks to pay someone to draw a picture of their house in a specific way. You've never paid for any art or entertainment? Netflix?
*$900, and no, the average person can’t afford $900 for bespoke art (or more likely, has no interest in paying $900 for one). Heck, I don’t see how you can look at the explosion of AI art online and not come to the conclusion the average person would much rather have the same for near free than paying hundreds of dollars. To me, that’s a pretty obvious revealed preference.
Pro tip you don’t even need an illustrator. While I do encourage hiring humans to do this work you can also use PolyCam with a phone that supports lidar, export it to Claude with Blender and voila.
It's _better_ that the illustrations were made by an illustrator, but it still would have been cool and front-page-worthy if that hadn't been the case.
This is typically the kind of hacking project that is preposterously non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers, let alone regular folks. Now, for the first time ever, AI is making it actually palatable for everyone who wants it done to have it done... and certainly much cheaper too at an equivalent quality level.
Commissioning art like this is at most a few hundred dollars. As was posted elsewhere, there are lots of young artists that need to pad out their portfolios, as well as artists in places where the cost of living is significantly cheaper. This isn't a multi-thousand-dollar thing that only the 1% could afford.
Some quick googling suggests that in the US, only 60% of people have iphones, and only 50% of iphones in use are pro or max. I would guess that HN skews towards more recent and higher end phones, but also skews towards android. Maybe saying most people don't have lidar is inaccurate, but I think it's still accurate to say the majority of people don't have lidar.
It’s cool they hired an actual person but if I was so happy with their work to write-up a whole article about it, I’d be crediting them in a much more prominent way!
/s
I think it's just an extension of my not caring to "tinker" with my professional workspace. I have all stock OS backgrounds, always preferred a GUI editor/IDE. Barely any customizations that aren't tied to significant velocity improvements.. IDK. I'm not a "space" tinkerer; physical or digital.
I never was interested in the tinkering side. The functional side has been very handy.
For example, smart thermostats reduced the heating bill 40% while leaving the place warmer where we actually are.
Smart dimmers on lamps let you dim them in the evening, or turn all the lights off with one push.
Your use cases may vary and the answer may be none do it but a good level of smart home things are quite practical.
Adding off-peak controls for electrical devices, water heaters, thermostats, EV charging, etc just makes sense so you don't have to think too hard about it.
I also really enjoy setting lighting for different moods - specifically when watching movies, and that's easy to do from the couch :)
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.
You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.
Decorating when you can easily swap out pieces and parts in images with realistic dimensions makes rapid iteration on physical things much faster and it's easy to figure out what "speaks" to you. Great use of these tools.
That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.
Most people actually measuring it come up with more savings when cutting the AC during the longer spans when nobody's there (usually during the hottest part of the day).
In general using a large setback will save more energy by not constantly cooling the home than it costs to return the house to a desired setpoint later.
Tricky question how do you know that person did a real drawing, not generated it in codex/claude code?
https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
Thank you.
I used AI to get it draw it. What worked is giving floor plan I already had and putting some labels on it - brown dining table here, fridge here, etc.
What didn't work was giving it bunch of photos and asking it to just figure it out. For things it did figure out - it was nice, but it made way too make mistakes.
The entire point of it was to put light switches and heaters on the map so I don't have to fiddle with a number of toggles in a table/list.
p.s. I wish I had huge eink display for home assistant dashboards. Some concepts I made and seen online are glorious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1wyyrd6/comm...
You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.
I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!
This is typically the kind of hacking project that is preposterously non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers, let alone regular folks. Now, for the first time ever, AI is making it actually palatable for everyone who wants it done to have it done... and certainly much cheaper too at an equivalent quality level.
1. paying an illustrator is non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers? and
2. AI would have done it at an equivalent quality level?
the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...