It stinks! It stinks! It stinks!

First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:

Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard, and the first version only just launched a couple years ago. They’ve been continuously working on it and adding to it, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.

And that’s just the backbone. That’s like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we’re all going to use 120V, 60Hz AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.

The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.

Secondly, a bunch of the author’s complaints are nonsense / just badly designed versions of smart home products:

• Light switches without clear On/Off/Dim/Scene Select labels on the buttons, are again, bad design. It’s perfectly possible to have a smart switch that is very easy to understand.
  • You know what also sucks? Having to tear out an entire drywalled ceiling and do 120V electrical wiring just because you want your light switch in a different spot, or you want it to control other lights, or you want a three+ way switch.
  • You know what’s nice? Having a complete separation between powering the devices, and controling the devices. It’s nice to be able to turn individual lights on/off/to different colours and brightnesses depending on what you’re using the room for.
• Turning on the TV and it not turning on the streaming box, means it’s an old tv or someone disabled HDMI CEC. New TVs will synchronize with the streaming box and soundbar / receiver automatically.
  • And I would argue that just having it start playing a random commercial filled channel, is worse for your brain then intentionally picking something to watch, but maybe that’s generational.
• I don’t know how the author, their mom, or the rental supplied tech guy couldn’t figure out how to look up the instruction manual for the dishwasher, because literally zero models of Miele dishwasher require wifi for setup or use.
• Black glass oven buttons with opaque symbols have nothing to do with smart appliances, that’s just bad design, and the author chose and bought a badly designed dumb oven, then blamed smart homes for some reason.
• Programmable thermostats have been badly designed since the 90s, and yet, literally everyone uses them. Why? Because if it’s your home, you look up the instructions, program to a schedule that makes sense, and then you don’t have to go and adjust it multiple times a day. Modern smart Thermostats do the same thing but are usually more intuitive and nicer designed. This is because the author rented an AirBNB (i.e. a home designed for people to live in) rather then a hotel (a home designed for someone to temporarily stay in).
• The author seems to not like touch screen numpads on their alarm system instead of buttons, because they display the weather while idle. Like ok, again, it’s an AirBNB, not a hotel. The buttons are clear to someone who has literally never used them, but uglier for people who use them every day.
• And with lag, yes, there is inherently more lag in a digital control device then an analog one but there does not have to be lag to the UI, that’s just bad hardware / software, and as long as they’re wired, the actual control parts of modern control systems have literally imperceptible lag, on the basis of <100ms.

Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:

• We’re still in the infancy of smart home tech.
• A lot of minimalist high design home stuff is functionally terrible.
• Renting an AirBnB means dealing with a home designed for someone else.
• Owning a software company makes you stressed out and rage at every little thing that’s different.

What I was saying is that it is not a binary choice between pushing damaging projects here or accepting damaging projects elsewhere, but instead wherever possible we should be doing what we can to mitigate and limit the environmental and social impacts of extraction, insofar as there are things we need to extract.

I mean, yes but there are always tradeoffs and time is a massive factor. If doing everything we can to mitigate local environmental damage means a process that delays the mining of minerals needed for mass-electrification and slows it down, then we’ll end up doing more overall environmental damage as we continue to burn fossil fuels.

I didn’t say anything about poor labour practices, but we do have to accept some environmental degradation.

There is literally no practical way to keep this many people alive without some environmental degradation.

Wholeheartedly agree.

No we cannot.

We literally need those minerals to build things like solar panels and electrical infrastructure that will let us transition away from fossil fuels.

There is no perfectly clean energy source, and we need energy to keep humans alive, healthy, and happy.

I am generally extremely pro workers right and pro environmental protection, but environmentalists really need look at the situation practically and holistically.

This article seems to suggest that it’s impossible to mine ethically, and while I get that it causes inherent damage and destruction, the alternatives will cause more damage and destruction, just not here.

The sad reality of bill 5 is that environmental laws have been used to block infrastructure projects numerous times. And while local environmental concerns are obviously valid, in the real world that we live in, it is not obviously ‘more ethical’ to let them block the project so that it instead gets built in say Peru, or doesn’t get built at all and we keep using fossil fuel infrastructure.

I mean, when you could convert Xbox Live Gold credits to Gamepass and get it for like $60 a year, it was genuinely a great deal. And that lasted for like 4+ years.

Because these articles don’t know what they’re talking about, and like to run around screaming the sky is falling.

Many data centers built today use closed loop, or immersion cooling, that do not waste water.

I generally agree with most of what you said, but there’s a balance to be struck when it comes to shitting on things.

If you publish that opinion online, be it a newspaper editorial, or a random comment on a post, you are helping to spread that opinion and sentiment to others.

Well thought out and reasoned critiques about specific choices are one thing, glib comments made from skimming headlines are another.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/qEOBXVHe_0EAAAAd/skating-basketball.gif

I would like to believe that’s true, but I’m not convinced that it is.

The Conservatives had an entrenched 30-33% of the vote, all the way through the Layton years.

This can happen when companies are making massive profits but want to hide them.

i.e. if they’re getting government subsidies, either direct ones, or indirect policy support, then they risk losing it if they post record profits and draw attention to their lack of need. So instead they will increase capital spending: buy up more properties, renovate their stores with nicer fixtures etc. On paper this keeps their profits down as their costs have gone up, however, in reality their overall valuation has increased because they now own all these assets that they can use, lease, or sell in the future (assuming they didn’t buy junk).

Some of it is also just normal expansion. If a new neighbourhood is built, banks and gas stations are often the first to try and get in. For gas stations it’s to get the ideal corner, and for banks it’s because people often switch banks when they move houses to whatever’s closest, and then never switch again.

Some of it can be specific government policy. The current US government has crafted policy to boost the gas powered vehicle market for years to come, which may give more confidence in building gas stations and having them be profitable long term.

And some of it can just be normal market adjustments. i.e. they stopped building banks thinking that everyone going digital would eliminate them, but their projections were wrong and they’re seeing more people then expected who still want to go into a physical location and talk to a person, so now there’s a wave of buildout.

Also, yeah the landgrab aspect is real. It would work differently for gas stations and banks, but look up the history of McDonald’s, they’re mostly a real estate company: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/

Jesus Christ.

I know every online leftist seems to think Carney is the devil, but these numbers should give people massive pause at what the alternative looks like.

It’s wild to me that with as centrist as Carney’s been, he’s barely pulled any of the actual conservative vote to him. Really seems like we have a serious problem with growing entrenched conservatism in this country.

You would think that a reputable journalist would know that… you know, update their articles once new information comes to light?

The article is interesting, and I would not spend the crazy amounts that some people do on cables, but cable quality does still matter.

First of all, the article says that one area it definitely does make a difference is:

Interference-prone environments: Poorly shielded cables can pick up interference, affecting signal quality. However, these tests show a broader point. Detecting audible differences is surprisingly difficult when visual cues, price, and expectation are removed. Without context or labels, even ridiculous conductors fail to produce reliably noticeable changes.

However, the tests arent testing for interference at all. They’re performed openly on a desk without much around, but it then goes on to conclude:

If wet mud and bananas don’t degrade the signal in ways listeners can detect, then subtle improvements from expensive cables are even less likely to be audible. In other words, the threshold for hearing real differences is far higher than marketing often implies.

Like yes, there is obviously marketing hype, especially if buying a name brand cable, but the quality of shielding legitimately can make a difference, especially if you’re running it alongside power cables / extension cords.

The other factor that can make a difference, has nothing to do with audio quality but just physical convenience, in that pure Copper cables will be more expensive, but thinner and more flexible, then Copper Clad Aluminum (CCA). CCA is cheaper, and if your runs are static and unmoving there’s zero issue with it, but if you’re moving your speakers around a bunch, the stiffness compared to copper can be annoying.

Yup, and they’re still hard to find a reasonable priced replacement for, so still go for like double their original price on marketplace.

The only downside to them is that they struggle a little bit to playback lossless audio. So you can’t play Spotify lossless off them and I found that they would occasionally crash when streaming Tidal / Quobuz lossless. I’m pretty sure this is just a thermal constraint though and you can fix it by taking off their case (some people even add heatsinks to them).

I bought the 2019 one and ended up selling it for this reason.

Have never had CEC compatibility issues with anything else. I’ve rotated through Samsung and TCL TVs, Roku Boxes, Google TV Boxes, Chromecasts, Switches, Xboxes, Yamaha and Denon Amps, and Vizio Sound Bars, but the only showstopping CEC issue I’ve ever had was with the shield.

What on earth are you basing that on?

Yeah, you can kind of tell, I think Chromecast Audios are the same thing.

Either one of the Google founders / board members still use them and love them and won’t let the company discontinue them, or one of the original engineers / PMs has risen up to the point where they can keep allocating support budget to it.

Most major languages these days are multi-paradigm languages that can do procedural, functional, or object oriented coding.

C#, Kotlin, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Python, Swift, etc all fall into this bucket.

Java has made a lot of efforts to support functional programming, but it’s still not first class.

I would argue that these languages adopting functional coding as a first class citizen has made dedicated functional languages somewhat more obsolete, but they also paved the way and set the standards for the general languages that came after.

On the web side of things, the most popular JavaScript / TypeScript frameworks these days are often fundamentally functional though, from React on the front-end to Express on the back end.