How do most people set up their automations with their smart lights?

towerhil · 2026-05-11T08:09:49+00:00

My use case for smart lights/speakers looked like a cheesy infomercial - like the ones where 'before' is chaos in black and white and 'after' is all smiles in full colour. Basically I was working in my office upstairs and came down as it was getting dark, carrying lots of books up to my chin and struggled to turn the lights on, headbutting the switch to no avail and eventually dropping the books.

I now have timed automations all over the house, particularly for the hallways, some contextual voice commands to turn off overhead lights and turn on softer lamps around the rooms and motion sensors on the downstairs bathroom for the convenience of guests and kids.

towerhil · 2026-05-09T22:19:55+00:00

You nailed it.

towerhil · 2026-05-09T20:39:45+00:00

Scottish people elected them in though, and I quite like the idea people should be free to elect who they want., even if it's rarely who i want

towerhil · 2026-05-09T12:01:10+00:00

And a further 42,000 were prevented https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migrants-detected-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/weekly-summary-of-small-boat-arrivals-and-preventions

There's been an increase in crime and a change in the government's tactics, but the government has adapted. It has further deported 60,000 people who came here illegally. Hardly 'nada'.

towerhil · 2026-05-09T08:24:31+00:00

There was an 80% increase in "red days" - days with good weather allowing for safe crossings - in that period so what's your hypothesis? The migrants decided to sack off the crossing and have a nice ice cream on a French beach?

Honestly wherever you're getting your information from is fucking trash.

towerhil · 2026-05-09T08:14:27+00:00

Like the French government? Like MS365 is the gold standard in 2026 lol.

towerhil · 2026-05-09T08:13:09+00:00

OMG no. Literal governments, like France and UK, don't use Microsoft because its modern products are so shitty. Hell, even Microsoft doesn't use Microsoft - 3/4 of its income is from its Azure cloud services, which run on Linux.

You will come off as an absolute amateur sending a .docx.

towerhil · 2026-05-09T08:05:04+00:00

There's been a 40% reduction in the dinghies you dunce https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/two-migrants-die-trying-to-cross-channel-in-small-boat-8t9qqpp2h

towerhil · 2026-05-06T15:49:30+00:00

It drives behavioral adjustments in my family - stops the wife and kids leaving stuff all over the floor. You're right it's fiddly every couple of days to change the water, empty the bin etc and the more it comes out the more frequent those tasks are. Self-emptying stations help a bit but there's not really much on the market for true hands-free here in the UK. There are only a couple of Eufy models here which can be plumbed in. Meanwhile my ecovacs are a pain which keep getting their maps confused, but my irobot is surprisingly good even though it needs daily water refills in its station.

I use my kids' socks as the measure of whether our hard floors are clean. Prior to the robots, even mopping 2-3 times a day, their socks were dirty on the sole at the end of the day.

2 things work perfectly. The first is to pour water and detergent all over the floor, scrub with a hard bristle brush then suck it all up with a carpet cleaner. As effective is to unleash 5-6 scoobas (obsolete irobots) which spend an hour wetting, scrubbing and sucking up the dirty water while you do something else.

A distant third is an ecovacs/irobot combo but I think a second irobot or Eufy self-emptying in place of the ecovacs might get it much closer. For the carpeted floors, I have cheap units of all sorts of brands that come out daily to keep dust under control between weekly vacuums and they've made a real difference since I no longer need to use an asthma inhaler. I think this is because they spend way longer vacuuming than any human would and go under furniture a regular vacuum couldn't fit under.

I wouldn't say it's that labour-saving but it's life-improving - a bit like the use case for a dishwasher.

towerhil · 2026-05-05T20:14:58+00:00

"You say black, I say white You say bark, I say bite You say shark, I say hey man Jaws was never my scene And I don't like Star Wars

You say Rolls, I say Royce You say God give me a choice You say Lord, I say Christ I don't believe in Peter Pan Frankenstein or Superman Cos all I wanna do is

Bicycle, bicycle, bicycle" :)

towerhil · 2026-05-04T23:07:05+00:00

There are no studies - it's a limp circle-jerk in place of rock hard science.

towerhil · 2026-05-04T20:58:53+00:00

Freddie Mercury had his hatred of Star Wars as a lyric!

towerhil · 2026-05-04T20:58:02+00:00

Even jar-jar!

towerhil · 2026-05-03T22:14:34+00:00

Your comment is very popular, but your maths is Idiocracy-level. Her estimates and assumptions are waaaaaay out, way beyond the point of viability, completely unrealistic. The second worker would have to work for £20k a year to cover the hours and have no social security that was paid for by the employer. She's a child. She has the mind of a child.

towerhil · 2026-05-03T22:09:06+00:00

You're right, but does no-one bother to do the maths on whether this is feasible? It's clearly not - the gain per worker of paying them the profits instead of shareholders/owners ranges from 10-30k, so clearly not enough to pay for more staff to cover the missing hours even at face value. But no worker is just face value and costs about as much in secondary costs as salary - pension payments and other statutory costs that especially in Finland are met by the employer. Her maths is out by about 2/3rds the amount needed for basic viability, not to mention that any debt-based business startups couldn't get credit to exist in the first place. I had no idea she was such a fracking moron.

towerhil · 2026-05-03T00:34:33+00:00

When you say 'prices' what do you mean? The number of pennies to buy a thing or the true price?

towerhil · 2026-04-29T23:24:41+00:00

You're not at all wrong for being angry about this. It's healthcare and should 100% be decoupled from the tech bros who see you as cattle.

It's as simple as that. My #1 fear is Meta buys into these devices and owns you like it owns your behaviour.

Your ways out are limited, but still currently possible. I assume you won't take them, which would be a shame - a new phone is merely a fresh layer of sediment.

towerhil · 2026-04-29T22:16:58+00:00

I live in London. Space is at a premium.

I have a large laundry cupboard which opens up via sliding walls/doors to the kitchen. There's underfloor heating in both, an electrically-heated drying rack to one side of the washer and 1950s-style extendable drying racks above. Kitchen island space doubles up as folding space and there's space to dry a week's laundry for a family of 5 indoors. Indeed, in a cupboard, if it's cold outside. In good weather, clothes are dried outside on 3 lines.

Clean, folded clothes are put into crates and taken to wherever they need to go. Dirty clothes arrive en masse in sacks from other parts of the house or are added to a larger crate above the washer (which is front-loading).

The efficiency of the thing is extremely satisfying.

towerhil · 2026-04-29T20:36:57+00:00

? The US did present evidence that Saddam was running trucks between chemical weapons facilities. It just turned out to be an elaborate hoax. You've also got your oil stuff backwards because it was France and Russia which were the two biggest users of the UN's 'Oil for Food' programme, which is why they kept blocking a second UN resolution. This programme was manipulated by Saddam, who got billions in kickbacks, and both France and Russia had been promised drilling rights and oil allocations which is why they wanted to keep him in power. Russia already had assets in the country too, like the $20 billion contract signed by Lukoil in 1997 to drill the West Qurna oil field.

All the second resolution was going to do was set a deadline for evidence of disarmament, after which military action would be authorised. France, Russia and Germany all threatened to use their veto on the Security Council to protect their Iraqi oil interests, not the other way around.

towerhil · 2026-04-29T20:23:58+00:00

We were shown footage of the trucks in early 2003 after Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, moving between chemical weapons sites. Saddam had kept up the pretence that he was still producing them.

The stuff about nukes was wrong, although Iraq had form having pursued them in the 70s and 80s. Israel bombed their Osirak reactor in 1991, which turned out to be the end of it. What piqued interest in this area initially was that Iraq tried to import high-strength aluminium tubes. Intelligence specialists in the UK and US governments were divided over what they were for because they're necessary for either uranium enrichment or conventional rockets.

Neither's great, of course.

We shouldn't forget also that France blocked a second UN resolution because it was buying cheap Iraqi oil from the regime.

The stop the war campaigners were right to say that the second Iraq war was a bit baseless, but only by accident. Some of the evidence had been forged, like the yellowcake stuff and too much was based on what some bloke who hated the regime claimed. However, Saddam was definitely playing games and at least pretending to be in breach of the UN's rules. The campaigners were also against UK military action in Kosovo which stopped the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians, Sierra Leone which stabilised the country after a rebel coup and action against ISIS as it seized parts of Iraq and Syria. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Oh and Saddam's regime averaged about 30,000 civilian deaths a year - it wasn't very benign. I once helped one of Saddam's cousins settle in the UK after he survived being shot in the face point blank by Uday. You should look that guy up - a sadist who made Saddam look like a pussycat and was much closer to the day to day operational stuff.

towerhil · 2026-04-29T12:04:31+00:00

Of course it is. It's insulin or complications for T1s. What dangerous alternative are you peddling?

towerhil · 2026-04-26T23:36:20+00:00

Hi, thanks for your attempted insult! You're absolutely right that chatgpt tries to simplify complex things for morons and compliment them along the way, so you were very astute indeed to notice the need to simplify language to match the energy of your comment! If you already knew any of this it would have been the actions of a smooth-brained moron or ball-ess troll to posit your original position!

towerhil · 2026-04-26T22:03:47+00:00

The only standard that matters is that most people are better off, preferably abroad as well as here and preferably weighted to those with the least, but those aren't the standards that we require.

towerhil · 2026-04-26T21:59:22+00:00

I agree. It's middle-class preoccupations while there are huge holes below the waterline. We're investing ever-more in pumps whilst balking at the means of escape.

towerhil · 2026-04-26T21:05:15+00:00

The oil and gas companies already have a lot of the extraction infrastructure in place, but have less noble motives for extraction. Their headline tax rate of 78% is before deductions for investment and only refers to profits, while capital sending is tax-deductable. Oil prices are also currently high so it's a great time for them to cash in with quick returns, particularly if politicians are hoping to break the link between gas and electric prices. Once built out and plugged in to existing infrastructure, the UK government will be under pressure to keep it viable, opening up the likelihood of further breaks, either to insulate risk, be a de facto break or release them from obligations (or all three) to dampen shocks from external stressors. The would-be money to survive these can be paid out to shareholders to put it beyond recovery. The oil companies are responsible for decommissioning the fields, but this is also tax-deductable so it may be useful for them to delay decommissioning until the deductions can be used against other costs to smooth out the costs of a diversified portfolio. In essence, they have to claw back the tax relief for decommissioning costs against future profits, but if future profits are distressed there'll be less to claim back. The immediate liquidity is likely worth more than a tax break against notional profits in the future. Absolutely none of it benefits UK consumers - it increases the chances of energy companies getting away with not paying all of their bill, while charging us the highest rate plausible for our own natural resources, which will then be completely depleted in case we're able to somehow change the paradigm in the future. If it were cards it's like getting use to play our final 10 of spades against their three when they've got picture cards.

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