this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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You got to love the author of that article. If you want the lights to turn off and on normally, maybe people should use light switches. Those aren't going to break due to software downgrades, those don't require Gemini or internet connections.
And I understand, there are rare situations when throwing the internet at your home appliances can make sense for solving niche problems. Those situations definitely exist, but for almost everyone almost all of the time, but it's pretty fucking easy to turn lights off and on.
Lights are one of the areas where I think automation is genuinely useful, but my rule with anything "Smart" is that it has to be able to run 100% locally.
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not "no switch".
and retire gracefully, where the device becomes open source and available to the community of owners who have invested in it.
You're absolutely correct. I have few smart switches around the house and automations for yard lights and stuff like that are pretty nice to have but I still have the physical switch where the dumb switch was to interact with if the automations are down or I just want to override them. The ones I use even accept the same faceplate than traditional ones so there's no change on anything unless you want to automate things.