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.)

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.

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 swear you people just invent difficulty out of nothing.

Says the guy intentionally running a computer off a switched outlet and complaining about how hard that makes things