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2 days agoIt’s overcomplicated because it’s not immediately easy to keep the smart functionality totally local to your own network.
Almost every company that sells an IoT product wants you to make online accounts, download their special app, sign up for subscriptions, download useless firmware updates, and have all the hardware connect externally with their mothership cloud servers in order to function, all because they want to run a data harvesting racket disguised as an “ecosystem”.
I’d use mechanical switches in the house, but at the same time, yelling at Siri to turn on my lights for the third time is the closest thing we currently have to sexbot servants. I only have so many years left on this planet, and I wish to embrace the future now.
I know someone who recently flew with Philippine Airlines that got an email exactly like this, after booking the cheapest possible economy seats. It’s a Wild West bidding war against other passengers for maybe a “premium economy” upgrade that gets you three economy seats in a row for yourself, so you can lay down and sleep on all of them during the long flight. It’s telling of an airline when this flight booked almost a year in advance wasn’t ever going to be a full flight.
That being said, if you’re ever flying to the Philippines, take any other Asian airline but PAL. They’re stingy with drinks, they have strict overhead carry-on weight limits that forces you to check bags in for a fee, their food is school/prison cafeteria quality, they delay flights without taking responsibility for screwing up your connecting flights, and you’re overall treated like cattle when in economy.