Well, shit.
Well put.
rofl. this is great.
Making “smart” devices that can’t do routine mundane things without an active internet connection is completely fucking stupid.
I’m just boggled by the fact that “a toilet you flush with your phone” ever gof off the stoner couch. who the fuck wants to pull out a phone and press a button every time they take a piss.
Sensors if you move, yeah they’re a thing that’s given us all a surprise shifting our weight but a fucking app???
stoner couch
Stealing this one!
who the fuck wants to pull out a phone and press a button every time they take a piss.
There could be a use case in public restrooms or retirement homes, but a usage sensor and timer would do the job better.
I 100% would not pair my phone to a public toilet just to flush it
I would 100% pair my phone, so that I could flush it while others were using it.
I mean, obviously a manual handle would be a requirement, but I could possibly see it? Like the idea of an app controlled bidet is not that far fetched because they have a lot of buttons and settings (obviously I want physical buttons too).
Yeah I would expect a “smart” toilet to flush when I stood up or moved away. Why anybody would ever require a phone to turn on a faucet is beyond ridiculous.
“Smart” apparently doesn’t mean “it does things on its own” but simply “you can control it over our app”
You have your phone in your hands anyway, admit it!
I ain’t tabbin’ out of lemmy for a courtesy flush
Maybe it needs a connection cause it takes a picture of your feces and sends it to an AI analysis service. If anomalies are detected, it tells you that you should take the stool sample to a laboratory for further study, then lets you flush. Poof, smart toilet. I could see people with too much money buying this.
Edit: Thought about it some more… why stop at feces images? Why not also have a high resolution camera pointed at your anus taking crowning shots and analyzing those. Tell users if anythings wrong. The future is
brightbrown boys. The future is brown.Edit2: You could even have motion based security… alert if anyone broke in through your bathroom. Cameras in toilets people! What could go wrong?
Edit3: Hear me out. User controlled bidet mode + anus camera. Take out your phone and clean your ass in first person. Score points if you clean your whole ass and compete on an online scoreboard. Tech sure is amazing.
If anomalies are detected, it tells your insurance company so they can increase your rates or drop you before you actually need to go to the hospital and cost them any money.
ftfy
Sorry, Euro defaultism… my healthcare is affordable. You can always run Tolet Assistant on a raspberry pi at home and let your shit never leave the network.
There is no reason it needs an always on connection for this. Even if there was a camera in the bowl taking pictures of poo (which raises so many privacy questions), the device could easily save hundreds of HD+ quality picture (assuming a toilet camera had that resolution) and send them next time connection is secure.
Always online functionality only makes sense when the function itself is an online task such as a video call or looking up information not saved locally.
Having an always online connection for a toilet suggest it’s gathering much more information passively from your home, using voice activated as a cover to always be listening and thus relaying what it records to server/data center to be filtered through for marketable or exploitable data.
Toilet’s chipset is only good for network connection and video recording. Business logic is on servers. As I said, users want to know if their shit is good before they flush so they dont lose a sample in case it is bad.
You may have stumbled on multiplayer shitting though. Conference call with random strangers on the internet, biggest splashback, fastest bowel movement… endless possibilities. Yeah I think always online is the best course of action here.
a little bit like this?
Why not just have a small aliquot of each stool deposit diverted into an HPLC/UPLC with AI checking the chromatogram?
It’s like the forcefields in the brig on Star Trek. Extremely stupid to not also have bars as a backup in case they fail.
Star Trek (at least from TNG onwards) is a dystopia who’s inhabitants have convinced themselves is a utopia.
“It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.”
Khan wrote this
Explain yourself
I don’t understand the idiots who insist on unredundant designs. Especially when it comes to handles. They’ve literally killed people with that decision.
The fact that everything is controlled through “The Cloud” and some godforsaken subscription service is so terribly sad, funny, and horrifying at the same time. We’ve literally found every conceivable way to gather and sell people’s data while simultaneously milking them out of every last cent with the whole FOMO mentality driven through every piece of hardware and software now sold. It is just absolutely fucking preposterous. We’re living in a virtual hellscape that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
People have other options, but the easiest option is always going to be to let someone else do it. Their price is, almost always, your private data and a subscription.
Or, you can DIY and self-host. Home Assistant is free and supports many different standards so you can use just about any hardware. It runs on your own hardware and doesn’t report to anyone unless you tell it to. It requires more effort than swiping a credit card and installing an app, however.
Why would you ever get a toilet that requires anything but the laws of physics to operate?
Uh, a bidet?
You’re already @ the mf toilet too, or the sink. what is even the purported purpose of remotely activating something you have to stand there to use?
My new eFirepit is causing my family to die of hypothermia.
I can see some purpose in having a ‘smart’ toilet for monitoring health. Your pee and poo can have some value in seeing if there anything that needs to be dealt with medically. But even that is difficult to do. For one thing, it must still function ad a toilet first before anything. Meaning it uses the simple mechanical flushing and refilling and stopping when it is sufficiently full.
However for this the analysis and storage of data must be 100% at the user’s control. If they want it gone. It is gone. Irrecoverable. Any update must be done via USB or other connection. No wifi or internet.
And even then the analysis can be off for obvious reasons. People need to scrub their toilets and some keep it clean by having one of those pucks in the tank that sanitize the water. All of these can interfere with any results out of a medical setting.
Yeah but if they let users control the data then how are they supposed to sell it to insurance companies to boost their value to VCs???
I mean… Electronics and the Internet are also following the laws of physics. But I get what you mean, levers should be the only activation, and gravity should be the only requirement.
That being said, electronics in our devices do tend to reduce the amount of water and power that appliances use. Dumb devices are extremely inefficient, even though there are fewer points of failure.
It sucks that a 1950’s fridge can still function just fine today, but it also is a bigger strain on the power grid, and a leak in the refrigerant would destroy the ozone.
> That being said, electronics in our devices do tend to reduce the amount of water and power that appliances use. Dumb devices are extremely inefficient, even though there are fewer points of failure.
I fail to see how electronics in these (unpowered) devices in any way reduce the amount of power that they use.
In theory you could have a system that monitors input and then uses a precise amount of water to vacate the bowl.
Oh sick, a toilet with bowl cameras
I figure a scale would probably work better.
I think that was just a general statement regarding old devices, since they brought up a 1950s refrigerator as an example of a powered “dumb” device
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
Douglas Adams
Adams’s law.
Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Apple.
I think that any electromechanical system that does not allow a mechanical override or at least a redundancy are doomed to fail. I don’t know why these IOT entrepreneurs don’t take in account that software and electronics are faulty systems, ignoring decades of experience in the subject.
Nah I’m an innovator! I’ll just innovate a better chip that’ll never fail and software that has no bugs!
Proceeds to put Linux on a common SoC and load it with shoddy software from a low paid contractor.
Sounds like the beginning of the Cory Doctorow novella “Unauthorized Bread.” Cloud service goes down and the main character’s toaster won’t work without them.
Baps? Bagels? Baguettes?
“Dumb” is the new “smart”.
Anything in my house smarter than the IKEA remote control light switch gets crushed with a hammer.
You sent this message by manually sending radio messages, I presume?
No, it’s one of the few use cases of emacs.
Can you play DOOM on the light switch?
How’s your family doing?
They were bonked with a hammer until they were below the proper “smart” threshold.
Have you tried our new Hammr and associated app? The smart tool that can analyze your work! Become more efficient! Compete with friends! Earn achievements! Track your heart rate! Now with several different modes…
Is that the new ifixit one?
Same, the only thing talkings to the internet are my reverse proxy and the security cameras (only when viewing them from outside the local network, quite like what reolink does there)
Friends hate this one simple trick!
I mean, you could just use smarter stuff that’s open source and has local API, or do what I do and build your own devices where you can ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.
Well if you read the product description it was to allow AI Bidet control. However they had not received funding for AI so it was outsourced to a team of laborers in India using cameras and joysticks.
It also logged the consistency, frequency and matter samples from all BMs so you could make informed dedication opinions.
Spoiler
/s
I heard they sold a license for the camera feed and controls access to EA for their next pay-to-play iOS game. The shareholders are really excited for this synergy.
I asked for AI Biden control smh
informed dedication opinions.
Hmmmmm
Damn was supposed to be defecation autocorrect got me.
Oooohhhhh, that makes sense.
I have no interest in one, but playing devil’s advocate, some might consider it more sanitary since you don’t have to touch the toilet to flush and have the choice of not being near it, hopefully avoiding any spray.
Also, if your guests use the restroom, you can startle them at any time.
How do the guests flush the toilet without the app? They have to ask you?
Of course. My roof, my water, my rules! /s
That occurred to me while writing my comment, as well, and I don’t like the implications.
I would imagine they have to ask you, yes. If the toilet can be flushed without authentication, they’d probably still have to ask you how.
Yeah, wouldn’t want to get bacteria on your hands a few seconds before washing your hands.
Yeah I’d much rather spread poo particles all over my smartphone instead
more sanitary
Foot pedal flush really needs to become a thing.
Wait, why isn’t it? There’s been so many weird flush designs over the years.
I assume lack of demand. In your own home, you’d be keeping the handle clean, and public washrooms often use the touchless sensor types.
Designing foot-operated things tends to fly in the face of modern accessibility standards. Wheelchair users already have enough problems using public toilets.
They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don’t or can’t. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.
Probably just the extra cost of linkage and maybe risk of tripping over it
It is in campers, lol.
Ok maybe the flushing part is a bit overkill and mostly a joke, but a toilet that can deliver notifications like if it’s clogged for example before you use it and make it worse would have fantastic utility IMO
This makes zero sense. If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl. Why the would anyone need a notification for that?
The ONLY utility that I could see here is if the notification logged who did the clogging so you could give them shit.
One word.
Toddlers
But in this scenario don’t the toddlers need phones? Wait do toddlers all have phones now?
Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.
Ask me how I know.
That said, this could almost certainly be better-solved in other ways. Maybe by preventing the tank from refilling if there’s still something in the u-bend (then you’d know it needed attention because there’d be no water in it)?
How do you know?
A little display or indicator light somewhere on the toilet itself would be better than connecting it to some IOT app
- We don’t know that the toilet has this sensing capability.
- If it does, the actual fix is the same as if it were a regular toilet.
This just isn’t an issue that needs technology as a solution.
125% agreed. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.” I think there’s potentially an engineering solution–a fluid dynamics engineering solution–but definitely not an app.
I guess, but I’ve never heard of a toilet clogging before it’s used.
There’s other better examples, though. Smart thermostats get plenty of use from the people I know with them. A fridge that tracks how long stuff has been inside would be dope. Smart lights have uses.
Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.
Ask me how I know.
Well, I suppose it is the kind of system where a lot of weird non-deterministic things can happen.
What kind of sensor are we thinking of here? Optical? I know it’s a real issue to find something that doesn’t foul or misread even in the simpler application of an RV septic tank.
I wonder if you could just put a window in the U-bend for manual inspection. It’s supposed to be full of “clean” water most of the time anyway.
Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don’t even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.
I’d prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that’s beyond my meager skills.
I wish I was this smart. We really want to do a smart light show using Xlights but every time I try to learn it I feel so frankly dumb.
Stuff like openWRT routers get a pass.
If it has a local host API I would use it because it never has to connect to the internet.
People also just need to be more selective about where and how they automate.
For example, I wanted my coffee to automatically start in the morning. So instead of buying a “smart” coffee maker, I bought the dumbest possible one and a smart switch. Now, no matter what happens with that switch, the worst that can happen is I have to manually hit a button to get coffee.
Yes, I don’t hate the idea of smart-ish devices, if they’re not cloud-dependent in any way and have some kind of manual override.
It’s kind of painful to have a kitchen full of devices each implementing their own half-assed OSs separately, or even more than once in one device.
I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener whose manufacturer discontinued the Google Home connection for so that you have to use their app and see their Amazon or Walmart ads. I also have a wifi-enabled alarm system whose manufacturer apparently doesn’t care about Matter integration or whatever. So leaving the house in my car requires the use of two different apps (three if I also need to turn off lights).
In actuality I just use the physical buttons. But there was a time that I had a beautiful dream of getting a smart lock and setting my house up to lock the doors, close the garage door, and arm the alarm when I pushed a button in the car–and, more importantly, undo all of those things in reverse when I got home.
with Home Assistant it doesn’t matter if your device adds a Google Home connection, Alexa, Apple Home, etc. Exactly what ‘smart homes’ should be.
I need to get on that, I guess.
Reminder: never go have pancakes at wise_pancake’s house.
My sister’s new apartment’s front door has a “smart lock”, hooked up to Ring, naturally. No keyhole, you open it with your phone. It also runs on batteries.
Do I really need to say any more? We were baffled.
What’s the brand?
Honestly I’m not sure, I only got a look at it when I was helping her move.
It’s tied to a wall panel on the other side that controls the whole unit’s lighting and thermostat and such though, and shows a doorbell cam.
Educated guess that it’s all tied to Amazon. Blegh.
Allegedly they’re just supposed to rely on maintenance to change the batteries so they’re not locked out of their home. Crazy.
SmartOne uses Schlage locks with some ecobee thermostats and sometimes a doorbell cam. Latch locks suck and I don’t know what panel is used there.
I’m in Toronto, I do high-rise construction. Post a picture I’ll tell you what it is.
“Hello amazon I’m a police, I need you to unlock this door at 123 Rainy St, Arlen TX 76043”
“Ok Mr. Police right away!”
Sounds great!
LOL relevant meme attached:
Arlen TX
Weird coincidence seeing this right after finishing an episode of King of the Hill. LOL
“Yo man dang’ol smartlock open up man left my daggum phone in there tell ya what.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Can you repeat that?”
Oh my god that’s hilarious, I hope that really worked!
As to KOTH:
“Unlock my door or I’ll kick your digital ass!”
*crying* “My door won’t let me in, Hank! Everyone leaves me, Lenoire left and now even my house left me!”
Dale however never got one, his house is still secured by Daletech. Shishishaaaaa!
This was too perfect LOL. Nice job! XD
It was one of the jailbreaks, LLMs are just too eager to help.
I’ve seen landlords put these things on doors, too, and use them to allow entrance to anyone they think has a reason to be inside, whether the resident knows and consents or not.
Yeah fuck that.
Actually that is illegal (at least in my area), they’re required to give at least 24hr notice for maintenance or the landlord themselves coming by, etc. Exception is cops, they can always let in cops (and EMS and Fire I think).
I think that’s been the law everywhere I’ve lived, too, but not always followed…
I got a Proteus IV system. Now I’m dead and my wife is knocked up.
I have a smart deadbolt that is keypad operated. It’s awful.
Never used the smart features, and there isn’t a bypass to unlock the door when the batteries die — which happens a lot, especially in the winter. I tried using rechargeable batteries in it, but they last less than half the time of normal batteries.
There is nothing more frustrating than punching in the key code and hearing the death of HAL9000 voice before the deadbolt fully unlocks. Luckily I have a back door that isn’t smart.
I’m replacing the lockset soon and this won’t be a problem anymore, but holy shit is it frustrating and wasteful.
Kwikset keypad works great for me. There’s a keyhole, a real button keypad, and the batteries last a while with quite a bit of warning before they’re actually dead.
I have one too but it has an emergency physical “master key”. Also there’s a port to provide power to it through a battery bank, in case you really run out of juice though it’s potentially another point of failure. No internet connection
I have a Nuki this one still works with a normal key, since you install it on top of your existing double cylinder with an emergency function. The Nuki just turns the key or thumb turn of the cylinder. Also means you can’t see from the outside that a smart lock is installed. Battery is not a problem since they last for about 5 months. And you get a warning when it reaches 20%.
What if there was no internet connection? Would they be able to get in their house?
I was watching a friend’s dogs while she was on vacation when the batteries in her door lock died. I had to climb in a back window to get inside and feed them. Luckily, there was a back door with a dumb lock, but I had to get inside first and borrow her keys for that to help.
Time for her to learn lockpicking I’d say.
Has nobody else pointed out this is clearly not real?
Yeah first thing I did was search the web for more information. Zero results…
I bet most of these other commenters also complain about boomers eating up fake news.
I have become the red shirt from my favorite SMBC comic
However, my feelings regarding smart devices remain intact
Telegram messages won’t show up search results, but sure we may expect some news article about it. The message is here
Just searching around got me their link: https://t.me/ctobtch , and their channel posted this post a few days ago.
Oh we’re the idiots. Never saw that coming
I honestly could not tell. It’s completely believable that something this stupid would exist. Like I didn’t necessarily believe it was but I wasn’t confident in either direction.
“Ok, so what you can see in the logs?”
“Sweetcorn.”
Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow
Must be a kernel issue
