Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI bias - <AUTHOR> https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ <comment><USER3> This is a problem with the recent social movements -- and you can even listen to Dave Chappelle offer this criticism: the people who may be right may be entitled to be offended, but the way they're going about it is not going to help the cause.

It is not good, when anyone who offers even a little bit of truth or reasonableness during a discussion is struck down as the enemy and attacked instantly by the vehemence of someone's offense.

If the successful chief scientist of a huge company can be taken down by forces such as this, while speaking truthful statements, what is the likelihood if I were a lowly junior researcher, I would dare voice an opinion or participate in the discussion? Or after a while, seeing what happens to such people, want to help?

Fear and exclusionary self-righteousness are not the way to win a social struggle. History shows that success comes from making more and more people feel they are a part of the solution -- not making them fear to open their mouths. Especially if, in the end, we each still stand alone in the voting booth and pull the lever based on how we've been made to feel.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your gist but let's not pretend that Yann LeCun has been "taken down." He is still tremendously wealthy, respected, influential, etc... it looks like the only change is that he's not on Twitter.

<comment><USER5> If an individual retains their personal wealth and lifestyle, but is unable to speak publicly - at least on one major platform, perhaps on many or all - <USER2> I don't think it's a justification of mob culture to say "well, he has a shiny car." It doesn't make the mob any less hurtful or hateful, and it doesn't somehow redress the harm that's being done to debate and free speech, which in the long run will probably have very damaging consequences not so much for him as for the mob.

<comment><USER6> How is he unable, other by his own choice?

<comment><USER7> Calling this his choice is an odd word selection, if someone is under extortion or blackmail do they give in by choice? If option A is horrible and one has to chose option B, is it fine and dandy because it was made by choice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone provide a simple explanation or example that illustrates why Yann was wrong? I'm highly predisposed to take his side in this, but I wonder if I could be missing something.

<comment><USER9> This is fundamentally a forest/trees type of situation. LeCun sees the issue with this one model, says, "If this had been trained on a different sample it wouldn't have this issue," and stops his train of reasoning there. The problem he is seeing is the mis-trained model, and nothing more.

But the problem is larger than this single model, because this issue (or similar ones) are pervasive in the fields in which AI are being employed. If a neural net is helping a court hand down sentences, it is going to be trained on historical sentencing data, and will in turn reflect the biases present in that data. If you are still only seeing the one tree, you say "well we must correct for the historical bias," and absolve yourself of thinking of the larger problem. That forest problem is that we will always be feeding these algorithms biased inputs, unless we do the work to understand social biases and attempt to rectify them.

<comment><USER10> It's not the job of the AI researcher to solve "social biases" in every field, it's their job to build the AI. LeCun is right to focus on his task and correct it, not just start talking about structural issues to which he cannot have insight anyway.

PS "Do the work" is a creepy phrase that is popping up everywhere in SocJus. I recommend describing the "work" that needs "doing" instead of just saying "the work" need be "done".

<comment><USER11> This is like saying it's not a civil engineers job to solve the geography's faults. If you can't build a safe and balanced bridge, then don't.

It has real world consequences that can drastically damage communities.

<comment><USER12> Another example...

The current nightmare that is cyber security is caused by developers who do not understand that with great power comes great responsibility.

The culture of software "engineering" and development is fundamentally broken and based entirely on "its not my problem if someone else gets hurt, I just build things."

There's literally not a single other industry where this level of greed and willful neglect is acceptable.

Of course, this would be reflected in the AI community as well.

<comment><USER13> That shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the fields of software engineering, cyber security and the fields. Both terms are individually overloaded such that many issues aren't even within their domain let alone actually handled by developers! No matter how good the lock is it does no good when the key is left on /top of tbe doormat/ by the user.

Blaming greed of engineers for security problems? Seriously?! That is like railing against EMTs as being responsible for the Coronavirus because they wanted to get rich without working hard. It conflates so many different areas and roles that it isn't even coherent logic and is nonsensical.

<comment><USER12> This is exactly the attitude to which I'm referring.

If you don't understand that engineering is the fundamental bedrock of IT and the lack of security application during the engineering SDLC is a consistent failure then I don't know what to tell you except maybe to gain more experience in software engineering and read more about data breaches.

Cyber security: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_security](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_security)

But for arguments sake let's just stick to network, application, mobile and IOT security.

\- Why is MFA not on by default?

\- How many devs have prod credentials published to Github.com right now?

\- How many unsecured IOT devices are there?

\- Why is email security such a dumpster fire?

\- How many companies have an SSDLC?

\- How many companies require separation of duties and approvals before a dev publishes another AWS bucket or some other unprotected data store to the web?

Go ahead and blame business but they don't know jack about software engineering. We determine which corners to cut as opposed to stating to business that security is just a part of doing engineering. We're the one's who decide and thus it's our responsibility despite denials of people like yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think one issue here is that Twitter makes it hard to have good conversations because it motivates people to optimize for pithiness and likeability/retweetability over substance.

That said, I'm disappointed at the lack of professionalism shown by Timnit Gebru in this conversation. I understand that she's frustrated that mainstream AI/ML research doesn't have a good understanding of how models can reflect and reinforce systemic racism. But her response to Yann doesn't attempt to find common ground, doesn't add any meaningful facts to the conversation, and is ad-hominem ("why are YOU too dumb to understand this?"). Timnit is a Research Scientist at Google who leads a group that works on Ethical AI. In that role I'd expect that her mission would be to elevate the collective understanding of ethical problems in AI, and solutions to those problems. Her communication here doesn't achieve that.

This is important to me because I'm also a (fledgling) member of the AI/ML community, and I want us to be able to have civil and constructive conversations.

<comment><USER15> "why are YOU too dumb to understand this?"

Citation needed. I don't like this sensationalism.

"civil and constructive conversations."

What was uncivil nor constructive? One person blamed a dataset for bias, but said researchers should not be on the hook for consequences stemming from the output that could be put into a deployed product. The other disagreed with the notion and stating that this was brought up in the past showing clear frustration. Uncivil tends to be a dogwhistle indicating how a person SHOULD act as if there are strict set of parameters for how to show frustration.

<comment><USER16> You are correct about the 'quote', as it does not seem Gebru ever wrote that. I am surprised none of these sibling comments have affirmed that. While personally I presume that parent poster meant the 'quote' only as an illustrative pharaphrase, it is clearly very easy to misinterpret. (Of course, if one assigns less charitable intent it is intentionally misleading, but I generally assume the best of people.) Either way, it feels intellectually dishonest that no one else has conceded this.

As an aside: I wish English had some more elegant method for forming compound words than just-concatenate-words-with-hyphens. Compounding of phrases and use of imagined quotes as compound words is one of those common flourishes of verbal communication that is difficult to express in written English.

As a note: I believe it is primarily the "dogwhistle" reference is what is earning you down-votes, as it subtly implies — whether intended or not — that parent poster is somehow racist. I presume the best intentions and up-voted you, but keep in mind how it can be interpreted.

<comment><USER14> "why are YOU too dumb to understand this?" is not a quote and was not meant to be; it's a paraphrase/interpretation of what she wrote. I think this is fairly obvious in the context of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The critic here, Timnit Gebru, is not doing a good job of articulating a well- reasoned argument about why dataset bias is not the only problem with ML. Allow me to attempt to do her job:

Machine learning approaches are powerful because they can take a "small" set of labeled data and use that to make billions of new inferences at low cost. The problem is that even when these data sets are fully representative of the "real world," the "real world" is rife with biases and unfairness and machine learning takes these unfairnesses and gives them a huge Tensorflow-powered megaphone.

For example, let's say you wanted to use machine learning to create a system for employers to make sure that they aren't hiring likely drug dealers. If you get a data set of every single American drug dealer's mug shot, you'd get a disproportionately black population because white kids selling ecstasy to their high school classmates rarely get arrested and booked. The data set is not "biased" —- it is complete —- but the enforcement of the law is biased. But now, rather than using the development of this software as a moment to _remove_ unfair bias, a machine learning model will amplify it, causing lots of black men to be denied legitimate employment opportunities, which will actually increase the chance that they sell illegal drugs to support themselves.

This machine learning doesn't just amplify the biases in the data set, it amplifies all of the biases and other imperfections in all of the events that fed into the creation of that data set.

<comment><USER17> I feel like this is really unhelpful nitpicking on the definition of dataset bias. In your example the dataset you want is the one of drug dealers so the dataset from the convictions IS biased and uncomplete.

<comment><USER4> Well this is a contrived example. But the fact is that all datasets contain the full biases of the world that created them. So there is no "unbiased" dataset... meaning that powerful AI amplifies the world as it is, rather than a designed point of view of how the world should be. That's fine in some cases (e.g. tumor detection in X Rays -- the combined judgments of thousands of surgeons might truly reflect how we want to treat a patient) but may not be better in other cases (the combined judgments of thousands of police officers may NOT be how we want to treat a suspect).

<comment><USER17> And imo LeCun would agree with this, they were talking past each other and I don't get the behavior of people lashing out and forcibly getting everyone to bend to their opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess Yann is making a statement about Twitter being a toxic cesspool or whatever. The thing is, in other public forums where he will make himself available for open conversation, he will experience the same thing. When you are Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, you are the face of Facebook, whether you like it or not.

<comment><USER19> The criticisms leveled at LeCun has nothing to do with Facebook or his employment, but rather with his commentary.

To summarize (in case you didn't read the article):

> LeCun responded, "ML systems are biased when data is biased. This face > upsampling system makes everyone look white because the network was > pretrained on FlickFaceHQ, which mainly contains white people pics.

> "The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product > than in an academic paper," continued LeCun in a lengthy thread of tweets > suggesting it's not ML researchers that need to be more careful selecting > data but engineers.

Other AI scientists, most notably Google's Timnit Gebru, disagreed with the framing of the situation strictly in terms of dataset bias:

> Research scientist, co-founder of the "Black in AI" group, and technical co- > lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google Timnit Gebru > tweeted in response, "I'm sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people > have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can't just reduce > harms caused by ML to dataset bias."

It's an especially sensitive time now when AI is being used to power many judgments with real-life consequences.

<comment><USER20> Not sure why you're being downvoted. I haven't been following this and I appreciated the summary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't help but shake my head at this whole story.

Someone (who by the way describes themselves more as an artist than anything else in public bios) builds a ML "bullshit artist" (literally) that hallucinates portraits from ridiculously undersampled data. Someone else runs a low resolution image of Obama through a hallucinating computer program, and gets a hallucination.

The story should end here at "these hallucinated portraits have basically nothing to do with the input data, they're meaningless". I would bet that input images that are this low resolution are difficult or impossible to determine the race of, no matter how diverse the training data for this model could have been. Note that the skin color of the low resolution Obama and the random "white" guy it generated are basically the same!? I doubt this pipeline will ever be capable of not confusing the race of its input and output.

What is on display here is the uselessness of this ML pipeline, not its racist nature. I have seen probably a dozen of examples of this ML pipeline failing hilariously in ways that have nothing to do with race. Yet this failure is suddenly fascinating to the entire tech journalism space as an example of ML algorithms being racist?!

And somehow, despite the absurdity of this situation, even ML "luminaries" get drawn into a destructive whirlpool of social justice debate about a hallucinating computer program that doesn't even work sometimes? What the fuck are we all doing here?

<comment><USER22> If you look at this single instance, independent of the world around it, it looks ridiculous.

You need to look at it in the context of a long[1] list[2] of works[3] detailing this exact problem, and the frustration that an leading expert in the field still doesn't take it seriously, despite the real-world consequences of that attitude.

1) [https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7684](https://www.pnas.org/content/117/14/7684)

2) [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html?mod=arti...](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html?mod=article_inline)

3) [https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2016.0047](https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2016.0047)

<comment><USER23> Why not pick all those other hills to die on, then?

If you want to talk about statistical methods being a horrible idea for policing, I'm with you. Probably most machine learning experts would be, too, just like most software engineers don't trust electronic voting. Instead, people chose "dataset bias affects machine learning models", the most basic Machine Learning 101 fact ever, to try and debate against.

It's like the woke people seek out the weakest possible ground because it generates in-group opposition that they can fight with and out-woke. Stronger ground could have _national_ consensus, way beyond bay area consensus.

<comment><USER24> Actually, that's Gebru's point. Gebru was pointing out frustration that LeCun was focusing on this narrow question of statistical bias, rather than the broader social issues you're getting at.

<comment><USER25> Your comment, among the sea of others, got through and made some sense to me. My follow-up questions are:

Does that negate the truthfulness of LeCun's response? What would Gebru rather he do or say?

I feel like I can't tell what the desired form of action is from the article, and I'm unsure what good it does for removing bias from ML to attack prominent figures (on twitter let alone anywhere public).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whatever. I'm sure LeCun will be dying for another job.

Gebru undermines her own cause by being a shitty ambassador. While asking for deep empathy in a radically marginal area of inter-sectional study, she seems to lack any of her own. I'm sure berating an adult for a technical assertion - one that is prima facie true - is an excellent tactic that has worked to change minds and open up insightful public discourse.

Gebru's commentary smacks of narcissism. Want a little air time and some notoriety? Call a famous person a bigot and see what happens. She has little to risk and much to gain.

<comment><USER27> Agreed, it bothers me that this tactic is so successful. I could not find an instance in this "discussion" where Gebru outlined any concrete steps to solve for, or lessen bias, in ML. It seems she mainly wants to complain, rather than _fix_ the problem. I have been googling about ideas to lessen ML bias, and the best I've found is "diverse training datasets" which Gebru herself says "is not enough".

Well what is then? Outrage without a solution is useless.

<comment><USER28> Hire more minorities in ML. One of the few industries where forced diversity is a good thing since your models will be better (wider range of opinions and sources).

See, it's not actually hard. Gebru is just correct in saying you are not listening.

<comment><USER29> You give too much credit to the people who build those systems. Having more minorities in ML is a good thing, but I don't think it's gonna change anything regarding bias in ML systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I still don't get what solution they are proposing to the problem. I have also always assumed that any bias stems from data since the system uses it to learn. What's the alternative?

<comment><USER28> Hire minorities to work on your machine learning models. At the very least it ensures you won't 'forget' to train the model with black faces.

<comment><USER31> I'm not from the US but there is a link between socioeconomic status and education. I would assume that with the large percentage of minorities, especially black Americans, raised in poverty that there would be a lack of suitable candidates. Just one of the ways that history of racism affects the modern world.

Do they have any practical suggestions on where to find a huge number of suitable qualified people? The people in prestigious academic positions often come from not just non-poverty backgrounds but wealthy backgrounds.

<comment><USER28> Facebook is rich enough to invest in black people's education and essentially train data scientists from the ground up. A black scholarship for data science would be a great gesture from them. Plenty of other industries do this for their fields as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Also, consider that most of us here believe in the freedom to tinker, the freedom to use general purpose computing, and the freedom to freely share results.

These freedoms are also at stake here. "Banning bad AI research" is just an awful idea.

</comment><comment><USER33> I recommend to all scientists that they disengage from Twitter. I know some think it's an effective way to communicate, but the vast majority of communication on the site seems to devalue rational thought. Ultimately, tweeting places your career at risk for reasons that are not well-aligned with reasonable principles.

One of the problems today is that you can be totally technically correct about something, but if you appear insensitive, you can be criticized to the point of being silenced. I am very troubled by the idea that rational, polite people who are trying to be helpful are being silenced because their point of view is not 100% consistent with that of the popular mob.

</comment><comment><USER34> While I sympathize with this view: "You can't just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias" (there's clearly other stuff like operator bias), I think there's a problem that if you don't focus first on dataset bias, you'll never reduce the harms caused by ML.

</comment><comment><USER35> This whole episode unfortunately reminds me of this Robin Hanson post.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about- gr...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about- grabbing.html)

The state of AI fairness research is really poor, as in the focus is on politics and sincere effort to develop useful algorithmic notions of fairness aren't even attempted.

It creates a way to take notoriety and clout within the AI field by doing work that is "about" fairness without actually solving fairness problems.

This article itself is a good example. Comparing Timnit Gebru's body of work or authority in the field even remotely with Yann LeCun is preposterous, and Gebru happening to focus on the impacts of bias in the field doesn't change that. Yet the article is totally loaded to highlight Gebru and undercut LeCun.

I think AI fairness is tremendously important for the world, but I don't see anyone remotely tackling the problem in a rigorous way at all. Instead I see people trying to hype up fluff work about fairness as a hot topic into fame & clout so they can be de facto leaders in the overall field of AI despite not actually contributing to it (not even in fairness research).

The whole thing politicizes it in a really ugly way. It reminds me of the Feynman anecdote where people try to get him to settle a dispute about the physics of electricity having an implication for observers of the Sabbath.

" It really was a disappointment. Here they are, slowly coming to life, only to better interpret the Talmud. Imagine! In modern times like this, guys are studying to go into society and do something--to be a rabbi--and the only way they think that science might be interesting is because their ancient, provincial, medieval problems are being confounded slightly by some new phenomena."

</comment><comment><USER36> Maybe someone already said it, but I just don't see Twitter as a public space -- it is not Hyde Park Corner, it is a large courtyard, very large indeed, but privately owned. From this perspective, I am really not bothered of who is on it and who is not (I am not on it).

The topic discussed in the Twitter thread, on the other hand, is much more interesting. I am a layman in ML (although I have implemented a NN myself, but I am not a data scientist) so I offer my view hoping to get some feedback and be corrected. My view is that the original post was correct and LeCun was not. I just can't see what sort of objective function you can use to solve every potential problem arising in the future about similar issues. You want a "totally unbiased" model? Then, you use total diversity in your training set? Can't it happen that the model will then enforce diversity in a non-diverse picture? Is that your ideal result?

That might be a silly example and maybe not 100% correct for the example discussed, but, in general, my layman feeling is just that ML cannot help in cases where moral judgement is required. It can provide a good tool in any other case where, for example, a quadratic error is a reliable error measure, but that seems a hard limitation.

</comment><comment><USER37> At this point, I think it would be a net win for society if all the tech companies got together and just ended Twitter. Revoke their DNS registration, shut down their cloud hosting, etc. Just completely end it. Twitter is tearing us apart. And I think it is intrinsically that way. Twitter is the meth lab of the of the Internet.

<comment><USER38> I don't really understand sentiments like this - Twitter is just a means for people to communicate. If the apparent result of this communication is "tearing us apart", then isn't that the fault of the end to which people communicate, and not the means by which they communicate?

<comment><USER39> > I don't really understand sentiments like this - Twitter is just a means for > people to communicate. If the apparent result of this communication is > "tearing us apart", then isn't that the fault of the end to which people > communicate, and not the means by which they communicate?

No, tooling and the incentives around them matter. Twitter makes it super easy to find the worst examples of the other side/take them out of context, and circulate what they said among 'your people' to get massive retweets. Twitter does this because it creates a more engaging experience. Yes, if people were perfect robots, Twitter could just be a means for people to communicate. But the incentive structure of social media, ie: what goes viral, selects for outrage. The medium is the message.

<comment><USER40> > Twitter makes it super easy to find the worst examples of the other > side/take them out of context, and circulate what they said among 'your > people' to get massive retweets. Twitter does this...

i mean, i can give plenty others that do exactly what you said. twitter is not unique and certainly not the problem.

i read his final(?) tweets and the reasons why he decided to leave twitter. and i don't think or remember him blaming the medium.

<comment><USER41> The pressure to keep one's communication brief due to the 240 character limit makes nuanced communication much more laborious, and that results in more conflict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> How can such things have cults ? This was a fierece debate of ideas which should have been allowed to continue instead of people jumping in and spoiling the debate with personal attacks. Had this debate continued based purely on facts and best practices we would have had better ideas about bias for free. I just don't understand this behaviour. People are Yann LeCun "fans", people are PyTorch "fans" (such people also sent Francois Chollet hate mail), elon musk "fans" (if you bet against you are a bad person, wth). Just to be clear "fans" are not very smart people and just because someone likes one technology or one idea over another doesn't make them Yann LeCun or a great technologist or a pioneer. It just makes one an idiot. Great ideas should win or lose regardless of who said what.

</comment><comment><USER43> What I'm reading is that researchers are getting mobbed for reporting their results. What are they supposed to do? Not report results? Report false results?

Then they go on to say this it can't be solved by changing the dataset. Okay, exactly what are the researchers supposed to do, aside from give up and go into sociology?

</comment><comment><USER44> In China it is enough not to speak against the CP, to be left alone and do your research. In the USA you actively have to signal your allegiance to the cause. And not only that, the cause can change overnight and what you said couple of years ago, may not be PC today.

</comment><comment><USER45> There are two fundamentally distinct research questions at play:

1\. Can a computer learn X _at all_ (and how)?

2\. Can a computer learn X _in an unbiased way_ (and how)?

Where (1) is clearly a prerequisite for (2). Most of the ML community is currently focusing on (1), and Yann is right in saying that unbiasedness should not be a concern for those focusing on it. And Timnit is right in insisting that more focus should be spent on (2), which is a perfectly valid research question in its own right and not something to be left only to ML engineers.

With that said, not being familiar with Timnit's work and seeing her explode like that did not leave a good impression of her and her cause.

Just my 2c.

</comment><comment><USER46> what I get from the tweets is that Yann offers a more or less technical explanation for a specific issue. then he gets screamed at with straw-man arguments and personal attacks by people who seem desperate for recognition in an emerging field (ethics of AI) (e.g. spamming about some single paper that they brought to "Yann's house", meaning an ML conference, as if it's the new Bible).

tbh Yann should've known what he gets into. everyone that knows anything about AI would already know the explanation. writing it on twitter would just attract an angry mob of pseudo-scientists.

</comment><comment><USER47> I read with horror once here that in some places in the US, AI is used to grade pupils exams in the form of long-form essays.

AI in its current form should not be used ANYWHERE as the default arbiter where human accountability is needed. Like in grading an exam, or in dishing out a court sentence. That is a pretty obvious thing, but most people are immune to understanding obvious things, especially if it doesn't fit their agenda.

</comment><comment><USER48> In fact, bias in statistical models has existed long before AI. For example, credit scores are biased, they will on average give lower score to a black person. So what is the politically correct solution here, to multiply credit scores by a certain factor based on race so average scores of all races are the same?

<comment><USER49> That's not a solution a bank will buy or pay for, because the bank would do worse on average.

The solution is to still have humans in the loop who can make reasonable decisions.

<comment><USER48> Apartment managers see credit score below X and reject an applicant. If they were to make their own decisions, it would be a legal liability. If they reject based on credit score and other non-protected criteria, they can't be sued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Twitter is like Linkedin for self-destruction these days. It is not going to end well for the platform and its users. On the positive side, at least we know these ridiculous debates are happening, as opposed to someone simply posing a job for unspecified reasons

</comment><comment><USER51> It may be a bit off-topic, but i'm still amazed people still consider twitter a good platform for expressing political views, or actually any views at all.

Instantaneous, short messages is clearly not the preferred medium for intelligent conversations.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think my favorite take on this was from Joscha Bach:

[https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1277509345756852224](https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1277509345756852224)

<comment><USER53> > _Twitter is not the ideal forum for controversies between people who > specialize on what 's true and people who specialize on what's right"_

Basically all of social media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I still see his account on Twitter so I am confused what does it mean to "quit" twitter? Can you not hide your account like you can in Facebook? Not familiar with the social media platforms so much.

</comment><comment><USER55> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672809)

</comment><comment><USER56> I think part of the problem here is that she's concerned that the data is biased because the people training it are biased. The data isn't racist, researchers choosing data are racist.

Pointing out the data is biased is just pointing at a secondary cause rather than the primary cause. The humans are the location in the chain of causality (i.e. a learning human) where permanent change is possible.

</comment><comment><USER57> I liked Bengio's take on this (plus much more) on Reddit: [https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hiv3vf/d_t...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hiv3vf/d_the_machine_learning_community_has_a_toxicity/)

<comment><USER58> Note that the poster of that thread is not Yoshua Bengio, it's someone with the reddit handle "yusuf-bengio"; a very misleading username.

<comment><USER18> It's a pun username. I don't think it's a misleading username. The poster actually refers to Bengio in the third person. And he makes some very good points.

<comment><USER41> It's misleading to refer to them as "Bengio," on HN, in this context. It definitely created a false impression for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> i wonder if the program should be ethical use of intelligence, not just artificial intelligence to prevent the reckless use of logic under an influence.

</comment><comment><USER44> AI research will simple move more to countries where there is less witch hunt and researchers don't have to defend themselves from SWJ crowd.

</comment><comment><USER60> I thought LeCun was at Facebook?

<comment><USER16> He is. Read "quits Twitter" as "has decided to stop using Twitter".

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> From the the perspective of a technical person, such as a software developer or AI scientist, it's easy to think about what we do as working with data and algorithms. While we might step back and look at a system as a whole, a lot of technical people can't communicate the birds eye view of what they're creating. They might have the capacity, but easier for them to rely on the technical description - yeah we can just make sure the data is good and the problem is fixed. However, that doesn't communicate fully and allow another person to understand the larger picture or that you even recognize it yourself.

As an example, consider the architectural view of a system where you need availability, performance, reliability, and scalability scalability. Over time we've learned to add Security. In recent years we've begun to learn how important how to include accessibility and privacy - we're learning and don't always get it right. All these things are often implied and we expect people to believe that we already know to include them. Now, lets look at more dimensions that are affecting what we build in the area of equality, diversity, and inclusion, which are part of our discussion, especially when we're talking about AI where we lack explainability.

So, it's true that we have to look at the data and that's part of the data science associated with AI work. When we are doing data science, it's more than just munging data to try to get a validation set match. We have to do the same thing we do with all other software and look at the domain of the problem, what it's purpose is, who are the users, and what are we trying to accomplish. If we examine the data set these things will help inform us on the appropriateness of the data being used, which takes analysis, just like other software problems.

It's simple to say, let's just make sure we have an equal amount of data from each represented group. While that isn't bad, it isn't enough. Imagine hiring or loan application program. We have demographics like name, location, occupation, sex, race, etc. Some obvious discriminants are sex and race. However, think about things like location - is it possible for someone to be denied a loan because they live in a part of town considered high-risk? Maybe a human wouldn't make that connection, but a machine learning algorithm with historical data that discriminates will also use that data to automate the discrimination.

We have to look at the history, current status, and goals of what we want to do to ensure we're thinking the problem through, rather than some mechanical input-process-output steps. That's why simplifying the discussion with "just change the data" doesn't communicate the source of the problem or how it should be fixed. It would have been nice for both people to ask "BTW, what did you mean by ...?" to open the conversation so we all could learn.

</comment><comment><USER62> Maybe we shouldn't use Ai for anything in critical situations. Perhaps there is no perfect model for AI training. Nuance is valuable and perhaps current AI systems are not valid answers to the problems we face. Money will say otherwise but it's hard to support these kinds of solutions. Better trained people are a solution that is unpopular currently.

</comment><comment><USER63> Yann LeCun is an excellent engineer, and he is making pedagogy about AI. His point is totally valid, but yet, he gets political replys that lose him.

Yan LeCun would be comfortable talking about why back propagation in convNets does better with white tones and shadows, but is not a politician, seller, politically correct personality, able to answer some "You can't reduce the society bias of ML to some kinda data bias ALWAYS #somehashtag".

See my point?

</comment><comment><USER64> Yeah well no shit, if your dataset is _exttemely_ imbalanced, you're gonna end up with predictions that lean towards the majority class, so to speak.

Doesn't mean that the model is broken or prejudice. It _does_ what it has learned to do.

If you want to fix the model by taking into account the said imbalanced data, that's one thing - but the dataset still remains the same.

Prejudice or biad would be to build a dataset by improperly cherry-picking your data, or other sampling errors.

Don't need to be a Ph.D to see or understand this.</comment>


Cryptovirology: The Birth, Neglect, and Explosion of Ransomware - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/7/218875-cryptovirology/fulltext <comment><USER2> I keep meaning to read the book properly, the premise seems very interesting to me.

If I recall correctly they've also written some of a newer book too.

Edit: [http://www.cryptovirology.com/](http://www.cryptovirology.com/) and click on 'new book' has some chapters

</comment><comment><USER3> > It started at Columbia University as a natural by-product of an unnatural > union: a former hacker placed in a room with a cryptographer, both given > ample time with which to contemplate the dystopia of tomorrow.

1\. put together hacker and cryptographer

2\. ????

3\. profit.

<comment><USER4> I find it weird that a cryptographer was required.

I'm no cryptographer, but I know by rule-of-thumb that AES with a randomly- generated key will do the job just fine.

<comment><USER3> The answer is a few lines below: this was around 1995, when knowledge about crypto was still very smaller (or not spread as it is today).

<comment><USER5> Yeah, at the time most writing about crypto was about how it was a munition and illegal to export, and about Phil Zimmerman getting hassled at airports.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anonymous releases credit cards for 13 FBI agents - <AUTHOR> http://pastie.org/4714784 <comment><USER2> While I agree with open data and that citizens ought to know more about their government, I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of releasing the home addresses of FBI agents. What good does that serve? What government transparency goals are achieved?

This leak doesn't seem to really do anything, except make it look like Anonymous are desperate for _any_ dirt on the FBI after the UUID incident.

<comment><USER3> It seems pretty consistent with anonymous's general behavior though, which is that of a moody 5-year-old...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_%28The_Twili...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_%28The_Twilight_Zone%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do credit card dumps gratify one's intellectual curiosity?

<comment><USER5> The CC#s themselves, no. But I do find the topic interesting on a few levels. It's fascinating sometimes to think about where we are socially and technologically that enables this sort of thing to happen. By this, I mean the whole 'anonymous' movement as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a feeling anyone who touches these, even with a digital 10 ft pole, will be having a nice chat with suits.

Who would actually use these things??

<comment><USER7> i accidentally clicked the link when i was browsing HN newest section am i OK? is there anything i should do? i immediately closed the window</comment></comment>


Why the Nokia Lumia 1020's camera is 10x better than the iPhone 5s [video] - <AUTHOR> http://your-gadget-is-a-gimmick.tumblr.com/post/70186256548/why-the-nokia-lumia-1020s-camera-is-10x-better-than

<comment><USER2> an interesting definition of 'better' \- functionality fragmented across 3 apps (+ 7 other editing + uploading apps) and it takes 10 seconds from app launch to be able to actually capture an image.</comment>


Show HN: A Cloud Neutral Alternative to AWS Code Deploy and AWS Code Pipelines - <AUTHOR> https://www.distelli.com/vm-dashboard/ <comment><AUTHOR> With the recent announcement of AWS Code Star I just wanted to highlight something my team is building.</comment>


NCAC Report: What's All This About Trigger Warnings? - <AUTHOR> http://ncac.org/resource/ncac-report-whats-all-this-about-trigger-warnings/ <comment><USER2> I stopped reading at "While there were widespread expressions of concern and respect for students, nearly half of respondents (45%) think trigger warnings have or will have a negative effect on classroom dynamics"

Nearly half said it will have a negative effect? So.... More than half said that it won't? What kind of biased "reporting" is this.

<comment><USER3> Well if you'd have kept reading you'd have found the data :

 _What effect, if any, do you feel the use of trigger warnings has or would have on classroom dynamics? (Answered: 712) Positive 17.28% Negative 45.22% None 8.99% I don 't know 28.51%_</comment></comment>


Europe's quixotic plan to "clean" the Internet of terrorists - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/europes-quixotic-plan-to-clean-the-internet-of-terrorists/

<comment><USER2> Has there been an epidemic of terrorists in the past 10 years or something? Why are all Governments starting to act as if the danger is 1000x greater than it really is?

<comment><USER3> A population living in fear is a population easily controlled. (Note that "terror" is a synonym to "fear"; _now_ who's the real terrorist?) Also note: any opposition to the dictator in the nearby Belarus gets labelled "terrorists"; I assume the EU is envious of this capability?</comment></comment>


The Chinese Government Killed Over a Dozen CIA Sources from 2010-2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-espionage-idUSKCN18G0UM <comment><USER2> This has all the makings for a screenplay right up my alley. I have the utmost respect for Clandestine Operatives and the conditions and considerations. It's not playing a game on a board with pieces, these are people's lives.

In 2003, I heard about China organ harvesting in its prisons and wrote a short story about it. 10+ years later, I made it into a screenplay. It's a Morality Play.

[https://www.scriptrevolution.com/scripts/infamy](https://www.scriptrevolution.com/scripts/infamy)

The line "We've lost another one" could almost be the goddamn title of my take on events. Nobody wants to make that call.

</comment><comment><USER3> As noted in the first sentence, this story is based on the NY Times report. The Times article is more comprehensive:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385359)

As per HN Guidelines, _" Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."_

</comment><comment><USER4> They are spies right? It is an essential part of the professional risk.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely.

What makes this newsworthy, though, isn't that the spies are dead-- it's that twelve died in a ~year. Something happened that the CIA wasn't ready for. Take this as a sign of a few possible things-- A) The US may have had a mole, B) China's security apparatus got much much better very quickly, C) The US is complacent in foreign human intelligence, D) Hacking may have killed more people. We're not sure of which one, or if it's any of those things, which leaves us the article-- 12 spies are dead.

<comment><USER6> or E) They gathered a tremendous amount of information over a long period of time, and played the CIA's game by giving it to them easy. That way more is revealed, and then China executed, no pun intended, the plan all at once when the time seemed right.

But again who knows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Original story [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia- spie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies- espionage.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why release this information now?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps to give the president pause before he blabbers information that will get some operative killed?

<comment><USER10> Like Oleg Erovinkin?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The former PM of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, had 9 witnesses against him killed while he was on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague.

It is a growing trend for extrajudicial killings to occur at the hands of the state (think Russia and journalists, Duerte and alleged druggies) for pretty much any reason.

What a sad and complex world we live in.</comment>


Dynamic Languages Are Static Languages - <AUTHOR> https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-languages-are-static-languages/ <comment><AUTHOR> It might be interesting to read this article along with [https://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/html/tratt__dynamical...](https://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/html/tratt__dynamically_typed_languages)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just use a language employing the Hindley-Milner type system and be done with it.</comment>


What is probabilistic programming? - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/04/probabilistic-programming.html

<comment><USER2> Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers: [https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic- Programmin...](https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers)

<comment><USER3> And for a more theoretical, less interactive picture, here's a video of Noah Goodman, one of the creators of Church, at a Google tech talk discussing the language's philosophical foundations and showing a bunch of applications in cognitive science/psychology.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fclvsoaUI-U>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing that's not entirely clear from the article is that probabilistic programming _is_ Bayesian modeling and inference. Probabilistic programming isn't a new machine learning technique it's a more flexible way to do Bayesian statistics.

The new term "probabilistic programming" stems from the recognition that stochastic programs can be automatically interpreted as defining a joint probability model and Bayesian inference on this model equates to sampling execution traces that are consistent with the observed data. This is an extremely powerful idea. It enables one to quickly build and compose both the standard Bayesian models you'd find in textbooks, and innovate easily to build new models tailored to particular application domains, often by composing more standard models with more exotic ones. Probabilistic programming provides a natural way to specify these complex models and has the potential to hide the computational difficulties that plague applied Bayesian modeling.

Making all this practical is the real challenge. Performant sampling of execution traces for a broad class of models is an unsolved problem, which is part of the motivation for DARPA's new project.

For those interested in this area, we're working on one effort alone these lines at Sense: <https://www.senseplatform.com>.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in actual implementations, the website of the Probabilistic Programming Workshop offers an overview of actively developed languages:

<http://probabilistic-programming.org/>

<comment><USER6> Thx. also this

[http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/173887/model-learner- popl...](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/173887/model-learner-popl13.pdf)

<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/>

[http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/avi- pfeffer/figaro...](http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/avi- pfeffer/figaro.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm still confused. What exactly does a probabilistic programming language do differently than a normal one? Does it just have a lot of support for machine learning and representing data and stuff like that, or is there something fundamentally different?

<comment><USER8> Correct me if I'm wrong, conceptually, probabilistic programming does to equation solvers what declarative language like SQL do to query data.

Say you have a model, y = mx + b, and you have some data. Normally you can solve this explicitly with matrices or whatever. But you'll need to implement the solution. With probabilistic language like BUGS, you can feed in the model and the data and it would return `m` and `b` as a probability distribution.

This is an trivial example. One example of where it really comes in handy is doing bayesian inference.

<comment><USER3> A useful analogy is Prolog, which you can think of as a logical programming language. It has formal, logical rules as primitives, and the deductive inference search happens under the hood. Similarly, probabalistic programming languages have random variables and probability distributions as primitives and do probabalistic inference (usuallly Baysian) under the hood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a test dev, I'm really interested in this (and in inference engines/languages like Prolog). How can I write code that has the best chance of finding bugs that customers might care about? Short of wrapping humans in APIs (and I also _love_ that), we can write tests that are different every time to try to avoid "stale" tests and approach the diversity that humans exhibit. Probabalistic computation has that built in! A lot of manager-types want a "repeatable" process but I'd like an "easily, know-ably mutable" one. One with known bounds even if the actual inputs/results weren't the same every time.

If your unit tests were automagically varied wouldn't that make them more valuable? They might actually find new bugs once in a while.

<comment><USER10> I'm uncertain from your description but have you heard of QuickCheck or <http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/smallcheck/> ? QuickCheck might be available in some form in your language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised the article suggested BUGS instead of JAGS. JAGS has pretty much all of the features of BUGS (except a GUI) and is open source, cross platform, faster, and easy to run batch jobs from the command line. I've been using JAGS pretty much everyday for the past 1.5 years for a research project I'm working on and have grown quite fond of it. Before that, I was using BUGS for 6 months and was in a living hell with how slow fitting models with it was. Since switching to JAGS, my productivity has increased by several orders of magnitude. I'm primarily using it for analyzing Markov Chain Monte Carlo models of behavioral data where standard nonlinear optimization techniques (such as MLE and MAP) are impossible to use.

Here's a link to JAGS's homepage: <http://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.net/>

There's also PyMC (which can do similar types of analysis). <https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc></comment>


The Graphical Keyboard User Interface - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/07/05/the-graphical-keyboard-user-interface/

<comment><USER2> The MS Office/Open Office control panel is also a terrible example of GUI. To the uninitiated, it looks like an airplane control panel.</comment>


Why Is My Smart Home So Dumb? - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/why-is-my-smart-home-so-fucking-dumb-1684949715 <comment><USER2> I've been into the home automation thing since before forever. There have been many periods of excitement over the years. They come and go. As a result I have to admit to a high level of skepticism about the current period.

The companies that generate and are influenced by this excitement tend to make two main errors.

1\. They don't understand that without an open standard for controls and sensors they are just fooling themselves. No one is going to permanently install something in their house that is sure to be useless in 10 years.

2\. They don't understand that people don't want to control everything ... they instead want to not _have_ to control everything. Being able to control a light from your phone is not really any better than being able to do it from the light switch. People instead want the light to just do the right thing without having to think about it. They don't want a thermostat controllable from a phone. They want a thermostat that makes it so they are comfortable and not paying any extra money they don't have to. As a result, the home automation people actually want is a much harder problem than what everyone always seems to assume.

<comment><USER3> Open standards are a real issues in the industry. I find it ridiculous that you often have to pay thousands of dollars for software that simply understands those protocols. Not only that, it requires you to jump through ridiculous hoops to do stuff that you could easily do with a reasonably simple Python script. (Look up Niagara AX as an example.)

Another problem is APIs and connectivity. Tuning a light on or off should be doable with a simple POST call to a RESTful service somewhere. Instead, we are sold dubious phone apps for everything.

<comment><USER4> Right, open standards. I think there's an XKCD comic about this...

There's no "open standard for wireless control of a light", because there's not one standard way to do it. For a dollar in parts, I can build a wireless light switch that uses 433 MHz, just like your wireless doorbell.

Oh, you wanted a network of addressable lights? Well now it's a dollar fifty. We'll move to 900 MHz and switch to a ZigBee radio.

Oh, you wanted to address them through WiFi? Well, here's the problem. Light bulb's don't have keyboards to enter your AP+Key. You could try and use WPS with a fixed pin code, but there's another issue. Putting an embedded Linux device that handles POST requests in a lightbulb is rather silly. We'll keep the ZigBee radios, and build a crossover "base station" that has a RESTful XML based JSON buzzword complaint interface.

Did I mention my ZigBee radio only talks with my brand of ZigBee radios?

The problem in making a standard comes down to the radios in the lightbulb. That interface will likely always be proprietary. Even if you get a standardized web interface, no one will be able to make a universal base station for all "smart" electronics. Wink is trying to do that, best of luck to them. I don't see it happening.

[http://thegadgetflow.com/blog/wink-wants-new-standard- smart-...](http://thegadgetflow.com/blog/wink-wants-new-standard-smart-home- devices/)

<comment><USER3> You would be surprised, but there are already standards for automation of almost anything you can think of. The problem is not with the lack of standards or network-enabled devices. The problem is with them being proprietary and tied to software that costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Some of that software is licensed in such a way that you cannot even install it without being an "authorized" vendor with an established relationship with the manufacturer/provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like my experience with Nest last summer. Got the thermostat, can't get it connected to my wireless. Support basically tells me to get bent until I go into full IT guy mode and prove its an issue with the unit. Replacement unit comes, doesn't work at all (first one was at least a nice looking thermostat with no connected features). Third unit comes and it's been fine ever since.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to get their smoke detector. One day it randomly detects smoke and will not shut the hell up about it even after resetting, replacing batteries, etc. Nest offered to replace it - I just put my old "dumb" detector back up.

I will say it's pretty damn embarrassing to buy this stuff and have it fail so spectacularly, at least my roommate wasn't here to see me seriously losing my mind trying to shut up the Protect.

<comment><USER6> Knowing that pretty much all software is buggy and Nest and Wink are pretty new to market, do you want to depend on them with your life?

In the northeast US this weekend we will be having a high temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. I don't want to rely on a flaky device determining if the heat should be on. What happens if the temp drops really low, like with a power failure? Did they test that?

Same can be said for smoke detectors. A lot of new construction houses have all the smoke detectors wired by electricity with 9v battery backup. One goes off, they all go off. Sure there can be device failures, but you're talking about something that has been around for a long time with a proven track record.

If anything, maybe keep the old tech devices running and use the new tech along side it to see how it works.

<comment><USER7> As a counter-anecdote, I have been very grateful for my Nest during these especially cold days. It takes the weather outside into account, and does a much better job keeping my house in a comfortable temperature range.

<comment><USER8> Outdoor temperature reset has been a feature on furnace controllers for a long time (also called modulating aquastat).

(so there is a sense in which it isn't necessarily a smart home type of feature, it doesn't need a great deal of integration or whatever, and will work with any dumb thermostat)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, to be fair, my Nest replaced a dial thermostat with a mercury switch on a bimetal coil...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a similar problem with Chromecast and Youtube. My friends literally cannot understand why I would rather use the YouTube client built into the TV and control it with the TV remote, rather than cast to chromecast and control with my phone. Controlling the TV with my phone is cumbersome. It takes time to unlock it,to find the app, to send the command and have chromecast react. What if someone rings and I want to pause the video before answering the call? Doable,but more complex than it needs to be. What if I leave the room but someone else wants to pause, skip or whatever, but their phone is not connected to my chromecast? In comparison, TV remote is always in front of my TV. Using it is dead simple,doesn't require pairing,and it's instantaneous. It doesn't leave the room when I go to the kitchen, and I can use it while I am on my phone. I feel like controlling lights with your phone is a similar gimmick. It doesn't make it easier or faster - it's just gimmicky, that's all.

<comment><USER10> This isn't as much of a problem if you use Chromecast with a tablet. Also, you can actually connect multiple devices with a Chromecast.

I think it's better to think of Chromecast as a wireless display device for your {smartphone,tablet,browser} than a displayless smart-TV. It's just a tool to turn your TV into a dumb client for your smart device of choice.

If you want something that extends your TV rather than something that lets you use your TV to extend other devices, you're better off with an Amazon Fire box or equivalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really don't grok why I should want to use my smartphone to move up and down my wifi connected blinders. Yet that's all I see when all of this is pictured: gimmicks.

I want to see a demo of a room alarm clock: with rising light (in brightness and temperature), birds chirping, room getting warmer, music/radio a while later.. and the same for going to bed.

<comment><USER12> I set up my house such that when I unlock the front door using my code, the downstairs lights come on if it's after sundown. I also have a camera capture the first few minutes of the door changing state. I get alerts if the door is opened outside of normal away hours (8-4 on weekdays). I also have a vacation mode that will control various lights in the house to simulate occupancy. I also set up a nightlight mode that will detect motion after dark and turn lights on and off as you pass through the house. This was all done with off- the-shelf components and minimal Lua scripting. Admittedly not life-changing, but more useful than moving blinds up and down!

<comment><USER13> What components did you use for this?

<comment><USER12> I used a Schlage Z-wave compatible door lock, a VeraLite smart home controller, and a handful of generic Z-wave devices (sensors, outlets, switches). I also have a Nest thermostat. The package cost me about $200 bucks (not counting the Nest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having each light bulb intelligent seems like overkill, I can see a per circuit setup where you replace the light switch. First off its not going to go bad like a bulb which will be replaced eventually; even LEDs which still die too soon. Really, who came up with this light bulb idea...its just daft.

Security motion detectors can be used to double effect here as well, you would naturally have them facing doors so they could activate wireless or through signals across existing wires. All sorts of options.

<comment><USER15> Well Phillips pushing the Hue is pretty far from daft in their perspective. Get people to shell out hundreds to replace bulbs instead of a 1/10th of that.

Remember, Phillips is the reason incandescent bulbs had their lifespans intentionally cut in half for planned obsolescence.[1]

1.[http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great- lightbu...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbulb- conspiracy)

<comment><USER16> You know, the hotter incandescent bulbs consume less energy, saving much more than their more usual replacement cost. Added to that, they are cheaper to make. But let's not disrupt a good conspiracy theory (who was Philips conspiring with, by the way?).

If Philips simply launched a bulb that lasted less, with no advantages, people would buy from other manufacturer, and Philips wouldn't be here anymore. They even took a huge risk launching it, because despite it being cheaper to use, people do not like changing bulbs.

<comment><USER15> Did you even read the article? They got with other manufacturers and agreed to put an age limit on the bulbs. Anyone that violates the pact was fined by the others? That is exactly what a conspiracy is and is one of the reasons we have anti trust laws now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Automated building systems are hard to get right even in the commercial space where the specifiers, installers, and operators are professionals and end users are given dummy thermostats to make them feel better or just outright locked out of controls and windows are inoperable.

Even then it all depends on dedicated circuitry: webs of low voltage wires for power and signaling snaking from control panels in closets. Sure Wifi is capturing some corner cases, but NFPA isn't going to allow its use for fire alarms any time soon. Those systems need to be reliable. Or people die.

The smart home won't be based on a wireless bus. Wall warts show that we're already at the point where a standard low voltage power bus makes sense. More wires and a case for surface mounting is the way electrification goes historically.

The current approach to smart homes is equivalent to configuring a new network, hooking up a dozen different 80's dot matrix printers, and then writing drivers for them...using a smartphone touchscreen keyboard. Except instead of technical support you get consumer services.

Adding a touch screen and 802.11 doesn't make getting a system working or geewhiz configured easier than X10. It just makes it look simpler and cleaner and more likely that the end user will blame themselves for not being able to use a smartphone.

<comment><USER18> The obsession over Bluetooth-this and WiFi-that continually drives me crazy. Home automation companies aren't investing in the sort of technologies we NEED because they're more focused on the sort of technologies they can SELL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again.

Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit in its infancy), the proliferation of 'standards' (properitary and otherwise) is offputting. Then there's the standards designed to interface between all the different standards...rinse...repeat.

Edit: Spelling - I have a dodgy laptop keyboard with melted keys due to a motherboard failure!! Waiting for Dell to come back again and change it!

<comment><USER20> I think one of the big problems with the whole "smart home" idea is that people don't consider the use cases. As the article mentions but doesn't really follow through the logic of, trading a light switch flip for a smart phone fumble just isn't a win.

But remote access is one of those cases that is a win. I have a relative that spends a lot of time about 1000 miles away for business and he's gotten some mileage out of his remote furnace control. Access for people with physical issues also makes sense, but relative to what I think the market is "expected" to be for this stuff, that's still quite a small niche too. (Large in absolute terms, that is, but nowhere near "we're going to have one of these in every house!")

Beyond that, though, what's the best case scenario in practice? I spend perhaps a minute during the day _tops_ flipping light switches... if you 100% eliminate that I will, frankly, not particularly notice. My heater already has a standard modern (and therefore a bit featureful) electronic control and I already don't use its sophisticated features.

This isn't one of those cases where technical advances just made home automation possible, like the way tablets were a joke until all the pieces came together for the iPad and gave us a practical device for the first time. The tech has been here for decades, and it has never taken off, even among the geek set. I think the problem is there just isn't a _use case_ here.

At the risk of sounding simply contrarian, I'm still not convinced the whole "Internet of Things" isn't going to fizzle out the same way. It's a basic principle of good software engineering that it isn't enough to just throw code at people and hope; you need a use case that makes sense. There will be some use cases here and use cases there, but I'm not convinced there's a massive new market that deserves a new moniker so much as "use cases here and there".

<comment><USER8> I think as soon as there is a comm protocol that is worth calling a winner (works well, widely supported), it will quickly become the case that LED bulbs and fixtures will come with it built in. A while after that, whole home lighting control is a $100 feature that you expect in every house (or less for smaller places), not a $500 or $1000 feature that doesn't work very well in houses where the owner really pursued it.

<comment><USER21> I don't expect there will ever be such protocol though, there is too much competition already and everyone wants to be the "platform", because no-one actually has any idea of what gadgets would be useful. Even if we just look at the low level, there already is a war between grid powered vs battery powered, which then influences the war between BTLE, WIFI and ZigBee. There are inherently very different architectures, I don't see a change for convergence. But then probably when everything has been already done Apple will invent THE Apple Home which will be (as always) the first of it's kind :)

<comment><USER8> Could be. There is some chance that hubs like Wink (which supports ~6 protocols) will encourage manufacturers to choose the ones that work well. Then someone just needs to make a similar hub that isn't architecturally tied to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a lot of cheap crap on the market but there's also some great designs out there.

For example, I've got this light control system installed in my home:

[http://houm.io/](http://houm.io/)

Wireless, battery-free buttons that you can put anywhere you like. I keep one of them on my night stand. Rest of the switches look and work just like regular light switches.

Except the switches are connected to the system, so I can activate pre-defined scenes with one click of a button. No need to use a smartphone. The scenes are configured through a multi-platform web client.

The client, by the way, uses a regular REST API so I can control my lights with cURL too. Over the internet :)

It's more expensive, but it just works.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe I'm just not getting it, but why would I want a "Smart Home"? It seems to be a little like a Smart TV, everyone wants more features, but really they're newer going to use the built in voice control or install any apps. We need a few basic feature and the rest just sits their, unused, contributing to the complexity of the device.

I have yet to see an intelligent house feature I would like. I understand that some want a better climate control interface, like the Nest. But I have yet to see a house that have central climate/heating control, and I don't miss it in my own home.

Is it really such an inconvenience to get up to turn on the light or turn the blinders?

<comment><USER24> _Is it really such an inconvenience to get up to turn on the light or turn the blinders?_

It can be; if you're incapacitated, for example. But automated lights and blinders also offer other possibilities besides remote interfaces, like waking you up with sunlight instead of an alarm clock.

In any case, I agree with you, for now; I do want a smart home, but the current implementations provide very little utility for me. I want a smart home if it can do actual work, like cleaning itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have had auto blinders, lights, and day alarm (courtesy of an old projector) for years. It's all controlled by some random netbook I got for $30, picaxe micros, and xbees (the xbees are admittedly overkill).

This is the sort of thing you build, rather than buy, since it will only ever fit the person who designed it.

<comment><USER26> I'd love to read a blog post about this.

Some dream features I'd like personally in a smart home:

* TV-aware lights - lights dim/turn off according to a preset pattern when the tv comes on

* Voice control - saying "Bed time" would turn off all lights & heating, other commands off the top of my head- "I'm home" (turn on hall lights & heating if its below a certain temperature) or "leaving home"\- turn off everything

* Low power screen in the hall, like e-ink, where I can have an electronic To Do list easily available, or warnings to bring an umbrella/coat today, or reminders for today from my smartphone calendar

Something like this Raspberry pi project looks promising for voice: [https://jasperproject.github.io/](https://jasperproject.github.io/)

For me, having to whip out a phone to do stuff like turn off lights is pointless. A smart home should be context-aware, e.g. home temperature, time of day, doing an activity like TV, or needing cold bedroom for sleep (open window, turn off heating).

If a smart home system isn't more convenient than the low tech version, then there is no point.

<comment><USER25> Agreed on convenience!

The way it works is, it's all xbee based (largely because I had a bunch of short-range xbees around when Serious Business decided to get longer range ones).

There's a remote that's a picaxe 28 (remember those?), plus a xbee, plus buttons.

There's an old netbook that also runs my projector, mostly netflix/youtube. It has a xbee and a few lines of python.

There's the light controllers which are just a USB charger, a relay, a picaxe 8, and a xbee.

The blinds have a tamiya motor and a L298 instead of the relay.

Both the remote and the laptop get to send commands to the other nodes, the remote also turns the projector on and off (by serial port).

Nothing to write home about really. It mostly got done because there was an excess of xbees.

The "serial protocol" is just sending two characters (0-9 digits) to address the picaxe, and then a one-letter command.

Doesn't seem to bother wifi any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not sure I agree with the article's title. He's basically bad mouthing the entire smart home industry when this really seems like more of a Quirky/GE/Wink mess up. Literally every single product he tested is by them.

I actually LOVE all of the stuff in my smart home! All I have is 6 hue bulbs, a Nest, and an Amazon Echo that I've programmed to control everything with my voice with the help of a Raspberry Pi.

Nothing feels better than walking in after a long day and saying:

"Alexa, turn on all the lights, color blue, brightness 9"

"Alexa set nest to 72"

Then sitting down on the couch and saying:

"Alexa play some jazz music"

 _pours bourbon_

If you're interested in this, check out my Alexa Home project alexaho.me or the YouTube video below) . I'm turning Amazon Echo into a smart home controller and people seem to be pretty jazzed about it. Frankly, if we can get stuff to work like this where it doesn't rely on your smartphone, people will use it a lot more. I also have a small switch next to my bed that turns on and off the overhead light and desk lamp in my room for when I don't have my phone on me.

I think success in the home automation biz is going to be all about untying it from your smartphone...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AmxiGVBekE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AmxiGVBekE)

<comment><USER28> Are you the only one using the system? That seems to be the big barrier to greater acceptance. Convincing everyone who lives in a house to not use the wall light switches is pretty hard. Heck, we basically leave our AV receiver on all the time because requiring someone to turn it on to watch TV is too big a step.

<comment><USER27> Yes, my roommate uses it too! But he's also in tech. I completely agree with you. We need more really cheap IoT light switches so everyone can easily get on board!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I know our generation is the one longing for the concept of a smart-home that we see in sci-fi movies, but until we reach a stage where we can actually give contextual voice commands that our "home" can understand I'm not convinced this is worth spending a dime on. Not even in the "to promote research in that direction" kind of way, because all I am seeing now are people taking advantage of our high dollar whims and are missing hard.

</comment><comment><USER30> I feel like there's some kind of rush to become the box/service that runs your smart home. _None_ of these vertically integrated solutions is going to cover all of the use-cases or user desires, yet it seems that everyone want to be the one that sells you their proprietary (and bug-ridden) box.

It would be much easier if most of this stuff could be shipped as software that you can install (somehow) into a box of your choosing and pull together components for your home as you see fit. This field isn't ready for consumers per se but those with a more hacky mindset would probably uncover the useful bits, which could later be picked up as integrated solutions. The only thing I've come across that's like this is openHAB ([http://www.openhab.org](http://www.openhab.org))

<comment> semi-extrinsic You really should check out Telldus ([http://www.telldus.se](http://www.telldus.se)). Their Tellstick Net is simple enough that my father installed his own setup at the summer house, where he has a thermo sensor and two heaters plugged in to remote socket receivers. So when my parents are going there for the weekend, he checks the app on his phone before leaving to see how cold it is, turns on one or both heaters from the app, and the place is warm when they arrive. All of this is available in brick-and-mortar stores in Europe, total cost is something like $200.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My main issue with my wink is that it has to go all the way across the internet to connect to the box 10ft away from me. A much "smarter" system would simply connect directly over my home wifi and avoid most of the lag and connectivity issues.

I understand WHY they did it this way (because they don't want to support an open device/protocol for interacting with the hub...) but it seems really short-sighted in terms of the user experience.

I've already rooted my wink hub and fully intend to implement this myself just to reduce the annoyance.

</comment><comment><USER32> Homeboy cameras are the one thing in my setup that work perfectly. I wish more products could be so well integrated with the cloud and the phone. I have them set up to send pictures to Dropbox via IFTT, and it all works perfectly, recording only when there's motion, and only when we are not home (it uses your cell phone location).

Tried a Quirky Spotter, and it does detect things like motion, but it doesn't know to send just one push notification; instead it sends a continuous stream of them while motion is happening, which is irksome.

</comment><comment><USER33> This article made me think about these idea for a bit. I thought of something that may not be very practical right now, but could be a way forward for these things. I think what a really good home automation system ought to do is a bigger version of what the Nest does.

All of the light switches, blinds, alarms, climate control, music, TVs, etc could be manually controlled at first, but there's a system that watches how you change all of them and coordinates it with your location and the time. It could look for patterns of doing several things in a row or doing them at the same time, and either offer to or just start doing them all together for you. Like you normally turn on lights 1, 2, and 3 when you walk in the door from work, so it notices and starts turning them on for you just from opening the door. Or you normally turn off lights 2 and 3 and turn on the DVD player within 5 minutes of each other, so it starts just turning off those lights when you turn on the DVD player.

Basically, something that notices what you already do and tries to do it for you, without you having to program things in with a smartphone or something. I bet normal people would love that. As long as it wasn't laggy and buggy, of course, which could be easier said than done.

</comment><comment><USER34> There are house-integrated things that are cool, but they rarely require integration. CO2 and humidity-controlled ventilation is really nice, as is whole-house sound systems. But why should they be connected to each other?

Maybe if you used some machine learning algorithms and made the house actually intelligent, so it could anticipate what you wanted. Other than that I don't really see the use.

<comment><USER8> A possible application would be to have different temperature regulation for occupied rooms (With some smart scheduling that anticipates occupancy).

So there's a reason to integrate the HVAC system with awareness sensors (which will probably be integrated with the sound system).

Not an interesting feature for an apartment or smaller house, but it's a reason to try to build the systems so that they can talk to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a big part of the problem is that integration is hard, and that the companies more or less resist it (I guess because they think keeping people in their garden is a good strategy).

It's also easy to oversell (to yourself) the value of a room having a movie mode. Most smart home features are 'nice to have', not worth a lot of messing around and cash.

<comment><USER35> > It's also easy to oversell (to yourself) the value of a room having a movie > mode. Most smart home features are 'nice to have', not worth a lot of > messing around and cash.

My girlfriend used to occasionally watch a show about house-buying (House Hunters). In general the show wasn't terribly interesting, but the real estate agents featured sometimes had some interesting tips.

One of those tips was to carefully consider not just _how_ you will use a feature of a house (like a pool, or guest bedroom), but _how often_ you will use it. Apparently people spring for expensive extras like pools and outdoor living spaces because they imagine how great it will be to have family and friends over for picnics, etc. But then they do it once, and never again because it is a huge inconvenience. Same goes for "mother-in-law suites" and spare bedrooms. People tell themselves it will be wonderful to have family stay with them, but the family members only visit once a year (if that), so a hotel is actually more economical (or just have someone sleep on the couch).

I tend to think of "smart house" features in this way. Every once in awhile I would appreciate having my living space adapt to my needs or respond to remote commands, but 99.99% of the time, it just doesn't matter. The light switch is right next to the door, I can stand up to close the shades, and thermostats have been programmable for decades now.

Eventually we'll probably come up with something that works even better (just like the programmable thermostats were a strict improvement upon their predecessors). But things like converting the light switch to an "app" or controlling the AC with a rudimentary geo-fence aren't it.

<comment><USER36> _I tend to think of "smart house" features in this way. Every once in awhile I would appreciate having my living space adapt to my needs or respond to remote commands, but 99.99% of the time, it just doesn't matter._

I find there is only a tiny overlap between the many modern technologies I would like to have in a new home and the many so-called smart home features that are aggressively advertised. There are plenty of new systems I think I would find valuable, and quite a few of them distribute some function throughout the house but could usefully be controlled from a single location, but I've never seen much advantage in controlling _everything_ together. That just seems to create one more point of failure, not to mention glaring security/privacy issues if any of the control systems are remotely accessible, which almost all of the major suppliers of home automation control systems proudly claim to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's a general pattern of trying to dumb things down to a simple, inflexible interface, too often with half-baked "AI" bolted on. Good products still need attentive human supervision.

I installed Insteon motion detectors and webcams after a robbery, but the included software was such undependable and inflexible garbage that I replaced it all with a simple Misterhouse-based Perl script that sends texts via email.

If I see another tech product ad aimed at millenials featuring bright easter colors and indiepop music pitched by Steve Jobs wannabes who are unable to get any angry nerds to make their products actually work, I might snap.

By the way, the other HN article about malfunctioning Nest smoke detectors is a hilarious accompaniment to this. ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048110) )

</comment><comment><USER38> So-called "smart home" devices are certainly new and imperfect but the story told at the beginning of the article is also not necessarily representative.

He describes months of setup, unlocking his phone, scrolling through apps, finding the right screen, drilling through menus, and then not having it work. In my limited experience with similar setups (a few Philips Hue bulbs, IP camera, and a Nest thermostat) I haven't really run into anything that obnoxious.

When I want to kick on the "mood lighting" for a movie or a party or whatever, I just wake my phone and tap one of several presets on the homescreen widget. Setting up those presets took maybe 10 minutes and I can always mess with the lamps manually or create more if I feel like it. Otherwise the handful of IFTTT recipes I set up and geofencing keeps the lights under control the majority of the time without any input from me.

Nest is similar. It's reasonably good at learning my patterns and if I want to tweak the temp or change something, I just open an app and the image on the screen matches the display of the physical thermostat.

These are certainly early implementations of connected/smart devices but compared to the state of "professional" integrated systems, they're just fine with me. Just read up on Crestron programming if you want to learn how complicated the enterprise solutions can be. And if you don't want to spend months learning their wacky programming tools and procedures you can spend thousands on hiring certified techs to do it for you.

The thing I'm most excited about is for more standardized and interoperable devices to start overtaking the pricey "pro" options for at least the lower level stuff in enterprise and education. As it stands now, a lot of the Crestron stuff is not much more than a glorified universal remote. The faster the consumer/DIY stuff improves, the sooner it will be able to replace the ridiculous "pro" stuff that's been the only option for years.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am now on my 4 controller "Smartthings (ST)" after dumping Nexia my 1st and for many reasons such as compatibility and monthly costs et cetera, then Micasa Verde whcih was okay but not the creates their tech support sucks and more incompatibility issues, then Indigo6 which was okay for a year but they drove me nuts refusing to speak to my doors locks (schlarge) and had to use vera bridge which couldn't keep proper track of the state of the doors.

All the while I was researching a stand alone controller backed by a big company like google, apple or samsung. Then I found ST backed by Samsung.

So here we are. migrated and all. Learning how to deal with MODES OMG. No variables I can set to do things.

</comment><comment><USER40> When you use a smart phone as a remote control, it's just a slow and inconvenient remote control device. If the lights don't dim by voice command, it should be by your regular smart remote or the switch.

"I unlocked my phone. I found the right home screen. I opened the Wink app. I navigated to the Lights section. I toggled over to the sets of light bulbs that I'd painstakingly grouped and labeled. I tapped "Living Room"—this was it—and the icon went from bright to dark. (Okay, so that was like six taps.)"

</comment><comment><USER41> Am I the only confused by the crazy delay mentioned in the article from the "Robots"? The processing can't be all that intensive, and I can't imagine a setup where communicating simple on/off commands to specific devices should be so costly as tens of seconds. I would understand a general delay from sensing the triggering event (i.e. opening the door), but that hardly explains the delay in between all the lights as shown in the gif.

<comment><USER42> Any time there's a significant buzz around home automation, opportunists with marketing skills and no appreciation for latency and UX flock to the scene, drowning out the technically superior but underfunded and poorly represented.

This stuff doesn't have to be slow: [http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L7jeJSdJPpk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The best 'consumer facing' demos of these involve the "I'm leaving home" or "I'm coming home" activities. Aggregate functions, think IFTTT.

For much of these devices today, the experience is so fragmented that only a tech savvy customer can figure them out.

Also, yes, it's not helpful when I have to take out my phone, put in the password, open the app, and click 'off' when I could just get up and press the switch much faster.

</comment><comment><USER44> Home automation is not something you can install yourself, unless you are a full stack programmer, and with full stack I mean also PCB's and micro- controllers.

Surprisingly there's a lot of cheap consumer stuff out there, witch can easily be modified to do what you want. Some of them are "unhackable" though.

The trick is to make everything automated. And use a high level language like JS to make it smart. Yes, I write my home automation in JavaScript :P

</comment><comment><USER45> It seems like the vast majority of the issues with the current generation of products on the market has to do with speed & reliability; thus hardwired is the only way to guarantee those 2 work all the time. Also by going the hardwired route, the sensors and controls will be vendor neutral; thus ensuring that it will be future proof.

After doing a bunch of research the conclusion I came to was Opto-isolated relays [1] are the way to go for lighting control [2]. This allows for simple logic boards to control line voltage things without the risk of the line voltage killing your logic board. Best way to do this style of home automation would be in new construction, as retrofitting it would be hard to do if the house is more than 1 story tall as you need access above and below. Would be labor intensive as well. Will also allow for manual control because you'd put a current sensor on the wire so the hardware can tell when the circuit is on/off.

I would also want to put in some thermal cameras, as motion sensors are not as useful when your sitting on the couch, to tell when you enter/exit a room for auto lighting control. Put temperature sensors in every room and have motorized dampers & air flow sensor allowing for the control of the temperature in every room. Now your lighting and hvac can be manually or automatically controlled. Wire all the sensors and controls to a hardware/software brain that can be upgraded at any time. If that hardware/software brain is disconnected, all the light switches will still work and the normal hvac system will still work; just less efficiently.

Have the thermostat be controllable from the panel when the house is occupied (thermal camera) and auto controllable when vacant.

All of the above is possible right now; it just would cost a lot of money. Every relay/current sensor is $80 bucks; every damper control is $100; every thermal camera is $500; add it all together and you got one very expensive home automation system. But it will work right now without a lot of user frustration.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opto- isolator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opto-isolator) [2] [http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/46601/home-light- auto...](http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/46601/home-light-automation- emulate-4-way-switch-with-relay/46610#46610)

</comment><comment><USER46> Home security too. Finding an HD, outdoor camera system that has smartphone and web functionality is very difficult. All the NVRs are horribly insecure. It's strange that a (physical) security product completely neglects software security. The more modern companies seem focused on indoor cameras with only one or two variants and not much by ways of optical zoom lenses.

</comment><comment><USER47> One comparison to this is the big push to get in car navigation and smarts developed by the tech sector. There is a reason radios and stuff work year after year through heat and cold and the like. they may not be pretty, but it (usually) does what its suppose to even after years of use.

</comment><comment><USER48> I think part of the problem is that frequently/mostly, I want a dedicated input device like a switch or a dial, not my iPhone to control stuff like lights.

Nest has an app but primary interaction is with dedicated UI widgets.

</comment><comment><USER49> What is the power limit of POE? I don't see a reason to try to dim LEDs on AC or a reason to keep converting DC/AC/DC/AC so often. Wouldn't POE or a similar standard be better?

<comment><USER50> PoE (that's Power over Ethernet, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet)) maxes out at 25.5 W at the powered device.

Not a lot general purpose domestic electricity, although of course lighting is being pushed down towards lower power these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of this is bad technology choice. The new hipster smart bulbs are a doomed technology, they were a bad idea from the start. Try INSTEON, buddy.

<comment><USER51> Do you have any suggestions on debugging INSTEON?

I have a setup at my house, but the light switches stopped talking to the SmartLinc and I can't get them to re-pair. And without any debugging options, I'm feeling a bit sunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Flicking a switch when I enter or leave the room sounds easier than taking out my phone and fiddling with some app. And it's way cheaper.

<comment><USER53> True. But having it turn on while you're on holiday is a nice perk.

Plus it isn't an OR choice, you often get both a switch and an app. So you can have the lights turn on as you drive into the garage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> my learning is to approach "fads" with some skepticism and wait for market to give a thumbs up before you try.

</comment><comment><USER55> If you have to set options or even program to get it started, it's definitely not so smart.

</comment><comment><USER56> Ouch, don't use GIF clips if the quality is so horrible.</comment>