I think the home automation market is waiting on things that most people really want and a lower barrier to entry.
Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
What has household automation really given us so far?
Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches.
Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.
The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.
In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.
Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.
If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.
Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.
Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?
1. Starting from scratch is rarely a good idea.
2. It always sounds like a better idea than it actually is.
3. Item 2 is true even if you think you've accounted for item 1.
Is there something specific that you want that cannot be implemented reasonably on existing systems?
Unless you have a specific compelling benefit that only a rewrite can grant, focused narrow rewrites are the way.
The gap between quality work and baseline LLM output is precisely the understanding.
If it can be validated by automation, the bot will do it. But no automation suite is complete or perfect.
What concerns me is that building software using the LLMs gives a distance that inhibits the formation of the sort of understanding I need to "just know" a code base intuitively. So when product asks for a feature, my ability to be sufficiently pedantic about the 6 different non-obvious things this impacts is less effective. And when I need to choose abstractions and try to form an effective ontology, my intuition is less effective. I believe I can still grind out an effective solution, but I start farther from the finish line.
Does the LLM's ability to "answer questions" about the codebase make up for my lack of intuition? Does my apparent ability to run faster make up for the fact that I am starting farther from the end of the race?
Yes, this is what I really had in mind but could not retrieve this from my memory banks. If the combatants are not going to properly identify themselves, then the risk of civilian casualties is going to be very high. I guess interlock breathalyzers was just the opening shot.
I really, really want that to be true, but my experience trying to adopt it has been really painful.
Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?
Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.
It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure. I gather you can create a "master sketch" and selectively project geometry into other sketches. But the last few times I've tried the app, I haven't gotten far enough into my sketches before rage quitting to validate the technique.
Right now I am back F360 with their hobby license wanting to escape their regular messing with the terms and conditions.
> Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?
Agree - selection isn’t broken, but it’s definitely sometimes frustrating and as it’s such a common function, absolutely should be as close to perfect as possible. I think it’s partly that the visual indication of what you’re hovering over and would be selected is too subtle, and also I’ve found (on Mac; I’ve not confirmed on other OSs) that it’s not selecting what’s at the exact tip of the pointer, but is rather selecting a couple of pixels away.
> Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.
Huh, once I’ve actually selected correctly, I find the constraints are fine - say, 95% as good as Solidworks.
> It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Do you mean you can’t have a sketch with (to take a very simple example) a circle inside a circle, or two unrelated circles, or something else?
There are situations I can think of where selection does seem broken by design. It's fairly easy to get into a situation in the 3d view where you want to select a vertex but because of the draw order it's very hard to find an orientation of the model that lets you put it "in front". So you spend ages selecting the lines around it, spinning the model, trying again from all sorts of angles. Heaven help you if you're trying to select a bunch of points that have this problem, it's frustrating as hell. The second is in sketches, where the constraint icons aren't selectable when they're grouped but will block the selection of a component underneath them anyway. That's just obnoxious. I think in both cases the UI is working as designed, but it makes for an unusable outcome.
Oh, and if the selection point isn't at the pointer point? That's just a bug, and needs to be fixed. I can't see any defending that.
It's a kind of crappy slide deck, not a proper home page. Even worse, the link drops you into the middle of the deck. (TBF, it wouldn't be so bad if you know that it's a slide deck when you load the page.)
Try using the arrow keys to navigate. It took me multiple tries to get it figured out.
Use up/down to navigate within a chapter/topic.
Use left/right to switch between topics.
The problem is most people won't take that attitude. For most homeowners, the home is the largest asset.
This is a Catch 22 for elected officials. We must reduce housing costs dramatically if we do so, we will devalue significant assets of a large number of active voters and political contributors.
I'd love to see some ideas on how to pull this off, because we need them.
The home is the largest asset, but the one you're living in. I personally agree with the other guy, I'd happily support a housing market crash, artificially induced if needed.
However, it's more nuanced. I can support risking that my house gets less worth than my mortgage, because I consider the probability of not being able to pay off my mortgage very low. I am guessing that people who feel less secure financially do see a house as a last-resort asset, even at the price of their children not being able to afford a home. And that's the root cause that should be fixed with policy I think.
There are a few things I wish we'd do in the US. We could not allow foreign investors to buy up properties in the US to use as short term rentals (airbnb) when they could instead be purchased by Americans and filled with families. We could also increase vacancy taxes to help encourage property owners to fill the millions of empty homes found all over the country. We could also decrease the wealth gap so that more Americans have enough money that they don't have to wait until they are 40 years old to buy their first starter house. (https://nypost.com/2025/11/05/real-estate/median-age-of-firs...)
Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.
The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.
In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.
Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.
If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.
Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.
Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?
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