I have an admittedly very specific set of constraints that led to me buying a wifi kettle. I:
- have a short window to get to the train in the morning
- want coffee on the train
- don't particularly like drip machine coffee
- want the water boiling when I wake up so that I can make coffee and get out of the house as quickly as possible
- am more morally opposed to waking up five minutes earlier (pushing my wake time into the 4 o'clock hour) than I am to having a smart device.
I couldn't find a kettle that runs on a timer, and just taping the switch in the "on" position and hooking it up to a plug timer felt unsafe, so getting a stupid wifi kettle and using their stupid app to set it to auto-start was the best option. It's on its own network, though.
These aren't constraints. These are preferences. Framing them like constraints makes it sound like the whole situation is out of your hands, and therefore owning a smart device is practically thrust upon you by external forces.
Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
We are constrained by the decisions we have made based on the preferences that we maintain.
Thus-constrained, this person states that they're able to get 5 more minutes of sleep every night and still make coffee before taking the train to work. That's ~25 minutes per week, or ~1.8 hours per month.
They didn't have to choose to go to bed earlier in order to gain this time and still make coffee in the morning. They were going to make coffee with a kettle anyway and were constrained by a the necessity of maintainining ownership of a kettle with which to do that.
So they simply selected a kettle that can be safely automated so as to be ready at the right time every morning instead of one that cannot be. In exchange, they gain around 20 hours per year, for every year that this kettle lasts for. (What would you do for nearly an entire extra day, per year?)
Sure: It's adjustable, just as many constraints are.
Maybe there's even a coffee shop around the corner that they could work at instead, and they could just walk there and brew themselves a cup of coffee using the hot tap on the espresso machine before they start their shift -- and skip the train.
But maybe that wouldn't fit into the constraint of being able to support the dwelling that they prefer to live in.
So maybe they could soften that constraint as well, and live a little lower. (Maybe they can soften enough constraints that they can just live under a bridge somewhere, with no permanent dwelling, no job, and no coffee. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we might find that even the constraint of living a life -- at all -- is also adjustable.)
GP might realize sooner or later that they need larger security margins, for when unexpected things happen; like really having to go to the toilets, spilling the coffee they just made, etc.
They can shift their daily schedule e.g. 30 minutes earlier and peacefully drink their coffee at home. They also should eat something at home or on their way, because hurrying in a cold morning with an empty stomach is not good. Source: personal experience. I did that for months as a student until I passed out one day in class.
If they don't like waiting for the train in the cold, they probably can find a warm place near the station, and wait there a little.
Yes, having coffee on the train is a preference, which is why I used the word "want". I suppose that having this job, or any job, is technically a preference. I decided to buy a smart kettle to satisfy my preferences given the constraints they impose. The parent asked why someone would buy a smart coffee device, and I thought it would be fun to give my answer for why, despite my general skepticism of smart devices, I bought one.
so you brush when you wake up right? The brushing takes about five minutes. The kettle probably takes less time than that. Probably two minutes in my experience. Why not just wake up fill up water click it on and then brush. I mean, you could even keep the water filled up the previous night.
I don’t disagree that over-automation is a thing. I miss my more leisurely mornings!
I use a Hario Switch to make coffee. It takes 3:30 to brew, so I pour the water and then brush my teeth and prep while waiting. Async coffee! I’m out the door as soon as the coffee is in the mug and get to the train station about 2 minutes before the train arrives.
I’ve accounted for this by planning an alternate route to the station, having a secondary station available and, for cases where those are also blocked, mounting an M2A1 50-caliber machine gun to the roof of my Toyota Corolla.
I have a smart plug that can turn on and off...I have my coffee maker switched on, and it only switches on when my wifi plug is on. So I can have the water heating before I come down stairs. Whether it's better than a smart coffee maker or not I'm not sure - but at least I have a popular device that has more eye. Not sure how many people are looking at niche coffee makers.
My understanding, and I would love for someone to explain why, is that they measure current with a shunt resistor which is fine for inductive loads like a water heater, but not fine for a big motor for example.
Boiling water in a kettle takes like 1 minute, in any cases less than two minutes. And other things can be done during this time. There's no real timing constraints that requires a wifi enabled kettle. You may prefer it this way, and that may be what matters the most here, but it's not really a constraint.
Sure, 120V is slower than 240V, but it's still pretty quick. If I'm boiling a full ass kettle for an iced tea pitcher it might take me 5 minutes. Only enough for a cup of tea is maybe 2 minutes.
Maybe they want to save their extraction & profile curves per recipe in the cloud or something. Or for less advanced devices, simply notifications to change the filter I guess.
I mean, if you really want profile curves and so on, it could just save it to some sort of SD card, or if you want to be really fancy sync it via bluetooth to a mobile phone with an app. Same with the notifications to change the filter or whatever, or a damn light on the machine. Right?
I have a very old school manual espresso machine (a La Pavoni). It's connected to a "smart" plug, which lets me turn on the machine remotely, and have it turn on automatically in the morning. It's nice to have it heated up and ready to go when I wake up. Nothing about the machine is smart though.
These sorts of products aren't typically driven by consumer wants. Rather they're typically driven by B2B/sales/marketing/investor types, who are primarily focused on finding/addressing secondary markets for further profits, more so than it is about addressing core consumer wants.
In other words, these product decisions aren't really made on the rationale that internet connected coffee makers make sense from the standpoint of a consumer who simply wants coffee made...
It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:
1) a coffee maker to consumers who want coffee made
2) consumers data/eyeballs to advertisers who want their info/eyes
- Germany, Berlin: personal information of civil servants, secret information about civil protection, emergency communication systems of the german gouvernment, overall 6 TB data
Packt? Avoid, avoid, avoid. This is true. Their stuff tends to be slop grenades thrown over the wall. And as you correctly point out, this was the case before generative AI.
My experience with Manning, OTOH, tends to be good. Most of the material I've seen from them was human-written.
AI Labs doing unsafe things in the wild in production follows a long trail of predecessors, like Google and Facebook "not having enough resources" to prevent scam ads and getting stashes of money off it without anyone blinking an eye.
"We're doing things at such a scale that we can't monitor it anymore" became a universal get-out-of-jail card.
I'm looking forward to reftable to become the default. It solves many problems with branches, like branches with weird characters created with non-standard clients making a fetch impossible; case insensitive branches with "same" names doing the same; or impossible to create branch FOO because FOO/Something exists.
All those problems just go away when branches are no longer files on disk.
I enabled it in setup script of one large repo I maintain; the main issue is the incompatibility with some people's personal tooling based on libgit2 (some git status tooling in oh-my-zsh), but people do find workarounds.
Yup, having _two_ active devices which are logged in to Google (and possibly other services that you rely on that opt you in to app-based 2FA) + with backups of 2FA is a must at this point. When I buy a new phone, I make it a "primary", and keep my old phone as "backup".
If you're not into cloud-based password/2FA syncing, Google Authenticator supports local export/import across devices via a QR code. For passwords, I use KeePass Portable / Keepass2Android + syncing between devices from time to time through a USB-C pendrive (The source of truth KP DB is on pendrive, and both phones work off a local on-device cache).
You don't need to have your phone stolen for things to get messed up. If your screen breaks, you can't type in a PIN anymore, can't unblock with a fingerprint, and you effectively can't access anything on the phone. ADB won't connect because screen is off, and you can't unlock / accept a new external connection etc.
I dislike reduce because people sometimes do wild things in the callback that take a lot of mental effort to understand.
Sometimes people abuse .map as well to do things that are not obvious (i.e. instead of mapping elements of an array to another array, they modify global variables in a for-loop fashion, and discard the result).
But reduce is abused more often and you always need to think really hard if e.g. the initial accumulator is passed or not (it's optional in some languages!), if a correct one is passed (when a compound type is used) and so on.
Hey! isgithubcooked.com is my site; I made this site in February '26, I think
The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.
One thing worth mentioning is that a law was passed around 2017 in France that as a tenant, if you want to install fiber, the landlord can't prevent you from doing so (because e.g. they don't want to drill holes in the walls or other excuses).
Also the vendors do not commercialize ADSL anymore since a decade ago or so if fiber is installed in the district.
What kind of functions it has that can't be replaced by:
- walking a few meters and pushing a physical button
- waiting a whopping minute for coffee to brew, instead of triggering it remotely
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