I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
antonfrolov.substack.com
[18 comments hidden]
The finished product benefited greatly. There's nothing quite like working with a genuine expert who knows the rules and tradeoffs on things like competition, color, etc. Author did good on providing the illustrator with a detailed brief. When the illustrator takes those guidelines and applies their style and training to the product, magic happens.
[13 comments hidden]
The case is slightly stronger if you want to talk about training that happened on our private code repositories, but publicly visible art and repositories are fair game for learners to learn.
[8 comments hidden]
[7 comments hidden]
(to be clear, I don't think this is an accurate description of how artists feel about e.g. publicly released diffusion models. The core is not that it's made by "corporations" or the for-profit aspect or even the copyright infringement part, it's simply the understandable and not-at-all-unique-to-artists resentment at having your job or passion automated or displaced)
[4 comments hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
We've been automating people "out of jobs" since at least the start of the industrial revolution. It's generally considered to be a goos thing.
We had a sort of weird special case for copyright preventing certain types of machine automation and I've heard plenty of complaints about how that worked, but it more or less did work for a while.
[hidden]
I could sort of get behind something like this in theory (weighing each new technology based on whether it furthers the values of the community, and rejecting it if it doesn't, kinda like what the Amish do), but I'm not sure it's being applied neutrally or consistently here, nor do I think it works in practice especially for something as decentralized as a diffusion model, which are surprisingly simple to build and train and can run on a home GPU.
[hidden]
[hidden]
Why would anyone be fine with people explicitly not actually making art.
Scrapping and generating isn't art and isn't comparable to people tracing/copying/learning from existing art.
[2 comments hidden]
[4 comments hidden]
[hidden]
There are art projects like this, but many traditional art projects are quick one-shot deals. Make a logo, design a business card, make a tshirt design. Bite sized, do the work, get paid, move on.
LLMs are great at short context tasks. A lot of art is short context. Building the software that runs a bank is not.
If you want to work as a professional artist in the age of LLMs, move into long context work. If it isn't already, it will be impossible to make a living off of fiverr.
[49 comments hidden]
2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.
[41 comments hidden]
[12 comments hidden]
You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.
[8 comments hidden]
Decorating when you can easily swap out pieces and parts in images with realistic dimensions makes rapid iteration on physical things much faster and it's easy to figure out what "speaks" to you. Great use of these tools.
[6 comments hidden]
[hidden]
refs of colors. atropic has some nice recipes somewhere online, entire prompts you can feed into cc. i used their workflows feature, otherwise it's painfully slow.
do it in two steps, first generate just the named 3d model, walls, stairs etc inspect for correctness, after proceed to the fun part, materials, colors, etc.
I did it in extra one step, not sure if that was needed, i build a local harness first for extra small room 6 ft by 6ft, and after that expanded into real size. It installed lots of tools.
[hidden]
[3 comments hidden]
One is a relatively complicated workflow producing 3D assets, the other is "just give pictures to chatgpt and tell it what you want".
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
Well with one bit of f_ckery that both of us missed until after the concrete had been poured because it was too small to see easily on the plan, and a second also too-small bit that I caught once they'd put the framing up and asked them to take it out again.
[22 comments hidden]
Yes, this is the "you wouldn't download a car" moment. Yes, I would.
(And no, I'm not doing it, because I have my own preferences, which involves hitting a very small target in design space, that is applying "dark cockpit" principles and a mix of industrial HIGs and nuclear reactor control room interface standards to LCARS.)
[10 comments hidden]
If someone spreads poison on your street to kill the strays and mutts (yes, that’s a thing that happens) and it kills your dog, would you like someone to tell you “that’s not sad, that’s literally what poison is for”?
Using a tool for its intended use has zero relation to it being sad.
[9 comments hidden]
[8 comments hidden]
[7 comments hidden]
That would be the first step to addressing the actual issues: Who will advance the field, assuming that generative AI will always be limited to copying instead of innovating? What will be the place in society for the people that lose their job due to these changes? etc.
[3 comments hidden]
And I wish people on HN would steel man arguments and not assume intentions in others, but here we are. There was no “appeal to emotion”, veiled or otherwise. The example used harming dogs because hopefully most¹ of us can agree that’s repulsive and bad.
Everything else you’re saying has nothing to do with the point. AI isn’t the point (hint: that’s why I didn’t mention it), the point is spelled out in plain English at the end of the comment:
> Using a tool for its intended use has zero relation to it being sad.
¹ I promise you that qualifier is necessary. I’ve seen some vile opinions on HN.
[11 comments hidden]
He said it's sad, and no matter how you want to spin it, it still is incredibly sad and depressing that we're hailing the age of "semantic photocopiers" as some sort of intellectual achievement.
[8 comments hidden]
[4 comments hidden]
[3 comments hidden]
On top of this is the gross ethical concerns where all AI companies were allowed to steal all of this information/wisdom/art to train these models. At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
We choose temporary sensory pleasure over a healthy society.
[hidden]
I think the concern should be more on "you can't just extrapolate the same process forever and expect the same kind of outcome". Just because it was good in small amounts before doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently good to have an infinite capability to do that.
Regardless of all of that, I think it's important if we do have the AIs we're making we treat it as a common good in terms of wealth (regardless if people were paid) rather than a way to funnel a small amount of money to the companies who initially drive it as we are now. I.e. don't even mind if we "steal" (copy) everyone's available outputs as long as we all decide it should really benefit everyone rather than a handful.
[hidden]
No, I definitely see the difference, but I'm acknowledging that many people probably never cared all that much about how a beautiful thing is made, or at least not as much as they care about being able to have it.
I think it's a net good for the world for more people to be able to afford the things they like (after accounting for all externalities), even though of course it sucks for the craftsmen that lose their economic basis in the process.
> At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
I'm pretty sure this was little consolation to e.g. the Swing Rioters [1]. I suspect that this only seems less bad in hindsight. For many people whose livelihood was destroyed by mechanized agriculture, the power loom and other advances of technology during industrialization, I'm pretty sure it seemed equally catastrophic, if not more (18th century government welfare programs were somewhat lacking compared to modern standards).
All that said, while I do believe in human rights, I don't think there should be something like a "right for everyone to continue living like they are used to", which ultimately always means something like economic protectionism, artificial/subsidized demand etc. I'd much rather we find dignified ways to manage the transition for everybody than to engage in some elaborate pretense of economic necessity when there isn't one. If we only grant value or even basic human rights to economically productive workers, maybe that's something worth addressing anyway?
[hidden]
We've been talking about being sad about a lot of different things in this thread.
But here's another thing to be sad about (somewhat related to what I was originally sad about): building "semantic photocopier" is probably quite an intellectual achievement, but so was the atom bomb. intellectual achievements, even impressive ones, can't be assumed to be good.
To hail a "semantic photocopier" requires a pretty myopic and parochial view. Looked at holistically, this stuff amounts to a project to rub out the human and replace it with cheap, inhuman slop. One aspect if that is when I see a picture like this, it's ruined because when I look at it I'm unsure if I'm communing with a human or getting fooled by a simulacrum. Another aspect is how the slop undermines the viability of creative and intellectually engaging professions.
We really ought to look at the kind of world we want to live in (which would probably have maximum satisfying creative work, and a minimum of drudgery), preserve the good parts of what we have, and focus on intellectual achievements to subtract the bad parts. But instead we're just mindlessly building whatever we can manage, damn the consequences or end result (which seems to be: more drudgery, less creative expression).
[hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
The guy should cherish the style he likes and be proud – just like I refuse to give up my en and em dashes.
[5 comments hidden]
I tried giving AI all the plans, descriptions, 2D artist renders, and pictures of the house under construction so that it could make a render with a bunch of different options to help me choose.
The textures were surprisingly good, but the overall plan was a total disaster, even if I tried to guide it. It's two semi detached houses, but there was just one really long house. There was either one too many floor or one missing. The windows were totally random. And the orientation/positioning of the buildings on the plot had nothing to do with the plan. It even hallucinated stairs to reach the property when the whole thing is flat.
All of this to say I don't think AI is there yet to build this kind of illustrations based on just a floor plan and some pictures.
[hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
[hidden]
I'm sure with a bit more efforts/tokens, you can do something amazing, with a virtual visit and so on.
[22 comments hidden]
I think it's just an extension of my not caring to "tinker" with my professional workspace. I have all stock OS backgrounds, always preferred a GUI editor/IDE. Barely any customizations that aren't tied to significant velocity improvements.. IDK. I'm not a "space" tinkerer; physical or digital.
[hidden]
[hidden]
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
[hidden]
Adding off-peak controls for electrical devices, water heaters, thermostats, EV charging, etc just makes sense so you don't have to think too hard about it.
I also really enjoy setting lighting for different moods - specifically when watching movies, and that's easy to do from the couch :)
[hidden]
I never was interested in the tinkering side. The functional side has been very handy.
For example, smart thermostats reduced the heating bill 40% while leaving the place warmer where we actually are.
Smart dimmers on lamps let you dim them in the evening, or turn all the lights off with one push.
Your use cases may vary and the answer may be none do it but a good level of smart home things are quite practical.
[hidden]
But now I need a way to monitor the status of a system I’m using to prevent a water line from freezing, and suddenly all this home automation stuff seems very useful.
[7 comments hidden]
1 - My child is a runner. Zigbee door position sensors talk to home assistant and play sounds when a door is unlocked or opened.
2 - I'm super private. Giving people a key to my house is not something I'm comfortable with. I use Unifi Access + ESPHome + Zwave deadbolt to get the level of control I'm comfortable with. The doorbell also plays a sound in the house (in addition to the app on my phone)
3 - I have an under counter water cooler that runs way too hot. Zigbee temp sensor + Zigbee powerbar + simple exhaust fan keeps it cool.
4 - I dislike having 15 tv remotes and I have a more traditional AV setup (not sonos). I use events on the TV to control the audio (power on, volume, infer input selection)
AI has made all this a lot easier. I don't reall put a ton of effort in anymore, whereas before I'd have to fumble with configs.
[hidden]
However this week spent an hour with claude to migrate to tailscale, latest home assistant update, sensor setup and filtering for my rtl433 antenna, connected hue lights while we're at it, migrated to latest pihole version and put everything in git in one nice compose file with a step by step instruction on how everything was setup and which account sign ups were needed. I still checked every step and manually approved stuff, but the remote session feature made this easy to finish.
[4 comments hidden]
That makes me uncomfortable, electronics controlling physical access sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm glad we have the options though, so different people can customize to the level that makes them feel safe.
[3 comments hidden]
And the most important thing(s) that any experienced HA automation geek knows is:
1) Always have a manual way to control a device if HA goes down.
2) Local only, no cloud.
[hidden]
For a home, I'd argue that you should fail open, for safety. So now I'm sleeping or out of the country and the software fails and the doors unlock.
Then there's the quality of the software. Home Assistance is probably fairly good, but the software in the devices probably isn't. All the demonstrations I've seen of home automation, regardless of supposed quality and interoperability has been, in my mind, yanking as all hell. If an IoT sensor reports nothing, is that because there's nothing to report, or has it lost connection, or is the configuration broken? I'd be constantly nervous about the later two. A practical example is tire pressure sensors, I despise them. They are more often than not misreporting, so you learn to ignore them.
And as you say: "any experienced HA automation geek knows", yeah, but I don't want to be a home automation geek, I just want the stuff to work. I don't want to be bothered by setup and configuration, I don't want to think about it, ever.
[hidden]
It is for this reason that my lights (Hue) and switches (Inovelli) are bound in ZigBee groups. HA adds some niceties, but the lights still work if it’s down. Accent lights I have bound to the Hue Bridge, because their app adds features HA doesn’t have, and they aren’t required for emergency egress.
The only gap I have, I think, is that because I’ve set all bulbs to respond to power restoration after a cut in last known state, if everything somehow lost its Zigbee binding, putting switches into dumb mode locally still wouldn’t help. However, since that’s an improbable scenario, I accept the remote possibility in exchange for not being awakened from lights coming on in the middle of the night. Plus I keep flashlights / headlamps throughout the house.
[hidden]
Example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DR9CMGZ
[hidden]
[hidden]
Like plugging in an old AC into a smart plug to manually turn it on remotely (make sure it had enough amps)
I will say though monitoring my air quality with a proper "smart" device (dedicated to monitoring) has been very eye opening
[hidden]
No, we were renovating the electrics and my boss got all excited and asked about all sorts of automation. We did none of it. The closet thing I have to smart home things is PoE in more network drops than I really need.
Frankly I don't want to deal with it, I have zero desire to debug my home. It even pisses me off that my car charger needs to be online, because I don't understand why it needs networking. If it's to prevent people from misusing it, just add the option of a padlock.
I have zero trust in IoT devices, both from a security perspective and from a functionality point of view.
[hidden]
You are not. I have no interest in having my appliances spy on me, or hit me with sudden unexpected costs or subscriptions, or being hacked.
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
4 years later I have more than 50 relays and sensors in 2 houses, controlling water pumps, irrigation, AC, thermostats, monitoring energy consumption and allowing energy optimizations and saving manual work. I have a smart water valve on my desk waiting to be installed and I need to add a few more thermostats (energy is so expensive these days), otherwise I am almost done.
I have nothing fancy like light themes and moods. I have solid solar-AC-heating optimizations with the temperature sensors and window open sensors; I have a decent irrigation setup and also external lights control. That's it. I am not a fan of tinkering with microcontrollers, I did not even modded or used custom firmware to any of it, I am just pragmatic in using the tech where I need and for what brings me benefits.
[hidden]
We're building a custom home and it's only been through this process that I've taken an interest in smart home / home automation. Why? Mostly because
1) building speakers into your walls & ceilings means you need to control their input somehow, and your gear is going to be in a wiring closet
2) if you don't want Alexas or Nest devices sitting around on horizontal surfaces, your voice control options are limited
3) you don't want your security camera footage stored in the cloud
4) you do want a single pane of glass for visibility into things like your HVAC, your irrigation system, your security system, your garage door status, and your AV gear.
Home Assistant is tremendously helpful as a FOSS alternative to Control4, Crestron, Savant, Lutron, and Josh.ai, but you can't entirely escape the "big tech" part of the ecosystem because each of the primary systems (say, your AV streaming or your power shades) will still require use of the OEM's product. Many of which have integrations with or APIs exposed to Home Assistant, but not all.
There are some quality of life improvements available through automation, but most of it is incremental and only enthusiasts would really care.
[hidden]
But being able to control my garage door when I'm not home is definitely very useful. Get a RATGDO and it's entirely local, no cloud. Use your remote access solution of choice to get into your local network to operate it.
[hidden]
[11 comments hidden]
That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.
[hidden]
In general using a large setback will save more energy by not constantly cooling the home than it costs to return the house to a desired setpoint later.
[hidden]
Most people actually measuring it come up with more savings when cutting the AC during the longer spans when nobody's there (usually during the hottest part of the day).
[4 comments hidden]
Even among people who service AC units I've encountered the misconception that it is more energy efficient to keep a space at the desired temperature than it is to let it heat up and then cool it back down again, but thermodynamics say it is not so. It could conceivably be more cost efficient if your energy costs are variable.
[3 comments hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
Air temperature is only one contributing factor for comfort in a home. Surface temperatures take longer to achieve and the larger the gradient the longer it can take.
There are multiple factors to take into account, including the highest temperature the home gets to, that is dependant on location and weather patterns.
If you keep the temperature in the home to 28-30 degrees then later cooling to lower temperatures before bed time you can reduce costs and energy expenditures than if you let it rise to 34 degrees or more and only lowering it when you get home. Or, what you save in costs you expend in otherwise like poor sleep.
Lowering it advance, on a schedule makes more sense if you want surface temperatures to also be reduced.
The blanket disabling of air conditioning when not home is not the only solution, and often is sub-optimal.
[2 comments hidden]
[hidden]
Regular heating can waste a lot of energy to heat the entire structure of the house, especially if you have thick walls, so it does more make sense to try and keep the temperature stable.
[hidden]
Admittedly, this will probably not work that well in a Minnesota winter, or an Arizona summer, but I think a surprising number of people could benefit.
[3 comments hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
Do you automate music selection too? My music taste is very different depending on mood, not to mention my kids.
Or cameras?
I also automate lights but it's pretty nice to be able to control them manually too. Or just pause automations during winter/summer.
Granted I don't use a layout like OP but still.
[hidden]
Not everywhere has really unpredictable weather. And I have a garage at home and at work, and the garage leads directly into the building. I go to work without ever considering rain (though I do keep an umbrella in the car for when I have to go shopping, etc.).
[hidden]
I think my grandma would think such a thing impossible.... Especially when it's 2am and you just need to get to the right app to turn the bathroom lights on...
[2 comments hidden]
IDK how much the illustrator was paid (they're Jakarta based and seem like a freelancer), but I think the result was worth it.
The arts have always survived because of patrons, regardless of how favourable or unfavourable the economy was for them. I'm not saying this is the only solution to protecting it from AI, but it's one worth thinking about if you have the resources to do so.
[hidden]
Thank you.
[2 comments hidden]
Tricky question how do you know that person did a real drawing, not generated it in codex/claude code?
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
[3 comments hidden]
https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
[hidden]
The "mid-wit" home automation philosophy, I think, strikes a nice middle ground.
[hidden]
But speaking as somebody also using Home Assistant, I'd bet the author has everything set up without internet access, fully locally controllable, and entirely operable the old fashioned way if Home Assistant goes down.
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[5 comments hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[3 comments hidden]
"A flickering fireplace, a softly lit garden, and a smart home the whole family finally enjoys." "not only in my house, but in a hand-drawn picture of it"
[hidden]
People think of creativity in one shape, but it comes in all shapes and sizes.
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
Go to the store. Buy a valve and some pipe. Mount the valve near the door like any other lazy person. Or, if the outside is too scary, buy an electric valve and wire it to an indoor light switch, maybe even a smart switch so you need not rise from the couch.
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[21 comments hidden]
[hidden]
You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.
[2 comments hidden]
[hidden]
I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!
[5 comments hidden]
[4 comments hidden]
[2 comments hidden]
It's just not a typical thing to do pre or post AI. "Revealed preference" doesn't seem like a useful lens without some basic degree of awareness that a choice even exists.
And on the flip side, I have a friend who commissioned some kind of avatar for social media from an artist friend of friend for the first time in their life. They loved the result a lot and since then have commissioned a bunch of little random things once they realized it was a thing anyone could easily do with a few bucks. For stuff like their WoW character/guild, D&D, social media, etc.
They make less than six figures, each request was <$100 IIRC. Budgeted basically like any other gaming/hobby purchase for personal entertainment.
[hidden]
So, sure 900usd or a part of that system is a lot of money and I wouldn't do it. But I've spent 900usd on techthings with a very diminishing amount of return :)
[7 comments hidden]
[6 comments hidden]
[4 comments hidden]
[3 comments hidden]
[hidden]
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1wyyrd6/comm...
[16 comments hidden]
[7 comments hidden]
[4 comments hidden]
This is typically the kind of hacking project that is preposterously non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers, let alone regular folks. Now, for the first time ever, AI is making it actually palatable for everyone who wants it done to have it done... and certainly much cheaper too at an equivalent quality level.
[2 comments hidden]
1. paying an illustrator is non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers? and
2. AI would have done it at an equivalent quality level?
[hidden]
For (1) the vast majority of people don't want to spend what's probably on the roundabout of a thousand dollars for their homelab's homepage. You can easily see this in almost every homelabbing discussion on reddit or even here, where everyone focuses on cheap/hackish solutions to avoid overspending... except in hardware of course =) It's kind of become a meme at this point.
For (2), certainly, especially so considering that the author gave the illlustrator blueprints, photos, instructions, etc. for the commissioned illustrator to convert into dynamically-compatible svgs.
There's a lot of top-down implementing there with very low bottom-up artistry. This doesn't at all take from the final quality -which is pretty good- but it makes it easily replicable using current-gen AI.
[hidden]
[5 comments hidden]
[3 comments hidden]
the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
I used AI to get it draw it. What worked is giving floor plan I already had and putting some labels on it - brown dining table here, fridge here, etc.
What didn't work was giving it bunch of photos and asking it to just figure it out. For things it did figure out - it was nice, but it made way too make mistakes.
The entire point of it was to put light switches and heaters on the map so I don't have to fiddle with a number of toggles in a table/list.
p.s. I wish I had huge eink display for home assistant dashboards. Some concepts I made and seen online are glorious.
ideasphere[8 comments hidden]
It’s cool they hired an actual person but if I was so happy with their work to write-up a whole article about it, I’d be crediting them in a much more prominent way!
ihuman[5 comments hidden]
elicash[4 comments hidden]
People are just never happy and always going to have something to say. Even if you don't go the AI route and hire an illustrator, even if you credit work, someone has to be critical.
melenaboija[3 comments hidden]
elicash[2 comments hidden]
oniony[hidden]
Shorel[hidden]
In this day and era such a thing will feel like yet another ad. We react on a very defensive way against ads.
The way it is actually done, it generates genuine interest, and you have the link to the artist at exactly the point where your interest is at the highest.
baxtr[hidden]
I used an illustration to…