Geometric and exponential are the same, except one is discrete and the other is continuous.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.In my understanding, geometric is xa, where x changes over time, and exponential is ax, where x changes over time.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 26th 2025 at 3:12:19 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"That's polynomial you're thinking of. Geometric is a^n, where n is an integer that changes over time.
Edited by petersohn on Jun 26th 2025 at 9:14:15 PM
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.Hmm. Now that's what I call a scaling problem!
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Funny story: I just bought a new room air conditioner to help deal with the garbage A/C I have in my house. It is WiFi enabled so you can control the settings remotely — kind of a "smart home" affair.
It makes sense if you think about it. Adjust the temperature before you get home so it's nice and comfy. I'm not seriously concerned about someone remotely hacking it and using the onboard processor to mine bitcoin.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 30th 2025 at 12:12:43 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I don't particularly care about the smart home features. Sounds like a perfectly good idea to me in general. My issue with the unit I bought is that it was missing parts out of the box.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Honestly, smart houses aren't so horrible as that smart appliances have their security being implemented by the lowest bidder (and generally not something you can fix because they're cutting costs by hardwiring a lot of this in).
And, as regards the dehumidifier, I could see some benefits from online updates if you can patch security holes, or deal with bugs ("In certain corner cases involving 77% humidity and a temperature between 80 and 92 degrees Fahrenheit, and a malformed packet is sent when checking if it's turned on in the web app, the monitoring loop hits a non-terminating condition where it ceases to receive instructions and continuously turns on until the motors burn out and catch fire").
Edited by FuzzyBoots on Jun 30th 2025 at 12:27:48 PM
The idea is fine. It's the implementation, as you note. But that's true of a lot of things.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"So remotely activated air-con, heating and even washing machines/dryers I get, thouse are all things I want to be able to turn on in advance of coming home so they have time to kick it or run their cycle such that stuff doesn’t sit inside and get damp/creased.
But lights, fridges and dishwashers? Why would I need to activate them if I’m not home (outside a super smart fridge which tells you its contents so you can check what you’re missing while at the shop)?
I suspect that a lot of smart home tech was developed not for general consumers but for people with mobility difficulties who have trouble with the normal devise interface but can manage an app. That’s all good, but then I wish companies woudlnt try and market such stuff to general consumers.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranWhy do I feel like some executive somewhere actually used the line in the alt text?
My musician pageI love this comic because it sums up my opinion on the matter nicely. I have IOT stuff, but I mostly build them myself, and if I buy such things, if possible buy ones that only connect to local network.
Heaters, air conditioners, etc. — they are useful as it can save a lot of energy if you only turn them on sometime before you come home. Washing machines, less so, as it's perfectly fine if it finishes an hour or so before you come home, so it should be fine to just program them to finish around the time you arrive.
Ovens — even less useful than washing machines. You won't leave unprepared food in the oven for a prolonged time, so again, it's fine if you just program it to finish in time before you leave.
Lights — they are useful if you set up some automation for them. I have some outdoor lights that are set to turn on at the evening and turn off when I go to sleep, or turn on when I arrive home.
Gates, doors — I wouldn't connect my front door to any network, I don't trust the security of anything, whether I build it or not, whether it connects to LAN or directly to the Internet. Gates are less critical, as anything valuable should have locked at least one lockable door behind the gate. And while a gate have usefulness for opening/closing them remotely, but most of the time you don't need to open it from that far, so a simple radio-controlled remote should be enough (something practically all motorized gates have by default).
Cameras — Having remote access to them is useful, but I wouldn't trust any company to handle a camera in my house or garden.
Cars — Again, it has some, but limited usefulness, but it's just too dangerous to be connected to the internet. I know lots of them do, but if I ever to buy a new car, I'd find one that isn't, even if it means buying an older, used one.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.Unless you've got a high social profile for some reason, door locks are a bit of a sinecure. Anyone seriously wanting to break in won't bother defeating them, but equally you won't attract the kind of attention that brings out the intrusion specialists.
Investing heavily in security might even make you more likely to be targeted, since people think you have something valuable to protect.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 30th 2025 at 3:08:13 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The problem with the Io T isn't that some Russian hacker is going to take over your house. It's that your appliances will stop working one day and it will be something happening out on the cloud, and nothing you can do about it.
Plus, how much extra are we paying for this service?
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.The most practical of the problems is that the manufacturer closes down or just stops supporting your model, so the device you'd paid a lot extra to be smart will at best work as a dumb device, or at worst stops working at all. It's not just a theoretical problem but something that happens, and not just to small manufacturers. More theoretical, but still not inconceivable danger is that you lose access to your devices because the manufacturer doesn't like you.
As a rule of thumb, if a device relies on a particular external service to work, then you don't own it. You get the worst part out of owning and leasing it. You still have to pay full price (or even more because it's "smart") and bear all maintenance costs, yet it can be taken away from you any time the manufacturer decides to.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.

New exercise for the students: project the increase in weather balloon launches over time using linear, geometric, and exponential functions and calculate how many years it will be before the balloons themselves dominate weather.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 26th 2025 at 9:21:05 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"