I know this trope is popular but it's hardly true. I work in tech and have a fully wired / smart home, as do several others I know.
That being said, we are picky about which smart components we use.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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it entirely depends on how much people want to faff about with that stuff, it's much easier to just get a dumb phone and pretend it's the 1980's
Home assistant with all local devices. This meme is getting tired.
Yeah, I have iot devices that are on their own wifi. Lover the automation for the thermostat. I am degoogling, last one is my phone, going to try out graphanie. Doorbell is poe, next is a door lock.
This meme is always spouted by paper engineers trying to fit in, meanwhile all the neckbeards can't go a second without mentioning home assistant lol.
I call it pop security. It's people with no actual background just jerking each other off trying to make it seem like they all know more about the topic than they really do.
Do you use home assistant? All my shit is in the cloud and now they're slowly starting to take away features and putting them into subscriptions. Even google assistance don't have continued conversation without paying extra since gemini. I'm reluctant to try home assistant since it seems complicated.
Home assistant has spent the last couple of years focused on improving usability to new users. A lot of it will self organise. What doesn't can mostly be set up easily via nice gui fronts, and easy to follow menus.
It's got an insane amount of functionality, which can be scary. However, you don't have to touch a lot of that. You only need to play with the bits you want, and it will hold your hand for most of it.
Couldn't do without it. I hope that it becomes so accessible that everyone can run it in the future, but it's not hard to dip your toes in now. If you don't have any dedicated HW you can run 24/7, you can get a cheap RPi. If you're ok splurging a hundred, try something like a zimaboard.
The latter has the advantage of coming with an app store, which is docker wrapped in a click-to-play coat. I have a couple zimas but I use compose, so haven't tried it, but it should be very friendly.
Yes
Spot on. Zero smart features in this house.
I don't even use the moisture sensing settings on my dryer. Fuck you machine, you don't get to decide when my pants are dry enough. You will run for 56 minutes and you'll shut the fuck up about it.
It would probably be a short series but I wonder how a cartoon strip about a low-esteem appliance would carry.
Just read Hitchhiker's Guide. Marvin would count, but there's also depressed doors and other unfortunately sentient objects.
Ha, Marvin was anything but low esteem though! Miserable, frustrated, cynical, yes, but certainly knew how underutilized he was and constantly made reference to it because he knew his own capability. It was the idiot universe with which he couldn't reconcile.
In Red Dwarf, Dave Lister owns a self-aware toaster. He doesn't like toast. The toaster hates him for it
Oh a temperature probe? You know what we did back in the day? We guessed when the meat was done, and if we wanted it raw we just ate it raw.
"I require me meat to be exactly 136.7 degrees American" - ranting of the weak and insane.
I'm in IT and have a home assistant and pfsense. I run my own photo cloud server and even my own server for jabber/messaging my family.
Internet connected systems are ok as long as you're protected.
What do you use for photos? Is it Linux or windows?
Not parent, but I run Immich and I really love it. Very integrated with mobile, works great on desktop. Docker on Linux, works great on a small N100 NUC.
I've heard of that one. I'll look into it tonight
I'm using Immich as well. I run this from my proxmox as a docker.
I'm the opposite. I used to build computers. I've beat a bunch of cool video games over the last 40 years. I've used Windows for 30 years, Word for 25 years, Excel for 20 years. I started my smartphone journey in 2010 with Android (iPhone wasn't available where I lived for years after) and I did custom firmware, root, Xposed, all that shit.
I'm a Mac user at home and an iPhone user now, and I have a pretty basic job. My coworkers ask me why I don't work in IT. I say I don't want to hate computers. I keep it a hobby. I'm still a gamer. I'm good with Windows but I'm tired of Microsoft's shit. Apple does a couple things that annoys me. I know I could put Linux on my M-series Macs if I really wanted to. So far, I don't. If my Intel PCs didn't die, they'd be running Linux now. I didn't buy Macs just for the hell of it. I never wanna use another kind of laptop (though I suppose that could change), but for a desktop... I still like my Mac desktop, but I also wanna repurpose an old Dell workstation as a Linux server? But also I feel like my most tinkering days were behind me and I'd probably get hacked trying to do something clever.
I guess the tl;dr is, I got old, I got lazy, and I chose easy. We do get some cool tricks. So OP was kind of on this meme posting spree? I copied the links on my MacBook, pasted them into Safari on my iPhone (universal copy/paste is so useful!) and then sent the memes to my wife. Typing it all out I realise I have Telegram on my MacBook as well, but now I have the memes in my meme folder on my iPhone, so win/win?
You're pretty much the tech enthusiast in the meme.
Maybe in spirit? I have a friend who invited me to his place, he was out shopping, and he sent me a temporary key to open his front door. It stuck itself in Apple Wallet, and I used that to unlock his door like I was making a contactless payment. It expired after the one use. I thought that was cool.
I guess I'm partway there. Any Apple guy would be. I'm sure you CAN get Windows and Android machines to talk to one another, but with Apple, all your stuff is accessible from each computer. My iPhone can browse both the Macs and each Mac can browse the iPhone and the other Mac. Like, "it just works." Plus we have an Apple TV and it has all my digital media on it. It's pretty neat.
So yeah... guilty
Well, they said they work in IT, not that they’re any good at it. If they were, they’d be ok implementing technology in their lives since the whole reason to do so is to improve your life. Risk vs reward.
Even cloud based services are ok depending on use case and what controls you can put in place.
When I hear "I work in IT" I take it as "I have a few certifications and mostly do tech support tickets."
Pre-2005 printers can still shoot a loaded gun.
Stay woke.
This shit is always so cringe. I am a fairly powerful STEM wizard who works in a cyber security adjacent field, and has an original dissertation in the area, and there no reason to fear tech as long as you operate it with a proper trust and threat framework. All of these posts just feel like dumb pop-security peacocking.
Like, I have a keypad door lock because I lose my keys a lot and I hate carrying shit around in my pocket. I can explicitly manage guest access in a much more granular way and I don't need to have five different physical keys floating around for different people who might need them. Sure, someone could hack my lock. They could also break the window. My threat profile doesn't really involve state actors hacking my lock. But my trust profile involves needing to manage access to my home in a way which makes a cloud connected lock extremely useful and significantly more secure than handing out keys.
Programmer here. Can confirm.
I hate technology. I just love writing code.
One word, homelabbing