Graceful degredation sounds like the best case scenario, to be honest. Backup power for essentials when the grid goes out, applications that work offline, heating that keeps working without an Internet connection.

It seems obvious but I'm not sure we're heading in that direction.

Progressive enhancement would be better. Then luddites like me could just turn off the bullshit.

We tried PE on the web. It's a great idea and the browsers and languages support it eminently. But most developers (including product people, and engineers like myself) are obsessed with the glamorous option rather than the plain-but-plainly-better lower bandwidth version.

I'm such a luddite. I will never have a smart thermostat, fridge, voice assitant in my home (until it's compulsory).

I feel like progressive enhancement is my choice to make. What do I purchase, what can it do, etc.

Whereas graceful degredation more is the product designers's choice. What does it do when it doesn't get Internet or electricity.

We will have local versions of all of these tools so that there's no downtime

We're going to have more and more bad days in the future as fuel sources become less plentiful and secure and climate change makes it harder to keep data centers running reliably.

Climate change is having and will continue to have significant effects on our physical infrastructure, especially in the coastal areas, areas prone to flooding/drought, and wildfires.

But I don't see data centers/internet/power being an issue. Data centers are already globally distributed and load-balanced. Internet is near-ubiquitous, with growing wired, wireless & even satellite options. Power generation from renewables, along with storage, have been growing at an accelerated pace even despite (or some say because) the pandemic.

Also, an off-grid solution is very feasible: I can easily imagine a near future where I have my "smart home" running on a local Alpaca instance, being powered by my solar roof.

Global distribution and load balancing exist yet we still need DownDetector. One of the reasons data centers go down is because of weather. Picture Cascadia devastating the west coast while a category 5 hurricane pummels the east coast.

Renewables aren't the panacea so many people want them to be.

I can't imagine that near future because despite the feasibility, the companies that manufacture smart home products want people in their thrall. Why go for a one-and-done purchase when that ubiquitous Internet can be used to hold basic functionality hostage for a recurring fee?

Most outages nowadays are caused by misconfigurations or hacking, not individual data centers going down. Think Azure, AWS, etc.

Renewables aren't a panacea, but they exist now and are seeing growing deployment, even without "fuel sources becoming less plentiful". Too late to prevent climate change, but definitely early enough to prevent widespread power scarcity.

Oh, companies will definitely try, and many people will go along with it. But, people who care will continue to maintain self-hosted projects e.g. Home Assistant. Hardware can be jailbroken, and/or small manufacturers will be willing to charge a premium for open/hackable versions. Worst case, many "smart" items can be cobbled together from Raspberry Pi/ESP32/ESP8266.

Also applies to humans:

https://xkcd.com/903/

Mouse over text: "Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy"."

I find that this is no longer working. But I also remember it being reliably working at the time of first reading this. Anyone know when/why it "broke"?

Just tried it on a few entries and it still worked for me. Also cool, if you keep applying the same method after Philosophy, you end up in a couple of clicks in an infinite Entity -> Existence -> Entity loop.