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!
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.
Wayback Machine confirms it was there a few days ago.
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.
Do you "demand money" when you do the job you were contracted to do? You make it sound like they're money grubbing and greedy for expecting payment for their services.
Whatever it may sound like, the illustrator didn't just do something nice and help the fellow human (client). If you say "but the illustrator needs the money to support himself", maybe OP also needs the money, maybe his grandparents are ill and have medical bills.
Yes? The illustrator could have decided not to pay for a prominent ad, and indeed they did, and they did not get a prominent ad. This is business, why are we acting like artists are some ineffable fairy dust? (I know why: politics.) If an ad brings more business, why not pay? It's not a friend, it's a business relationship.
As the spouse of an illustrator, I applaud the author for hiring an actual artist. We've seethed at the way artists work was scraped online for the training of these models, recreating their very style for the creation of these infringement engines.
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.
I'm a 3d modeler and a software engineer. AI didn't steal my work. Anybody could have looked at my repositories and art and learned from it. Just because something came along that is a really good learner doesn't make that suddenly be theft.
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.
Most artists I know never had a problem with other artists learning from them. But they do have a problem with corporations training on their data without any sort of consent and then selling a product that takes away their jobs, they never agreed to it and they never would have shared it to them.
Then they presumably are fine with open weights models made by hobbyists by scraping publicly available art on boorus and such, yes? because they are neither made by corporations nor are they selling any product.
(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)
Multi-billion-dollar copy-machines are the same as a person just dropping by and having a look? If you can't tell the difference, what are you? Be you human or robot?
The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".
It's not sad, it's literally what those tools are for.
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.)
He didn't say it's illegal (even if it's debatable and kinda loophole-ish, but lets pretend for now that society has fully embraced a world-encompassing copyright exception if you're named Altman or Amodei).
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.
If you consider it incredibly sad and depressing for the majority of people to have cheap access to things that would have cost a small fortune due to being inevitably hand-crafted only a few years ago, I hope you're renouncing clothing manufactured using automated looms, printed books etc. as well?
Absolutely, I think fast fashion brands like Shein and TEMU-style shops are incredibly sad, toxic for the economy and the environment, and I've never bought anything from them.
> It's not sad, it's literally what those tools are for.
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.
I designed my basement renovation using a combination of image modelsand a 3D scanned Houzz Pro FloorPlan, and I gotta say it REALLY helped the contractor deliver on the vision that I had.
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.
I’m genuinely curious how you use image models for this type of design. I need a way for my wife and I to visualize a remodel project and don’t know where to start or which tools are best for the job.
dump the plan, make sure it has height etc, after dump pictures if needed,
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.
It’s not different . One case you chose tiles , you take a picture of your bathroom , and give it a rough sized of tile + room and it will
Give you visual check . Second option if you want it also to calculate materials . This is a 3d path . First one can be done by just chat , another one is coding agent .
I tried a couple of the web-based design-a-floorplan sites and all of them were kinda like using crayons to draw a circuit diagram. Ended up doing a pile of sketches on paper, then when I had what I liked finalised it in Visio and sent it through to an architect who turned it into proper plans which, since they were architect-drawn plans I had to check for f_ckery and then the builder checked it for stuff I'd missed but ended up with a rebuild that was exactly what we wanted.
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.
yes, it's amazingly/depressingly good at things that would take a $1000+ software, and years of education just a year ago. Now I'm doing this with leftover claude/codex weekly quotas( i do have both due to some testings at work).
Sad, but at the same time it's worth asking how many people would actually pay an artist to do this, versus those who would never do this unless it was for AI.
I want mine in watercolor. I’ve been wanting to take a watercolor class, so I figure this can be my mini-thesis project. I’ll still pass it to an AI to refine and animate.
Fwiw, I'm currently having an house built, and I was asked to choose the colour of the garage door.
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.
You ought to give it a blender install and ask it to model the house for you & show you color options for the garage door, I bet it would be much closer. I had Astra w/ Codex model rigged miter saws, table saws and router tables for my carpentry simulator [0], it did a surprisingly decent job.
It's definitely a better approach. I was just checking what the models were capable of with a simple one off approach. And honestly, it mostly did what I required, which was the texture work. The rest didn't really matter in my case.
I'm sure with a bit more efforts/tokens, you can do something amazing, with a virtual visit and so on.
That would probably be better suited with a vision model of some sort or some other model specifically trained on the task at hand. It's not a problem with AI in general but rather using a general AI for a special use case.
Agree, and same here. But upon some reflection I've concluded that I think I and you are the problem. We're essentially assisting AI in taking something away from us by immediately associating a style with AI.
The guy should cherish the style he likes and be proud – just like I refuse to give up my en and em dashes.
>> Try starting the sprinkler with the button on the unit itself, then running out of the garden before you get soaked.
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 25$ smart switch.
Gotta admit, pretty cool! I'm just like.. My interest in smart home stuff is near zero; am I alone?
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.
I think the audience for home automation is U-shaped. There are folks who are neck deep in it and care deeply, and others who couldn't care less, but not many in the middle. The middle 90% is decently served by Apple, Google and Amazon, too, so there's no need for any real passion or exploration by most anyway.
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.
I just like being able to control my lights and thermostat from my phone, I’ve never bothered with higher level automation outside of having a lamp turn on at dusk automatically lol
I also have limited interest, but alas, I have home assistant and I'm not sure I could fulfill my needs without it.
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.
Hah second the AI part. Started a home assistant setup years ago to setup water leak sensors with alerts to my phone, but didn't feel comfortable enough having home assistant accessible from the web, so besides writing brittle yaml files now also had to deal with open VPN etc etc and after major update my config files were incompatible and with kids just didn't get back to it.
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.
> I use Unifi Access + ESPHome + Zwave deadbolt to get the level of control I'm comfortable with.
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.
What would really make you feel uncomfortable is there is near 100% probability that there are electronics controlling your physical access to buildings you use on a daily basis. Maybe not your home, but other acess.
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.
> Always have a manual way to control a device if HA goes down.
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.
I just feel incredibly uncomfortable with something as complex as modern software controlling something as basic as physical security. Now modern locks aren't exactly create, but adding on a layer of software just provides you with an additional layer that can fail.
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.
It was fun to play with for a while. But after some integration broke for the third time I didn't bother to set things up again, and I really don't miss it that much.
I was not interested about smart home. At all. Then my father asked me to help him install an automatic switch for external lights in the yard. I never did that, I used a Shelly relay and Home Assistant, it was simpler (yes, sounds strange, but it was simpler). Then I found that I can automate some stuff in the house that was manual until then, so I did some.
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.
I have kids, and I have to leave the house quickly, so being able to set the house for "away" mode or make sure you shut off all the lights when you are all in bed is really nice.
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 :)
> My interest in smart home stuff is near zero; am I alone?
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.
I basically don’t care and until recently I had no reason to. My house has no AC and I heat with wood.
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.
I'm the complete opposite of what you said in the second paragraph, I am very comfortable and appreciative of my tailored dotfiles, but I will say I don't stare at my light switch and think about tinkering with it usually. I do have one or two stupidly placed switches, like when the door to one room is closed I can't turn one of the ceiling fan lights on/off without opening the door (because the switch is outside the room), and also I have a bunch of switched outlets (awful to hit by accident if a computer is plugged into one) from boomers with a lamp fetish living here previously, but otherwise I'm happy with my light switches. Also I sit in the dark most of the time so even if I could turn every light in an area on/off at once, I'm not sure I'd do it often.
I have a time of use electric plan and adjust load (grow lights, dehumidifier, AC, battery backups) at certain times to save money. Smart home can be pure tinkering but it can control some pretty practical things.
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
I think it's worth asking, especially with agentic AI tasks that can cost upwards of $20, whether a human could've done a better job on at least one aspect of your project. Fiverr exists.
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.
That is lovely. Certainly puts my barebones 2D SVG floor plan to shame. (On the other hand, there's 20+ sensors on there which might be tricky to fit onto something like that image.)
This would only be true for very short time periods (minutes) that cause the compressor to power up more times than it would have otherwise as compressor startup incurs transiently high power consumption, but a thermostat will usually do this many times a day, so the period of time that this has any practical implication is very short (<1 hour). At longer time periods, it is always more energy efficient to disable cooling and restart it only when temperature control is again desired.
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.
I remember the same misconception existing about fluorescent lamps in the past. "They consume more when turning on, so the gains vs incandescent are negated". Which was verifiably false to me at the time by checking the label on a lamp.
This is a common advice I'm not sure I've ever seen properly explained and proven. It's mostly "we asked the experts!" kind of 3min tidbits with a guy in a corporate polo shirt talking assertively to the camera.
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).
Pretty sure that is completely false, though it is popular to say. It 100% fails even a basic sniff test. The rate of energy transfer from outside to inside will be greatest when the inside is coolest, so the air conditioner will have to work harder overall to keep it that way.
It can be true, but usually not for AC units, as these are quite effective at only heating/cooling the ambient air and not the walls, ceiling etc.
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.
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.
I can't help but notice that the displayed CO2 levels in your example images are quite high. If they're screenshots of the system in action I would change the air in your home more often. If they're just made up numbers, then never mind :)
That's about perfect for my office, keeps my hands limber and avoids carpal tunnel, but not warm enough to sweat. I do like it more like 19C at night for sleeping, though.
I've commissioned art before via the Krita web forum's job section. Lots of bright young artists, many of them students, that do great work for affordable prices to build their portfolios.
You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.
I never said it was lack of budget, it's lack of interest. I'd honestly rather have a $30 print of a Picasso, a patent, a blueprint, or a movie poster than pay someone for custom art, nor do I think one needs to buy or commission something for it to have a personal connection (for example the ratty BTTF poster I had in college, or the Chicago Lyric Opera advertisement I saved out of a nursing home dumpster).
I'm not sure what that is supposed to convey. This person was able to scrape together a couple bucks to pay someone to draw a picture of their house in a specific way. You've never paid for any art or entertainment? Netflix?
*$900, and no, the average person can’t afford $900 for bespoke art (or more likely, has no interest in paying $900 for one). Heck, I don’t see how you can look at the explosion of AI art online and not come to the conclusion the average person would much rather have the same for near free than paying hundreds of dollars. To me, that’s a pretty obvious revealed preference.
The overwhelming majority of people of any income level will never pay to commission any kind of art or even be familiar with the possibility to consider as a practical option.
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.
But i mean, i dont think he thought of this as an "art-object" more like a ... house-control-kiosk-whatever. And people spend tons of money on those things. Eink-screens for thousands. Control4 for whatever amount. Homey-hub for..300usd? Hue-lights for hundreds etc.
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 :)
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.
Pro tip you don’t even need an illustrator. While I do encourage hiring humans to do this work you can also use PolyCam with a phone that supports lidar, export it to Claude with Blender and voila.
It's _better_ that the illustrations were made by an illustrator, but it still would have been cool and front-page-worthy if that hadn't been the case.
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.
Commissioning art like this is at most a few hundred dollars. As was posted elsewhere, there are lots of young artists that need to pad out their portfolios, as well as artists in places where the cost of living is significantly cheaper. This isn't a multi-thousand-dollar thing that only the 1% could afford.
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.
Some quick googling suggests that in the US, only 60% of people have iphones, and only 50% of iphones in use are pro or max. I would guess that HN skews towards more recent and higher end phones, but also skews towards android. Maybe saying most people don't have lidar is inaccurate, but I think it's still accurate to say the majority of people don't have lidar.
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!
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