This is literally why no one in my household ever uses the home cinema system except me.

(Fine, my mum plays Switch on it. But for watching movies and stuff.)

My takeaway is that AV receivers, although cool and useful, are surprisingly user-hostile for devices that have big labelled buttons on the front.

🦝 Anyway I got some Tradfri lightbulbs and a ZigBee dongle plugged into a spare Pi on a long USB extension to avoid radio interference, and I went on aliexpress and ordered some cheap ZigBee knobs and buttons so I can set up cosier circadian-rhythm-respecting lights as a sidequest to schedule my water heater and monitor my eventual photovoltaic setup.

^ see that sentence? That's both a legit telling of what I've been up to lately, AND a self-parody shitpost. The only people who recognise it as a legit post are other doomed individuals.

I'm glad I'm in a long term committed relationship because yikes can you imagine trying to use this software while dating

🦌 *tugging at shirt* Hey, do you mind if we turn the light off?

🦝 Sure!

🦌 OK~ wait why is there tape on your lightswitch

🦝 Oh wait yeah. Sorry. *grabs phone* Hold on. *fiddles* Just a sec.

🦌 um... ok?

🦝 Sorry. Just gotta do an update. Sorry. Just a sec. It's not normally like this

🦌 Did you just pull out your phone and start doomscrolling? While I'm right here?

🦝 sorry sorry no it's a different kind of doom, just a second, nearly there, sorry this never happens

🦌 wait my purse is vibrating, someone must be calling me

🤖 HOME ASSISTANT HAS DETECTED. LOVENSE. LUSH. SET UP DEVICE NOW?

🦌 goodnight

Better minds than mine have been warning about this shit since The Twilight Zone was new. What happens in every show that ever had an episode about The House Of The Future? Everyone's impressed for about five minutes and then it all goes wrong and there's usually at least one death.

But on the other hand, cosy lighting and RGB LED coolness so, y'know,

You know the best thing about Home Assistant?

There are some things, if you shit all over them on the internet and say all the ways they messed up, their fanboys will come out and tell you hey no, you just don't understand it yet, it's not shit you are

Home Assistant, the fanboys come out and say haha yeah join the club, wait hold on I've got some even wilder stories, just you wait lol

🦌 *hands curling around coffee cup, worried expression, leaning across table and talking softly* Does your husband know about Home Assistant?

🐩 I dunno, HEY HONEY

🦌 shh! Don't ask him!

🐧 YEAH HON

🐩 NOTHING NEVERMIND

🐩 Why's that?

🦌 It's a cognitohazard. If you ask him about it he'll want to know what it is, and then he'll be doomed.

🐩 Doomed, you say?

🦌 Doomed. It puts your house on the computer. He'll spend three hours a night programming the lights and you'll never see him again.

🐩 Oh my, that sounds awful. *pulling out phone* But you don't seem to be affected by it.

🦌 It seems to mostly affect dads.

🐩 Mostly... *smiles, turns phone around, it displays a big red button* but not exclusively. *press*

🦌 My god

🐩 *presses again*

🐩 Sorry, this is supposed to play the Dramatic Chipmunk sound on the kitchen radio

🐩 sorry

🐩 one sec

🐴 "I use Home Assistant so I ripped all the lightswitches out, wired all my light sockets to be live all the time, and replaced the switches with Smart Switches that radio the computer and tell it to radio the bulb to turn off" ~ actual things that people do with Home Assistant

As someone who works with electricity, my absolute favourite thing in the world is components that are energized while giving the appearance that they are not

An actual forum thread I witnessed:

🐴 Hey my bulbs turn on after a power outage, even though I've got them set to turn on at zero brightness, what gives?

🐑 Yeah turns out there's a safety override so you don't think the socket's safe when it's actually live

🐴 Ugh, that's such bullshit, what are the manufacturers thinking? Has anyone figured out custom firmware for these things?

I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.

🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway.
🐇 o...kay?
🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature.
🐇 What's colour temperature
🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean.
🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful.
🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this.
*awkward four-second pause*
🐇 It's green!
🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation,
🐇 What's saturation
🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and hold and turn anticlockwise. It gets lighter and lighter and then cycles back round to bold colour.
🐇 Coooooool
🐇 Dad... can we make this go on a timer

I put a remote pack in her ceiling fan / light 'cause she couldn't reach the pull cord for the fan, so between the SMART KNOB and the remote control and the lightswitch itself she's got as many competing lightswitches as my dad's Frankenstein Land Rover has gear levers

The ONLY sensible thing involved in this is that if the bulb loses and then regains power, it defaults to being an unremarkable warm white bulb turned on at full brightness.

So we've had the conversation about how the knob works and how the remote pack works and how the light switch works and how if any of these things fails and she needs the light on she's gotta just flip the switch off and on again

This kid's doomed

So you decide to mess with Home Assistant and find out that this means you've gotta program your own dimmer switches.

(at this point, you've already had your Naked Lunch moment and you know the sensible thing is to run screaming but you're ploughing on regardless knowing whatever happens next, it's on you, bought and paid for)

So you write your dimmerSwitch.yaml in yaml which simultaneously stands for "Yet Another Markup Language" and "YAML Ain't a Markup Language" and is a cursed way to try and program, and you've filled your little yammal up with comments so when it breaks you can remind yourself what any of this crap means:

# dan it's 2am and this is the bit that registers the knob turning anticlockwise

# dear future dan, hi from tired past dan, this next part is a sin and I'm sorry

And you can do all this in an editor in the browser that's surprisingly capable, and hit Save.

You'll find out the next time you open the file that your comments were automatically and silently deleted, and you'll go "Huh, yeah, that tracks"

Note for normal people who actually work for a living: code is the part of the program that makes it work and paradoxically isn't all that important, comments are the part that make it keep working a couple of months later and Very Much Are Important.

Like, there's practically infinite ways to write a bit of code that does a thing, but the important part is the comment above your mess saying that the following bit of code does this thing, and the comment underneath apologising

Part of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in

And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a stack of fifteen hats that are making suggestions to the hats beneath while arguing and trying to topple off each other and shouting DON'T LOOK AT THE HAT UNDERNEATH ME while the aforementioned crying man shouts back GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME SEE WHAT YOU'RE HIDING

It's not even that hats are bad, everybody likes a good hat, but wearing so many stacked on top of each other is asking for a mess every time you walk through a door

So I did some digging and apparently this mess is because Home Assistant itself does not speak YAML but JSON, no YAML files exist, and if you click the button labelled "Edit as YAML" then Home Assistant looks at its JSON files and conjures up a YAML for you to look at. When you hit Save, HA converts the YAML to JSON (which doesn't support comments (which makes it useless by default)) and discards the YAML, poof gone

WHY DOESN'T THE BUTTON SAY EDIT AS JSON AND JUST LET YOU EDIT THE JSON THEN FFS

I found someone else having a problem with the whole YAML thing and they mentioned that it does occasionally swallow or rearrange chunks of code and HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT THAT WAS ME.

Going through my lamp thing the other night going "Huh, that's weird, this was working yesterday, what's the story with this... wow, I don't even remember putting that there, I must've been really tired... wait where'd the rest of it go..."

Gaslit!

Your YAML to JSON story reminds me of Linux kernel developers being completely baffled at why *some* plain text emails sent through Microsoft Exchange mail servers were being mangled.

A person would send a plain text email through Exchange, and it would be received with lines switched from manually line-wrapped to flowing paragraphs, and tabs were converted to spaces.

That's fine for emailed correspondence, but not fine for Linux kernel developers who used email to send code changes as plain text patches to a code file. The mangled patch wouldn't apply, and the code change would be refused, probably with insults about the sender's technical skills and inability to follow Linux kernel development norms.

The mysterious part is that some plain text emails got through Exchange mail server without being mangled. Linux kernel devs thought it was related to the person's email client. "Don't use Outlook, use mutt or symbian." There was an elitist distain for anyone who sent mangled patches, and no one to help people learn to use a new email client.

And it turns out it was not related to email clients at all.

The Microsoft Exchange mail servers would convert received plain text emails to rich text format, and then convert the emails back to plain text just before sending them out. The plain text to RTF conversion is what messed with line wrapping and converted tabs to spaces.

But why did these mangled emails only happen sometimes?

Finally someone noticed that if the plain text email was short enough, it didn't get mangled. With some experimentation, the IT developer discovered exactly how many bytes an email could be it before the message was mangled by Exchange.

Somewhere in the guts of Microsoft Exchange code, there is an if/else branch that lead to many many people being harassed because their patches didn't apply to Linux kernel code.