Primarily because I don’t know when they are passing.
Well, that’s not ENTIRELY true. I do have a Alexa Echo Dot in my home office in the basement which announces anytime my FLPro cams see someone walking past my house, and tell me so, but in order to catch them and “shoot the breeze” with them as they are passing, I’d either have to do one of the following:
Creepily try to have a conversation with them through the FLPro speaker (when they’re trying to go on a walk, not stand there talking to a Floodlight),
Sprint up a flight stairs, throw open my front door and charge at them to catch them before they pass my house, just to say “Hi, what’s up!” That would be a little creepy too.
Sit in my front yard all day hoping I catch them walking by. But usually people are walking by in the morning while I’m sleeping, or in the evening, when I am trying to work.
Alternative solutions: encourage Wasp nest building in the bushes right by the sidewalk, instead of having wasp traps all around my house…that seems less humane than turning on sprinklers to solely cover the grassy areas though. Though I’d have to figure out how to make sure the sprinklers don’t turn on to spray my mail lady who has permission to cut across my lawn…what happens if she steps on my lawn while my cats are in view.
I’m starting to think I will have to create a custom solution using RTSP, custom detections with Frigate (ie: only trigger when it sees a DOG step on the grass) then have it turn on a dedicated Wyze plug which triggers a specific Wyze Sprinkler Zone. That might be the best route since Wyze AI can’t distinguish between types of animals. I can then also make exceptions for it not to run if someone is wearing a USPS uniform or if certain other people like me have been detected in the last X minutes. Could be a fun project.
Or get one of the (s) to stand guard. If the dog sees the cat it won’t have time to leave any land mines in your yard. We had a cat that would charge at my large Husk/Wolf mix dog when we were walking down the street. It was good the dog was on a leash.
I don’t like weeding, so to me, that sounds like a waste of my time I just use IFA’s 4 step lawn care program specifically so I don’t have to hand-weed my lawn. (no shade on anyone who ENJOYS weeding, I respect that different things are enjoyable and meditative to different people…taking breaks in here in this forum is MY relaxing meditative break time, we each have our own things and I respect that, I’m just saying that WEEDING is not MY cup of tea).
I admit there are still a few weeds that sneek in occasionally, but then I usually just blast those sneaks with liquid weed killer every month or so.
I know that all my extra chemicals probably mean my lawn is no longer “organic” but the insects, etc on organic-only diets are more than welcome to move to my neighbors’ lawns for a more healthy lifestyle and variety of weeds.
Honestly, I am not opposed to eventually tearing out all my grass and replacing it with artificial grass at some point. Maybe at my next house. Then instead of looking to buy a robot lawnmower, I can just look for a robot vacuum Or maybe I’ll just use my leaf blower every few weeks after a storm. If I had to hand-weed my lawn very often, it would definitely be getting torn out and replaced by almost anything else. I’d just tell all the neighbors I’m xeriscaping to help with the recent drought issues our state has had in recent times. Our city already pays us to replace the park strip with xeriscaping friendly things. I think they paid us $1.25/ft to tear our our grass in our park strip to reduce water use. There are a bunch of neighbors taking it to the next step and just replacing all their grass with xeriscaping now.
There must be something in the medical literature (that you could find instantly and comprehensively through the myrical of AI) that would support you doing something counter to your crazy auto-erotic-auto-matica syndrome tendencies, no? We should work on this together, you first.
I may be a romantic, but laying oneself on the physical gears and getting ground to burger sounds better than laying oneself on the RF and mind-* gears of the digital age and getting reduced to e-waste. I am a romantic, I admit, but still, e-waste??
I believe I have said the definitive ‘thing.’ You will notice now how further replies find little purchase. A slow demoralization of the opponent sets in. We roll-up our gains.
Maybe if you use a it would hasten the…denouement, both from the dogs and their walkers.[2]
Or on your front porch, in a creaky wooden rocking chair, sipping a glass of lemonade, a coach gun loaded with rock salt leaning against the wall and easily within arm’s reach….[3]
I’m actually a fan of this, especially when it involves native grasses and other local vegetation.
When she was still alive and enjoying her indoor/outdoor existence, my parents’ cat would regularly chase cats twice her size and other animals from the front yard. She was adept at guarding her territory.
Sure, though I do it because it feels like it benefits my life A LOT and it is a much better addiction than my past addictions. My wife says she’s okay with this one and I don’t want to have to drop it and find something new to fill that hole when this one feels pretty healthy and productive and my life is the best it’s ever been in every category. Why would I want to disrupt any of that just because someone else has a different preference for themselves and for them to feel healthy and happy? I will leave them to pursue their desired differences.
Outside of that, my confirmation bias excuses are that I automate things to save me time from doing things that feel like are a waste of my time (to me), so I can free up time to spend on things I actually prefer to spend time on because they are more of my preference.
Other things I hate having to spend so much time on because they FEEL like a waste of time (to me), include: making food, eating, driving, etc. Many of those are things other people really enjoy and find pleasure in or are meditative for them. I sincerely respect that. To me, they FEEL like a waste of time and I only do them when I have to, because I have to, or because someone I care about needs them done, and when they are necessary, I try to do something else enjoyable when I have to do them, such as play an audiobook, which DOES feel enjoyable and productive to me. Since I can do that at the same time I do the time-waster activities, they are then somewhat tolerable because I can still do something that feels like less of a waste of my time.
Luckily, my wife LOVES to cook, so that works out for us. My wife also basically has to drive because she gets car sick if she’s not the one driving, so that works out perfectly for us. I can spend time on my phone while she drives. Win-Win.
If I could affordably automate my cooking, eating (nutrition), driving and more things so I never had to do them again, I totally would.
I love automating everything I can. I already rarely ever manually turn lights on or off in my house now. Most rooms in my house automatically control lighting.
Or there is his TED Talk which also helps to make the point I’m making about automation:
Summary: His mom used to have to “waste” a ton of time on washing clothes by hand (believe me, I know all about this because I lived in Haiti for years, and hand washing clothes is a LONG process and complete waste of time). In some places I would pay some local ladies to wash my clothes for me (partially to help them out, but it also saved me time, but sometimes I chose to do it myself). Big waste of time that could be spent doing other things…and BILLIONS of people agree. BILLIONS of people use washing machines to “automate” this time-wasting task so they can do something else. Human productivity and quality of life was incomprehensibly improved because of the washing machine alone…let alone TONS of other things that automate countless things in our daily lives. Automation frees us up (frees up our time) to progress and advance in ways that were previously nearly impossible because of all the “necessity” time wasters we previously had to spend our energy and time doing.
So, why would I want to UNDO any of that? No, I will absolutely not go back to manually hand washing all of my clothes for the same of:
doing something counter to your crazy auto-erotic-auto-matica syndrome tendencies
Bah, my friend. I do obsessive crazy auto-erotic-auto-matica partially BECAUSE I strongly believe in what it represents. It’s part of the ideals I strongly believe in…and have some factual evidence in support of it. There are certainly some downsides or compromises, and things that need consideration, etc. But in general, I love and support automation. It freed me up to be able to read 80 books last year (I have like 4,000 more books on my NAS that I still have waiting for me to get to ), all while working the equivalent of multiple full-time jobs, plus family time, etc. My life is much more enriched, safe, productive, happy, etc. because of such automation.
I respect those who want and CHOOSE to do all their laundry by hand and have less time for other things. Maybe it’s meditative for them or whatever else. Great. But it is not for me. I prefer to let automation do that for me, and free up hours and hours of grinding work, not to mention the strain on your hands being subject to soap and water for hours so often. As I said, I’ve been there, done that. No thanks. De-automation is not for me.
This thread/video makes an interesting point for automation too. In some cases it isn’t just for saving time. In some cases like this, it can make things possible that are hard to impossible to accomplish without automation. The OP here said there were flowerbed visitors, and created an awesome and creative automation to resolve issue, including without any hard coming to said visitors. Automation like this is just so awesome!
My wife did this at our last house. She tore out the entire front yard and replaced it with flowers and other intentional vegetation. People loved it. Though I admit it was @#$% on my Wyze cam cooldown when I didn’t have cam plus. Every single plant triggered the cooldown constantly, so the motion detection and person detection notifications were basically worthless because of the cooldown. Well, it worked okay in the winter time when everything was dead or covered by snow. I had to compensate by putting out some motion sensors that would ignore the plants, face the door and trigger cloud uploads when they sensed PIR changes. That was a little more effective way to make sure I didn’t miss a person coming onto our porch. But our front of our house looked great. an entire yard full of flowers and plants. But it did require a lot more manual weeding, which my wife chose to do, so…I guess if she liked it, great.
I am not promoting ‘no’ technology, as you know. I am promoting a reasonable balance, as I believe we once had.
The reasonable balance acknowledged the benefits of both.
The promoters of the current trend seek a ‘totality.’ Not reasonable. Not acknowledging the benefits of anything but itself. Salivating that people have so easily accepted its promoted ‘inevitability’ fallacy. Eager that the dream is realized before its death.
Mothers read books? What year was that?
Substitute obsessive TV and phone-surfing for books. Still golden?
I may be taking an extreme point of view, partially for fun, but I’m going to hold to it for fun too (don’t assume I fully embrace all this to an extreme as presented…what point is a conversation if I just 100% agree with you? That would be boring, and I love alternative perspectives):
That’s too subjective and arbitrary. Balanced from what time period or standard? Anything that could be said to be “balanced” now would still have been seen as unbalanced pure technological witchery a few decades ago.
There are studies suggesting that even the majority of people alive in the US today (including most people below the poverty line), still have a higher standard of living with more luxuries overall than Billionaires like John D Rockefeller did when he was the richest man in the world. The progress of technological innovation has been dramatically beneficial in uplifting even most of the most needy compared to the past. Why would we want to “balance” that in the reverse instead of continue to improve the standard of living for everyone. Can you imagine if in a few more decades, the “lower class” of the future lives with a higher standard of living and more luxuries, etc than even the richest billionaires today can dream of? If that same standard continues, it seems to be beneficial for most of humanity if technology, automation and such continue on this trajectory. Why wouldn’t I support and push for it to continue? Future generations will likely think “Balance” means something VERY different than anything we could think up right now and would seem extreme to us now. This is how progression works over time and history. I expect it to continue the same because of human nature. As we get older and our brains neural connections wire together in set ways, we generally increasingly develop more cognitive rigidity simply from a biological standpoint. We have less plasticity than newer generations and what we think is balance will always be different from what future groups think of as balance based on their own adaptations. I can’t support enforcing my adaptive rigidity on future generations which will always have better neural plasticity for such adaptation.
Balance is important in some contexts, but it is not necessarily always a universal positive value.
If some people like to commit heinous acts, and others don’t, you don’t compromise with a balance by instituting “The Purge” once a year to allow a “balance” where people can do those horrible things sometimes to whomever they want. That would be ridiculous. (I could come up with more ridiculous “balance” examples if needed). Thus we can agree that “balance” in and of itself is not necessarily an ideal standard in all situations. But even if it were, we would have to define the boundaries of what constitutes as balance or not. I could argue that REAL balance comes from INCREASED technological progression and automation as it frees people up to have more time to do whatever they want instead of just trying to “survive” and meet their “needs”…if we can automate everyone’s needs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs through technology and automation advancements, then perhaps more people would be able progress up the hierarchy to self-actualization.
Would that not be among the most worthy of goals to progress toward and a kind of “balance”? It may be different than you idea of balance, or what constitute as balance for you, but must we dictate to others what is “balance” for them?
I by no means think a near technological singularity is “inevitable”…but I am a strong supporter of it coming to pass. I don’t think such things should happen overnight though.
Thank you. I do Not. Want. to be Typical. I do not think this is the thread to elaborate on that, but I take that as a high compliment.
Also, don’t get me wrong, I am partially having fun in this response. I am truly a strong proponent of “Balance”…I actually once totally “unbalanced” my whole life in my 20’s and put myself through utter and complete miserable chaos because of it. Finding “Balance” in areas of my life was utterly critical…though that is a whole different topic and I’m having fun with some thought experiments on semantical interpretations of balance…so don’t take me too seriously
Regardless, I do TRULY love technology and automations. This is one reason I am continually pushing Wyze to improve their automation options. The more options the better.
When you have conjugal relations, are you thinking, abstracting, verbalizing internally, or are you swept into the primitive physicality of it? Is it better to talk about these things, experience them with dumb wonder, or is there some balance that might be struck?
Haha, I plea the 5th,Guidelines compliance. I promised Gwen and Jason I’d be a good boy in here for them and I do what I can to uphold my promises beyond minimum expectations…at least as long as they are reasonable (ie: barring unforeseen circumstances, harm to myself or others, coercion, predicated on false information, someone else significantly betrays/changes the circumstances, and a few other reasonable exceptions).
Oh I have doubt…colonizing frogs establish new populations on isolated islands, and the fact that you’re on the internet clearly demonstrates that you are not in the colonized frog class…imposter!
That would be a little creepy too.
Though I’d have to figure out how to make sure the sprinklers don’t turn on to spray my mail lady who has permission to cut across my lawn…what happens if she steps on my lawn while my cats are in view. 
(s) to stand guard. If the dog sees the cat it won’t have time to leave any land mines in your yard. We had a cat that would charge at my large Husk/Wolf mix dog when we were walking down the street. It was good the dog was on a leash.
I don’t like weeding, so to me, that sounds like a waste of my time 
(no shade on anyone who ENJOYS weeding, I respect that different things are enjoyable and meditative to different people…taking breaks in here in this forum is MY relaxing meditative break time, we each have our own things and I respect that, I’m just saying that WEEDING is not MY cup of tea).
I’d just tell all the neighbors I’m xeriscaping to help with the recent drought issues our state has had in recent times. Our city already pays us to replace the park strip with xeriscaping friendly things. I think they paid us $1.25/ft to tear our our grass in our park strip to reduce water use. There are a bunch of neighbors taking it to the next step and just replacing all their grass with xeriscaping now.
.
it would hasten the…denouement, both from the dogs and their walkers.
