Oddbean

There we go - the technological enshittification pandemic has also reached Philips #Hue. Apparently they weren't making enough money by selling bulbs at $50/70. They'll now force you to log in through their app to the bridge too, or all of your bulbs will just stop working. They've joined the long wagon of companies that have decided to make the core of their money by scooping up as much data they can and selling it to data brokers rather than selling actual products, and they don't care if doing so means to literally break the lights in the houses of millions of customers. These companies have turned from customer-centric places, to businesses run by human failures who masturbate while thinking of how much more data they can scoop from their customers, and in how many ways they can break the customer experience if they don't comply with their new data policies. Of course, I was kind of prepared for this, as I've stopped trusting every single tech company a while ago and build my own infrastructure for everything. I have #Platypush installed on a RPi with a Zigbee dongle and zigbee2mqtt, and it already does the job for a bunch of Hue, Ikea and other cheap Zigbee lights. That's all you need to make your own Zigbee bridge. #HomeAssistant is another popular option, of course. But it'll still take me a while to unpair ~40 Hue devices in my house from my Hue bridge (which I purchased a decade ago btw) and reconfigure everything on my self-managed bridge. I used to love being a software engineer, building things and solving problems. Now my job sucks, even as a hobby, and I don't feel anymore like this is what I want to do with my life, nor this is the industry where I want to work. It's not up to me to decide what to build anymore. It's up to Spotify killing their streaming libraries, Twitter or Reddit killing their API, Hue breaking their products if you don't log in through their app, YouTube coming up with ways to break youtube-dl on a daily basis, Google breaking your browser extensions, Messenger periodically logging out your alternative clients and locking your account, and the list could go on forever. I wake up in the morning thinking "how did tech companies decided to fuck me up today, and which activities will I be forced to put aside in order to write some code that fixes the shitshow that their lobotomized greedy managers have decided to put up now?" It sucks. I've reached the point where I'm ready to throw away all the devices in my house that are more complex than a dumb calculator. Congratulations, motherfuckers. You've broken the game for everyone with your greed, and managed to get even someone like ME to hate tech. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/09/26/hue/