Conversation

When I first set up home automation I told my wife a story. A guy bought a robot vacuum and it went haywire every night. Hours on forums, days of troubleshooting. The cause: the outlet its dock was plugged into had a motion sensor that cut power at bedtime to save energy. So every night the dock went dead and the vacuum wandered off hunting for a charger.

The vacuum wasn't broken. The system around it was. I told her: if we live on this edge, some of our problems will look exactly like that.

This was one of those. I lost web for five hours; my mother-in-law texted to ask if I could fix it.

But nothing irreversible happened. I'd bounded the risk with backups, locks and logs, so the worst case was an afternoon, not a catastrophe. I learned something, and the system has new safeguards.

If we're going to live on the cutting edge, we accept we might get cut. The job is making sure the injuries are the kind you recover from, not the kind that kill you.

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