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!
baxtr 39 minutes ago [-]
I think part of the problem is that he included the illustrator so prominently in the title. He could have just said:
I used an illustration to…
Shorel 7 hours ago [-]
What would you want?
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.
ihuman 8 hours ago [-]
They credited the artist at the bottom of the article. Not sure if it was there before you commented or not
stronglikedan 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jasongill 11 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, it's ok to just do something nice to help a fellow human, without expectation of payment
jychang 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bonoboTP 8 hours ago [-]
Presumably the illustrator didn't follow this principle when demanding money for the drawings.
smith7018 4 hours ago [-]
"demanding money"
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.
bonoboTP 3 hours ago [-]
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.
matsemann 2 hours ago [-]
Then they could have decided to not hire an illustrator??
Using "demanded" to get an agreed upon payment is loaded language, and I'm honestly baffled by your takes here.
bonoboTP 2 hours ago [-]
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.
willy_k 8 hours ago [-]
Presumably the illustrator offers their skills to support themselves. What potential loss is there for a line in a substack blog?
bonoboTP 3 hours ago [-]
He offers his marketing skill, writing skill, audience and likely brings customers.
gamblor956 9 hours ago [-]
Why would the illustrator pay?
ajkjk 13 hours ago [-]
... weird way to say that
ckozlowski 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ralusek 3 hours ago [-]
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.
felipesoc 2 hours ago [-]
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.
frnz 1 hours ago [-]
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?
palmotea 14 hours ago [-]
1. Hiring a human illustrator is the right thing to do, and I applaud this guy.
2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.
beachy 14 hours ago [-]
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".
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
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.)
easyThrowaway 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
latexr 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
9935c101ab17a66 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
maxdo 12 hours ago [-]
I spent last 2 months in construction stores. A good chunk of people drop a size in claude/chatgpt, and put tiles in their existing picture etc.
You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.
sailfast 11 hours ago [-]
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.
subpixel 10 hours ago [-]
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.
maxdo 10 hours ago [-]
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.
knowaveragejoe 8 hours ago [-]
The difference in the replies to this comment are striking.
One is a relatively complicated workflow producing 3D assets, the other is "just give pictures to chatgpt and tell it what you want".
ezst 6 hours ago [-]
And neither shows the outcome as to illustrate/support their point, which is phenomenally ironic considering the context..
wonderwonder 9 hours ago [-]
Just upload the pictures to a chatGPT chat and tell it what you want, My wife uses it for this all the time.
pseudohadamard 9 hours ago [-]
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.
wonderwonder 9 hours ago [-]
My wife designed our pool and our patio this exact way.
She spent hours on it and it worked perfectly.
I can look out my window and see the exact scene she made in chatGPT.
Really impressive how useful it has become on some very general things
truetraveller 11 hours ago [-]
just claude/chatgpt, no specialized app?
maxdo 10 hours ago [-]
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).
lofties 3 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
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.
thendrill 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't this how we invented fire and started civilization?
"One dude did a thing and the rest copied it coz it seemed cool. Everybody wants to be cool..."
zimpenfish 25 minutes ago [-]
If "everyone wants to be cool", copying fire seems like a mistake...
crystaln 5 hours ago [-]
That's a great idea. I may just try it.
Leherenn 5 hours ago [-]
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.
taylorfinley 5 hours ago [-]
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.
colordrops 5 hours ago [-]
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.
gspr 9 hours ago [-]
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.
owenpalmer 7 hours ago [-]
> I've concluded that I think I and you are the problem
Oh please. If someone shits in your sandwich, you're not the problem for disliking the flavor of salami for the next 2 years.
zimpenfish 27 minutes ago [-]
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.)
davvie 29 minutes ago [-]
This looks terrific and feels like a project where a lot of love and effort went, so good to read about it in the age of AI
Rapzid 11 hours ago [-]
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.
graeme 11 hours ago [-]
>Barely any customizations that aren't tied to significant velocity improvements
I never was interested in the tinkering side. The functional side has been very handy.
For example, smart thermostats reduced the heating bill 40% while leaving the place warmer where we actually are.
Smart dimmers on lamps let you dim them in the evening, or turn all the lights off with one push.
Your use cases may vary and the answer may be none do it but a good level of smart home things are quite practical.
ChickeNES 11 hours ago [-]
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
dewey 2 hours ago [-]
It's just a hobby like any other, some people will like it, some people won't care for it. There's nothing wrong with that.
matsemann 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Melatonic 4 hours ago [-]
Smart home stuff I mostly agree. But there's still plenty of semi dumb smart home stuff you can do that's nice.
Like plugging in an old AC into a smart plug to manually turn it on remotely (make sure it had enough amps)
I will say though monitoring my air quality with a proper "smart" device (dedicated to monitoring) has been very eye opening
richardlblair 9 hours ago [-]
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.
persedes 9 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wallst07 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
2) Local only, no cloud.
mrweasel 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sailfast 11 hours ago [-]
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 :)
subpixel 10 hours ago [-]
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.
opan 7 hours ago [-]
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.
latexr 2 hours ago [-]
> My interest in smart home stuff is near zero; am I alone?
You are not. I have no interest in having my appliances spy on me, or hit me with sudden unexpected costs or subscriptions, or being hacked.
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.
instagraham 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dewey 2 hours ago [-]
> Fiverr exists
I wonder how many contractors on Fiverr are actually just meat proxies at this point.
topham 11 hours ago [-]
"When everyone leaves, all the air conditioners switch off."
That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.
overtone1000 8 hours ago [-]
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.
whstl 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rootusrootus 8 hours ago [-]
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.
imp0cat 7 hours ago [-]
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.
makeitdouble 10 hours ago [-]
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).
ellisv 11 hours ago [-]
I’m curious why you think that.
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.
micromacrofoot 10 hours ago [-]
depends on the duration and temperature differential
15 hours ago [-]
skyberrys 14 hours ago [-]
The illustrator did beautiful work, it's amazing how much different your program became from the original dashboard to one simple home gui.
mbnielsen 4 hours ago [-]
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 :)
swiftcoder 3 hours ago [-]
This is incredibly charming. I wish my house evolved at a slow enough pace to be worth doing this to
gerdesj 14 hours ago [-]
Great job and a cracking write up. The notes on making sure you get layers etc right so you can animate effectively is great advice.
Thank you.
maxdo 12 hours ago [-]
I did almost the same but it was completely AI , and started from renovation. it build me material list looked for discounts, saved me ~$2k.
Tricky question how do you know that person did a real drawing, not generated it in codex/claude code?
OJFord 4 hours ago [-]
It doesn't really matter if they're happy with the result does it? Many of us here generate stuff in Claude Code for our employers.
There's still expertise and experience used in prompting, reviewing, refining it - a professional using AI doesn't automatically make it a scam.
They posted a link here which has illustrator’s commission site.
pmkary 4 hours ago [-]
This is amazing!
nharziro 2 days ago [-]
this is so cool! i love it.
phs318u 15 hours ago [-]
Perhaps “cool” is the wrong word. Did you notice the temperature recorded inside the house? 24degC (26 in the office). A little too warm for my taste.
rootusrootus 8 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 14 hours ago [-]
Unless it was taken in the summer, in which case it's really cold.
qlte 10 hours ago [-]
Am I wooshing a joke? That's 75F which is hardly cold in any season.
For summer that's right about the upper end of tolerable range if I don't want to hear the A/C starting/stopping just for a few degrees of cooling.
ur-whale 4 hours ago [-]
Beautiful, and such a cool idea, would love to do this with my house.
burgerone 46 minutes ago [-]
How very inspiring and full of character in the age of worthless slop
melody_calling 2 days ago [-]
Really well done, nice work!
wonderwonder 9 hours ago [-]
This is pretty awesome man. I had zero insight into home automation and this really made me want to learn more. Well done
minasrc 15 hours ago [-]
appreciate you sharing the artist name!
14 hours ago [-]
14 hours ago [-]
cringleycringe 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zatkin 13 hours ago [-]
Whose attention are you trying to capture by making this post?
cringleycringe 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Legend2440 14 hours ago [-]
Cool, but if you can afford to hire an illustrator to make a custom dashboard for your lights and thermostat, you're clearly in the 1%.
sho_hn 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dolebirchwood 12 hours ago [-]
$900 for digital art isn't exactly cheap, but you sure as hell don't need to be pull a $750K salary to afford it.
Disposable income and being in the 1% are entirely different things.
kenferry 14 hours ago [-]
How much do you they think they paid? By home improvement standards, might not be out of line at all.
I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!
onlypassingthru 13 hours ago [-]
Ever buy any pictures or posters for your wall? Same thing.
ChickeNES 11 hours ago [-]
I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than…$30 a piece for posters vs $900 for this commission.
onlypassingthru 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps at some point your budget will allow you to buy or commission something more personal that brings you pleasure to look at every day.
ChickeNES 6 hours ago [-]
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).
mrmlz 3 hours ago [-]
Okay, good for you.
loloquwowndueo 14 hours ago [-]
You say it like it’s a bad thing?
fragmede 14 hours ago [-]
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?
vntok 2 hours ago [-]
Calling $900 "a couple bucks" shows how wide a gap there is between perception and reality though.
aussiethebob 13 hours ago [-]
And?
AuthAuth 13 hours ago [-]
Its $100 at most. Thats something majority of people can afford.
ChickeNES 11 hours ago [-]
*$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.
qlte 10 hours ago [-]
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.
tayo42 7 hours ago [-]
Idk why people work so cheaply. Less than 100. They're probably working for like 10/hr
mrmlz 3 hours ago [-]
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 :)
dzhiurgis 2 days ago [-]
This is beautiful. Reminds me floor796.
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.
_virtu 15 hours ago [-]
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.
tiagod 15 hours ago [-]
Pro tip the whole point is that it was made by an illustrator, and that's also the reason it's on the frontpage.
scubbo 14 hours ago [-]
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.
vntok 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe the reason is simply that it's a cool idea?
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.
KZerda 13 hours ago [-]
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.
orphea 14 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, I have a hard time understanding you. Correct me if I'm wrong, are you saying that
1. paying an illustrator is non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers? and
2. AI would have done it at an equivalent quality level?
vntok 6 hours ago [-]
Yes to both.
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.
hatthew 14 hours ago [-]
Most people don't have lidar phones, and commissioning this art is about the same price as buying a lidar phone.
happyopossum 14 hours ago [-]
> Most people don't have lidar phones
the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...
hatthew 13 hours ago [-]
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.
dwnw 13 hours ago [-]
Most people don't have lidar phones. The statement is still very true, even if you said US only. What are you trying to say?
c22 10 hours ago [-]
Regular photogammetry is probably sufficient for this sort of project.
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!
I used an illustration to…
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.
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.
Using "demanded" to get an agreed upon payment is loaded language, and I'm honestly baffled by your takes here.
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.
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.
2. AI kinda ruined this style for me. The first thing I did when I saw it was start searching for AI incongruities which is sad.
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 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 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.
You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.
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.
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.
One is a relatively complicated workflow producing 3D assets, the other is "just give pictures to chatgpt and tell it what you want".
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.
I can look out my window and see the exact scene she made in chatGPT.
Really impressive how useful it has become on some very general things
"One dude did a thing and the rest copied it coz it seemed cool. Everybody wants to be cool..."
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.
[0] https://sawdust.diy
I'm sure with a bit more efforts/tokens, you can do something amazing, with a virtual visit and so on.
The guy should cherish the style he likes and be proud – just like I refuse to give up my en and em dashes.
Oh please. If someone shits in your sandwich, you're not the problem for disliking the flavor of salami for the next 2 years.
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 never was interested in the tinkering side. The functional side has been very handy.
For example, smart thermostats reduced the heating bill 40% while leaving the place warmer where we actually are.
Smart dimmers on lamps let you dim them in the evening, or turn all the lights off with one push.
Your use cases may vary and the answer may be none do it but a good level of smart home things are quite practical.
Like plugging in an old AC into a smart plug to manually turn it on remotely (make sure it had enough amps)
I will say though monitoring my air quality with a proper "smart" device (dedicated to monitoring) has been very eye opening
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.
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.
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.
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.
2) Local only, no cloud.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
You are not. I have no interest in having my appliances spy on me, or hit me with sudden unexpected costs or subscriptions, or being hacked.
https://reddit.com/r/theinternetofshit/
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
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.
I wonder how many contractors on Fiverr are actually just meat proxies at this point.
That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Thank you.
Tricky question how do you know that person did a real drawing, not generated it in codex/claude code?
There's still expertise and experience used in prompting, reviewing, refining it - a professional using AI doesn't automatically make it a scam.
https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
The "mid-wit" home automation philosophy, I think, strikes a nice middle ground.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37859437
For summer that's right about the upper end of tolerable range if I don't want to hear the A/C starting/stopping just for a few degrees of cooling.
You don't really need to be in the 1% to be a patron if you need some art.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1wyyrd6/comm...
I agree it just feels weird to spend on “software” for home improvement, but sometimes it may make a bigger difference than the hardware!
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.
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.
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.
1. paying an illustrator is non-economically-viable for 99% of homelabbers? and
2. AI would have done it at an equivalent quality level?
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.
the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...