Smart home devices should work without the internet

Author here. This is ten years of home automation rules, led by one: nothing core should depend on a vendor's server. Setup core is Tasmota, MQTT and Node-RED on a Pi. I've given this talk a few times and started working on a third for the agentic era. What's the most pointless internet dependency you've found in a device?

I'm not really sure what this is doing on HN tbh, but regardless of that.

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I suspect that for resilience reasons alone, we might see a shift towards connecting less stuff to the public internet.

Not because consumers would complain. No one cares about consumers - including consumers themselves. But because of the threat to the stability of the system, internet connected stuff poses.

The fridge meltdowns are an example of that, but you can equally stun an enemy economy by just messing with the smart lights in people's homes, as it is the people who work.. or don't because they're tired.