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ckozlowski 21 minutes 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.
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!
stronglikedan 5 hours ago [-]
The illustrator probably didn't want to pay for more prominent credit than the standard, which is included at the end of the post.
jasongill 2 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, it's ok to just do something nice to help a fellow human, without expectation of payment
jychang 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gamblor956 37 minutes ago [-]
Why would the illustrator pay?
ajkjk 4 hours ago [-]
... weird way to say that
palmotea 5 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 5 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".
maxdo 3 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.
wonderwonder 9 minutes 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
sailfast 2 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 1 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 57 minutes 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.
wonderwonder 8 minutes 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 34 minutes 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.
truetraveller 3 hours ago [-]
just claude/chatgpt, no specialized app?
maxdo 1 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).
gspr 3 minutes 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.
The guy should cherish the style he likes and be proud – just like I refuse to give up my en and em dashes.
Rapzid 3 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.
richardlblair 40 minutes 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.
graeme 2 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 2 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
subpixel 1 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.
sailfast 2 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 :)
coldbrewed 2 hours ago [-]
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.
turnwrighthere 22 minutes ago [-]
The author did an excellent job of giving the artist a very detailed brief. Kudos. Put good in, get good out.
wonderwonder 4 minutes ago [-]
This is pretty awesome man. I had zero insight into home automation and this really made me want to learn more. Well done
The illustrator did beautiful work, it's amazing how much different your program became from the original dashboard to one simple home gui.
topham 2 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.
makeitdouble 1 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 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
depends on the duration and temperature differential
6 hours ago [-]
maxdo 3 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?
gerdesj 5 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.
throwaway81523 3 hours ago [-]
Very nice illustration, but when I hear the words "smart home" I reach for my, um, analog kitchen timer.
I love that you hired an illustrator to make this!
zerolunier 2 days ago [-]
where are you based, how much you paid for it ?
srik 4 hours ago [-]
They posted a link here which has illustrator’s commission site.
nharziro 2 days ago [-]
this is so cool! i love it.
phs318u 6 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.
stavros 5 hours ago [-]
Unless it was taken in the summer, in which case it's really cold.
qlte 1 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.
melody_calling 1 days ago [-]
Really well done, nice work!
minasrc 6 hours ago [-]
appreciate you sharing the artist name!
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
cringleycringe 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zatkin 4 hours ago [-]
Whose attention are you trying to capture by making this post?
cringleycringe 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
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.
Legend2440 6 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 6 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 3 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.
onlypassingthru 4 hours ago [-]
Ever buy any pictures or posters for your wall? Same thing.
ChickeNES 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than…$30 a piece for posters vs $900 for this commission.
kenferry 5 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!
loloquwowndueo 5 hours ago [-]
You say it like it’s a bad thing?
fragmede 5 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?
aussiethebob 5 hours ago [-]
And?
AuthAuth 5 hours ago [-]
Its $100 at most. Thats something majority of people can afford.
ChickeNES 2 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 1 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.
_virtu 6 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 6 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 5 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 5 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 5 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 5 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?
hatthew 5 hours ago [-]
Most people don't have lidar phones, and commissioning this art is about the same price as buying a lidar phone.
c22 54 minutes ago [-]
Regular photogammetry is probably sufficient for this sort of project.
happyopossum 5 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 4 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 5 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?
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.
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!
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.
You can feel differently but it saves you so much money, time, and bring you so much pleasure. Not the other way around.
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
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.
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.
The guy should cherish the style he likes and be proud – just like I refuse to give up my en and em dashes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.
That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.
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.
Tricky question how do you know that person did a real drawing, not generated it in codex/claude code?
Thank you.
https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
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.
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.
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.
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?
the most popular phones in the US (iPhone pro max and pro) have had lidar cameras for the past 6 models...