Rick's b.log - entry 2026/03/18

Does your lightbulb need an update?

A firmware update.

For a device whose core competency is simply: "be bright". It has, quite literally, one job - to glow.

Of course, when faced with the prospect of an exciting update to a lightbulb, one is naturally curious as to what exactly is being improved. Has the concept of illumination undergone a recent breakthrough? Has someone discovered Light 2.0, now with 15% more photons and a useful "dark mode" for night time use (reinventing the dimmer switch, but I digress)?
Or, and this feels far more plausible, is the update not really about the light at all, but about its ongoing relationship with the mothership. Certificates expire, encryption standards evolve, and somewhere deep in the bowels of a server farm, a handshake fails unless your living room bulb agrees to a revised set of cryptographic chatter.

This, of course, raises an uncomfortable question: if the bulb's continued function depends on a distant service maintaining its end of the bargain, what happens when that service quietly goes away? When the company decides that this particular model is no longer worth the electricity required to remember it exists? We have, in effect, not purchased a light, but a subscription to illumination, with the small print noting that the supplier reserves the right to turn off the sun at their convenience.
And, as is all the rage these days, to record and track when the lightbulb turns on and off "in order to improve our products and services" - at least, that is how it is usually presented to encourage enthusiastic participation.

And then there is the matter of updates themselves. Not the polite, optional sort that one might defer until a rainy afternoon, but the insistent, unavoidable kind. The ones that arrive uninvited, install themselves with quiet determination, and present upon completion a cheerful request that you agree to an updated licence agreement. There is, of course, no practical alternative. Decline, and the device you paid for becomes an inert piece of landfill. Accept, and you are deemed to have read and understood several dozen pages of legal prose that would make a contract lawyer reach for a stiff drink.
It is quite a curious arrangement: a company unilaterally alters the terms, compels you to accept them, and calls it consent. Is this even legal?
One might struggle to imagine this model working elsewhere. Your kettle requires you to acknowledge that boiling water constitutes a binding arbitration clause. Your toaster refuses to toast until you agree that bread is, from this point forward, a licensable "experience".
Which is particularly unfair on the toaster, because it used to have its life rather well sorted out.

Before it developed ambitions of connectivity and a promising future in distributed computing, the toaster was an exercise in quiet mechanical competence. You pressed a lever to lower the bread, a circuit closed, the heating element started to glow red-hot, and somewhere inside a small strip of metal began to warm. As it heated, it bent. It did so slowly and predictably until, at a point determined by the position of a knob on the front, it triggered the mechanism that released the spring and sent the toast on its brief, triumphant ascent (or, depending on trajectory and enthusiasm, onto the floor).

That was it. No timers in the modern sense, no chips, no software, no need to consult a server about your breakfast preferences. The level of browning was not a setting stored in memory or synced across devices, but a simple physical relationship: how much bending was enough. It was gloriously analogue.
And it worked. Not because it was clever, but because it was just clever enough.

There is a lesson here, though it is one we seem increasingly reluctant to learn as we shove "AI" into everything whether or not it makes sense or is logical.
The lesson is simple: not everything benefits from complication.
Some things achieve a kind of perfection through restraint, doing one job, and doing it well enough that no further improvement is required. The more we add, the more we create opportunities for failure, dependency, and the slow creep of obsolescence.

Analogue technology, for all its supposed crudeness, has a certain stubborn honesty about it. It operates within the bounds of physics rather than policy. It does not wake up one morning to discover that it is no longer supported, or that its continued operation is contingent upon accepting revised terms and conditions, or that its tenuous relationship with "security" means that it is no longer a functional appliance but part of a botnet intent on...something. Nor will it sit there tragically blinking a little indicator whenever there is any disturbance with its connectivity to the mothership.
Instead, it simply continues, utterly indifferent to trends, updates, and the shifting priorities of companies that may or may not still exist next year.

Don't get me wrong here - not all progress is folly. There are places where complexity earns its keep, where digital systems solve problems that analogue ones never could, or where one can replace a pile of analogue logic chips with a simple processor and some software running on it.
But the mistake here is in applying that same mindset indiscriminately, as though every object is merely an unfinished computer waiting to be completed and connected.

Some things are already complete. Some things were never meant to be connected.

The toaster had it figured out. The lightbulb did not need negotiating with. And yet here we are, surrounded by devices that insist on being managed, updated, and agreed with, rather than simply used.

All of this would be merely amusing were it not for the creeping sense that we have traded simplicity for fragility. The old devices asked very little of the world and, in return, worked almost all of the time. Lightbulbs, kettles, and toasters only needed electricity...and then they worked.
The new ones ask for updates, agreements, connectivity, and trust in systems far beyond your control - and in exchange, they may refuse to perform their singular, uncomplicated task because somewhere, something, has decided they no longer should. This glitch may be temporary, or it might be forevermore.

It's hard not to feel that, in our enthusiasm to make everything smarter, we may have overlooked the quiet brilliance of things that simply did their job.

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺
As of February 2025, commenting is no longer available to UK residents, following the implementation of the vague and overly broad Online Safety Act. You must tick the box below to verify that you are not a UK resident, and you expressly agree if you are in fact a UK resident that you will indemnify me (Richard Murray), as well as the person maintaining my site (Rob O'Donnell), the hosting providers, and so on. It's a shitty law, complain to your MP.
It's not that I don't want to hear from my British friends, it's because your country makes stupid laws.
 
You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.

John, 18th March 2026, 20:42

Brilliant! For the moment, that is!

Joseps, 19th March 2026, 09:38

I have some fun with these new bulbs, the dumb led ones (cheap Chinese variety) are fantastic when tuned to ridiculously low wattage, and I have a use case for one smart one that has improved things around.    It is zigbee, so no call home or any Internet for it, neither firmware updates (although Homeassistant could offer those). During the day it works as a regular bulb, but between sunset and sunrise (with some offsets), it turns on automatically at 1w on its warmer colour, to light the stairs so the dog can go to the bathroom (no more landmines!). On that state, if you click the switch, it goes to and from regular brightness.    Ok, is not that great. Could this be done leaving a regular night light, and maybe a timer? Sure. And cheaper! , but I needed a zigbee router upstairs, and the whole Homeassistant playground is pretty entertaining.    That said, I would never recommend any "smart" crap connected to the Internet to a regular human friend. I only enjoy those for the tinkering.

Tom, 20th March 2026, 08:16

The Van Moof bicycle (Dutch brand) had a lock that you operated with an app on your smartphone. Next thing that happened was that the factory went bankrupt ...

Rick, 20th March 2026, 18:20

In a sane world that wouldn't have mattered because the app would talk directly to the lock using something like BLE.  This is not a sane world...

Add a comment (v0.12) [help?] . . . try the comment feed!
		Your name
		Your email	(optional)
		Validation	Are you real? Please type 39206 backwards.
		UK resident	Check to verify that you are NOT a UK resident.
		Your comment