The one saving grace is that their one-off custom damn shit always feels well designed, and they move a lotta units (which helps with repairs when everything is GD custom). Dunno if that’s changed in recent years.

With that said I avoid them for personal use usually for the same reason, why have a desktop if you don’t get the benefit of parts compatibility?!

Argh, okay gotcha. Someone needs to start a Framework, but for IoT devices. This is bullshit lol

I do understand what you mean, but I think you’re probably significantly overestimating the difficulty of using the tool. One of its major strengths is its ability to just understand you, like you’d talk to anyone human, with the benefit that you can even instruct it to use a style you prefer. Just say “I’d like your answer to be terse, let’s see if we’re on the right track before getting into details”. Just as an example.

With all that said you know what you want and need better than anyone else, that’s all I’ve got to say on it, cheers!

Just throwing this out there, but the problem you’re describing sounds like a good fit for an LLM I’ve been using for similar purposes, Claude.

I’ve found it to be really good at helping me slog through what would be a burdensome and wasteful amount of reading, in order to answer specific questions OR to get a baseline understanding of a thing.

It’s a bit hard to know how much value comes from my engineering background and my tendency to “know what I don’t know” and thereby ask focused questions, but it’s definitely worth a shot. I have found it to be surprisingly sophisticated and much better than slogging through the wasteland of bad search results + too much unrelated but real info.

A topic like this where there’s a tremendous amount of legit docs, articles, and forum activity - it’s really the exact use case where it’s very difficult for a human, and very easy for an LLM to effectively digest that info.

Some caveats I’ve noticed:

• it sometimes is overly agreeable / “friendly” when it should be more direct
• it does sometimes hallucinate or say BS with casual confidence, which sucks because the more you need the info the less well you can spot that. It hasn’t hampered usefulness too much for me, but then again I’m usually able to spot the mistakes even in ~unfamiliar subjects
• they’ve moved the free tier back to a less capable model at the moment…most of my good experiences are with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but Claude 3 Haiku (present free tier) is still good

If you’re really curious but the volume of reading and documentation to get started is presenting a big barrier, try using Claude to see how quickly you might be able to clear that obstacle. It’s been removing those exact barriers for me very effectively lately.

Edit to add: a particularly useful way I can imagine folks in your shoes using this - as a “companion” while you try to follow a guide in an article somewhere. It can answer questions about terms you don’t understand, even reasoning behind doing certain steps or what to do if it goes wrong. In fact, you could almost certainly just feed it the written procedure itself (telling it that you’re doing so) and really get it to reason about the process with you. Just help get you through whatever implementation.

Argh, this is exactly the scenario that I’ve anticipated and has kept me away from similar (home automation as well).

That’s what I want, high reliability, local only storage, remote view of some kind, and minimal (ongoing) fuss. Sounds like you did not quite land on that if the thing you bought grosses you out? Or do you mean something different?

Oh man, that’s hilarious. “Our business model doesn’t actually even work where we live. But I know what we’ll do about that, we’re going to do it exactly the same in a place we don’t have a clue about!”

The hubris, lol. It’s delicious.

Yeah, I know what you mean, and yep it looked like just input sanitization on a very specific thing. I don’t disagree, headlines being headlines, and even just broad benefit vs. overall level of effort seems pretty positive to me from an outsider’s perspective.

But then again, issuing a firmware update is also an implicit guarantee that no (unrelated) functionality will degrade, which really needs a degree of testing in order to be a responsible business decision. And then on the optics side, I can see there being a benefit to a hard line in the sand regarding EOL, vs getting into the weeds of determining on a case by case basis what merits violating their own policy, and all the implications such granular judgment calls would entail (although they and all others probably must do something similar, to some degree).

Idk, I don’t own much or any of their stuff these days, no real skin in the game, nor do I have any particularly relevant info or opinions on the company. Just rambling lol.

Yeah, I mean…what IS “end of life” / “end of support” other than not patching newly found issues, after long enough? Not enough info in the article to indicate any kind of bait and switch or annoyingly short support window, and the support window didn’t end recently either. Seems pretty reasonable TBH.

Then again it’s a lot of vulnerable devices, and doesn’t sound like too hard of a fix. But for all I know they’ve dismantled their tooling for testing patches on those devices, etc. Would be nice if they addressed it, but I can’t exactly condemn them for not.

Lol ah yes, the “fork me daddy!” camp weighing in

Oooh, that’s a fun one. I can just barely remember some of my early research projects for school - getting source material at the library was a bear. What a time to be alive.

When did they add blackjack and hookers?! That’s a hell of a feature update

We’ll also assume that destroying the universe takes constant time.

Well yeah just delete the pointer to it!

Yeah, in my case this one was too close to home for me to love it. 10 or 20 years ago I probably would’ve felt differently. Similar for Idiocracy, I don’t think I’d feel the same way about it if it came out today. Kinda chilling when I think about that, honestly.

I’ve been wondering about exactly this, do you have any statistics you can point me to? No hard feelings if it was a thing you saw but didn’t save.

That’s definitely part of the problem. I had an incident recently where an older family member had a minor panic. Because I left my (mfg in 2006!!) vehicle running in the driveway while I ran inside. During the day. In a very safe suburban neighborhood. Just a flat out absurd concern and she leapt right to it, instantly. She’s always been concerned, she’s a grandma, but she wasn’t pointlessly terrified like this years ago.

I think many of us don’t realize how badly this irrational fear has taken hold, or maybe I should say how effectively this irrational fear has been deployed. Otherwise ~reasonable people are walking around thinking the worst is going to happen everywhere at all times, based on absolutely nothing - worse than nothing, it’s based on weaponized deception.

Wait yeah, to echo other commenter is this a tongue-in-cheek comment on how that fairly normal stuff is being perceived as “negative” due to racism/classism, OR is this an actual technique being used because it legitimately tends to have such an effect?

Edit: OOPS. You meant whether the statement about being puzzle like applies to OG Rogue. You said almost exactly that. My bad lol, below remains intact to display my shame (and enthusiasm).

It’s a puzzle in the sense that you have a constrained number of options, both in a given combat scenario and in the general sense of building your character and attacking the dungeon. And usually all those options have some tradeoffs, beyond just the opportunity cost. Skill (and creativity! one of my favorite elements!!) of the player make the difference between a doomed run and a cakewalk. Careful marshaling of resources, knowing when it’s time to spend something rare or take a gamble. Knowing what late game change might solve the weaknesses your character has and help achieve specific goals, knowing what would be folly.

Lot to learn, and then deploy in fun and creative ways. And challenging. Loss is the teacher, lol. So good!

Oh snap! Haha well, musta been something I sensed in your comment. DCSS sure feels like an extra fun puzzle to me. Cheers!

A good rogue like is a super complex puzzle with randomness thrown in! Completely see the similarity.

Only RL I went hard for was DCSS for some reason, and it’s hard to estimate how much time I put into that over the years. At least as much as other heavily played AAA or MMO type games for me. What about you?

That seems pretty plausible to me, yeah, because it’s being attempted already and we seem to be sliding that direction. Privatizing those public services sounds like precisely the way to usher in a fresh new hell like this, completely agree.