Well it only took until the 2nd paragraph, and the words "DJI’s remote cloud servers" for me to be forehead-slappingly disgusted again.
Obviously proper diligence wasn't followed with this product, and obviously this is going to be something we've all heard before, but why does a vacuum need to talk to a server at all?
And also, to go even further back, is there anything more leopards-ate-my-face than a compromised robo-vacuum? I have never understood the appeal of these things. Except as satire. Pushing a vacuum around takes minutes, once a month, all the more so when you live in a 3m x 3m box with 12 roommates, and is badly needed exercise for a lot of pathetic little nerd noodle-arms.
> Pushing a vacuum around takes minutes, once a month, all the more so when you live in a 3m x 3m box with 12 roommates
That's a lot of assumptions.
I budget an hour every couple of weeks to vacuum the entire house (kitchen more frequently, but that's quick). When we had pets, which we'll probably have again in the future, this had to be done weekly.
I get the frustration, but this is how pretty much all of the connected home devices on the market work. Sure, there are local-only versions of many of these things, but that sort of design is in the minority both in number of products and in sales.
And it makes sense: most people want this stuff to just work, and be accessible when they aren't at home on their WiFi network. The only reasonable way to do that these days is to have a central server that both the devices and the control apps connect to. Very few users (and yes I am one of them) are going to set up a local control server and figure out how to securely set up remote access to it.
It's a crappy situation that leads to security incidents like this one, but that's just where we are right now.
Regarding cleaning frequency: no need to repeat what the sibling commenter said, but I will say I suspect your cleaning needs are much lower than those of the average person.
> Pushing a vacuum around takes minutes, once a month,
Wait, you vacuum your living space *once a month*? If that is indeed the case, I am nit surprised you do not get the appeal. But everybody I know personally has a different understanding of cleanliness. We vacuum once a week at least and ans frequency only goes up if you have kids or/and pets.
> and is badly needed exercise for a lot of pathetic little nerd noodle-arms.
I get the implication, hahaha. But in all seriousness, our Robot vacuum was the only tech purchase that I ever made based on an explicit wish of my girlfriend.
These things really make life easier for lots and lots of people.
You're probably right but I no longer try to guess what's AI-written. LLMs learned all their bad habits from humans in the first place after all. But for sure I can still tell good writing from shit, so that's how I still look at it. I'd venture very little truly good writing is AI-written, and a lot of shit writing is. So maybe I'm rejecting roughly the same set of things, but just the fact that a thing intrinsically sucks, is enough information for me to act on. I dunno if I'm making sense or why I'm even commenting. Thanks for reading.
So toward the end of last year, the FBI was after archive.today, presumably either for keeping track of things the current administration doesn't want tracked, or maybe for the paywall thing (on behalf of rich donors/IP owners). https://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-trying-to-unmask-the-registra...
That effort appears to have gone nowhere, so now suddenly archive.today commits reputational suicide? I don't suppose someone could look deeper into this please?
> Regarding the FBI’s request, my understanding is that they were seeking some form of offline action from us — anything from a witness statement (“Yes, this page was saved at such-and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since”) to operational work involving a specific group of users. These users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or right-to-repair advocates.
> Since no one was physically present in the United States at that time, however, the matter did not progress further.
> You already know who turned this request into a full-blown panic about “the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to confiscate everything.”
The Luigi Mangione method? United Healthcare's brief couple-week spasm of not being complete dicks and borderline fraudsters to people with legitimate insurance claims, was encouraging in this regard. Unfortunately, to take this position you have to condone murder. And I don't see it doing anything to redistribute wealth - it just passes it on to their spouses or kids. On the other hand, if the spouse is a Melinda Gates or MacKenzie Scott type, having them be in charge might be an improvement.
maybe we have to start systematically hunting these people instead of one-off events :D
who am i kidding. consider myself a pacifist, talk instead of fight, find common ground and all that cute jazz. i feel powerless. murdering people will not change the system, too global and interconnected for this.
maybe us commoners really should start living like hippies. stop consuming from corporations, grow your own crops, start solarpunk societies. repair stuff. reuse. i don't know.
From the capitalization I can tell you and the parent might not be aware it's "minimal GNU for Windows" which I would tend to pronounce "min g w" and capitalize as "MinGW." I used to say ming. Now it's my little friend. Say hello to my little friend, mang.
Yes, I think that's how it will go, like all those other industries. There will be an artisanal market, that's much smaller, where the (fewer) participants charge higher prices. So it'll (ironically?) end up being just another wealth concentrator. A few get richer doing artisanal work while most have their wage depressed and/or leave the market.
Thanks for reminding me of the word plinth. I agree with the author that the job is less fun now, less interesting. I'm doing and accomplishing more, and it matters less. And unfortunately, having other ways of defining your identity doesn't really help, for me. What it does is make those other aspects of myself relatively more attractive as careers, in comparison to this one. Although then again, I suppose it's helping in the way you intend: I could leave (and I might), I could adapt. So I'm feeling none of the fear or anxiety about AI. Just something that I think is roughly boredom.
Obviously proper diligence wasn't followed with this product, and obviously this is going to be something we've all heard before, but why does a vacuum need to talk to a server at all?
And also, to go even further back, is there anything more leopards-ate-my-face than a compromised robo-vacuum? I have never understood the appeal of these things. Except as satire. Pushing a vacuum around takes minutes, once a month, all the more so when you live in a 3m x 3m box with 12 roommates, and is badly needed exercise for a lot of pathetic little nerd noodle-arms.
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