andrew0

@andrew0@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a friend who set up a Dreame L10s Ultra. I helped them solder the breakout board, and was there when they flashed the new firmware. Relatively straight forward! Just follow the guide on the website and you should be good.

  The robot is now accessible only on the local network, and they got it working in Home Assistant. The only feature that is missing now is direct camera view, which the original robot had. Basically, you could get a live feed of the robot at any time. Looked fun, but it was not necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This article just screams ragebait. Not that I am against making people aware of this kind of privacy invasion, but the authors did not bother to do any fact checking.

  Firstly, they mention that the vacuum was “transmitting logs and telemetry that [the guy] had never consented to share”. If you set up an app with the robot vacuum company, I’m pretty sure you’ll get a rather long terms and services document that you just skip past, because who bothers reading that?

  Secondly, the ADB part is rather weird. The person probably tried to install Valetudo on it? Otherwise, I have no clue what they tried to say with “reprinting the devices’ circuit boards”. I doubt that this guy was able to reverse engineer an entire circuit board, but was surprised when seeing that ADB is enabled? This is what makes some devices rather straight forward to install custom firmware that block all the cloud shenanigans, so I’m not sure why they’re painting this as a horrifying thing. Of course, you’re broadcasting your map data to the manufacturer so that you can use their shitty app.

  But it doesn’t have to be like this. Shoutout to the people working on the Valetudo project. If you’re interested in getting a privacy-friendly robot vacuum, have a look at their website. It requires some know-how, but once it’s done, you know for sure you don’t need to worry about a 3rd party spying on you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Believe If 90% Prefer A over B, A Must Be Much Better than B. Are They Wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true only if the decisions were made independently. If you allow people to make a decision after they’ve seen the metrics, this no longer holds.

  Here’s an example of the first. You go at a farmer’s market with a cow and you ask everyone to write on a piece of paper what they think the weight is. If you get the replies and average them, you will find that the mean of all answers will be quite close to the real answer. A mix of non-experts and experts will iron out a good answer somehow.

  Now take the average experience of going to a restaurant. One might have just opened recently, has great food and great staff, but only 5 reviews, at an average of 3.8 or something. Another restaurant nearby has been open for 3-4 years, and has 1000 reviews, at maybe 3.9. People will usually follow the one with more reviews because they think it’s the safer option due to the information available. However, if you were to hide this and ask them to choose by just looking at the venue and the menu, they would probably choose the first one.

  Group dynamics are quite interesting, and the psychology behind this is quite funky sometimes :D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What can I use for an offline, selfhosted LLM client, pref with images,charts, python code execution⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All the ones I mentioned can be installed with pip or uv if I am not mistaken. It would probably be more finicky than containers that you can put behind a reverse proxy, but it is possible if you wish to go that route. Ollama will also run system-wide, so any project will be able to use its API without you having to create a separate environment and download the same model twice in order to use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What can I use for an offline, selfhosted LLM client, pref with images,charts, python code execution⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ollama for API, which you can integrate into Open WebUI. You can also integrate image generation with ComfyUI I believe.

  It’s less of a hassle to use Docker for Open WebUI, but ollama works as a regular CLI tool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bulgarian border city hails Schengen tourism boom⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait, you didn’t need a passport before, did you? Since it was still EU travel, you could get in with just a national ID, or am I wrong?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Trump tariffs and implied trade war have a significant effect on the global emissions of greenhouse gases?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It was just announced that the EU is pausing sustainability requirements on smaller business (< 500 employees) for 2 years. This stems from fears related to the trade war, as they want to keep smaller businesses competitive. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that this won’t be great for the environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developing a self-hosted alternative to Google Keep⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For notes, I have moved to Joplin with the option to synchronize my data using a WebDAV server. It works really well, and it has both a mobile and desktop app. If you’re interested in developing your project, maybe you can have a look at the options this provides. For example, I really like the ability to separate notes between groups, assign tags, create drawings, and the possibility to use Markdown.

  Good luck with your projects! To mirror @enemenemu’s suggestion, I would also look into collaborating with the people trying to push the EU Docs alternative. Not sure if that will work, but it’s worth a shot if you’re interested :D