- Oh. Okay, yeah. Makes sense
Yeah, sorry about that. I agree it indeed worked out for you and that is great.
The point that I'm getting at is that it is necessary for the system to occasionally produce a winner, because otherwise, people would stop trying.
Think for example about a casino with zero wins. No one would come to play. If they however occasionally select a winner, that winner will then be the best marketing they can get, encouraging all his friends to also start gambling.
Please do not mistake this analogy as me questioning your merits. I am confident in your abilities at your craft.
What I am however saying is that the system does not select its winners based on that merit. Instead, the criteria for selection are usually based on what benefits the system most. This, in some situations, might line up with general merits to some degree, but it also might not, and that is one of the core deceptions, the corporate world runs on.
I do believe you that the idea of the article was to encourage people so that they can also have these great wins and experiences you had. But, as said, that is just one side of the coin, and it would be unethical to not mention all the outcomes in which a person does not win.
- If you throw my nickname into a search engine, you will see that that is the case for me as well. Doesn't change anything about what I said though.
If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.
But anyway. Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.
I hate corporate so much man. Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.
___
I understand that your role requires you to do this. That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.
What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.
That is, above all else, strategically unwise.
Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.
- I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
- The good thing is that at least for a somewhat technical crowd, there is absolutely no need to buy into any of this, as there have been proper solutions available since at least 2018.
Just buy Hue, maybe Aqara sensors, use zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant and be happy while observing the shitshow that is this market from a safe distance.
- Thanks btw. The prior question of mine looks like I knew it all along, but in reality it only came to me because I was challenged here.
There was a large gaping hole in the docs that has now been closed: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/so-youve-been-banned.ht...
I genuinely think that this is a good addition and it wouldn't exist without your input. I just wish there would be less pain attached to all of this.
- Question:
I see that you have a lot of energy to fight for what is right and that's great!
Have you considered directing that at the vendors? Any vendor. Roborock, Dreame, Ecovacs, whoever.
These are those responsible for why you are still being forced to engage with me in some way. And you have a clear paid customer relationship with them. They must listen.
Imagine how great it would be if my whole project would become entirely irrelevant, because there is a proper vendor solution with paid commercial support and without some weird ideological Hardliner.
That to me sounds like the ultimate win. It would even side-steps me completely, stripping me of all my undeserved autocratic power.
Instead of fighting over a tiny cake, what about making that cake much, much bigger? Just some food for thought.
- I see that you're back to your old self, Stefan, after for a moment it almost looked like you've dropped it and moved on.
Will you ever move on? You do know that what you want is for me to stop being me and that is something I simply cannot do, right? This can't be fulfilling, especially given it's a reaction to once being part of the in-group.
As a fellow adult, I would really wish for you to somehow make peace with this fundamental incompatibility.
It is probably me. I am incompatible with the world how it is now. You're okay the way you are.
What else can I do other than putting up many, many warning signs?
__
Anyway.
Lie is a very strong word you're using there. What is true is that I'm certainly not providing a high-speed instant path to achieve that, but just because there isn't a large neon arrow pointing at a high-speed industrial conveyor belt, doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a set of stairs close by.
Finding those stairs and bothering to walk up is in itself another filter in the spirit of the CoC and the appeal process. Essentially, selecting for caring and bothering instead of "needing to fix this one thing to get back on track".
- Sure, but the action is still incorrect and that's why the reaction was removal.
Deserving sounds like a punishment, but it's just action => reaction. Attendance privilege was misused so it was revoked for a while.
I get where you're coming from, but the question there always ends up "where is the line?"
The answer in this case makes it simple. The line is crossed the moment transactional self-promotion happens.
No surprises for anyone. No discussions about which groups might be allowed to do so and why. A simple "no transactionality full stop".
Btw, most bans in my space expire after a while, because I do believe that people can and will change, but, as per the CoC, there is also another way to appeal a ban.
- > but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time
No, I can't. The world, in this aspect, is wrong. It is flawed. Rotten, even. I (and actually we) cannot approach this by just accommodating what is broken.
Everyone has been doing that and you can see what damage this has done to democracy and to reality itself.
As the docs state, Valetudo is counter-culture. The definition of being that is that you will hear a steady stream of loud screaming, because culture is being countered. If this stream stops, that means that the countering also stopped.
I do not think that we can afford to let the world deteriorate even further than it has already. We need to re-learn context. No matter how painful that might turn out.
I know HN is the last place for this :D But I also didn't ask to be linked here. I did however ask to not be posted here anymore.
I also believe that Valetudo is a unique opportunity for this, because no one is being held at gunpoint and forced to use it, nor will anyone die because they can't use it. But, at the same time, it is highly-polished software that just works and offers massive amounts of value for free. You only pay with accepting that context exists and that other humans exist.
> It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries
This is precisely what I am doing. I would argue thought that the "unapproachable" really depends on where one is coming from.
- > I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?
This is an interesting question that comes up from time to time and it's actually not as it seems. While it is work and taxing at all, the whole act of explaining is actually not very expensive. In fact, it is simply tapping into the stream of consciousness and piping it into a text input.
What _would_ be expensive actions would be to:
a) _not_ explain, see that something isn't quite right and then try to handle the internal discomfort sparking from that.
b) mask and play a different "more polite" role, which actually just means "accepting the unsolicited emotional offloading and the task of handling those attached to it"
both being "providing a service" to the random person that just approached me, and operating in a style that is unnatural to me. This is counterintuitive for the vast majority of people, because for them it works exactly the other way round.
Doing this emotional labor for free would also be just giving away the thing that makes me money. Specifically, being able to understand technical details and also communicating those to people that won't necessarily do.
Effectively, the free-plan includes technical support but not emotional consulting. This, for some, is hard to understand, for others, it is hard to accept.
And, of course, it always gets worse when social media (like HN) is involved, because these machines erase any context and replace it with violently jamming in defaults + rewarding those that dunk the hardest and make the in-group of the mob feel pleasant feelings.
- Business in this case means a clear transactional mindset. And you do get paid, just not in cash. You push your brand, your credibility as a security researcher and all that. You earn social credits and reputation.
And that is why you tried to hook people to watch your talk.
I bet the talk is good. Great, even. But this (maybe even not conscious) transactionality just does not belong in that space. HN, for example, is a much better place for it.
- Oh, yes, absolutely.
I am not in any way challenging that. That is the correct Take-away. Genuinely.
As said, the culture is different. I do not intend to convince you that my project would be better than what the vendor can offer. In fact, you have correctly pointed out that in your situation, the vendor might actually offer the _better_ experience with actual paid support.
- > and there's indeed quite a lot of hardware specs detailed on the talk itself
Not in what you posted though, nor in the link you posted.
> well, with your current behavior and tone as a community "admin", you're certainly making sure I'll not work on that direction in the near future
Not just with that, but also with the Contributing.md in the repository clearly and unmistakably stating that this is not wanted nor needed.
- > you ban most people.
I do not ban most people as so much that I ban people that did not read and act according to the rules of the space. Which does turn out to be "most people" when you look at an unfiltered set of all humanity, because the ideology of the space is rather far away from that baseline. That is on purpose though and clearly explained many times in the documentation.
The "Why not Valetudo?" page is a good start. The "FAQ" also houses some info. Code of Conduct, obviously and the Contributing.md too.
The information is out there and I did try my best to make it comprehensible and coherent. Most people that get banned usually get banned because they did not read the information first but instead showed up with defaults.
- I think "discuss" is actually an interesting and probably accidentally specific (and correct) choice of word here.
If you look up the definition, you find
> to talk about a subject with someone and tell each other your ideas or opinions
> to talk or write about a subject in detail, especially considering different ideas and opinions related to it
In contrast, the garden text:
> You can take inspiration from it and bring that home to your own garden, giving it a personal twist and adapting it as needed. You can even make friendly suggestions if you have a really good idea that ties into the vision that is already there.
- Having thrown one version of everest-server of _a_ CRL-200S firmware (which might not be the one OP's firmware is running) into Ghidra and having found the string, this "REMOTE CONTROL" to me really does not look like it's executing remote commands.
I mean it does, but not like shell commands but probably IR remote? The CRL-200S can be controlled via an IR remote, so it is possible that it saw something. The sun, perhaps?
Feel free to prove me wrong on this of course.
- > That was the moment my vacuum ceased functioning. The timestamp matched precisely with when it had stopped working, even though I hadn’t touched the app.
> 2024/02/29, 14:06:55.852622 [LogKimbo][CAppSystemState] Handle message! cmd_id 501 RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT, len 8 serialno 0
> Someone—or something—had remotely issued a kill command.
Uuuuh are you sure that you're not reading a bit too much into the word "REMOTE" in that logline?
These are some very strong accusations and opinions that to me don't feel like they're being backed up with equally strong evidence. At least not evidence that is part of that post.
What even is a RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT? Did you maybe check with e.g. Ghidra?
Yes, yes, we have privacy extensions, but you can still group those through higher-level fingerprinting. You don't get mixed traffic.