Longer trips in EVs require one small reframing, at least when compared to how we used to do longer trips before.

In longer trips with an ICE, we would have a meal before the trip, then drive until the destination, and have a meal when arriving.

With an EV, you should plan to have a meal on the road, and charge while you eat.

I’ve had a few experiences with this recently on a 300k trip we do fairly regularly. We do it in an older EV with comparatively poor range, but still we get away with making one stop to eat and charge.

Given that you are the author of the project, I do consider you the higher authority on what it can and cannot do.

But to me, there’s a slight distinction to be made here - Valetudo allows you to directly control the robot from a server running locally on the robot, giving you the option to not interact with a cloud service in order to remotely control the robot vacuum.

This doesn’t immediately imply that the robot is directly prevented from passing information to a cloud service - just that the cloud service does not have to be involved as a command proxy.

The larger feature I was thinking of was not only serving a local server to allow commands to come in directly, but also actively prevent any outgoing connections from the robot vacuum to its manufacturers cloud.

Again, you are the author - you know far better what Valetudo does and does not do, so your information weighs heavier here.

I guess I can also mention that I will be pleasantly surprised if my Chinese robot vacuum has actually been prevented from logging any information back home as a part of me having run Valetudo for the past years.

To be fair, their sales in Sweden have absolutely collapsed.

As sad as it may seem, Tesla did kind of win that fight in the end. All the union employees were bought out in the end, and the strike was called off. Tesla operates with impunity in Sweden.

Interesting.

This seems to be a model-specific quirk and moreso a side effect of getting Valetudo to work rather than an explicit goal - the same option does not appear in DustBuilder for my model (Roborock S5, still going strong after 941 hours of cleaning time).

I feel like I should check out this DEFCON talk though.

I learned something new today, thank you for that

Valetudo actively blocks the cloud connections.

Are you sure about that? It’d be a pretty big feature to implement, and surely it would be something that the Valetudo author would mention in the docs for the project.

I’m not talking about the code in Valetudo - I’m talking about the code that’s already running on the robot vacuum before installing Valetudo. It remains on the device after you install Valetudo.

Basically, any concerns about privacy stemming from the original software on the robot vacuum do not get eliminated by installing Valetudo

I’m not convinced this actually holds. To be able to use Valetudo at all, you at minimum do need to connect it to a wifi network which you are connected to as well on some kind of device. Unless you happen to be setting up some kind of firewalling on the robot vacuum, it is at that point free to start logging whatever information it deems appropriate.

Valetudo runs alongside the existing software on the robot vacuum though, does it not?

It’s pretty good practice to have your app modularized to the point where you can execute the core business logic separated from your UI layer, for which you then don’t even need a CLI.

In the same vein, it’s good practice to have your UI be modularized to the point where you can test its logic separated from the core business logic

Chinese models are typically only cheaper than models from western labs, not higher performance. Which is better in one aspect, but not the other

I mean 27b models are practically speaking useless at anything but turning your computer into a space heater, in my experience, but yeah

Mind-blowing that people have positive associations with ordering food online. I’ve always found the process generally tedious and unpleasant

You can give the model access to a tool like ghidra via a MCP

Better yet, give your model access to a CLI and save on context window

Half as Interesting made a video on the subject: Nebula / YouTube

Text watermarking is trivially removable, fwiw

Thermoelectric is hilariously inefficient, so you can’t really use it for electricity production, once it’s served its purpose of turning the turbines.

What you can do with spill heat is to reuse it in district heating networks to provide hot water. And heating, of course, but there’s no use for that during heat waves

It can certainly be someone working in tech, in particular a startup founder.