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Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

The article is very vague on what actually caused the shutdown. Does he think a human triggered the kill command? Or the remote servers do this when they haven't heard from the device in a while? Or the device shuts itself down if it can't reach the servers?

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Most, if not all, of the article is written by AI.

I downvoted you for two reasons:

1. I didn't see any obvious AI ticks in the article.

2. If you want to claim that some slop is AI then please bring reasons. Even if they are the stuff of "there is too many em-dashes" then fine at least you brought something.

Top image is definitely AI, watermarked though so they're not hiding that.

I do see a lot of em dashes throughout the opening, but at least one of them seems proper. "Inside, the iLife A11 wasn’t just a vacuum cleaner; it was a small computer on wheels." is also kind of an AI tick phrasing. And there's pretty heavy use of bullet points for listing things beyond what I would normally expect from a tech blog.

(Also a lot of random lines are in block quotes for emphasis, but that could be a writing quirk. Kinda weird to read though)

If you go through there's at least enough of a smell I suspect someone had an AI polish or edit their actual blog post here?

I do see a lot of em dashes throughout the opening

Maybe he's using a Mac?

Those of us who have been professional writers are quite comfortable with pressing ⇧⌥-

The art is pretty obviously AI, though. But I didn't get that impression from the article.

Seemingly remote kill command, very likely punishment due to not receiving telemetry because that particular address was blocked through firewall:

"2024/02/29, 14:06:55.852622 [LogKimbo][CAppSystemState] Handle message! cmd_id 501 RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT, len 8 serialno 0"

Note something being named RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT

Yes, but automatic or manual? If automatic, what exactly was the trigger?

I'd have been tempted to explore this further - does sending fake or repeated telemetry satisfy it?

OT, but anything automatic was manually and intentionally implemented at some point

But is it malicious or innocuous? I could see just the assumption being made that if it hasn’t phoned home it must be malfunctioning and ask risk mitigation then force it to brick. It’s not super unreasonable considering very few people will ever block the comms.

I think OP said it claimed to be able to work offline.

How is that reasonable? What about loss of network access makes vacuuming less safe?

it's not loss of network access, it's partial network access. There still got to be _some_ connection to get this 501 command.

I wouldn’t argue it’s reasonable, but these kinds of decisions get made without much thought all the time whether we like it or not. It’s possible they just didn’t give it much thought. Or, it was just a directive from Legal and so nobody asks questions. Possibly the marketing team doesn’t even know this got made and still touts it as “works offline”.

I’m not really defending it but pointing out this is still on a different plane than outright maliciousness.

Punishment due to not receiving telemetry? Please, that's fantasy land stuff.

It might be a malfunction caused by his blocking, but the idea that someone in HQ was like "guys, we've got someone blocking telemetry!" "disable his vacuum, the bastard".

Or in some design meeting they were like "what do we do if a handful of privacy nerds block our telemetry?" "well.. I guess we should automatically disable their vacuums in a weird way so they repeatedly send them in for repair and it costs us loads of money".

Come on, at least try to live in the real world.

>"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."

He posits that some low-level support person triggered a remote "kill switch" because he dared to block some telemetry servers which is, frankly, ridiculous.

So what's your explanation?

A much simpler explanation is that the device disabled itself after being unable to contact the cloud servers for X time (probably a bug), rather than an employee sending a kill command over the now-disabled cloud connection.

The article is obviously AI-written, and also I very much doubt that these conclusions were reached without a sycophantic AI in their ear.

He didn't posit that it was a manual action, only that the kill command came over the network.

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