coreyp_1

If I connect my washing machine to the internet so that I can use a stupid, proprietary app, how do I know what telemetry it's also sending?

Does it capture MAC addresses, SSIDs, bluetooth identifier, etc? That information could be used to identify who most frequently uses the device, personal schedules, friends/acquaintances that stop by, and a whole host of other inferences. When combined with other private corporate data sources, it may reveal things about me that I don't want them to know.

I don't want them to know to target me for advertising. I don't want them to have an economic profile so that they can extract as much money out of me as possible via surveillance pricing. I don't want service people to decide to charge me more based on how desperate I am to get the thing fixed.

I don't trust anyone that says, "I'll do that for you. No, I won't let you do it on your own... you have to go through me (my app)." Companies do not have my interest in mind... they are only trying to extract more money out of me.

Give me Zigbee or nothing!

I will not use a device's proprietary app. I won't connect it to the internet. I don't want appliances to phone home. I don't want them to help a company build profiles about me, my habits, etc. It's none of their business, and I don't trust them.

I will never use an app to operate my washing machine. I would love to be able to track the information (current status, total time, frequency of use, etc.) but not if it has to phone home to do it. It would be easy to expose this via a Zigbee interface, but manufacturers don't want me to bypass them. They want to spy on me from now on.

I was a Drupal developer back in the day, and I loved its templating system (the fact that HTML was assembled on the back end) and it was so powerful! It allowed for so much customization without leaking the internals of your representation to the front end, which was much more secure, IMO. Now, you have to give your templating logic to the client and potentially expose parts of your system to the end user.

Then, along comes MVC, and everyone drank the Kool-Aid, despite the fact that nobody ever actually implemented MVC purely, because it wasn't designed for the web. It wasn't designed for general systems, either. You may say, "you're wrong! You can adapt any system to MVC!", and I would respond that that is not what I mean. I mean that it is designed for custom applications (what you are referring to), and not frameworks which are for general use. You might claim that it is a framework, and I would point out that the nuance is in where the customization can be controlled and distributed. (Side note: I know MVC has been around a long time, but so have I and I remember when ajax was the hot new toy. MVC took a long time to gain traction and to infiltrate everything... and now we have ultra slow websites with tens of megabytes to download before they can even show a blank page. I stand by my statements and distain for MVC.)

I was building my own CMS that went back to server-side rendering, but I stopped because I just didn't have time to work on it. This may inspire me to do it again, only this time I'll use an LLM to get me through it faster.

I'm sorry that your post is flagged and now mostly hidden unless someone actively tries to read it.

I'm actually curious about a few things.

1. How much total did you spend (and with which provider)? I'm curious because I've seen a lot of people do experiments like this, and I see that you gave an amount for how much you spent to get a correct answer, but I would also love to know how much it cost to do it all in the first place. I'm assuming that you had to re-run attempts, failed runs, etc. I think there's value in understanding the cost to get the results throughout development, not just the final result.

In other words, I think that many people don't appreciate how much work/$$$ it takes to develop something like this... they only look at the final result. I want to better appreciate it myself.

2. How long does it take to run? You may have mentioned it in the writeup, but I don't recall.

3. What was your motivation? General curiosity, or are you working as part of a larger picture?

4. Are you intending to publish the results beyond what you've done here?

Is it because it's a summary? Because I also found it helpful as I went through the actual link.

Is it because of the low Karma? Because mine's not that high, either, and it seems quite difficult to get people to upvote you here unless you are a sycophant for their particular political or technology bias.

So, what's the deal HN? Have we become elitists? I don't get it.

Do you mean, for example, Jellyfin, which reaches out to my home server and is for my personal use? Because that works.

Or do you mean why don't we just write our own apps which talk to our own infrastructure?

Or do you mean that it's just hard to have your own/personal infrastructure? Or that most apps don't support your own infrastructure?

Or are you referring to the fact that the mobile platforms lock down things such as push notifications so that it absoultely must go through them?

Can you be a bit more specific?

Blender can run Python... with the app open or headless.

My Blender skills are nigh useless. I know how to describe what I want mathematically with variables/constraints, but I don't know what magical incantation to use to make it appear in Blender... and don't get me started on the hotkeys!

About a year and a half ago, I started writing a script (by hand) to generate a non-trivial widget for personal use (a zigbee controller housing). I sketched my own pencil drawings and wrote about 900 lines of python. It was going really well for a few days, but then life got busy. The file was an experiment (it was named `temporary.py`!!!) that I decided didn't need to die. But I haven't touched it since.

Enter AI... This weekend, after not touching the project for 18 months, I used Cursor to convert my one messy file into a proper, multi-project mono repo for all of my 3d designs, abstract out common Blender commands, scaffold a proper structure for revisions, etc. Then, I was able to use Cursor to finish the design.

I love it! I'm still making my designs (believe me, these aren't 1-prompt creations) but I don't have to worry about the minutiae of Blender's interface and, most importantly, I can use its power.

Side point: I loved it when I could say something like: The body ellipse should have a base whose height is .5 of the body ellipse diameters is .5 the shadow of the body. Using a spline/bezier curve-like profile, it should rise from the floor plane, shrink to 1/3 the size of the body, then grow to meet the ellipse at 1/3 the height of the ellipse, at an angle matching the ellipse's tangent, and parallel to the floor. And it just worked! And I can change the proportions and regenerate the model whenever I want to tweak visual aesthetics.

I have a list of things that I've wanted to model, but the overhead of learning interfaces when I'm already insanely busy is, in a word, prohibitive. This frees me up to build what I can already see clearly in my head, and I love it!

I guess I don't need it in my life.

LOL Exactly!!!

I was only doing it because my family asked me to. Meta killed that, too, I guess.

But, as a general rule, I keep all of my accounts separate. There's too many horror stories of a person getting locked out of one account, and then they can't do anything else.

Separate accounts are the only safe option.

I think my takeaway on this is just that Instagram isn't worth the hassle. I did lose the write-ups that I did for my pictures, though (which is why my upload pace was so slow).

But, whatever. They set up an automated system that weeded out a human while letting bots run rampant.

Maybe we need a page about "falsehoods programmers believe about human behavior", but they wouldn't read it. :/

I disagree, though, that it's spam behavior. It's "well, it's time to set up my account" behavior.

I mean, it's not like they could provide for a human to review after they asked for me to take a selfie. A selfie that shows the same person as the one that has used the facebook account with the same email address and face for over a decade... No, that's definitely asking too much. Or perhaps informing the user of concerning behavior, because all that they did was point to "community standards", which said nothing about what I was doing.

Apologies... my snark is not directed at you. It's just the exasperation towards a system that makes actual human participation impossible, while assuring that bots are the only ones who can get something done and yet stay under the radar.

Just because AI was used doesn't mean that it wasn't valuable to that person as an experience, and that it's not also valuable to someone else.

I say good job on shipping a project!

The newer models are nice, but the harness is the secret sauce that can make or break the experience. I wish we had better open tools for using/modifying these types of things.

In development, it will sometimes do all sorts of wild and convoluted things because the conversation has been compressed and it suddenly can't remember the structure of the project or other critical instructions.

AI should never have access to a production environment. Ever. Thankfully, we enforce that.

Can you give an example of your use case?

Local has come a long way, but it is still limited and slow. And while there are some people who have done stuff like this, the field is so new that you're probably going to get someone that doesn't have direct experience with everything. In other words, they're going to get stuff wrong. You will have to rebuild some part of it. You might not purchase the right hardware. Can you live with this?

In all fairness, though, if you have someone who has experience in evaluating new systems and using them to build something, then you can still be in good shape. I mentioned this, simply because it's a skill that is not as common as we would like in this world. Just look for someone with a track record of delivering functional software using new technologies.

My personal bias is that I love to keep as much local as possible, but I also realize that I bought a $3,000 machine that so far has saved me $5 in tokens from an external API. As I see it, the only real reasons to have local AI at the moment is privacy, but that does fit your use case.

As for a turnkey solution, they have their benefits, but their moat is significantly smaller now than it used to be. Quite frankly, you can vibe code the majority of TurnKey solutions in a weekend. Well, at least the parts that you need.

Sorry to not give more specific answers, but a lot of your questions may depend on whichever developer you decide to use. There's not necessarily a wrong answer in many cases, there are multiple paths to achieve what you are trying to do. If I were you, I would focus on long-term maintainability and security of your system. For example, you can have the best thing in the world, but if you can't pass a SOC2 (or, even worse, your developer has never heard of something like that) then you are going to be in a lot of pain.

These are available to read completely free online, but I do plan to purchase the physical books some day.

[edit] I realize that I should probably give more context to my answer. The books on the site are basically interviews with the authors of the software and they discuss what choices they made as well as the advantages/tradeoffs of this approach. In other words, the direct answer to your question is to learn by reading what other people have written about their own successes and glean from that.

[edit 2] Your favorite LLM could also provide a list of books that are similar in spirit, but there's just something about the series that I linked to that I like.

I love coding. I love low level coding. But I haven't written any code in the last 6 months, roughly.

But I don't feel empty or dissatisfied at all. My realization for myself is that I love solving problems and designing elegant solutions. Using AI, I still have to do that. I still have to make choices about how I want specified modules to interoperate. I know the big picture, and can catch when the AI is taking a shortcut.

I realized that it is all still low level design in my eyes. And I enjoy doing it, whether with my own hands, or with AI.

The amazing thing with AI, though, is that it has allowed me to explore so many things much quicker than I could before. It's still my design, my ideas, and even my poor choices that I have to deal with, but it reduces the boiler plate, so to speak.

That, and it has allowed me to explore more than I ever dreamed that I would be able experience.

Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software.

This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.

Editing to give more context:

I'm on an ultrawide and didn't see the help at the top right corner.

But, now I'm thinking: "OK, I typed something... what do I do with it?" Is the intent to copy/paste it somewhere? Take a screenshot? Does it convert to a less-savory format (e.g., latex)? Just looking for some directions.

By the way... congrats on shipping a project!