Anyone who's somewhat technically inclined should, in my opinion, only be buying valetudo [0] compatible vacuums and replacing the default software as soon as possible.
I found the “Why Not Valetudo” page on that site extremely persuasive. I would consider myself technically inclined. I also own a robot vacuum so I can spend more time doing important things that leverage my skills. Valetudo does not serve this mission.
Very impressive, but I disagree that this is the clear best choice for anywhere close to anyone.
Many geek hobbies like 3D printing and home automation are becoming full of unnecessarily smug evangelization if you're not using hivemind approved software and tools, even if it requires a lot more work to do.
It's nice to a see a project encourage their userbase to be realistic about what it is and refrain from trying to force it on everyone as the only acceptable way to use a robot vaccuum.
> Many geek hobbies like 3D printing and home automation are becoming full of unnecessarily smug evangelization if you're not using hivemind approved software and tools, even if it requires a lot more work to do.
A mix between gatekeeping and tribalism. Reasonable people realize that others who want to enjoy a hobby do not have to do the hobby the same way as they do, or make the "right" choices.
- all the same downsides as keeping the stock OS would have ("it's opinionated software", "it's not about you", and the last one "it's not a community" basically means "you can't tell me how to change my software and be confident I'll do it")
- that this fan project is not necessarily as polished as the original software (as I would have expected)
- Only supported robots are supported (as the author themselves say: duh)
- it only works in english
- you can't revert to stock software if you don't like it
For me, the latter is the only thing worth mentioning. You made me curious what all these compelling downsides are but the rest is obvious and the latter isn't surprising / I would have known to check beforehand
How did you come to the conclusion that it's not likely the right choice for nearly anyone? Do you think so many people wouldn't understand enough English to operate the controls of a robot vacuum cleaner? Have you found features to be missing or clunky/fragile enough that people would frequently want to revert to stock? Do you think people care so much about it being community-driven FOSS that they'd rather keep the proprietary OS instead of open source that isn't community-driven?
Btw I have no experience with the project whatsoever and am not involved, only interested in trying it out once we need a new vacuum. I just came to a very different conclusion and am quite surprised by yours
There is also the "No multi-floor/multi-map support" point. Apparently it is treated less seriously than others there, and omitted here, but seemed particularly unfortunate to me: having per-floor dry cleaning robots seems wasteful, while in that text it is assumed that they should be fully autonomous (no manual transfer of those between floors), and likely with large and frequently used docking stations for wet cleaning.
(FWIW, I do not use multi-floor robots myself, only using an old random-walking Roomba in a single-floor setting, but considering getting another robotic cleaner for a two-floor house, where it does seem reasonable to manually move it between floors, as I would move any other cleaning tools.)
Yes, I didn't know what to make of it since it said that it's a legacy entry and that people only ever want it because it's listed on this page
Not sure what one needs a map for though, I know what my floors look like and the only thing I want from a future robot is that it drives around cables instead of suffocating on it
This was the example that really drove home all the other points for me. Not only is Valetudo opinionated software, but you'll be accused of having "fictional budget concerns" for wanting a very reasonable feature.
I occasionally take my Roborock upstairs on weekends for a vacuum. Turns out it will also do a basic mop run with the water in the tank. Takes me 5 minutes of setup/tear down to get an extra floor for no extra cost. It would take me more time to babysit the extra base cleaning task of a second mop, so this saves me time and money.
To me, this demonstrates that Valetudo is intended to be hobby pursuit of maximal automation/freedom at all costs, resulting in a system that has worse features and takes more work than the base software. I applaud the creator for being so clear in this mission to the point of explicitly encouraging me not to use it.
The main value proposition is privacy and security. If you are content with the privacy and security of your existing vacuum, then yes, I'd agree it's not for you. That being said, your critique seems to imply that Valetudo will increase your overall time spent managing the vacuum, and this has not been my experience. There is the initial setup time which I'm sure varies by robot, but for me took (conservatively) and hour or two, and then I never think about it again, to the same degree that I would before. You still have schedules, etc. and all the same features that make a robot vacuum a time saving item.
I won't try to make as strong a claim as the person you are responding to, but unfortunately, the politicized nature of the topic makes research on gun violence, especially as it relates to gun laws in the US, extremely fraught. The vast majority of research articles are plagued with issues. One should not just blanket trust the research (in either direction, and there are definitely peer reviewed journal articles pointing in different directions).
The claim you responded to was too strong, but for similar reasons, yours is also far far too confident.
Same thing with anything in regards to drug use in the United States. Dr Carl Hart talks about how hard it is to get anything that doesn't show harm published https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hart
I'm responding to someone making assertions with zero cites, and I cite a source. If anyone has a cite showing that loose gun policies results in lower rates of gun deaths, they're free to present that.
I'm impugning the entire field of research, why would I then provide an opposing citation? My own claim should lead you to not trust it. I'm also not making any particular directional claim that would require such a citation.
I'm arguing that your statement, citation supported or otherwise, was stronger than I believe is warranted. You (correctly) criticized the original comment for making a stronger claim than they were able to support. You then technically did a better job in supporting your own claim (in the sense that you made any attempt to support it at all), but, in my opinion, you still made the same mistake of making a claim that was much stronger than warranted.
I didn't say it was strong evidence or that one should just accept my claim, but regardless you have to agree it would be weird for me to say "the entire field is untrustworthy....but here is a paper anyways".
Your entire position is weird. The claim that there isn't a single source worth citing strains credulity. "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
"there isn't a single source worth citing" is not my claim. It's that the field has a very high amount of highly politicized dreck and it can't be _generally_ trusted. I'm sure there are good citations. But one can't know if any particular citation is a good one without diving into the details (probably while having some degree of subject matter expertise), and any randomly selected article is more likely than not to be bad. As such, most people should not take the existence of a citation as proof of very much since it is more likely than not to be borderline useless. Especially given that the worst, most politically motivated articles (again: in both directions) are likely to be the ones that tell the strongest stories and have the least nuance and are therefore likely to be the most often cited.
This is an area where lay people should stay out of it, and should _definitely_ not be making strong claims like "documented, empirical fact" based on a shallow reading of someone else's summary of the literature.
I would dispute your source just by look at my own state, which has incredibly open gun laws, including free open carry and having had these laws since before anyone here was born, and a massive hunting population, and yet is claimed to be in the top half of strong gun laws. It is ranked significantly above Texas, and yet I know for a fact that my state has way more permissible gun laws than Texas, both historically and currently.
So I already know they are fudging the numbers, presumably because my state usually votes democrat and they want us to look good.
Hell its got Vermont as #17, but it has some of the highest gun ownership rates and most permissive gun laws in the nation.
Isn't the validity and credibility of the source critical to it being supportive of your argument? Seems like a reasonable counter-argument in my opinion.
I provided a source, and so far all those who’ve disagreed have only provided opinions. No one has cited anything that contradicts my source, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that the validity and credibility of my source has been impeached. ‘I don’t like it’ is not a valid criticism of a source.
Not only the source, but the specific repoprting has been refuted already by others.
So you have failed to present an argument, and then continued to fail to support it. So all you have done is express an opinion. Those are fine and allowed, but of no significance to anyone else.
Additionally, I don't think that these kinds of failures say much about overall intelligence. Humans are largely visual creatures, and we fall prey to innumerable visual illusions where we fail to see what's actually there or imagine something that isn't there under certain visual patterns.
LLMs are largely textual creatures and they fail to see things that are there or imagine things that are under certain textual patterns.
I don't think you would say a human "isn't really intelligent" because it imagines grey spots at the intersection of black squares on a white background even though they aren't there.
I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months?
That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.
There was a cartel, but this is one of those "more complicated than it appears" situations. In incandescent bulbs, there is a real tradeoff between durability of the bulb, efficiency (lumens/watt), and brightness/quality of the light, for physics reasons you _can't_ improve one without degrading the other.
Since "quality of light" is a very difficult thing to market, there was an incentive to push "lifetime of the bulb" in marketing and just make the light quality increasingly worse. The cartel attempted to halt that by making everyone agree on a lifetime/quality to hit and not participate in a race to the bottom (and yes, there was also the obvious benefit to the cartel members of increased sales and profits, which they explicitly talked about in internal documents).
I want to be very clear that I'm anti cartels and I'm not trying to say "so this was all hunky dory", just that this was not (and these things very rarely are) a simple case of "they made the product objectively worse for the sole sake of more money". Instead, they chose a different point on the pareto-frontier of brightness/efficiency/lifespan that also had the benefit of making them more money.
But yes, LED bulbs are currently mostly garbage and have terrible heat/power management electronics which means that in practice you almost never get anywhere close to the theoretical life span increases (because the electronics die from overheating far before the actual LEDs themselves would go out), and finding out information on how well a given bulb brand does on heat/power management is essentially impossible.
As far as I understand it, they aren't being allowed to drive. They are doing the equivalent of "ignore that, it's not a real obstacle" or "try to go around this way", and then the car takes that input into account and does the actual driving (steering, control of throttle/brake) on it's own as usual.
I don't need, legally, to demonstrate any knowledge of this to drive on US roads currently (or even, strictly speaking, to know what side of the road I should drive on).
No, I'm saying that no one should be "concerned that non-registered drivers in one country are being allowed to drive remotely in a different country" because they aren't driving.
While I recognize that, as a business who needs reach, they kind of need to be using these websites where everyone is, I really wonder how difficult it would be to mirror everything they post to some more open and accessible location (a self hosted webpage, anything). I can't blame them for using Instagram/Facebook/whatever, but I can blame them for using nothing but that site. It would almost certainly get very little traffic so it wouldn't need much bandwidth and costs should be low, and it would be a lot more consumer friendly.
People or organizations using Instagram as their only form of online presence don't have the ability to self-host. Instagram is easy and reaches almost everyone they want.
I'm not sure it's that negligible. Mythbusters found that weaving in and out of traffic could save between 5 and twenty-five percent. Now A) Mythbusters did an experiment with an N of like 4 or something, along a single commute in the Bay Area, so it's basically anecdote and I'd love a better source if one existed, but it is at the very least proof-by-existence that larger impacts on travel time _can_ happen. And their non-weaving person was, if I recall from the video, not constantly decelerating to keep a buffer.
And from personal experience in some places, keeping such a buffer, in some traffic conditions would just literally be impossible. There are sometimes enough aggressive drivers such that they can just consume it faster than one would be able to create it. It is simply not always the case that you have sole power to create and keep the recommended buffer size (although very often it is and you can).
I keep a decent buffer whenever I am able, but at some point, you have to bow to road conditions.
You can buy IR and UV leds. All high end grow lights have these for plants. Low quality cheap led products won't include them but that is nothing to do with LEDs themselves that is just consumer preference and price conformance.
[0] https://valetudo.cloud/
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