• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • This article just screams rage-bait. Not that I am against making people aware of this kind of privacy invasion, but the authors did not bother to do any fact checking.

    Firstly, they mention that the vacuum was “transmitting logs and telemetry that [the guy] had never consented to share”. If you set up an app with the robot vacuum company, I’m pretty sure you’ll get a rather long terms and services document that you just skip past, because who bothers reading that?

    Secondly, the ADB part is rather weird. The person probably tried to install Valetudo on it? Otherwise, I have no clue what they tried to say with “reprinting the devices’ circuit boards”. I doubt that this guy was able to reverse engineer an entire circuit board, but was surprised when seeing that ADB is enabled? This is what makes some devices rather straight forward to install custom firmware that block all the cloud shenanigans, so I’m not sure why they’re painting this as a horrifying thing. Of course, you’re broadcasting your map data to the manufacturer so that you can use their shitty app.

    The part saying that it had full root access and a kill-switch is a bit worse, but still… It doesn’t have to be like this. Shout-out to the people working on the Valetudo project. If you’re interested in getting a privacy-friendly robot vacuum, have a look at their website. It requires some know-how, but once it’s done, you know for sure you don’t need to worry about a 3rd party spying on you.




  • Tesla’s bang for buck is horrible. You get a shitty car made from the worst plastic possible, and on top of that they don’t even have good quality control. The only thing that differentiated Tesla from the competition previously was the battery technology, but they no longer have that edge nowadays.

    The Norwegians are probably getting them because they got used to it, and probably don’t want to rely on Chinese cars. Beats me why they would select a Tesla nowadays over the European brands.








  • You’re right! Sorry for the typo. The older nomic-embed-text model is often used in examples, but granite-embedding is a more recent one and smaller for English-only text (30M parameters). If your use case is multi-language, they also offer a bigger one (278M parameters) that can handle English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified). I would test them out a bit to see what works best for you.

    Furthermore, if you’re not dependent on MariaDB for something else in your system, there are also some other vector databases I would recommend. Qdrant also works quite well, and you can integrate it pretty easily in something like LangChain. It really depends on how much you want to push your RAG workflow, but let me know if you have any other questions.






  • For notes, I have moved to Joplin with the option to synchronize my data using a WebDAV server. It works really well, and it has both a mobile and desktop app. If you’re interested in developing your project, maybe you can have a look at the options this provides. For example, I really like the ability to separate notes between groups, assign tags, create drawings, and the possibility to use Markdown.

    Good luck with your projects! To mirror @enemenemu’s suggestion, I would also look into collaborating with the people trying to push the EU Docs alternative. Not sure if that will work, but it’s worth a shot if you’re interested :D