The scary thing about IoT is that it's impossible to know what is being transmitted back to servers once a device is connected to an outside network (unless, of course, the network protocol doesn't allow external egress, such as Zigbee).
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.
I use Home Assistant to gather info about my house. I use Zigbee devices exclusively (with the exception of a Z-wave device that was not available in a Zigbee flavor). Why? Because that protocol allows me to talk to the device, but the device itself can't phone home to something outside of my network. I, however, can still talk to the device via my personal system. From thermostats to switches to various monitors and sensors, I don't need someone to spy on me in order for me to have a smart home.
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.
Please revisit your CMS idea. They're still around, like Kirby and others.
You are right about the old templating systems. I still use them. I still use PHP, it's ridiculously fast and mature. It has a readability unmatched by other languages (for devs like me with design background).
I'm surprised to hear CS people like yourself talking up the old templating systems!
> I hate modern web development.
For me, modern web dev is about modern CSS and JS and native browser APIs and all that fun stuff. It's ironic now with LLMs, the people caught in the grinding gears of MVC bloat are benefiting least from LLM.
Well, perhaps I can't make that claim, but the point is LLMs do a fantastic job at focused, single-layer arrangements such as the good old templating systems, vanilla JS and just direct "old school" frontend coding. Why burden ourselves or the LLM with truck loads of layered dependencies or a million steps to hello world? No need but people get angry on this topic though, so I just do my thing in my corner of the web and deliver results for those I build for.
AngularJS aka Angular v1 was the worst thing I've ever worked with in my career, other than all the BigCo apps I've had to touch that were using it.
Macromedia made ActionScript in 1998 and we still somehow haven't standardized on a good solution to this problem across the industry, everyone just adds ever more layers of abstraction.
Is it really this hard to make a decent GUI lib that runs on bare metal with a good-enough API and a mode to drop to drawing, moving, and applying a texture to triangles in 3 axes if that's what you need?
I actually wrote my own scripting language (Tang... complete with JIT compilation on x86_64 with a bytecode fallback) so that I could have flexible, familiar syntax (cross of C++ and Python) but without the danger of random imports. I built it for my CMS. I just need to get back to it. Again, I may invoke LLMs this time, as all of my previous work was done the old-fashioned way.
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?
Why was the comment from the Author flagged? I found it helpful.
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.
It's probably a pretty common misconception that websites should have total control over how their content is viewed, but it's strange to see that on a website like this. Part of the reason apps are so popular with companies is that it gives them control over how content is presented which is something webpages were never intended to give them.
The internet existed and thrived long before the advertisers infested it. The internet was different, but in many ways better. It was still useful and amazing. That was why they came. It would be still be useful and amazing if every advertiser on Earth disappeared tomorrow and took their ads with them.
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!
What do you mean by my "existing account"? I didn't have an instagram account before today.
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).
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!