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.
Really great analysis. Always cool to see the divide between PKI in theory and practice.
It does make me wonder if the zealous pursuit of shorter expirations has gone too far, especially up at the root. Is there good public discussion on root expiration? Seems to mostly come up when old devices get bricked because of it. Certainly 15 year expirations are not a substitute for extremely strict root key management or root key revocation.
> Is there good public discussion on root expiration?
Haven't seen a specific one but I guess the most relavant public discussion on root CA-led device bricking issues might have occurred around the time when DST Root CA X3 (naturally) expired - that's around September '24: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.htm...
I personally believe most issues blocking old device reuse can be solved by manufacturers returning the root permission back to users, so that users can install modded systems with up-to-date stuffs. However, it's a pity that manufacturers aren't willing to do it, as it hurts their interest on selling new devices. Will laws on "right to repair" work? Time will tell.
It's even worse: based on "orange iPhone" they just bought an iPhone 17. So they'll skip the next two iPhones and be back in 2028? Sounds like a standard upgrade cycle.
I (perhaps naively) still believe that communities can successfully curate human writing. While there's lots of AI slop that gets posted on HN, for instance, the amount of thoughtful human content seems well above the base rate.
You are not alone and fuck all the people that say that everything is doomed and that there's no way to still have a good internet full of wonderful content made by people.
This (as previously posted) is one of my few Favorite posts on HN. Half because of how awesome it is, and half because I can never remember what it’s called.
CAIDA is doubtless a gold standard. One thing to note, however, is that the same vantage point avoidance issue applies even more to publicly-documented vantage points. In fact, it was concerns specifically about adversarial avoidance of academic telescopes that led to our research at UW-Madison and eventually to Terrace.
When looking at telescope data like CAIDA’s UCSD-NT, it’s also important to remember that source IPs can be spoofed absent a valid handshake, something that both our and GreyNoise’s analysis accounts for.
Surprisingly measuring legitimate Telnet usage may be even harder than measuring attacks! Getting representative metrics of benign src-dst endpoint pairs while controlling neither approaches impossibility, especially since at global scale it’d be mixed with (I suspect) orders of magnitude more attack traffic. Best you could probably do is measure on a clean-ish ISP like a university network.
We cannot know for certain what the root cause is. However, honeypot fingerprinting is a well-known risk for any vantage point, particularly a high-profile one.
/context?
reply