So what you didn’t want to read the rest of that and just jumped to insulting me? I’ll never be ashamed of learning new information and adjusting my views.

Son look up all of the other comments that said that and also where I responded to it already.

I really enjoyed Gifable, a self-hosted gif library. It was great, albeit a bit feature light. About 3 years ago the maintainer stopped maintaining and went AFK, nothing to be heard of then. I’ve since forked it, and I’ve been working on some new features to hopefully bring it up to speed. (Things like S3 storage, using AI image captioning to auto-caption your memes, categories, and hopefully full matrix integration), but it’s a slog.

First I asked it how to create a dump file. I hooked up ADB debugging to my phone, then used the scooter’s app as normal, with the logging turned on in Android developer tools. It created a very long and complex dump file of hex that I could not understand.

However, then I had Claude get to work. I describe that in that I had opened the scooter’s app, and turned it on, paused a few seconds, then turned it off and closed the app. It started attempting to mimic the commands through the computer’s local bluetooth device, to get a successful response. Eventually, after something like 20 attempts it found a hidden clue that was basically a pattern that it had detected, and it was able to finally get an ACK from the scooter. Something I would have never been able to do. From there we have a plan on how to map out all of the other commands, but it was a huge win for the day.

Personally it’s what I use them for the most. I do not have the time to reverse engineer arbitrary things like this. I have a scooter that uses Bluetooth BLE which has no connectivity beyond that. I’ve been using Claude to help reverse engineer the protocol to hopefully get a home assistant integration up and running.

Claude can see things I can’t, patterns in hex that are coming back, I send in results from wireshark and it can try ad neaseum to try and get something working. Right now it’s about half working. When I have time I’ll keep plugging away. Then hopefully other people will be able to use it, and we can have one less vendor locked in device

Kind of skipped over my entire thesis there didn’t you? And my other comments addressing those.

Each of these points makes it worth it. Price is always overlooked. Renting is same as a subscription. If you buy your modem it’s more expensive, but at the end you still have a modem. Renting at the end you have nothing.

I agree with your take, and I think it’s why there can’t be a rational discussion about AI on the internet, because AI is a very nuanced topic and the internet does not comprehend the concept of nuance.

Like all hype technology, both polar opposite sides will probably be wrong. The best and worst case outcomes are only 2 of an infinite number of outcomes in between. We will probably end up with some form of AI that sits comfortably in the middle.

Thinking that way, for engineers, I think refusing to use it will only limit you. It’s akin to refusing to use an IDE, or css. It may not feel like that, but to companies you might as well say you only code on punchcards. I can personally attest that searching for senior engineering roles last yeardid not ask if I used AI. they asked how much AI I used, and I was required to use it during the interviews. This is not one company. Every company interviewed with. It’s here to stay. Refusing to use it comes off as stubbornness to hiring managers, not some grand fight.

I’m on my phone now so I can’t respond to everything. I wanted to say I do disagree, but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out and I understand your point of view.

While I understand the underlying guidelines we try to uphold, I don’t think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes, and it’s not fair to hold people to standards they didn’t personally agree to. If that’s your personal belief, I’m all for it, but this guy might have just decided to make a project without caring about the exact definitions of OSS. that’s a risk we take using OSS code is that the maintainer can change their minds, but we can also take it and do what we please with it.

Anyway, I’d have more but thumbs are stupid. Thank you for your thoughtful reply

See my other comment in this thread, sorry it’s a lot and I’m on my phone

I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word. I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing. If he is picking up his toys and going home, we still lost a developer. I wasn’t there for those issues so I don’t know how they were handled.

I’ll compare it to Lemmy. Lemmy devs are (sorry guys) I’ll say… Disagreeable. They are headstrong and definitely have their own opinions which I have different opinions are about. I don’t think we would be friends. However, look at what they built, and the communities we’ve built thanks to their work. They started all of this, and now we have mbin and piefed and others thanks to what they started, even if don’t like how they handle things. We should always remember that the people contribute, and that’s more than the vast majority of us.

(Not directed only at you commenter, but everyone else reading this to share my point of view)

Congrats guys! We did it!

We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It’s truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.

Seriously. I loathe AI’s encroachment into everything. Copilot and OpenAI are being absolute assholes. However, the people who scream against it on message boards and and tell fellow engineers that they’re evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. Is AI killing software engineering? Debatable. What isn’t debatable is that us, people, killed this project. We can debate about the ethics of AI for ages. That’s not the point of this comment though.

Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not. Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing. How they were contributing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that they probably never will again. Open means open, open to anyone and everyone. We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

No more Storage Full warnings.

Is that a challenge?

Good practice. Good luck then! Let us know if you need anything, on matrix I’m @scrubbles:halflings.chat, feel free to DM with questions

That’s how I started too, so very good plan, and good way of thinking ahead. Ssd will be fast so the app will load fast for your users, and images can take a few seconds and no one will mind.

Make sure you have a solid backup plan for both

Basically for a cloud provider s3 storage is just any storage. It’s not a disk that needs to be high availability with programs reading and writing to it with an OS on top, its just blobs of data. Images, video, isos, whatever. Its meant for access that is lower than what a VM would need for an active program.

For matrix this is ideal for its content. An image uploaded will be read a fee dozen times, and then less and less until eventually it isn’t really needed ever unless someone scrolls and scrolls up.

So for hosting, if you store that on a disk you’re saying “this is critical to the operation of the software and must be highly available and optimized for vms reading and writing to it.”. Think like m.2 ssds. Blob storage then analogous to us home labbers to throwing it on a giant nas. Its there, may take a bit to load, but its there.

Then s3 has classes too, where if you need your data even less you can pay even less trading off access times, you can get even better rates if you know you need it extremely infrequently, like audit logs. Tape drives are actually used quite a bit for those opt-in low access tiers because if you think about it the data storage is incredibly dense, but opening up a tape can be minutes or longer to access. No problem if you’re pulling up some archive from 20 years ago.

If you’re running locally on your own system then yes you can use your own. You can use something like MinIO or Garage to self-host an S3 bucket, and then point Matrix to that

Docs would be helpful, I can’t find much of anything, I think you honestly did the best writeup.

Star Trek quotes is hilarious and perfect!

I’m not sure your level of understanding of cloud infrastructure, so let me know if you need me to go into more detail. Disk storage, like what is attached to a VPS/VM is very expensive, and it’s the 100GB drive you have attached. What is much cheaper is object/blob storage, known in AWS and most cloud providers as S3. This is far far cheaper for many reasons.

Matrix (and really I should say Synapse, what I use) can be configured to save images, photos, uploads, etc to save to a blob storage “bucket” instead of disk. So you can lower your disk from 100 down to something lower because your data is stored in blob storage (fully encrypted). For synapse, the module you need is here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider

Thank you! I’m going to start playing with this and see what I can figure out! I’ll be referencing this frequently!