entwine413

I would piss on his grave, though

It's fine to grieve still alive humans and pets. We keep both alive too long to satisfy our selfishness.

It's not surprising to me that she was one to cause a stink. I'm glad she did.

Man, I wish I could get my SO to suspend disbelief. I like talking shit as much as any pedantic former reddit user, but literally every line is a bit much

It's basically like a tiny virtual machine running locally.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion depending on who is online, but 99.9% of pugs and almost every bulldog should be euthanized because allowing them to exist is animal cruelty.

I applaud the efforts of ethical breeders trying to return them to healthy animals, but anyone who buys an animal who was bred to suffer for life should experience the worst kind of genital mutilation for the genitals they have.

I'm having Excel nightmares

You guessed correctly. I was a senior SecOps engineer for a federal contractor before DOGE decided that my company increasing government efficiency by 900% was a bad thing.

I disagree that it breaks the trust. No one buys a computer and expects software updates 20 years later. Of course you can make the case with Linux, but that's a general purpose OS and requires knowledge beyond that of a typical consumer. A more apt analogy would be to expect Microsoft to still provide updates for Windows 98.

If you're going to support legacy hardware indefinitely, or even for decades, you're going to have to continuously add developers, and developers for legacy code are super expensive. Sure, COBOL still works fine, but you have to pay someone $250k a year to maintain it.

If the public expects their smart devices to be supported for 20 years, then their expectations need to be broken. Hardware, cyber security, and resource utilization will continue to rapidly evolve, and old equipment literally won't be able to keep up.

Hell, most of the smart devices out there have critical vulnerabilities. The ESP32 stack has been found to have hidden commands whose attack vector isn't fully understood. Literally every smart device on the market should have been EoLd months ago, and I can only imagine what holes tech from 2014 has.

The people down voting me to hell just don't understand how fucking dangerous the Internet is, and how much effort is required to protect an infrastructure. People like me bust our asses to keep shit like this safe, but there's a limit to what we can reasonably be expected to do. We're already really fucking overworked.

Of course, I would prefer that it be codified into law that companies need to allow the ability to manually flash a firmware before marking something EoL. Block it from your servers, but let volunteers maintain the hardware for as long as possible.

It's an Internet connected computer that has a temperature sensor and relays. Computers run operating systems, and those operating systems require constant updates to patch vulnerabilities. When those updates stop, the clock starts ticking on when they'll become attack vectors. You don't allow attack vectors to access your servers.

The only thing being taken offline is access to their servers (which is a plus for me). The thermostats still function as thermostats.

So no, it's not a fucking thermostat. If you want one that'll last 50 years, go buy an old mercury thermostat or one that relies on other laws of physics instead of literal computers. Everything has an expected lifespan.

Honest to God, I could have sworn I remembered Google bricking these same devices like 10 years ago, which is why I find it weird that anyone cares about Nest products. I built my own smart thermostat (super easy, you just need homeassistant, an ESP32 or pi pico, a 4x relay board, and a sht-3x sensor (plus 18vac to 3.3vdc or 5vdc converter to power everything). The hardest part is an enclosure, but I guarantee there's a nerd like me in your city that would design you one for fun (literally, building custom smart devices is what I do for fun)