This reminded me of St Augustine’s reflections on Time: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there would be no present time.”

Lantern argues that being able to create indexes quickly is useful for tuning the hnsw paramters.

It does not! Would be interesting to try that!

Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You were taken from us too early.

Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You’re 5,000 candles in the wind.

Makes you wonder about the conversion factor between Roomba years and human years.

My Roombas seem to last about 5 years (then they get transformed into experimental robot platforms).

But since it's getting harder to find ones that don't connect to the network, I think I may just start actually repairing the one that's currently used as a vacuum when it breaks, so I can continue to have a good robotic vacuum.

So look into Valetudo if you want local control of your vacuums.

It's a open source application that (after rooting the vacuum) replaces the cloud with a self hosted control webUI.

I am a big fan.

Thanks for the pointer. I'll look into this.

Verring off topic...

Can I run a Roomba whilst preventing it calling home?

Is there a setting for that or would I have to configure firewall rules?

Not completely. If it's one that does mapping, that's all stored on the cloud.

You can prevent some of the telemetry with a pi hole, but be aware that every run will end with a notification of "communication error" when the Roomba tries to report on you

Is there a maker of privacy respecting robot vacuum cleaners that you know of?

Not a maker exactly, but there is an open source hobbyist software project for certain brands of robot vacuum: https://valetudo.cloud

It lets you run them without any cloud connectivity or forced updates.

iRobot still sells all the parts for their old, non-cloud vacuums if you don't mind buying used and doing DIY parts swaps. They're very repair friendly: No special tools required and easy to take apart.

I run a ~5 year old Roomba, that I just never connected to anything. I control it via the physical buttons and it works just fine. Is that not an option anymore on newer models?

My oldest is approaching more than 11 years I believe, though I've replaced its brushes and rollers and batteries at least once.

Bobsweep still sells some that don't connect to a network. They also have an online store with spare parts.

> "I think CS curricula should have a class that focuses specifically on these issues, on the matter of how do you actually write software?"

I agree. And for that reason, I liked these playlists: https://www.youtube.com/@MissingSemester/playlists

Here's an example of pgrx being used: https://tembo.io/blog/postgres-extension-in-rust-pgmq