Hello World!

  • 4 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Many are, but as far as I know, no hosting provider has ever tried something like what was claimed (which is why it made such news).

    It seems like many people didn’t even verify that portion of ToS was new (checking web archive), or wait for Vultr’s response before closing their accounts.

    Even after the official response, it feels like people stuck to their original assumptions and felt justified moving services?

    Companies, and specifically the people in them, make mistakes. What matters is their reaction. I’m scratching my head to think what Vultr could do better in this case (other than creating a time machine to avoid the initial screw up).













  • Not the OP, but commenting on the Atoms. They are good for testing, but not sure I’d want to use them for a full setup.

    For one, speakers are pretty rough in them 😂 That’s kinda to be expected though, it’s intended as a cheap dev device.

    However, the bigger thing for me is to wait and see what hardware HA will support when they implement on-device wake-word processing. I’d definitely prefer no continuous audio streaming over the network, until after I have said the wake word.


  • I picked up an Atom for testing as well. I do get a delay, but definitely not 28 seconds… Maybe more like 4-5?

    It’s totally dependent on the speed of the hardware you are running HA on though. Since the microphone is just streaming sound to the server, which then processes it. I’m running on fairly beefy server.

    Just for a test, you could also try toggling off the wake word in the Atom Device settings in HA. Then you can send a command by pushing the physical button. Could at least narrow the delay down to wake word processing vs normal speech processing that way?





  • It was a server-side block, from Cloudflare (security rule specifically). I’m very familiar with it, having used the same service over a decade. They are able to tweak the overall security level, or specific WAF rules for the endpoint in Cloudflare. They also have analytics that will show them exactly how many cancellation requests would be blocked. The fact that they totally ignored these details in my ticket, is concerning.



  • On a related note… I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message “you don’t have an active membership to cancel”. I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for “security reasons”. Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.

    I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.

    Not sure if it’s a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!