Comment by cebert
4 days ago
I can’t wait till somebody figures out how to reverse engineer these with a LLM so we can just sync the scale data ourselves. I purchased one of these devices, but I am somewhat regretting my decision now.
4 days ago
I can’t wait till somebody figures out how to reverse engineer these with a LLM so we can just sync the scale data ourselves. I purchased one of these devices, but I am somewhat regretting my decision now.
I can't help but feel that something soon gonna break, and break big. Like, the decompilation stuff either gonna get criminalized, or forbidden in training, or I don't know. Current state of affairs became super imbalanced, where I can decompile 400k+ lines big game in a weekend and rip it's engine; or, as pointed in sister thread, as someone cloned music processor device in 2 hours.
The question is who and when first blinks.
Luckily we have open weights models that can't be banned. Even if you tried, it would be impossible to enforce, like Napster/Bittorrent again.
Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security, and then they'll just purge anything "revolutionary" from services. The endgame currently getting pushed by the big players is pretty obvious.
> Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security
Molon labe
It'll be made illegal in the same way piracy is. Major platforms won't be able to host it but anyone who wants it will trivially be able to torrent the latest model and do whatever they want.
Other countries won't care and let people reverse engineer away.
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And the big players will run out of money. Win-win, I guess.
We've been having an existential crisis in the SaaS industry for at least six months now. See stock prices and internal panic. The recent recreation of the Adobe suite (the hard way, not a decompile) is the nail in the coffin. A company worth $98B just had its most valuable software copied by one guy with a laptop. Software patents have always been difficult or impossible to secure and defend, all over the world. So there is little legal protection.
On the one hand, everyone gets all the software they could ever want now. That's cool. On the other hand, the entire profession and industry is soon worthless. That's a lot of lost jobs and companies. We are not ready for this level of change this fast.
Have you looked at the issues page on Github? Looooooooong way to any recreation, and I doubt anyone is even wanting to walk that way. It was all for hype, and hype it got.
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I’m surprised it’s not already forbidden in training. They won’t even mention brands or characters because that’s wrongthink.
I'm also surprised when reading stuff here like "agent harness app %X% is a new moat!". I mean, I can point even GPT itself on their own new app and it happily obliges in dumping all features, writing product doc or disassembling itself.
Not that I want it -- my tokens are not free -- but it's here. Up for grabs.
What AI are you using? Image generators are kinda like this but AFAIK no LLMs do this. Maybe a little or warning about copyright at most for specific use cases.
Remember it needs to get criminalised everywhere for it to stop happening.
I think I’m going to have a crack at with with Claude and REA this weekend, if nothing else comes up.
got a link to that comment in the sister thread?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104955
I'm coming to the conclusion that my life is improved the more I can leave these technologies alone.
This is the unfortunate truth. I've gone through 2 Withings scales because the battery basically had planned obsolecense. Then I bought a Quardio smart scale, but the company went bankrupt and all cloud syncing went down. Meanwhile my mom's $20 dumb scale works perfectly fine.
These days it's not true that if you pay for the item, you're the customer. Now you're just a potential revenue stream.
Do the newer ones have rechargeable batteries? I thought even my new one used AAA's. I have one from 2012 that's still kicking. Aside from this rugpull I've been very happy with Withings.
I don't have the scale, but I got the protocol for the watch and it'll probably be similar enough.
Been using my implementation exclusively for months, seems fine.
https://github.com/davidventura/withouthings
Nice work. Have you seen GadgetBridge? https://gadgetbridge.org/
This came up on HN about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550436
I already did, the scales local sync with bluetooth is at https://github.com/NavistAuLabs/esphome-withings-wpp
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries - https://rea.tools
I'm not as optimistic. I think we're in a very small golden window and once companies catch on that reverse engineering is taking off in a big way, they're going to panic and start demanding cryptographically-sealed binaries with remote attestation everywhere. And they'll probably get it, because what the consumer wants barely matters anymore.
I also think it will be a short window. I can already imagine the convoluted encryption algorithms and weird stuff the big companies will put in place to stop us from cracking their software and so on, but at least in the meantime, and with legacy devices, there will be fun to be had...
Convoluted encryption algorithms are something the games industry has been playing at forever and they haven’t made something uncrackable yet.
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Something something think of the children.
Except it'll all be locked down into a lower-bidder insecure state too.
Used to be a thing before LLMs too.
Here is a starting point. It includes a link to instructions on how to reverse engineer a Bluetooth scale[0], and it looks like someone dumped some data already.
[0] https://github.com/oliexdev/openScale/issues/786
True but it's good to see access to our own devices democratized, for once.
It isn't far short of magical to watch Opus hack a piece of connected hardware. Everybody should try to take advantage of that capability at least once, if only to see it in action before they nerf it.
We need an open firmware for these scales.
I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
I've had pretty good luck using Google Appscript to either access web APIs or screenscrape, then parse into a Google Sheet (which I either use as-is or as the source to populate a web app).
I give it at most a week. People freed the Whoop pretty quickly. I mean, you could probably do it yourself if you have the time and an LLM, it's probably not that locked down.
Maybe LLMs are going to help free us from enshittification. For now.
Pretty sure it's already possible. I have a small service running on homelab that syncs all the withings data to garmin. Has needed no attention in years and just works.
It would take a few hours with Claude probably. Someone just has to care enough to spend the tokens.
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