If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.

It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.

I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent over existing cellular protocols/networks and then, similar to Stuxnet, make the device exagerte some existing functionality to a point where it caused a malfunction? Thoughts on this?

I love your optimism.

I've seen their implementation. It was horrible. We eventually took the project away from them and had the local team work on it.

Also a fun story: they didn't use version control at all. When we eventually forced them to use git, they put the whole codebase in a .zip file and committed that.

Well they can make a billion for all I care, I'm done with Xiaomi. After =~ 10 years of using their increasingly buggy, crappy and at the same time expensive phones, I'm out. I'll still stay on Android since that's what I know to use (and to some extent, develop for), but for my next phone I'll reach deeper into my pocket for a Samsung. I heard good things of Google Pixel as well but meh ... too technical. Samsung's got a bit of glamour as well where I live.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the bugs on my Xiaomi phones:

- Battery draining from 100% to 10% overnight, while in sleep mode, energy usage showing "screen activity". Goes on and off, I suppose depends when the Chinese government decides to do a data examination.

- Video mode on the camera takes 10-30 seconds to start. If you plan to film Bigfoot, make sure you turn the camera on some minute before he makes his brief appearance. No update ever fixed this, if anything it broke other things as well and made it worse (sometimes it just hangs and never starts video mode).

- Speaking of updates, the rule with Xiaomi is that any update will break more than it will fix. With guaranteed some new annoying crap, usually worse than what you're trying to fix. After my last Xiaomi slowed to a crawl, whenever I charged it it basically bricked itself, nothing but a hardware restart turned it back on, I broke my rule and updated. Only to end up with a notification "Looks like you performed a factory reset (spoilers: I didn't!). Connect to the network and restore MIUI" with two buttons "Not Now" and "Restore". Pressing "Not Now" will keep popping the annoying notification and "Restore", after taking an inordinate amount of time, fails. Great job, Xiaomi developers!

- Taking pictures is fine but to examine them I need the patience of a saint. For 20-30 seconds or more it just hangs and shows me a white preview. I guess it needs to pass them through the Chinese cloud for approval first or something. One workaround I found is to take a picture, open gallery, press "share" on the white loading crap and send it to WhatsApp. I can then examine it in WhatsApp while Galery still hangs on Chinese cloud AI processing.

Fuck Xiaomi! Never again!

The solution: unions.

A single person saying “no” just means they will find the next person to do it. In return, person that said “no” will face consequences. Impossible to complete work. Slightly more hostile work environment. “Evidence” the management will use to create PIP. PIP will probably be work that cannot be completed within timeline.

Shit like this wouldn’t fly in a union.

Personally, I wouldn’t give 2 shits. I would love to see the face of the douchebag that asked me this and I just left that person on unread.

In this market, AI engineers get hired easily. With recent ruling on non-compete clauses, this makes it much more easier to move between firms.

Let them squirm. Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives. Take it even to starting a union if needed.

You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.