If that happens just jump the low voltage to your wires. Most heat pump setups have two inputs: on/off and heat/cool via the reversing valve.

You can even wire an old style thermostat in parallel if you want, or have it available to slot in.

Note that this doesn’t always work with smart thermostats. From first hand experience, there are some models out there that will generally work fine but will not complete booting up if one of the outputs is detected as closed.

Yeah, in that case you can get an old thermostat that disconnects easily and wire it somewhere out of the way.

(Though replacing a smart thermostat with a mercury switch one is a five minute job if you're comfortable with it.)

It’s not necessarily the engineers. Product and Leadership needs the telemetry in order to justify the expenses for their department or team or whatever and therefore justify the existence of those engineers.

Maybe, I guess, but it’d be pretty weird to be an engineer of any kind and not know about local file systems. More likely, both companies and most users want remote updates, and companies certainly love as much telemetry as they can get.

At least in this case, ASUS routers all have local firmware install functionality, so this particular case is certainly not an example of engineers not knowing it’s possible to write offline updates.

Now if you’re really lamenting the lack of computing devices that cannot be updated remotely by design, that’s a different story, and might be on a ship that sailed a while back. The problem there is that local updates are inconvenient enough for most people that they aren’t done, which is problematic from support and security perspectives, even though there are legit problems with remote updates too…

> It was hard to get Google to surface a link without a date due to so much SEO bullshit

Google no longer does search, it does "recommendation" and it sucks hard.

No longer??? It's been more than a decade. A lot more

For some of us, a decade really isn't a long time.

Now get off my lawn ))

I just searched [Nest thermostats turned off the heat because of a botched software update] and the first result was correct