AI’s “Help” Is an Illusion — And a 1991 Film Exposed Its Myth

That video captures the true essence of human endeavor, that all efforts have costs and that no lunch is free. The trouble that isn’t in plain view, hidden in the shadows, is the devil in the details. It’s often missed and forgotten as time passes. The following video highlights the chain link of technology that modern society has become dependent on and how one weak link could have gone unnoticed.

The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew – Feb 25th 2026

This video was published not long before highlighting the risks of poorly manufactured lithium batteries. The public unwittingly places a tremendous amount of trust in these devices to operate without fault or flaw without fully understanding the potential risk of loss to property or life.

The Surprising Flaws in 18650 Lithium-Ion Batteries – Jan 20th 2026

The Espressif modules covered in this blog have mainly been for entertainment. In many circumstances the operational boundaries have been crossed with the intent of discovering what is possible. It has revealed more than whether something can or can not be done. It has shed light on that trouble hidden in the shadows.

Microcotroller roll over is a timing issue that is common. Using the millis() function in a short term bench environment is not unacceptable when developing. However, there is a risk of encountering the time roll over if the function is placed in production on devices that will operate well past that time span. For Espressif ESP modules, that is roughly every 50 days. If the timing function is micros(), that decreases to roughly every 70 minutes. This post goes more into the problems with time functions that fail to account for overflow, https://davidmac.pro/posts/2020-12-22-arduino-millis-roll-over/

The ESP32-Cam module has a peculiar bug that manifests itself after 5000 minutes, 3 days 11 hours and 20 minutes. The module will randomly hang after that roll over. I have several projects that don’t all follow the same use case, be it mqtt, image capture, wifi network scanning, data logging, etc. It is a hidden bug that is poorly documented. I have no interest in pursuing it since my work with the Espressif platform is a muse. My impression has no solid lead as to what might be the cause, it could be a library, it could be the silicon die, or both.

However, it has been documented recently that Espressif had unpublished commands for its BLE layer, https://www.opensecurity.es/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-rootedcon-bluetoothtools.pdf. Bluetooth projects with the Espressif module is a great platform for those gaining skills with the protocol, https://theorycircuit.com/esp32-projects/control-led-using-bluetooth-on-esp32/. Espressif responded to the report here, https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Response_ESP32_Bluetooth. Concerns surrounding the issue about unpublished commands have been dismissed as an industry standard practice. If you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.