Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds

Comments

• vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Welcome to the “brand new world” of IOT hardware where you are the product and continued service depends entirely on how you can be monetized.

  source

  • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m assuming it runs on AI and the company has to provide the backend. So yeah, if you purchase something that requires a company’s infrastructure, it can certainly be bricked.

    source

    • jonne@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Which is why you should only buy stuff that relies on local APIs and on board processing.

      source
    • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Self-hosting makes more sense every day.

      source
• Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

  That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

  I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

  Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

  This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

  source

  • pixelscript@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

    If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

    There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

    If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.

    source
  • VonCesaw@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    um, my favorite streamer Pirate Software says it is impossible for corporations to provide code to extend the life of anything

    source

    • bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why?

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Not just Foss, but also open hardware.

    And Lemmy mods: stop banning open hardware projects. Just because we happen to sell stuff doesn’t make us spam

    source
  • tibi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    For big contracts between companies, this is actually done, in a way, through source code escrow. Would be nice if this was a thing for consumers as well.

    source
• IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No thanks. I’ll get an emotional support cat and you can’t brick my cat. Take that, big tech!

  source

  • protist@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    you can’t brick my cat

    Is this a challenge

    source

    • IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      🤨

      Somebody call SPCA!

      source
    • Lennny@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

      source
    • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s not even a challenge, one drop of rogaine will brick any cat. App you have to do is touch them with it.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.

      Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.

      Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • medgremlin@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

    My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

    By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

    source

    • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m sorry to hear about your cat. 🫂

      Just to add on about FIP treatment— if your cat ever gets FIP then on Facebook look for “FIP warriors” or “global fip cats” (iirc) to find volunteers who can help supply medicine

      Also note that there IS an FDA approved compounded version but many vets aren’t aware about it, and even if they were aware since it is compounded they won’t have it in the office meaning that it will take a few days for you to order and treatment is often time sensitive from what I’ve heard.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • greybeard@lemmy.one ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    you can’t brick my cat

    Have you tried putting socks on it?

    source

    • FoxyFerengi@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Kitten Mittens!

      source
  • Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Catnip

    source
  • semperverus@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    not even doom music

    source
• peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Man those parents. Oof.

  I do not wanna be in their shoes.

  Telling your kid that needed an emotional support robot friend that the robot friend is going to take a nap for a long time and might not wake back up? Ooo boy.

  Dealing with a kid in a divorce is hard enough. This seems like a terrifying nightmare.

  source

  • Etterra@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    To be fair, electronics break all the time, and living pets die eventually - both things everyone needs to learn how to cope with, including children. This is just the Venn Diagram of those two pieces of reality.

    source

    • peopleproblems@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I imagine the children with these things are emotionally disregulated in some way shape or form. A small group of children sometimes don’t learn to self soothe when they are very young, others in ASD struggle with it for a lifetime. Some with ADHD have a very difficult time when their medicine wears off and their emotions kick back in to overdrive.

      For all those groups I mentioned, the whole concept of this thing was almost brilliant. Something that they can go to knowing it will be able to help them guide through emotions while mom and dad are doing something necessary like cooking or fixing something outside, or in the bathroom.

      If you haven’t had to deal with a child that has emotional regulation problems, then it is hard to explain the difficulty that the failure of this device will make. It is true that they will adapt it, they always do, that’s how things work. The problem is that the emotional disregulation leads to broken things at home, aggressive behaviors with peers, getting kicked out of preschool and day care, etc.

      It truly is a nightmare scenario. The parents have to prepare for all of these things and a new way to help their child through the limited existing means.

      source
• SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Christ, even Amazon refunded everyone who bought a Glow.

  source

  • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It sounds like they literally can’t refund people because the company completely ran out of money and is gonna be liquidated. Sucky situation for all parties involved.

    source

    • uis@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If only there was law demanding to refund broken products before liquidation.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • Corngood@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Surely in that case they could open their software so the community can figure out what it would take to keep it running.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there’s a chance they don’t own all of it.

      source
    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I bet they can

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • clgoh@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And Google refunded everyone who bought Stadia.

    But they both have deeper pockets than a startup.

    source
• stevedice@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Wait, you can refund your kid?!

  source

  • whoknewr@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    thanks for the good laugh

    source
  • ThunderComplex@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You can do anything if you complain loud and long enough

    source
• MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But the short-lived, expensive nature of Moxie is exactly why some groups, like right-to-repair activists, are pushing the FTC to more strongly regulate smart devices

  Which will be harder in the next 4 years. On the other hand, maybe it sensibilizes more towards cloud-indepent operation and Open Source.

  source
• angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.

  source
• nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.

  The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.

  I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.

  Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.

  source
• A7thStone@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  See there’s the problem right there. They shouldn’t have sold the robot. It should have been a subscription model, with micro transactions. That would have kept the investors flocking in.

  If like to say this is sarcasm, but unfortunately it’s the most likely lesson these ghouls will learn from this.

  source

  • ATDA@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.

    source
• Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Emotional support brick their CEO’s face

  source
• Beardsley@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What’s the opposite of “eating the onion”? I thought this was satire for sure.

  source

  • maniclucky@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Pooped the onion? Honestly, I’ve only ever seen these kinds of stories as notTheOnion.

    source

    • TseseJuer@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      wouldnt it be not eating the onion? or shoving up your rear end

      source
  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    winning a vickrey auction

    source
  • lud@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Onionphobia I guess.

    source
• SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Will it also brick for kids with refunds?

  source

  • moseschrute@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Will it brick the kid?

    source
• azl@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I would like to think the community could work out the API’s and replicate them on a free server, but if this was just a glorified Alexa box, there is probably a lot more server-side processing that needs to happen to keep it running.

  source
• zephorah@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I hate people.

  source

  • Klear@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So does the startup.

    source
• Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Sorry Sally, Geoffrey has to die because a company wanted to make their products utterly dependent on their servers. We’ll bury him in the yard next to Gertrude.

  source
• NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I already experienced this with that one small robot a few years ago. It was resurrected a few years later but required a subscription.

  That was the beginning of me not caring for subscription based products and being weary of products that relied on servers instead of being locally hosted.

  source
• LiamTheBox@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can’t you just use openAI api as the backend??

  source
• TIN@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Read the title as “Starbucks will brick…”

  I was thinking that there’s a lesson here in not buying things that are non-core to the companies operations

  source