This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
I'd like to say this is sarcasm, but unfortunately it's the most likely lesson these ghouls will learn from this.
Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
thanks for the good laugh
You can do anything if you complain loud and long enough
Buy anything that must login to a web server not located at your house and expect it to get bricked when that server doesn't work anymore. Simple....don't. Plus they are clearly gaining something from you.
Shit, I've a house?! Where have you been all my life? /s
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.
What's the opposite of "eating the onion"? I thought this was satire for sure.
Pooped the onion? Honestly, I've only ever seen these kinds of stories as notTheOnion.
wouldnt it be not eating the onion? or shoving up your rear end
Not earing the turnip?
winning a vickrey auction
Onionphobia I guess.
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
I hate people.
So does the startup.
Jesus Christ it's like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.
Will it also brick for kids with refunds?
Will it brick the kid?
Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can't you just use openAI api as the backend??
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.
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.
Which is why you should only buy stuff that relies on local APIs and on board processing.
99.99% of the people willing to buy an emotional support robot for their children will have no idea what the words you said even mean.
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. ❤️
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.
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.
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.
Helping a kid through a divorce is hard enough. This seems like a terrifying nightmare.
A parent with autism is probably seeing it as another "could've been" that they get to toss out now, likely paid for by insurance.
I wonder how big that pile of products is, failed crap marketed to insurance companies and parents for autistic kids.
Big business.
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.
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.
No thanks. I'll get an emotional support cat and you can't brick my cat. Take that, big tech!
Christ, even Amazon refunded everyone who bought a Glow.
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.
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.
It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.
I get the feeling, but tools come in many shapes and forms. If this was truly helpful for any kid, it's a fucking tragedy that's bricked.
I assume it relies on external servers for processing, so it was a matter of time though.
