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.
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.
I hate people.
So does the startup.
Jesus Christ it's like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.
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.
I'm confused how a robot even CAN be emotionally supportive. I didn't even know this was a thing.
Programmed emotional support isn't new. ELIZA was written in 1966 & surprisingly effective given the crudeness of computers at the time
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.
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.
No thanks. I'll get an emotional support cat and you can't brick my cat. Take that, big tech!
you can't brick my cat
Is this a challenge
🤨
Somebody call SPCA!
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 if there were 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.
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.
If only there was law demanding to refund broken products before liquidation.
Or a law stating that in the case fair refunds can not be provided that the software needed for running the hardware becomes public domain and is published and released on a git maintained by the library of Congress.
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.
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
You can do anything if you complain loud and long enough
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.
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
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.
What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?
A robot has infinite patience and will never get mad or bully a child for fun. Ideally, this should also be true of a parent, but it's not. From a less grim angle, a robot doesn't have other responsibilities like work.
For a kid who feels too shy to talk to people, a robot can be good for practice. But it requires a lot of attentiveness from parents to make sure the child doesn't become dependent and moves on to taking to people once they get their confidence.
Back when drag was a kid, we used imaginary friends instead of robots. But a lot of parents and children don't believe in imaginary friends, which is a shame, because robots are a lot more expensive.
