Jesus Christ it’s like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.
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.
Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can’t you just use openAI api as the backend??
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.
winning a vickrey auction
Onionphobia I guess.
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 hate people.
So does the startup.
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
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.
Will it also brick for kids with refunds?
Will it brick the kid?
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.
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
They are considering it making it open source, among other options to keep the robots alive
OpenAI started as open as well. Sadly
Awesome if that ends up happening.
Settle down there, that’s not what all the headlines say. How will the pitchforks get used unless the headline is 100% negative?
To be fair, it’s bad… I’m not arguing against that.
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.
um, my favorite streamer Pirate Software says it is impossible for corporations to provide code to extend the life of anything
Why?
They sometimes use the IP of others and it can be a real headache or impossible to get permission from everyone.
This argument seems hollow, releasing source code is not an all or nothing situation. They can just release what they are allowed to, and let the community replace the missing stuff.
Releasing anything is better than releasing nothing and letting the community reverse engineer everything instead of just some third-party libraries.
But also, in a world where such a law did exist, it would naturally force every third-party to create their contracts in a way that would allow the eventual release of the source code, or lose out on the deal and subsequently, the money.
When we are talking about laws, yes you are right.
I was arguing more about developers not releasing the source code on their own, when they stopped releasing patches, or even remove the game from stores or shutdown servers, while stating that reason: “We cannot because we use third-party stuff.”
No, they just do not want to. They might even think that their past games are in competition to their current games. So they do not want people to play (and improve/mod) them anymore.
Understandable
While I agree in principle, a blanket enforcement seems like a great way for companies to purposely tank smaller entities just to get hold of their code/IP. Alongside this, it probably doesn’t help to just release the code, when these devices will run on web services, or perhaps even proprietary tech.
In this case, it would be a great way to dissolve the company. Switch the endpoints over to a custodian project, have the servers owned and run through a community campaign, and open source the code and artifacts.
In my ideal world, IP and copyright wouldn’t exist at all, but obviously that won’t happen in my lifetime.
Neither would my suggestion of releasing any defunct software as GPL, sadly.
The codebase the would be a great start, even if it previously ran on proprietary tech, having the codebase at least allows engineers to pull out the proprietary hooks and rebuild them to work with something open source.
We need a right to repair but for software, sadly that also is a pipe dream in our current environment.
Companies already tank smaller entities all the time just to have less competition. I don’t think OC’s suggestion could accelerate this in any way. They’re already going at full speed.
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
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.
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.
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.
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
You should go watch Big Hero 6, then. You’ll get a very good idea of how a robot can be supportive.
Yep, and that’s a shame. There should be some sort of government rating or warning put on stuff like that.
Or just a straight-up ban.
Self-hosting makes more sense every day.
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.
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
Whatever you do to that cat I will do to you
Oh yeah? Well I’m gonna love him and cherish him forever
❤️
Now kiss
You’re going to snuggle me, feed me, and clean my poop?
…ok man…
I was talking to that specific person about that specific cat.
But yes.
🤨
Somebody call SPCA!
It’s not even a challenge, one drop of rogaine will brick any cat. All you have to do is touch them with it.
Edit: don’t fucking do this you sickos.
oh my fucking god. is this why when I was a kid my friend’s cat went from super healthy to extremely sickly and died the next morning? his dad definitely used rogaine
Oh goodness, that’s really sad and probably.
I’m unclear, and I’m not going to do this, but what does that do? Is it poison to them?
It contains an enzyme their body cannot process and it effectively poisons them to death. I believe it attacks the nervous system.
Oh. Damn. Good thing I found this out.
I mean, I never have actually touched rogaine, but this is kinda like when I was 4, and I was going to feed a dog a piece of chocolate. The dog wanted chocolate, I wanted to share, suddenly I’m getting my hand slapped and yelled at.
Like c’mon! We JUST watched a seseme street last week about how good sharing is! Now my wrist hurts!
THEN she tells me dogs can’t have chocolate! Like I’m just supposed to just KNOW a dogs digestive system! I’m still learning colors and shapes, and you’re asking me to know biology of dogs!
So, no dogs have died from chocolate from me, and now I know if I lose my hair, and have a cat, I can’t have rogaine. Because I assume I’ll be sleeping, and you just KNOW my cat is gonna be the weirdo cat who licks people in their sleep. Suddenly I wake up with a dead cat.
So good thing I learned now.
Turns out dogs are perfectly fine eating milk chocolate. I know this because I had a dog who jumped up on a table and ate an entire package of Hershey’s kisses once. We thought she was a goner, but poison control said she’d be fine and she was. High quality dark chocolate is what poisons dogs
Chocolate is what poisons dogs. There’s just a much higher concentration of it in dark chocolate than milk chocolate. Too much milk chocolate can still kill a dog, and “too much” isn’t even all that much. 8 ounces of milk chocolate for a 30 pound dog is enough to be concerned about.
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.
What The Fuck?
That’s where the term “catatonic” comes from, or so I’ve heard, and it’s a reflex because mother cats carry their babies by the scruff of their neck. From what I understand it’s totally harmless.
Someone who actually knows these things can correct me if I’m wrong of course.
As the owner of various cats over 50 years it does nothing to adult cats. It will hurt an adult cat because their weight is too much for the skin to hold. As a kid I tried it many times because I heard the myth and it only made my cat more angry.
I don’t believe kittens are affected other than being physically unable to do anything. Sort of like if you were put in a half-Nelson hold. You wouldn’t be catatonic, just unable to fight back.
You don’t pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But – at least for some videogenic cats – they will instinctively relax.
My cat relaxes, but then my cat gets all loungy anytime I interact with him.
Pet tax: He is one with the universe in a box.
To be fair, he wasn’t talking about picking the cat up by the scruff of the neck, only squeezing it there.
Anyway, regardless of your anecdote, it is a real thing: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/article/pinchinduced-behavioural-inhibition-clipthesia-as-a-restraint-method-for-cats-during-veterinary-examinations-preliminary-results-on-cat-susceptibility-and-welfare/CFCC52F39F2235340C1DBA4630EC07F0
As an owner of a less cats over less years, this is absolutely a thing and is sometimes referred to as “disabling” or “deactivating” the cat. You can do it at home with a clothes pin.
You don’t pick them up.
Here’s an example from what looks like a professional setting. https://youtu.be/T9TmmF79Rw0
This is regarding parent comment about:
A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.
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.
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. This means that it will take a few days for you to order and treatment is often time sensitive from what I’ve heard.
FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.
That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.
you can’t brick my cat
Have you tried putting socks on it?
Catnip
not even doom music
