Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds
Embodied says it will try to refund recent purchases but makes no promises.
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.
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.
They are considering it making it open source, among other options to keep the robots alive
Awesome if that ends up happening.
OpenAI started as open as well. Sadly
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
you can’t brick my cat
Have you tried putting socks on it?
Catnip
not even doom music
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.
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.
And Google refunded everyone who bought Stadia.
But they both have deeper pockets than a startup.
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.
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
thanks for the good laugh
You can do anything if you complain loud and long enough
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.
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'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
Onionphobia I guess.
winning a vickrey auction
Not earing the turnip?
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.
Yeah, kids focusing too much on their robot instead of other people is one of my concerns.
A robot can teach the kid all the right things, but it will never give a kid the real social experience, which can get rough if a kid is not sufficiently exposed to it right from the start. Even now, as real human communication moves online in a large part, children grow up increasingly socially anxious and maladapted. From that position, I'm quite uncomfortable with "study from home" trends as well, as school is one of the key venues for IRL child-child interactions.
On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if all kids first developed with perfect robots and then started interacting with one another. But that's a subject for yet another unethical experiment.
It's also probably a developmental aid also. As someone with a child, you'd be surprised at how laser-focused parents can be with regards to developmental delays or issues and ensuring that their kids have every opportunity to meet specific milestones.
IMO while it's absolutely not a replacement for human interaction, something like this with the right backing could be very useful to a lot of kids that need additional help.
I see!
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
Emotional support brick their CEO's face
I hate people.
So does the startup.
Will it also brick for kids with refunds?
Will it brick the kid?
you come across headlines nowadays and have no clue this was even a thing people were grifting children about, man..
Jesus Christ it's like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.
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.
Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can't you just use openAI api as the backend??
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.
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