• @[email protected]
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      347 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        37 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          And who is going to pay for that? If they could afford to refund all their customers they wouldn’t be going bust.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            The law would probably make sure customers whose products are being bricked are counted as creditors. Ideally after employees (unpaid wages) and before investors. They may not get full refunds, but they’ll be entitled to something if it’s possible.

          • @[email protected]
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            7 months ago

            Liquidatoon doesn’t mean they have no money. And they still have some assets.

            Also that’s why we should apply mandatory copy laws to software too.

        • bizarroland
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          237 months ago

          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.

      • @[email protected]
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        47 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            Yeah, likely true without some sort of legislation.

            Well at least there’s a business opportunity for someone to reanimate these things and use them to push gacha games and energy drinks on the innocent children they’ve bonded with.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 months ago

      And Google refunded everyone who bought Stadia.

      But they both have deeper pockets than a startup.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)
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    1757 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      477 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        287 months ago

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

        • Chozo
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          557 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            227 months ago

            I’m confused how a robot even CAN be emotionally supportive. I didn’t even know this was a thing.

            • Dragon Rider (drag)
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              97 months ago

              You should go watch Big Hero 6, then. You’ll get a very good idea of how a robot can be supportive.

            • @[email protected]
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              17 months ago

              Programmed emotional support isn’t new. ELIZA was written in 1966 & surprisingly effective given the crudeness of computers at the time

          • @[email protected]
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            117 months ago

            Yep, and that’s a shame. There should be some sort of government rating or warning put on stuff like that.

      • sunzu2
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        97 months ago

        And this is the lesson here!

        Take note folks.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 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 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 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. This means that it will take a few days for you to order and treatment is often time sensitive from what I’ve heard.

        • @[email protected]
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          117 months ago

          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.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          67 months ago

          I’m unclear, and I’m not going to do this, but what does that do? Is it poison to them?

          • @[email protected]
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            117 months ago

            It contains an enzyme their body cannot process and it effectively poisons them to death. I believe it attacks the nervous system.

            • @[email protected]
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              107 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                77 months ago

                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

                • @[email protected]
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                  27 months ago

                  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.

        • @[email protected]
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          87 months ago

          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

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        57 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.

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            But he only said he scruffed them (if I am reading it right), not that he grabbed them by the scruff, is this apparently something that is considered abusive or something? If a cat claws at my leg and I pinch there to make it stop that is absolutely not the same as grabbing them there. I would never actually try lifting them that way.

            • lad
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              7 months ago

              It doesn’t work on all the cats, though. Also, I heard that it’s not painful for a cat to be lifted that way, but I would prefer not to.

              Edit: I was wrong

          • Pennomi
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            47 months ago

            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.

    • GreyBeard
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      137 months ago

      you can’t brick my cat

      Have you tried putting socks on it?

  • Kokesh
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    347 months ago

    It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.

    • @[email protected]
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      177 months ago

      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.

  • rem26_art
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    77 months ago

    you come across headlines nowadays and have no clue this was even a thing people were grifting children about, man…

  • The Infinite Nematode
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    17 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

  • @[email protected]
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    237 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.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    187 months ago

    What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?

    • Dragon Rider (drag)
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      197 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        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.