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??
I hate people.
So does the startup.
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.
If 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.
Buy anything that must login to a web server not located I’m 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
Will it also brick for kids with refunds?
Will it brick the kid?
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
thanks for the good laugh
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
