Technology

The headline is clickbait.

• Bricked = totally dead, no recovery without serious intervention; device is completely unusable
• Malfunctioning = buggy, slow, or misbehaving, but still fixable

like when an escalator breaks; its just stairs now.

(rip mitch)

HTC had quite a run there. I still miss my HTC One X, back when it was actually interesting to get a new phone. These days I routinely forget which iPhone it is that I have.

Dat censorship, funny that one can't even express ones self with out being censored preemptively.

I don’t mind cloud services as an automation overlay, but at that point you basically have an Alexa powered Harmony remote, which is unlikely to provide the level of telemetry that Bezos demands. This bed situation is great though. It’s a concrete demonstration for enthusiastic techies about why you shouldn’t connect objects to the web just because you can.

It doesn't need one. Sleep Eight decided to make it that way.

I've been having a lot of trouble with sleep lately, and it's really impacting my work and life. Apart from working with my Dr I was seriously considering ponying up the big bucks for a Sleep Eight until I found that literally all of it's features rely on the cloud, and a monthly subscription, for no legitimate reason whatsoever.

Look, I'm for subscriptions when they make sense. Have a service that requires a lot of infrastructure? Subscription. Something that needs continuous dev work? Subscription. All I ask is that the subscription be kept low so that it's affordable and everyone can be happy. But that's not how it goes. Two things end up happening:

1. They price the subscriptions at $10-15+ per month making it quite a large expense in aggregate. They're not being priced the fair cost of maintenance or development, they're being priced to make even more money.
2. The device doesn't need cloud infrastructure at all, they just chose to do it that way to retain control and keep you dependant.

Both are what's happening with the Sleep Eight. You literally can't use any of the sleep detection features (things that run locally on a cheap smart band from 10 years ago) without the cloud. Its insane. There is no good reason that couldn't be done on device.

I refused to buy it because of their business model, but they're really the only game in town for this kind of product. They seem to be getting away with it, so I guess fuck me.

The more features something has the more there is to go wrong.

I am also immediately suspicious of any mundane item or appliance that wants internet access.

It still is, this shit is hilarious as an observer.

No, but "bricked up" is slightly more accurate for beds that got stuck fully erect and got bed-privism when they overheated

Almost like capitalism seeks to dominate every element of material life and the internet is dependent on its material infrastructure to function.

It’s great because the internet was initially developed as a decentralized service so that if any part failed, the rest could maintain communications.

And no communication ability was lost. Just the service to which those communications were directed.

I mean, if it's a missile, it makes sense it won't accept launch orders if the service intended to give those is dead. Except for some dead hand ideas.

It's a redundant system for hierarchical applications.

Well... Afaik the AWS outage only affected a certain region. So the company could have just deployed their online service in two different regions for redundancy.

Or even better. Enable Offline Support 😐

Yep, all I lost was Alexa control so I had to open the app and dim my lights like a caveman 🤣

I’d use HA Voice if it was closer in quality/ability to Alexa (for shouting into the air to control my house) but it’s not quite there yet.

Surprise terms of service update you've been opted in automatically by having purchased the product in order to return your bed to a flat position, you'll need to now pay a monthly subscription /s

Replacing devops must be one of the stupidest decision I have seen in a longtime. Like do the llm conrect to an ssh instance when some random-ass deps act weird ? Just an example, but it baffles me.

They only said the bed was smart.

Cloud service purchaser doesn't realize the system is ONLY a cloud service. Much like the commenters here, these bed owners are asking the same thing" why the fuck does a bed NEED to be connected to the internet?

I would have assumed it allows a direct connection between the controller and your phone. While I fucking hate the need for a wireless device to control my sleep Number (paid for a Bluetooth remote though), none of us can ignore the fact the gen pop loves having apps for the most basic of functions.

They don't even know what a server is.