This latest outage was a great test for my home assistant. Only integrations that went down were weather reporting.
lol. This is partly why, as a tech person, I refuse to purchase anything for my home which requires a connection. Data mining sons of removed.
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.
Why the fuck does a bed need a subscription, and why the fuck does it need to be cloud based.
Fuck that garbage, for the price just buy a fuckin used hospital bed.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
What kind of subscriptions require large infrastructure?
Music/media/cloudstorage can all run on a single pc/server costing maybe half a day of setting it up by most people at the level of having switched to Linux.
Acces to a big multiplayer game server is the only one that really comes go mind.
If it’s just for a few people there is very little need for maintenance, rarely any developer work.
I think 4K media streaming does need a fair bit of infrastructure management.
My jellyfin can stream 4K just fine, even remotely through a vpn so i am not sure what you mean.
Depending on transcoding you might require a gpu but still not a standard “gaming spec” pc cant handle.
Come to think of it, my internet provider does allow upload up to 25mb/s and this is the highest end available for consumers in my area. Technically thats a subscription but realistically its bill similar to water/electricity.
The upload limit is also purely and artificial cap, they could easily quadruple it if they wanted.
Also Realistically usecase for 4k movies is usually your home couch so it be streamed on Lan speed. Quality is often better than common stream providers because they do cheat to keep bandwidth down.
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.
That’s not what “bricked” means.
No, but “bricked up” is slightly more accurate for beds that got stuck fully erect and got bed-privism when they overheated
“Bricked” in the title feels a bit of a clickbait. In my interpretation if something is bricked, it won’t just start working again after a few hours.
RIP my precious HTC Desire…
The headline is clickbait.
- Bricked = totally dead, no recovery without serious intervention; device is completely unusable
- Malfunctioning = buggy, slow, or misbehaving, but still fixable
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.
like when an escalator breaks; its just stairs now.
(rip mitch)
I remember when technology was fun and exciting.
It still is, this shit is hilarious as an observer.
Just like companies embracing ai and messing up to the point of catastrophic failures
It’s great because the internet was initially developed as a decentralized service so that if any part failed, the rest could maintain communications.
Over the past decade, corporations have been actively developing an internet of services that heavily rely on just a small set of services … and if any of them go down, everything is lost.
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.
Almost like capitalism seeks to dominate every element of material life and the internet is dependent on its material infrastructure to function.
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 😐
Wasn’t it also some kind of DNS problem on top?
You tell me, haha 😄
DNS usually is a bit of an issue when TTL is too high and the stuff the records point to isn’t available.
The fact that the pods cannot be controlled when you don’t have the internet is diabolical. I wish I knew this before purchasing.
Cloud service purchaser upset that purchase requires cloud for service to work.
Why do people never consider that anything that requires a server will likely end up in this position when the company decides it isn’t worth it to keep the servers running (or they just go out of business)?
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.
these bed owners are asking the same thing" why the fuck does a bed NEED to be connected to the internet?
To harvest your data, obviously. Which is also why they don’t allow local connectivity: you might stop them from being able to data mine you.
I would have assumed it allows a direct connection between the controller and your phone.
Lmao, good one.
Just about any Internet of Shit device I’ve ever worked on, ‘cloud connected’ means ‘cloud first/only’. If your device says it uses the cloud and doesn’t SPECIFICALLY say you have offline access, you don’t.
This is why my smart shit is zigbee/zwave, you can’t cut me off if you can’t leave my network.
They don’t even know what a server is.
I’m more disturbed that a bed needs to be online for it to function appropriately.
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
People keep talking about trying to not buy Amazon. How about purging all your subs, except your VPN?
You say /s, but who knows at this point? People keep voting yes with their dollars.
Brick is an evocative word for something happening to a waterbed.
buying a smart bed isn’t too smart, you know?
They only said the bed was smart.
Idiots who pay $2700 for a “smart bed”, deserve this level of service
Most people don’t even consider things like this. That’s why companies keep getting away with it. It’s not the customer’s fault.
Made my day.
“She’s a brick and I’m drowning slowly”
“Smart” beds
