• A7thStone@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    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.

    • ATDA@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.

  • LiamTheBox@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Its 2024 and you cannot use a product the way you want to. Can’t you just use openAI api as the backend??

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    20 hours 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.

    • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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      22 hours 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.

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • Etterra@discuss.online
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        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.

    • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    2 days 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.

  • azl@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 day ago

    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.

      • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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        2 days 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.

        • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day 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

          • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

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

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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              1 day 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.

              • protist@mander.xyz
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                1 day 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

                • tuck182@lemmy.world
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                  19 hours 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.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day 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.

        • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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          1 day ago

          Why would you try that with any cat, especially one that you’re close to? The fuck.

          • Verat@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day 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@programming.dev
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              1 day 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@lemmy.world
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            1 day 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.

    • medgremlin@midwest.social
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      24 hours 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.

      • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day 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.

        • medgremlin@midwest.social
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          1 day 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.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

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

    • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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      1 day 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.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        1 day 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.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.