$800... for an emotional support toy?
Is this why there's so much poverty in the world? Because once people have enough excess wealth, this is what they choose to spend it on instead of helping those who need it more?
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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Yes, most millionaires are cringe but you should go after billionaires first.
Obviously it are the avocado toast
No, it's because of billionaires that hoard more money than 1000 people could reasonably spend in a lifetime.
I'm with you....except I choose to believe there's a reason they're going bust (because no, folks aren't choosing to spend on this)
That said, I'd like to remind everyone that Elon Musk has the money and power to end homeless and poverty in the US and chooses not to.
Well he’s not American so why would you expect that?
He can do it for SA though
No, but you will be happy to know the product failed
What a waste of resources just to make somebody richer!
Amazon Dash buttons have entered the chat.
Yeah, but everybody knew those were a stupid fucking idea from the start. I didn't and still don't feel much sympathy for the people who deliberately bought one of those solely for its intended purpose and then got the rug pulled out from under them.
Amazon was effectively giving them away for free for a large portion of their lifespan. You'd have deals where you'd pay for them and then get a coupon for actually using them equal to the purchase price. I feel like I even remember a few times where the coupon you got worked out to slightly more than you paid for the button. Basically, saying that someone 'bought' one was usually only partially true.
They did have a few legitimately good uses. Had to have something that needed restocking sporadically but you also didn't think about often and could wait 2-3 days to receive when you realized you were out. A lot of prerequisites there, I used the ones for trash bags and detergent often.
It's mostly just a shame the amount of ewaste produced at this point. I still have a box full somewhere in hopes of finding a use case.
By "everybody" you mean everybody except Amazon. And I had fun hacking those. They were often on sale for like 2 bucks and they came with a battery that was good for like a thousand presses. You had to start the online setup process but not select any products, listen for the button's msg to Amazon which contained a unique ID. You could then have your own server listen for a "pressed" signal from that button and do whatever you want. I keep meaning to find out if there's still a way to initialize brand new ones.
What's the deal with these buttons?
Doing the right thing. How rare.
once they threatened to abandon it sure. eventually even corporations can be dragged into doing the right thing.
And how great of these particular folks for doing the right thing1
OpenSourcing is a good move
What is "trying to" open source though? Make the GitHub repo public, include the database schema, and you're done.
Yeah it's so simple, no way they could be the good guys, can't have that.
Likely they have proprietary or otherwise private information they want to clean out first, or they want to make it more presentable or documented.
I agree I'm not a fan of the "trying to" phrasing either.
Startups like this aren’t known for their robust infrastructure design.
It’s most likely running on some weird unicorn setups no-one has bothered to document.
Probably a lot of stolen code
Fear of embarrassing code is often a factor too. Amazing how coding standards instantly improve across the board the moment you realize people outside of dev might be scrutinizing what you've been shipping to customers.
These guys are out of business anyway. They don't have to care; they can just dump whatever they have somewhere and scuttle off into the night, never to be seen again, nothing more than an echoing "woop woop woop woop" fading off into the distance.
They've been handed a rare and highly valuable treasure. They get all the good will from the community for doing the one thing that everyone always wants these companies to do but never happens, and this is now someone else's problem.
If you're going to have a problem, someone else's problem is the best kind to have.
This guy codes.
This is true even for my personal projects lol
I'm not a programmer but dabble. I'm always so nervous when actual programmers look at my code.
Definitely missing documentation to make it a proper repo
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