9 ms·

The state of the product's security wasn't unexpected. I was, however, shocked by this part: > I was willing to overlook: > The bed costs $2,000 > It

The state of the product's security wasn't unexpected. I was, however, shocked by this part: > I was willing to overlook: > The bed costs $2,000 > It won’t function if the internet goes down > Basic features are behind an additional $19/mo subscription > The bed’s only controls are via mobile app Nothing about this bed should depend on off-site servers. Nothing about the product should necessitate a subscription fee. The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry. It makes me so sad.

chrisandchris 2y ago
> Basic features are behind an additional $19/mo subscription One can just question how we want to live our lives in the future. Behind each and every step a subscription? And all of them seem to be priced 10-20/month, no matter how much value they provide.
readthenotes1 2y ago
Conspicuous consumption drives a lot of irrational behavior
jjice 2y ago
I've heard the sleep people get with this is excellent, but no way in hell am I paying a subscription and requiring an internet connection for my bed. The entire concept is just absurd. If it sells, it sells, I guess.
- megadata 2y ago
  I've also heard people are having excellent sleep in their traditional modern beds. Me included.
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    I've also heard about people finding new foam mattresses too hot :( like me. will buy a spring mattress next time Edit thank you for your recommendation but I'm in italy, European and American mattresses are quite different. Before discovering this, I once wrote to the customer support of the flamingo hotel, Las Vegas, because I loved their mattress: Hi, i do think that what i'm gonna write is weird, but anyway haha. On july of the summer 2019 i visited the fabulous las vegas. nor the nightlife neither the opulence of sin city could, however, reach the pinnacle of the human civilization, the mattress on which i slept at flamingo. I now have to change my own mattress at home, and i'm looking for the model on which i slept. the website only says "Simmons beautyrest", although Beautyrest is just a brand name used by simmons and doesn't mean a specific model. could you help me in this modern day divine comedy, be my Virgil and help me find the mattress name? Regards Name I got an answer: Thank you for contacting Caesars Entertainment. I was delighted to hear that you enjoyed our mattress on your visit! Currently, we are using the Simmons Hospitality Beautyrest Felicity Pillow Top. They can be purchased at https://caesarsguestpurchase.com/shop https://caesarsguestpurchase.com/shop or 1-866-926-8233. Please feel free to write back if you have any further questions. Thank you for choosing Caesars for your gaming entertainment! Have an amazing day! Shirley
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Have you tried a more firm foam mattress? I had similar sentiments about foam mattresses but they were all the type where you just feel like you're sinking into the foam.
      - amarcheschi 2y ago
        I did, but in the showrooms in the short time I tried them (and with jeans and clothes and so on) I didn't got that it was warmer than other firmer mattresses
      - kali_00 2y ago
        [dead]
    - vl 2y ago
      I use latex topper because of this. It works like foam, but has cold feel to it, and hypoallergenic dust mite resistant on top of that.
      - quickgist 2y ago
        How can a latex topper be hypoallergenic when tons of people are allergic to latex?
        tofof 2y ago
        Because the Talalay and Dunlop processes involve vulcanization at 115+ C to turn the material into a foamed rubber, which denatures the proteins that the immune system recognizes and overreacts to. Denatured protein - think egg white once it's heated and turns white, instead of clear - has its structure radically altered. The molecules get pulled apart, tangled with others, and can in no way be recognized by the antibodies that trigger the immune response. Similarly, Talalay latex mattress material is usually only about 30% natural and 70% synthetic, and the synthetic does not cause immune response. If you powder the natural material and directly expose it to IgE, the dominant protein of interest for allergies, you can get a reaction (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10436396/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10436396/), but in practice with sheets and the outer cloth covering on the mattress basically no proteins ever come into contact with the body. And even in that study only Hev B I was detectable, which is only one of many latex proteins that trigger the immune response, and only 3 of the 21 tested human sera actually had a reaction to the direct mixing with the powdered latex. As far as I understand it, there has never been a confirmed case of an allergic reaction to a latex mattress.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cthalupa 2y ago
  This all has me quite torn. The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me - I have sleep apnea, as well as an eight sleep + the electronic platform. It automatically changes the elevation of my head based on apnea events, and I see a marked reduction in them when using this feature. I have a cpap machine that also makes automatic adjustments but I still get noticeably better sleep quality with the eight sleep. I also really enjoy the temperature control, since it saves on HVAC costs vs. climate controlling the whole house. I've not tried an aquarium chiller for this purpose, though I have used one for doing temperature control on a beer fermenter, and I can extrapolate from there that I value the management of the actual eight sleep device vs. managing an aquarium chiller's temp control.
  - AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
    [dead]
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    > The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me... All of those features could be provided by local compute, either nestled somewhere in the soft and fluffy gross profit margin of a $2,000 product, or with Bluetooth to a "thick" application running on a phone. The reason this product, and so many other "IoT" products, put their compute across the Internet is to facilitate a business model. The industry has the technology to put as much compute, storage, and reliability on-site with a high-margin, high-cost product like this.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Even if it were a nightstand device rather than a phone. The immediate loss of functionality when loss of signal to the mothership is an egregious design flaw. There's no reason the thing can't have a bit of storage so it can then upload the logged data when the signal returns. Of course, they'll probably claim AI running in the cloud is making the decisions which makes the local first controller not possible.
      - gopher_space 2y ago
- darksaints 2y ago
  I love my device...it has profoundly changed my quality of sleep on the same scale that CPAP therapy has. Seeing the founder fellate Elon and his Doge employees has given me second thoughts. I may be looking for an aquarium chiller in my near future.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  The entire "computer" should probably be replaced by an esp32. Upside being that you could flash an esphome config and be free of The Cloud
balls187 2y ago
Don't blame the market. Blame the engineers who know the risks of such foolishness that lack the courage and conviction to stand up to decision makers.
- dralley 2y ago
  The market deserves some blame here.
  - balls187 2y ago
    My partner has difficulty sleep unless it is the perfect environment (black out curtains, noise cancellation, sound bath, temperature), and is more prone to the effects of a single bad nights sleep. For people like her, $20/mo + $2000 fee is a small price to pay for a solution to a very difficult problem. I would of course, attempt to veto unnecessary IoT devices and subscriptions for usage, but this would be a fight I would likely not win.
    - squeaky-clean 2y ago
      They're not complaining about the price. They're complaining about the high price for a bed where those high priced features stop working if your internet goes down, or there is a server outage, or you stop paying a monthly fee, or the original company goes bankrupt.
    - binarymax 2y ago
      How in the world does this necessitate a subscription? All of these things can work without centralization, setup once, and contained entirely within the home.
      - balls187 2y ago
        > How in the world does this necessitate a subscription? I can only speculate. But, there is demand to improve sleep quality. The provider wants to charge a monthly fee for that. The market simply puts buys and sellers together. People making business decisions will stick with Econ 101--charge what the market will bare, and why shouldn't they?
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Software is devil-is-in-the-details to the extreme, and maximally opaque even to programmer-capable consumers, much less general consumers. And all tech companies are now founded with zero regard for good behavior. I mean, they don't even do minimal amounts of customer service, which is the bare minimum of having regard for your customers. In general, the IoT industry has suffered and adopters get burned over and over and over so the market is what it deserves in the long run. But that doesn't mean that snooping and monitoring doesn't increase insidiously year after year. This is a serious problem with future technology. What person would do cybernetics or similar life saving products from companies like this? Perhaps the rigor that Medtronic and similar device companies are subjected to would apply, but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security and privacy. We are clearly in an age of increasing authoritarianism. China has become far more authoritarian under Xi, right wing fascists are on the rise in Europe, and extreme partisanism just leads to round robin authoritarianism on the path we're on, assuming the next election happens. Russia is trying to expand its reach, and disrupt democratic institutions worldwide. Undermined privacy and data collection is the tools for total information awareness by authoritarian states, only made far far far far far far far worse by the rise of functional AI. The future of humanity is bleak. The filter approaches.
- waveBidder 2y ago
  > Perhaps the rigor that Medtronic and similar device companies are subjected to would apply, but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security and privacy. As someone on an insulin pump they do. Iirc they have reps showing up at hacker conferences looking for red teams. Definitely agree with your worries generally though.
- hinkley 2y ago
  You could probably extend from medical devices to children’s toys. And once those are entrenched, go after the rest.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  > but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security They most certainly do. I'm deep into a security analysis of a similar device rn.
moolcool 2y ago
I wonder if there'd be a cottage industry for new control boards which de-shittify IOT devices but keep their functionality. Like buy the bed, and then buy a little pre-programmed ESP32 logic board to replace the factory board.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Probably could never make that kind of thing work at scale, but maybe as something within the maker community, perhaps adjacent to the world of 3d printing, Arduino, and RPi.
  - moolcool 2y ago
    There'd probably be a few liability concerns at scale. Like if you made a replacement board for a Keurig to allow aftermarket k-cups, it'd likely be a matter of time before Keurig sued you, or someone burnt their house down.
- hinkley 2y ago
  If smart devices were required to have standard pinouts that were arduino or raspberry Pi compatible, that would make me so happy.
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    Plenty of those have just standard ESP8266 modules inside that you can program yourself, even with Arduino IDE if you want.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      That's good to know but if it's a custom board and it gets fried by soapy water getting in or a decade of humidity, it would still be good if the pinout was something that a new device could be programmed and dropped into to replace.
- willglynn 2y ago
  ESPHome fills much of this niche for me. It's a framework for turning YAML device definitions into custom microcontroller firmware, with myriad supporting tools. The official device database at https://devices.esphome.io https://devices.esphome.io lists 554 devices but that's nowhere near the end of it. Most manufacturers bolt on IOT functions by dropping an off-the-shelf module onto their device-specific board. It's sometimes possible to replace the factory firmware with ESPHome, sometimes even using over-the-air updates. For example, AirGradient air quality sensors: https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome Even when it isn't possible to commandeer the factory IOT module, the fact that it _is_ a module is still useful, because it's almost always possible to inhibit or remove the factory module and connect your own instead. The factory IOT module controls and senses the device, so your replacement module can too, using the same pins. For example, an IOT air filter: https://github.com/mill1000/esphome-winix-c545#final-assembly https://github.com/mill1000/esphome-winix-c545#final-assembl... Some devices are designed around multidrop communication busses. These are usually even easier, since the ability to join the bus is an intended design feature, even if the device you're using is not intended. For example, many Samsung residential HVAC systems: https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus/discussions/39#discussioncomment-9830257 https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus/d...
xg15 2y ago
In addition to everything else, also love how a bed with the express purpose to increase sleep quality requires you to open your phone every time you want to adjust a setting.
- cthalupa 2y ago
  The newer models have a touch control panel on the side. Different taps to adjust settings. Not that this ameliorates all the other issues here.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I’m still fairly upset that ambient devices never really took off. Nanoleaf at least made a remote like this. It’s a dodecahedron with an accelerometer, so you can program each face with a different setting. The simplest being to program opposing faces for two different light levels. You want to take a nap, turn the controller upside down.
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    I like this idea, now I want to make one of those. Even a two- or six-sided one would be useful, and I can print different enclosures and reprogram the feather or ESP if I want to add sides.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      I don’t think they sell it anymore, but I forgot it’s actually a HomeKit controller, so you could (try) to use it to control several devices at once. Since only one face is up at a time you would have to gang the behaviors, such as turning off several lights or turning them on. Old CNet article: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nanoleaf-remote-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nanoleaf-remote-review/
    - kolektiv 2y ago
      See my comment to a sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132279 - there's a few simple little functional objects out there which make this kind of process quite easy.
hinkley 2y ago
I think one would also assume that some fraction of that $2000 would go into a fund to keep those servers up. One thing SaaS has not learned from nonprofits with longevity: you do big fund raisers to get money so you can live on the interest payments. If you think of a new project that will increase your burn rate, you throw another fund raiser. Figure out how many of those beds you expect to be junked for breakage or obsolescence each year and set your margins to keep the long tail running for 10-15 years.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  > One thing SaaS has not learned from nonprofits with longevity... I think SaaS has eschewed strategies for longevitiy because it's contrary to the market's "wisdom" that for-profit companies must have sustained high-rate growth.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    So they can get more rounds of VC money or get bought out, yes. Sometimes it’s clearly the founders who go extractive, but others it’s clearly the new owners or partial owners.
- chpatrick 2y ago
  If they sell one a month for $2000 that would be enough to keep the lights on with a sensible backend setup.
cyberax 2y ago
> It won’t function if the internet goes down Come on. We can improve that! The next version of the bed will go into carnivorous mode if the subscription lapses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrAK6sUZ_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrAK6sUZ_0
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  I'm thinking a Thomas Midgley, Jr.[0] mode. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Death
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Thomas has three different inventions with a massive body count. The last one had a fatality rate of 100%.
    - BizarroLand 2y ago
      I mean, even at the start 13 - 15 people were killed in leaded gas's infancy all because the oil companies couldn't make as much money from ethanol as from tel. That's insane. A rational society would have shut those companies down and thrown the executives into prison.
  - smitelli 2y ago
    Wikipedia seldom disappoints on this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_invention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...
- hinkley 2y ago
  Well, you remember that total eclipse of the sun about a week ago?
api 2y ago
This product would be hard to believe if it showed up in an episode of Black Mirror.
janpot 2y ago
step one is to stop pretending the market is a democracy
- kibwen 2y ago
  Step two is to stop pretending the market isn't a kakistocracy.
sweeter 2y ago
There is no amount of consumer choices and consumer "activism" that can fix these issues. They are ineffective by design.
from-nibly 2y ago
And if we try to parent them by fixing it for them, they will stay that way.
autoexec 2y ago
> The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry. It makes me so sad. A lot of this bullshit only happens long after the sale has been made and consumers are blindsided when things advertised as free are suddenly paywalled off behind a subscription following a ToS update. "The market" is never going to solve this. What we need are consumer protections in the form of laws and regulations with real teeth and consistent enforcement.
robertlagrant 2y ago
It's not rent-seeking if you don't have to buy the bed. The market mostly does not buy this bed.
asdff 2y ago
>The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry. It makes me so sad. It is a $2000 dollar internet connected bed. The market in this case is probably people who could wipe their ass with that $20 every day and not miss it. I don't think they are stupid. This class of Americans has always been about paying for ongoing service instead of being pragmatic or doing things themselves. "Let the help over in bangladesh fiddle with the connectivity and updating the mobile app for me, while I merely rest my head and make plenty of money," they probably figure, at least subconsciously.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  I don't think the people buying the bed are stupid. The collective mass of people who buy these "IoT" devices that (1) don't actually need to use Internet-hosted services to function, (2) don't actually need a subscription for their business model to work _except_ for having been unnecessarily tied to an Internet-hosted service, and (3) will fail to function when the Internet-hosted service is gone do not understand the ramifications of the buying decisions they're making. They're enabling these awful companies and business models. They're making the world worse by buying this soon-to-be e-waste garbage. Stupid is a bad word. Let's say ignorant, instead. They don't even know what they don't even know. Our asinine industry normalizes these practices because profit. I think computers have tremendous power to make life better for humanity. I think that can happen without being contingent on this kind of business model. The bed is an egregious example. There are certainly other lower-priced products that still have this kind of stupid unnecessary "tie" to Internet-hosted services and subscriptions.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  One might argue that the market itself becomes "stupid" (stops accurately indicating value) when people have so much money that they stop caring about how they spend it.
  - uoaei 2y ago
    Exactly, it indicates profoundly inefficient dynamics. That money could be put to use far more productively.
chiph 2y ago
This is the sort of thing I would have expected to see during the dot-com era, if they had had the idea to charge a subscription for things back then. I mean, it's the :CueCat. But comfy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
m463 2y ago
it's enough to keep you up at night.
drawkward 2y ago
>The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry looks at DOGE Yep.
senectus1 2y ago
these are non starters > It won’t function if the internet goes down > Basic features are behind an additional $19/mo subscription I'd pay more, a LOT more for a good bed. but if its not self hostable and without a need for a subscription... its a non starter
skirge 2y ago
I know someone who signed agreeement about delivering an app and then providing fixes for free. He escaped the country. Market is not stupid, market learned nothing is free.
- kdmtctl 2y ago
  Why leave the country?
  - skirge 2y ago
    different jurisdiction
    - kdmtctl 2y ago
      To avoid a litigation? Genuine curious what could happen.
solatic 2y ago
> Nothing about this bed should depend on off-site servers. Nothing about the product should necessitate a subscription fee. I'll play the Devil's Advocate here. If this product isn't controlled by a remote server, it either needs to be controlled by a local bit of hardware (i.e. with its own screen and hardware input devices) or by your phone. Considering the upper-class target market (high-priced luxury product), the "local bit of hardware" option is a bad call. If it's controlled by your phone, then it would presumably happen over Bluetooth, which is both (a) unreliable and (b) would disconnect if you don't have your phone in your bedroom, which if you're willing to spend $2k on a cover for better sleep, you've probably already tried. The industry went in the direction of direct-to-Internet connections for home devices because, quite frankly, it's the lowest-friction approach for most home users. Everything else is a distraction from a great product experience for 99% of the market. With all that said... bundling in hard-coded AWS IAM keys (for Kinesis Data Streams) and hard-coded SSH public keys is just bad engineering. You can't revoke an abusive customer without revoking everyone, and you can't fire any employees without updating every customer end device. Sleep Eight needed to set up IAM Roles Anywhere with a private CA where a user's initial setup gets the private CA to issue a cert for the base unit in the user's name, which is then used to get temporary credentials through AWS STS to write to Kinesis. Similar story with SSH, if it's actually genuinely needed for some reason, set up a private CA, in both cases, with certificate revocation lists. They're unlikely to sell enough beds (remember: luxury product) or fire enough employees for CRLs not to scale well on this solution.
consteval 2y ago
It's not that the market is stupid, it's that consumers are flawed. We are all just meat sacks at the end of the day. Our time is limited. We can't investigate everything thoroughly. I mean, if I wanted to check how many calories are in a food item and the FDA didn't make companies tell me, that's going to be at least 1000 hours of work. For one food item. One time. If I had to do that for everything I'd just starve. Software is, arguably, more complex than modern ultra-processed food. We can't audit these things. Even when we do audit, we only scratch the surface. There's billions of lines of code behind "hello world".

chrisandchris 2y ago

> Basic features are behind an additional $19/mo subscription One can just question how we want to live our lives in the future. Behind each and every step a subscription? And all of them seem to be priced 10-20/month, no matter how much value they provide.

readthenotes1 2y ago

Conspicuous consumption drives a lot of irrational behavior

jjice 2y ago

I've heard the sleep people get with this is excellent, but no way in hell am I paying a subscription and requiring an internet connection for my bed. The entire concept is just absurd. If it sells, it sells, I guess.

megadata 2y ago
I've also heard people are having excellent sleep in their traditional modern beds. Me included.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  I've also heard about people finding new foam mattresses too hot :( like me. will buy a spring mattress next time Edit thank you for your recommendation but I'm in italy, European and American mattresses are quite different. Before discovering this, I once wrote to the customer support of the flamingo hotel, Las Vegas, because I loved their mattress: Hi, i do think that what i'm gonna write is weird, but anyway haha. On july of the summer 2019 i visited the fabulous las vegas. nor the nightlife neither the opulence of sin city could, however, reach the pinnacle of the human civilization, the mattress on which i slept at flamingo. I now have to change my own mattress at home, and i'm looking for the model on which i slept. the website only says "Simmons beautyrest", although Beautyrest is just a brand name used by simmons and doesn't mean a specific model. could you help me in this modern day divine comedy, be my Virgil and help me find the mattress name? Regards Name I got an answer: Thank you for contacting Caesars Entertainment. I was delighted to hear that you enjoyed our mattress on your visit! Currently, we are using the Simmons Hospitality Beautyrest Felicity Pillow Top. They can be purchased at https://caesarsguestpurchase.com/shop https://caesarsguestpurchase.com/shop or 1-866-926-8233. Please feel free to write back if you have any further questions. Thank you for choosing Caesars for your gaming entertainment! Have an amazing day! Shirley
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Have you tried a more firm foam mattress? I had similar sentiments about foam mattresses but they were all the type where you just feel like you're sinking into the foam.
    - amarcheschi 2y ago
      I did, but in the showrooms in the short time I tried them (and with jeans and clothes and so on) I didn't got that it was warmer than other firmer mattresses
    - kali_00 2y ago
      [dead]
  - vl 2y ago
    I use latex topper because of this. It works like foam, but has cold feel to it, and hypoallergenic dust mite resistant on top of that.
    - quickgist 2y ago
      How can a latex topper be hypoallergenic when tons of people are allergic to latex?
      - tofof 2y ago
        Because the Talalay and Dunlop processes involve vulcanization at 115+ C to turn the material into a foamed rubber, which denatures the proteins that the immune system recognizes and overreacts to. Denatured protein - think egg white once it's heated and turns white, instead of clear - has its structure radically altered. The molecules get pulled apart, tangled with others, and can in no way be recognized by the antibodies that trigger the immune response. Similarly, Talalay latex mattress material is usually only about 30% natural and 70% synthetic, and the synthetic does not cause immune response. If you powder the natural material and directly expose it to IgE, the dominant protein of interest for allergies, you can get a reaction (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10436396/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10436396/), but in practice with sheets and the outer cloth covering on the mattress basically no proteins ever come into contact with the body. And even in that study only Hev B I was detectable, which is only one of many latex proteins that trigger the immune response, and only 3 of the 21 tested human sera actually had a reaction to the direct mixing with the powdered latex. As far as I understand it, there has never been a confirmed case of an allergic reaction to a latex mattress.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cthalupa 2y ago
This all has me quite torn. The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me - I have sleep apnea, as well as an eight sleep + the electronic platform. It automatically changes the elevation of my head based on apnea events, and I see a marked reduction in them when using this feature. I have a cpap machine that also makes automatic adjustments but I still get noticeably better sleep quality with the eight sleep. I also really enjoy the temperature control, since it saves on HVAC costs vs. climate controlling the whole house. I've not tried an aquarium chiller for this purpose, though I have used one for doing temperature control on a beer fermenter, and I can extrapolate from there that I value the management of the actual eight sleep device vs. managing an aquarium chiller's temp control.
- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
  [dead]
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  > The "smart" features on it are genuinely useful for me... All of those features could be provided by local compute, either nestled somewhere in the soft and fluffy gross profit margin of a $2,000 product, or with Bluetooth to a "thick" application running on a phone. The reason this product, and so many other "IoT" products, put their compute across the Internet is to facilitate a business model. The industry has the technology to put as much compute, storage, and reliability on-site with a high-margin, high-cost product like this.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Even if it were a nightstand device rather than a phone. The immediate loss of functionality when loss of signal to the mothership is an egregious design flaw. There's no reason the thing can't have a bit of storage so it can then upload the logged data when the signal returns. Of course, they'll probably claim AI running in the cloud is making the decisions which makes the local first controller not possible.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
darksaints 2y ago
I love my device...it has profoundly changed my quality of sleep on the same scale that CPAP therapy has. Seeing the founder fellate Elon and his Doge employees has given me second thoughts. I may be looking for an aquarium chiller in my near future.
bmicraft 2y ago
The entire "computer" should probably be replaced by an esp32. Upside being that you could flash an esphome config and be free of The Cloud

balls187 2y ago

Don't blame the market. Blame the engineers who know the risks of such foolishness that lack the courage and conviction to stand up to decision makers.

dralley 2y ago
The market deserves some blame here.
- balls187 2y ago
  My partner has difficulty sleep unless it is the perfect environment (black out curtains, noise cancellation, sound bath, temperature), and is more prone to the effects of a single bad nights sleep. For people like her, $20/mo + $2000 fee is a small price to pay for a solution to a very difficult problem. I would of course, attempt to veto unnecessary IoT devices and subscriptions for usage, but this would be a fight I would likely not win.
  - squeaky-clean 2y ago
    They're not complaining about the price. They're complaining about the high price for a bed where those high priced features stop working if your internet goes down, or there is a server outage, or you stop paying a monthly fee, or the original company goes bankrupt.
  - binarymax 2y ago
    How in the world does this necessitate a subscription? All of these things can work without centralization, setup once, and contained entirely within the home.
    - balls187 2y ago
      > How in the world does this necessitate a subscription? I can only speculate. But, there is demand to improve sleep quality. The provider wants to charge a monthly fee for that. The market simply puts buys and sellers together. People making business decisions will stick with Econ 101--charge what the market will bare, and why shouldn't they?

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Software is devil-is-in-the-details to the extreme, and maximally opaque even to programmer-capable consumers, much less general consumers. And all tech companies are now founded with zero regard for good behavior. I mean, they don't even do minimal amounts of customer service, which is the bare minimum of having regard for your customers. In general, the IoT industry has suffered and adopters get burned over and over and over so the market is what it deserves in the long run. But that doesn't mean that snooping and monitoring doesn't increase insidiously year after year. This is a serious problem with future technology. What person would do cybernetics or similar life saving products from companies like this? Perhaps the rigor that Medtronic and similar device companies are subjected to would apply, but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security and privacy. We are clearly in an age of increasing authoritarianism. China has become far more authoritarian under Xi, right wing fascists are on the rise in Europe, and extreme partisanism just leads to round robin authoritarianism on the path we're on, assuming the next election happens. Russia is trying to expand its reach, and disrupt democratic institutions worldwide. Undermined privacy and data collection is the tools for total information awareness by authoritarian states, only made far far far far far far far worse by the rise of functional AI. The future of humanity is bleak. The filter approaches.

waveBidder 2y ago
> Perhaps the rigor that Medtronic and similar device companies are subjected to would apply, but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security and privacy. As someone on an insulin pump they do. Iirc they have reps showing up at hacker conferences looking for red teams. Definitely agree with your worries generally though.
hinkley 2y ago
You could probably extend from medical devices to children’s toys. And once those are entrenched, go after the rest.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
> but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security They most certainly do. I'm deep into a security analysis of a similar device rn.

moolcool 2y ago

I wonder if there'd be a cottage industry for new control boards which de-shittify IOT devices but keep their functionality. Like buy the bed, and then buy a little pre-programmed ESP32 logic board to replace the factory board.

mikepurvis 2y ago
Probably could never make that kind of thing work at scale, but maybe as something within the maker community, perhaps adjacent to the world of 3d printing, Arduino, and RPi.
- moolcool 2y ago
  There'd probably be a few liability concerns at scale. Like if you made a replacement board for a Keurig to allow aftermarket k-cups, it'd likely be a matter of time before Keurig sued you, or someone burnt their house down.
hinkley 2y ago
If smart devices were required to have standard pinouts that were arduino or raspberry Pi compatible, that would make me so happy.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  Plenty of those have just standard ESP8266 modules inside that you can program yourself, even with Arduino IDE if you want.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    That's good to know but if it's a custom board and it gets fried by soapy water getting in or a decade of humidity, it would still be good if the pinout was something that a new device could be programmed and dropped into to replace.
willglynn 2y ago
ESPHome fills much of this niche for me. It's a framework for turning YAML device definitions into custom microcontroller firmware, with myriad supporting tools. The official device database at https://devices.esphome.io https://devices.esphome.io lists 554 devices but that's nowhere near the end of it. Most manufacturers bolt on IOT functions by dropping an off-the-shelf module onto their device-specific board. It's sometimes possible to replace the factory firmware with ESPHome, sometimes even using over-the-air updates. For example, AirGradient air quality sensors: https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome https://github.com/MallocArray/airgradient_esphome Even when it isn't possible to commandeer the factory IOT module, the fact that it _is_ a module is still useful, because it's almost always possible to inhibit or remove the factory module and connect your own instead. The factory IOT module controls and senses the device, so your replacement module can too, using the same pins. For example, an IOT air filter: https://github.com/mill1000/esphome-winix-c545#final-assembly https://github.com/mill1000/esphome-winix-c545#final-assembl... Some devices are designed around multidrop communication busses. These are usually even easier, since the ability to join the bus is an intended design feature, even if the device you're using is not intended. For example, many Samsung residential HVAC systems: https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus/discussions/39#discussioncomment-9830257 https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus/d...

xg15 2y ago

In addition to everything else, also love how a bed with the express purpose to increase sleep quality requires you to open your phone every time you want to adjust a setting.

cthalupa 2y ago
The newer models have a touch control panel on the side. Different taps to adjust settings. Not that this ameliorates all the other issues here.
hinkley 2y ago
I’m still fairly upset that ambient devices never really took off. Nanoleaf at least made a remote like this. It’s a dodecahedron with an accelerometer, so you can program each face with a different setting. The simplest being to program opposing faces for two different light levels. You want to take a nap, turn the controller upside down.
- kevindamm 2y ago
  I like this idea, now I want to make one of those. Even a two- or six-sided one would be useful, and I can print different enclosures and reprogram the feather or ESP if I want to add sides.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I don’t think they sell it anymore, but I forgot it’s actually a HomeKit controller, so you could (try) to use it to control several devices at once. Since only one face is up at a time you would have to gang the behaviors, such as turning off several lights or turning them on. Old CNet article: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nanoleaf-remote-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nanoleaf-remote-review/
  - kolektiv 2y ago
    See my comment to a sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132279 - there's a few simple little functional objects out there which make this kind of process quite easy.

hinkley 2y ago

I think one would also assume that some fraction of that $2000 would go into a fund to keep those servers up. One thing SaaS has not learned from nonprofits with longevity: you do big fund raisers to get money so you can live on the interest payments. If you think of a new project that will increase your burn rate, you throw another fund raiser. Figure out how many of those beds you expect to be junked for breakage or obsolescence each year and set your margins to keep the long tail running for 10-15 years.

EvanAnderson 2y ago
> One thing SaaS has not learned from nonprofits with longevity... I think SaaS has eschewed strategies for longevitiy because it's contrary to the market's "wisdom" that for-profit companies must have sustained high-rate growth.
- hinkley 2y ago
  So they can get more rounds of VC money or get bought out, yes. Sometimes it’s clearly the founders who go extractive, but others it’s clearly the new owners or partial owners.
chpatrick 2y ago
If they sell one a month for $2000 that would be enough to keep the lights on with a sensible backend setup.

cyberax 2y ago

> It won’t function if the internet goes down Come on. We can improve that! The next version of the bed will go into carnivorous mode if the subscription lapses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrAK6sUZ_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrAK6sUZ_0

EvanAnderson 2y ago
I'm thinking a Thomas Midgley, Jr.[0] mode. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Death
- hinkley 2y ago
  Thomas has three different inventions with a massive body count. The last one had a fatality rate of 100%.
  - BizarroLand 2y ago
    I mean, even at the start 13 - 15 people were killed in leaded gas's infancy all because the oil companies couldn't make as much money from ethanol as from tel. That's insane. A rational society would have shut those companies down and thrown the executives into prison.
- smitelli 2y ago
  Wikipedia seldom disappoints on this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_invention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...
hinkley 2y ago
Well, you remember that total eclipse of the sun about a week ago?

api 2y ago

This product would be hard to believe if it showed up in an episode of Black Mirror.

janpot 2y ago

step one is to stop pretending the market is a democracy

kibwen 2y ago
Step two is to stop pretending the market isn't a kakistocracy.

sweeter 2y ago

There is no amount of consumer choices and consumer "activism" that can fix these issues. They are ineffective by design.

from-nibly 2y ago

And if we try to parent them by fixing it for them, they will stay that way.

autoexec 2y ago

> The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry. It makes me so sad. A lot of this bullshit only happens long after the sale has been made and consumers are blindsided when things advertised as free are suddenly paywalled off behind a subscription following a ToS update. "The market" is never going to solve this. What we need are consumer protections in the form of laws and regulations with real teeth and consistent enforcement.

robertlagrant 2y ago

It's not rent-seeking if you don't have to buy the bed. The market mostly does not buy this bed.

asdff 2y ago

>The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry. It makes me so sad. It is a $2000 dollar internet connected bed. The market in this case is probably people who could wipe their ass with that $20 every day and not miss it. I don't think they are stupid. This class of Americans has always been about paying for ongoing service instead of being pragmatic or doing things themselves. "Let the help over in bangladesh fiddle with the connectivity and updating the mobile app for me, while I merely rest my head and make plenty of money," they probably figure, at least subconsciously.

EvanAnderson 2y ago
I don't think the people buying the bed are stupid. The collective mass of people who buy these "IoT" devices that (1) don't actually need to use Internet-hosted services to function, (2) don't actually need a subscription for their business model to work _except_ for having been unnecessarily tied to an Internet-hosted service, and (3) will fail to function when the Internet-hosted service is gone do not understand the ramifications of the buying decisions they're making. They're enabling these awful companies and business models. They're making the world worse by buying this soon-to-be e-waste garbage. Stupid is a bad word. Let's say ignorant, instead. They don't even know what they don't even know. Our asinine industry normalizes these practices because profit. I think computers have tremendous power to make life better for humanity. I think that can happen without being contingent on this kind of business model. The bed is an egregious example. There are certainly other lower-priced products that still have this kind of stupid unnecessary "tie" to Internet-hosted services and subscriptions.
nicoburns 2y ago
One might argue that the market itself becomes "stupid" (stops accurately indicating value) when people have so much money that they stop caring about how they spend it.
- uoaei 2y ago
  Exactly, it indicates profoundly inefficient dynamics. That money could be put to use far more productively.

chiph 2y ago

This is the sort of thing I would have expected to see during the dot-com era, if they had had the idea to charge a subscription for things back then. I mean, it's the :CueCat. But comfy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

m463 2y ago

it's enough to keep you up at night.

drawkward 2y ago

>The market is clearly too stupid to vote against the rent seeking tech industry looks at DOGE Yep.

senectus1 2y ago

these are non starters > It won’t function if the internet goes down > Basic features are behind an additional $19/mo subscription I'd pay more, a LOT more for a good bed. but if its not self hostable and without a need for a subscription... its a non starter

skirge 2y ago

I know someone who signed agreeement about delivering an app and then providing fixes for free. He escaped the country. Market is not stupid, market learned nothing is free.

kdmtctl 2y ago
Why leave the country?
- skirge 2y ago
  different jurisdiction
  - kdmtctl 2y ago
    To avoid a litigation? Genuine curious what could happen.

solatic 2y ago

> Nothing about this bed should depend on off-site servers. Nothing about the product should necessitate a subscription fee. I'll play the Devil's Advocate here. If this product isn't controlled by a remote server, it either needs to be controlled by a local bit of hardware (i.e. with its own screen and hardware input devices) or by your phone. Considering the upper-class target market (high-priced luxury product), the "local bit of hardware" option is a bad call. If it's controlled by your phone, then it would presumably happen over Bluetooth, which is both (a) unreliable and (b) would disconnect if you don't have your phone in your bedroom, which if you're willing to spend $2k on a cover for better sleep, you've probably already tried. The industry went in the direction of direct-to-Internet connections for home devices because, quite frankly, it's the lowest-friction approach for most home users. Everything else is a distraction from a great product experience for 99% of the market. With all that said... bundling in hard-coded AWS IAM keys (for Kinesis Data Streams) and hard-coded SSH public keys is just bad engineering. You can't revoke an abusive customer without revoking everyone, and you can't fire any employees without updating every customer end device. Sleep Eight needed to set up IAM Roles Anywhere with a private CA where a user's initial setup gets the private CA to issue a cert for the base unit in the user's name, which is then used to get temporary credentials through AWS STS to write to Kinesis. Similar story with SSH, if it's actually genuinely needed for some reason, set up a private CA, in both cases, with certificate revocation lists. They're unlikely to sell enough beds (remember: luxury product) or fire enough employees for CRLs not to scale well on this solution.

consteval 2y ago

It's not that the market is stupid, it's that consumers are flawed. We are all just meat sacks at the end of the day. Our time is limited. We can't investigate everything thoroughly. I mean, if I wanted to check how many calories are in a food item and the FDA didn't make companies tell me, that's going to be at least 1000 hours of work. For one food item. One time. If I had to do that for everything I'd just starve. Software is, arguably, more complex than modern ultra-processed food. We can't audit these things. Even when we do audit, we only scratch the surface. There's billions of lines of code behind "hello world".