Biggest problem is a company like eight sleep has the marketing. So if someone really wants a temperature controlled bed, it's hard to know what a credibly good one is. I *think* Chilipad is a good one, but it's a pretty pricey thing to evaluate and thanks to internet-everything, it's not like you can see for yourself.

But yeah, Eight sleep deserves every amount of bad press they can get for being such a douche company.

They have local controls on most recent models, *however* the controls will deactivate unless the cloud control has blessed the user in the last 24 hours. Before getting going, they'll talk to local phones without internet, but *only* for the end of getting the WIFI set up. They know exactly how to make local phone control work.

It was never about cost savings, it was always about a path to forced recurring revenue. They opened with early adopters not having to pay subscription fee, but still forcing them through the servers. Early adopters also didn't have to pay too much and actually had a decent warranty. When they managed some good momentum, they cranked up the price, tanked the warranty, and forced subscription.

The code was written toward the purpose of forcing the users into a monthly subscription.

The goal was not to deliver the best user experience. To the extent they have tried to accommodate demands for local control, they have predicated it on having relatively recently been 'blessed' to let the user do that within the last few hours. That takes explicit effort to implement a local control loop and make sure it gets approval.

My wife insisted on it and we bought one when they were getting started and relatively cheap and the subscription was not yet required. We've been grandfathered in so we don't pay the subscription, and thanks to the leaks we have been upgraded to the latest model, so I have familiarity.

They are a shit company with a decent hardware design (now) that stops short of being good all around precisely to gouge users.

Even worse, they have a local control loop, but they deliberately cripple it.

If the bed is 'on' (which is only allowed through their cloud connection), then you can locally adjust things fine. However it will refuse to do this if the internet hasn't approved the device to operate locally.

This 'enhancement' was added after people demanded local remote or buttons or *anything*. They implemented an earbud-style tap side of bed N number of times for adjusting temp or dismissing alarm.

So they know precisely what they are doing, it's not dumb engineering, it's malicious engineering.

But what if no one is ever going to use the output anyway? Might not need to check it.

I've dealt with *way* too many business processes that have people generate obscene amounts of prose that no one will ever read or even skim or reference.

I remember one of these companies championed that they used LLM to complete an important 'overhaul' of their source code. The 'overhaul' was generating separate document detailing all these uncommented functions and what the LLM guessed they were supposed to do and how in plain text. The theory was that if one day they actually wanted to start porting this code to something else, that document would be 'helpful'. And of course:
- They never will do that porting
- Even if they did, the developers will likely ignore that document.

Question to what extent was revenue reduced versus deferred. If 90% of their customers couldn't reach competitors either, was revenue lost or did it just happen later?

The thing is that this is terrible for all the outages to be aligned for the internet users, but for the providers, the thought that outages are likely to align with competitor outages might be a pretty solid mitigation, so long as the outage doesn't exceed what they might incur themselves. Even a longer outage common with competitors may be better than a shorter outage that *only* impacts them.

Certainly if AWS was down enough that someone could get a competitive advantage by moving it would drag on them, but if it's not *much* worse than their own outages, well there's a comfort in making sure your competitors are more likely to go down with you.

But what is the tax? These services are down and no one is blaming the companies, they just say it's an Amazon problem. No one is penalizing a company because their Internet services went down just like most of their competitors

I'm glad you looked up the real number as I usually see estimates of 65% of USians or something like that living in apartments (zero of which have chargers installed in the parking lot of course).

But what you are saying is that no progress can be made on the other 66% who can install a home charger until absolutely every possible case is covered, which is not out of touch but simply pro-Big Oil propaganda.

I am sure my dedicated 5080 with cuda can run circles around your mac

Here come the edge cases! Apartments! Towing a trailer from San Diego to Maine. Driving from Little Rock to Boise to return that tool you borrowed but being back in time for work at 0700. Nothing is decided until everything is decided.

Sure, whatever.

Auto industry analysts and enthusiasts alike have a hard time understanding how Stellantis is still in business, particularly now that they have screwed up the Jeep line in North America. I wouldn't take them as indicative of anything.

Beg to differ a bit: while GM made some missteps, particularly in handing the VOLTEC technology over to their PRC subsidiary and dropping it in North America, they took their time to develop a well-engineered and manufacturable EV platform for the next 10-15 years. The problem is their executive team is now living in fear of what a fascist regime could do to them if they don't toe the line and that has given the anti-progress faction at GM operations HQ the chance to counterattack and put anchors on EV marketing and sales. Really a shame and it will cost them dearly over the next 20 years [1].

[1] the anti-progress faction at GM will be well-retired to their backwoods Michigan cabins with their 2,847hp offroad pickup trucks by then

There's only one question in my mind: when the United States wakes up 10 years from now and realizes we have fallen 20 years behind in basic and applied science, EVs, public transportation, and re-creating our built environment to center humans instead of machines (ok, we're already 30 years behind on that last) WHO ARE WE GOING TO BLAME?!? SOMEONE DID THIS TO US - THEY MUST BE PUNISHED!!!

"Electric vehicles are one of those things that are a really good idea in theory but out in the real world they are just simply unworkable. "

EVs are like the apocryphal bumblebee: they don't work in theory, yet millions of people use them every day with no more serious inconvenience than ICE vehicles experience from time to time (e.g. the mythical 'range anxiety' = running out of gas on a back road).

I've had people give me long lectures about the un-usability of EVs while I have driven them across the city, errands, and back on purely electric power in my PHEV.

They won't make worse products specifically for the UK, but they will make worse products for the rest of the world which will also be sold in the UK.
Even down to the plugs - UK plugs are used in Malaysia and Singapore too.

China makes a range of products, but what's sold in western countries has to comply with relevant local safety standards. They make much cheaper (and often far more dangerous) products which are sold in countries with lax regulations like Myanmar, Laos etc.