"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...
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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The headline is clickbait.
- Bricked = totally dead, no recovery without serious intervention; device is completely unusable
- Malfunctioning = buggy, slow, or misbehaving, but still fixable
like when an escalator breaks; its just stairs now.
(rip mitch)
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.
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.
This isn't meant as a slight, but I take it you don't work in IT. You are way underestimating what it takes to run a service at the scale these large companies do. Homelabbing is cool and a great way to get off these providers, but we as individuals have completely different requirements. A proper cloud service is incredibly complex with multiple environments, rigid change controls, global availability, zero allowable downtime, etc. You can't just wing it with a few desktops.
Must be different requirements indeed. But yours don’t sound like typical consumer requirements. Why do we need the same scale as a large corporation?
I can respect the corporate ability to serve thousands at a time but a typical household simply doesn’t need that.
Me and a few of my friends all work in IT and each have a dedicated proxmox machine that runs all of these things just fine. Nextcloud has so far only failed me once when i needed it and it was actually a cloudflare issue and still worked locally.
Navidrome i use all day every day and need accessible from anywhere. I have not updated or checked the container since setup and it has been stable as a rock. Fuck spotify which doesn’t have the bootlegs i listen to anyway.
The endgoal, which i archived is that i have no need for subscriptions and actually own my data which is the point right?
My actual hobbyist goal is to create something that can persist locally if the internet one day disappears.
We were originally discussing why subscriptions can make sense to fund ongoing costs and you replied:
What kind of subscriptions require large infrastructure?
My response was based on the original topic of services provided by large companies, not self hosting for individual consumption. I also run a proxmox server and have similar requirements to you, but this is not indicative of the type of infrastructure a larger company with higher SLAs and demands would require.
Saying you can slap together a couple proxmox servers and have something equivalent to what it takes to run Netflix is highly disingenuous. Saying you can do the same and have an alternative to Netflix for YOU is true, but not what we're discussing.
Ah i completely missed that context.
I thought we were just discussing consumer subscriptions. I don't often think about corporate entities as customers because often the product is a complete different class i don't qualify for and i have radically position on economic organisations
Interesting thing i just found out is my internet providers has a plan for business which is identical to the one i own except its cheaper and doubles the upload capacities.
As far as my level of knowledge , people at work come to me because i understand computers, but not for finances.
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
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.
Almost like capitalism seeks to dominate every element of material life and the internet is dependent on its material infrastructure to function.
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.
My internet-connected dental floss didn't work either until DynamoDB came back online.
I love not even noticing these.
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.
buying a smart bed isn't too smart, you know?
They only said the bed was smart.
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.
Good for you, I'm glad you know so many things. Your knowledge is above average.
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.
It's funny aws report didn't mention 40% stops were replaced by AI. https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops-team-then-let-ai-take-their-jobs-d9db9d298bfa
Replacing devops must be one of the stupidest decision I have seen in a longtime. Like do the llm conrect to an ssh instance when some random-ass deps act weird ? Just an example, but it baffles me.