My god, this is just hilarious. Remember, kids: If a piece of furniture that has been basically agreed upon for thousands of years (with some changes) needs a cloud connection:
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You’re paying too much.
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You’ll continue paying too much.
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You might wake up sweating in an uncomfortable position.
This week’s Amazon Web Services outage had some people waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
A Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affected AWS cloud hosting, resulting in an outage that impacted more than 1,000 web-based products and services and millions of people.
Perhaps one of the most avoidable breakdowns came via people’s beds. The reliance on the Internet for smart bed products from Eight Sleep resulted in people being awoken by beds locked into inclined positions and sweltering temperatures.
As spotted by Dexerto, the AWS outage caused smart mattress covers from Eight Sleep to malfunction. These “Pod” mattress covers connect to a physical hub, and users can set the covers to temperatures between 55° and 110° Fahrenheit via a companion app. Eight Sleep also sells smart mattress bases that let people control their bed’s elevation with the app. As of this writing, the Pods’ MSRPs range from $2,449 to $3,249, and the base has a $1,950 MSRP. Eight Sleep also sells its Autopilot feature through an annual subscription that starts at $199. Autopilot is supposed to help automatically set Eight Sleep devices to users’ optimal sleeping conditions. Pod purchases require a one-year subscription to Autopilot.
There’s admittedly a bit of Schadenfreude here. You seriously subscribed to a fucking bed?
Eight Sleep also sells its Autopilot feature through an annual subscription that starts at $199.
I don’t really want my bed running stop signs and murdering innocent folks.
It’s entirely possible they’ve also murdered criminals …
My new washer wants to send me a text when it’s done. Makes this wimpy little noise I can’t hear 5 ft away. I think it’s embarrassed by this shit also.
Every day I want to live more like this:
I’d rather a happy medium of local control where it can be hooked up to HomeAssistant. I like smart home when the smarts stay in my home!
I haven’t gone lookimg but I’m sure I could find acceptable alternatives. I’ve just never felt the need to blow so much money and time for so little gain.
I was talking about this recently with someone (read: ranting as they nodded sympathetically) and I finished up by saying “what’s the point of ‘smart’ tech if the humans who use it are steadily disempowered and ultimately, made less smart?”
I’ve recently been dabbling in HomeAssistant and learning how to set things up properly feels like it’s been making me more smart.
Yeah, I absolutely adore being able to set up things that make my life easier without getting in the way and without worrying it’ll all ruin my day if something stops working.
We use smart light switches that look and work like regular switches, but with Z-wave control built in. Controlling otherwise non-smart lights is great, but then so is being able to trigger things with double and triple presses!
My favorite example is that my espresso machine takes a moment to warm up in the morning, so I have it on a Z-wave outlet for remote control. I can turn it on from my bedroom by double-clicking my bedroom light switch on the way out of the room in the morning. By the time I collect the cups from the office, and get them cleaned out in the kitchen, the machine is usually ready to use.
I’m rather close to a downward triple-press in the bedroom kicking off a full bedtime routine that turns off all the lights, TVs, locks the house doors (with feedback from a smart speaker if that fails), locks the car doors, turns the temperature down a couple of degrees, and arms the house alarm.
A downward triple-press in my office locks the family’s computers.
All 100% locally, and I adore it!
Kasa TPlink sockets and switches can be set to only run local on Homeassistant., with some github hacking help. Don’t need their cloud app at all
Internet of Shit. It’s like the mobile app I’m supposed to use with my fridge. I don’t use it. Why? Because it’s a damned fridge.
I wish there was a law stipulating that smart devices must allow for local control. That’d never happen in the USA (since companies couldn’t make as much money selling the data, and we can’t hurt the poor companies’ revenue streams), but maybe it’s happen in Europe one day.
Aren’t there enough zigbee devices anyway?
Most Zigbee devices are locked into working with proprietary gateways to the cloud. The last leg of connection being not-wifi doesn’t change that.
Matter seems like a step in a somewhat good direction for establishing open standards so devices from different vendors can be combined and more importantly, controlled from a hub of user’s choice.
It gives the phrase “you’ve made your bed, now sleep on it” a whole new level of meaning. :)
More “we made your bed, and you don’t own it.”
Oof okay so they definitely fucked up architecture wise BUT:
We are currently outage-proofing your Pod experience and we will be working tonight-24/7 until that is done.
Douchebag CEO right there. God knows he was just like FIX IT NOWWWW to them and forced them to work overtime because of this. This is a complete rearchitecture. Sure it can be done, but it’s not a one night change.
And then he went to bed, leaving it to his serfs.
And how did no one think about a fallback in case of a outage? I bet some of the tech people thought about it and management said: “No, we don’t want the consumers to have a functioning unit without internet access. We need the data!”.
Btw. same with the new Windows 11 setup. There’s no technical reason for a computer without internet access to deny the installation.
Weirdly enough, most companies collecting your data are actually really bad at doing so. Business people don’t prioritize data at all, and data collection is a total afterthought, often treated as a major inconvenience. It costs money, and they can’t charge for it.
The reason why there was no fallback is because that would have cost money to implement, and they can’t imagine someone wanting to use their product that way.
Surely it doesn’t do this when your internet drops out, right? RIGHT??
Anything that relies on an internet connection that should be unnecessary is a bad idea.
Save money and sleep on a pile of dead leaves directly on the floor. 😃
Or a regular old dumb mattress, I guess… But that’s boring.
Its only boring, if everything works as it should. My old mattress was dysfunctional and I had to fight with it every night. I’m so glad my current one is boring and forgettable.
I look for “boring” in most products. Excitement is for experiences, not furniture.
I feel the same about software development. For personal projects, I’ll often use a technology stack I’m very familiar with, like C# and MySQL on a Debian Linux server. Maybe not the fanciest, but they’re proven, reliable technologies that have been around for a long time, and will likely still be around a long time from now.
New frameworks, libraries, and languages pop up all the time, but some of the ecosystems move way too quickly. I have some Node.js sites I built years ago that I can’t even run any more without major changes.
Relevant: https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a-boring-stack.html
This is a great post that I hadn’t seen before. Thanks for the link!
I bought a cooling cover for my bed last year and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever bought. I’m looking for the one I wanted to buy I wanted to avoid anything that communicated offsite because why the hell does my bed need to talk to a server?? The one I ended up buying has some basic touch controls and does 100% of what it needs to.
What is a cooling cover for a bed?
A thin-ish water filled mattress topper hooked to a cooling system to try and maintain a temperature. Even with A/C and a fan I can still get quite warm while I sleep and getting one of these systems has helped me a lot with having a more well-rested sleep.
The brand that I went with: https://hydrosnooze.com/
Thanks for the link, I really want to see if NDIS might fund something like this. Does it slide around a lot? Also does it play nice with your fitted sheet?
It stayed fairly stationary when I used it, it did start to drift over consecutive nights so I’d pull it back into position a couple of times a week. But I’m also only talking about 50mm or so of movement.
I can’t remember it causing any problems with the other sheets. Though some of my fitted sheets are well past their use limit and it could just be my tolerance to them not fitting that well to begin with.
Oh shit that looks like the Fallout 76 Enclave cot! And you say its smart‽ Give me 20!
