Sorry Sally, Geoffrey has to die because a company wanted to make their products utterly dependent on their servers. We’ll bury him in the yard next to Gertrude.
It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.
I get the feeling, but tools come in many shapes and forms. If this was truly helpful for any kid, it’s a fucking tragedy that’s bricked.
I assume it relies on external servers for processing, so it was a matter of time though.
No thanks. I’ll get an emotional support cat and you can’t brick my cat. Take that, big tech!
you can’t brick my cat
Have you tried putting socks on it?
Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.
My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.
By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.
I’m sorry to hear about your cat. 🫂
Just to add on about FIP treatment— if your cat ever gets FIP then on Facebook look for “FIP warriors” or “global fip cats” (iirc) to find volunteers who can help supply medicine
Also note that there IS an FDA approved compounded version but many vets aren’t aware about it, and even if they were aware since it is compounded they won’t have it in the office. This means that it will take a few days for you to order and treatment is often time sensitive from what I’ve heard.
FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.
That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.
Catnip
you can’t brick my cat
Is this a challenge
A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.
Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.
Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.
What The Fuck?
That’s where the term “catatonic” comes from, or so I’ve heard, and it’s a reflex because mother cats carry their babies by the scruff of their neck. From what I understand it’s totally harmless.
Someone who actually knows these things can correct me if I’m wrong of course.
As the owner of various cats over 50 years it does nothing to adult cats. It will hurt an adult cat because their weight is too much for the skin to hold. As a kid I tried it many times because I heard the myth and it only made my cat more angry.
I don’t believe kittens are affected other than being physically unable to do anything. Sort of like if you were put in a half-Nelson hold. You wouldn’t be catatonic, just unable to fight back.
To be fair, he wasn’t talking about picking the cat up by the scruff of the neck, only squeezing it there.
Anyway, regardless of your anecdote, it is a real thing: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/article/pinchinduced-behavioural-inhibition-clipthesia-as-a-restraint-method-for-cats-during-veterinary-examinations-preliminary-results-on-cat-susceptibility-and-welfare/CFCC52F39F2235340C1DBA4630EC07F0
You don’t pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But – at least for some videogenic cats – they will instinctively relax.
My cat relaxes, but then my cat gets all loungy anytime I interact with him.
Pet tax: He is one with the universe in a box.
As an owner of a less cats over less years, this is absolutely a thing and is sometimes referred to as “disabling” or “deactivating” the cat. You can do it at home with a clothes pin.
You don’t pick them up.
Here’s an example from what looks like a professional setting. https://youtu.be/T9TmmF79Rw0
This is regarding parent comment about:
A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.
Poisoning your cat so it’s in a coma before it dies is not where the word catatonic comes from.
Catatonic syndrome was a diagnosis first used by a German psychiatrist in the 1800’s. Before that it was described by ancient Greeks.
It’s a category (also a word that has nothing to do with cats) of major depression and schizophrenia.
Scruffing a cat poisons it into a coma?
That’s what the conversation was initially about. My mistake.
The rest of my comment stands.
Why would you try that with any cat, especially one that you’re close to? The fuck.
But he only said he scruffed them (if I am reading it right), not that he grabbed them by the scruff, is this apparently something that is considered abusive or something? If a cat claws at my leg and I pinch there to make it stop that is absolutely not the same as grabbing them there. I would never actually try lifting them that way.
It doesn’t work on all the cats, though.
Also, I heard that it’s not painful for a cat to be lifted that way, butI would prefer not to.Edit: I was wrong
🤨
Somebody call SPCA!
It’s not even a challenge, one drop of rogaine will brick any cat. All you have to do is touch them with it.
Edit: don’t fucking do this you sickos.
oh my fucking god. is this why when I was a kid my friend’s cat went from super healthy to extremely sickly and died the next morning? his dad definitely used rogaine
Oh goodness, that’s really sad and probably.
I’m unclear, and I’m not going to do this, but what does that do? Is it poison to them?
It contains an enzyme their body cannot process and it effectively poisons them to death. I believe it attacks the nervous system.
Oh. Damn. Good thing I found this out.
I mean, I never have actually touched rogaine, but this is kinda like when I was 4, and I was going to feed a dog a piece of chocolate. The dog wanted chocolate, I wanted to share, suddenly I’m getting my hand slapped and yelled at.
Like c’mon! We JUST watched a seseme street last week about how good sharing is! Now my wrist hurts!
THEN she tells me dogs can’t have chocolate! Like I’m just supposed to just KNOW a dogs digestive system! I’m still learning colors and shapes, and you’re asking me to know biology of dogs!
So, no dogs have died from chocolate from me, and now I know if I lose my hair, and have a cat, I can’t have rogaine. Because I assume I’ll be sleeping, and you just KNOW my cat is gonna be the weirdo cat who licks people in their sleep. Suddenly I wake up with a dead cat.
So good thing I learned now.
Turns out dogs are perfectly fine eating milk chocolate. I know this because I had a dog who jumped up on a table and ate an entire package of Hershey’s kisses once. We thought she was a goner, but poison control said she’d be fine and she was. High quality dark chocolate is what poisons dogs
Chocolate is what poisons dogs. There’s just a much higher concentration of it in dark chocolate than milk chocolate. Too much milk chocolate can still kill a dog, and “too much” isn’t even all that much. 8 ounces of milk chocolate for a 30 pound dog is enough to be concerned about.
Whatever you do to that cat I will do to you
You’re going to snuggle me, feed me, and clean my poop?
…ok man…
I was talking to that specific person about that specific cat.
But yes.
Oh yeah? Well I’m gonna love him and cherish him forever
❤️
Now kiss
But the short-lived, expensive nature of Moxie is exactly why some groups, like right-to-repair activists, are pushing the FTC to more strongly regulate smart devices
Which will be harder in the next 4 years. On the other hand, maybe it sensibilizes more towards cloud-indepent operation and Open Source.
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
thanks for the good laugh
Will it also brick for kids with refunds?
Will it brick the kid?
Read the title as “Starbucks will brick…”
I was thinking that there’s a lesson here in not buying things that are non-core to the companies operations
you come across headlines nowadays and have no clue this was even a thing people were grifting children about, man…
What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?
It’s also probably a developmental aid also. As someone with a child, you’d be surprised at how laser-focused parents can be with regards to developmental delays or issues and ensuring that their kids have every opportunity to meet specific milestones.
IMO while it’s absolutely not a replacement for human interaction, something like this with the right backing could be very useful to a lot of kids that need additional help.
I see!
A robot has infinite patience and will never get mad or bully a child for fun. Ideally, this should also be true of a parent, but it’s not. From a less grim angle, a robot doesn’t have other responsibilities like work.
For a kid who feels too shy to talk to people, a robot can be good for practice. But it requires a lot of attentiveness from parents to make sure the child doesn’t become dependent and moves on to taking to people once they get their confidence.
Back when drag was a kid, we used imaginary friends instead of robots. But a lot of parents and children don’t believe in imaginary friends, which is a shame, because robots are a lot more expensive.
Yeah, kids focusing too much on their robot instead of other people is one of my concerns.
A robot can teach the kid all the right things, but it will never give a kid the real social experience, which can get rough if a kid is not sufficiently exposed to it right from the start. Even now, as real human communication moves online in a large part, children grow up increasingly socially anxious and maladapted. From that position, I’m quite uncomfortable with “study from home” trends as well, as school is one of the key venues for IRL child-child interactions.
On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if all kids first developed with perfect robots and then started interacting with one another. But that’s a subject for yet another unethical experiment.
I already experienced this with that one small robot a few years ago. It was resurrected a few years later but required a subscription.
That was the beginning of me not caring for subscription based products and being weary of products that relied on servers instead of being locally hosted.
Buy anything that must login to a web server not located I’m your house and expect it to get bricked when that server doesn’t work anymore. Simple…don’t. Plus they are clearly gaining something from you.
Shit, I’ve a house?! Where have you been all my life? /s
Emotional support brick their CEO’s face
Jesus Christ it’s like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.
I would like to think the community could work out the API’s and replicate them on a free server, but if this was just a glorified Alexa box, there is probably a lot more server-side processing that needs to happen to keep it running.