conuly | Truly, this is the very stupidest dystopia

Smart beds flipped out during the AWS outage, and so did their sleepy owners

1. Why does a bed need to be smart?
2. Why does everything have to be a subscription nowadays?
3. Why didn't they design the damn things to just be normal beds if cut off from the internet?

Seriously, you couldn't have written this 30 years ago, nobody would ever have accepted the premise! I'd say something about fools and their money, but....

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

james

I don't know that I want nuclear crocodiles. I would like to opt out.

From:

dine

yeah, that seems like a v.v. bad idea to me!

From:

conuly

Croc-man, croc-man, does whatever a croc can. Does he bite? Listen bud! He's got crocodile blood. Look out! He's a crocodile man.

From:

dewline

*looks at Killer Croc over in the Batman comics...*

From:

conuly

Would you rather have radioactive alligators? Florida is the only place in the world where alligator and crocodile habitat overlaps.

From:

james

I feel like alligators are cuter than crocodiles, so yes I'd prefer radioactive alligators.

From:

dine

I am baffled by the concept of a smart bed - of course, I fail to understand why one's fridge or toaster oven needs to be connected either. keep 'em all dumb, is my motto!

but yeah, #3 on your list should be the obvious default if the power/internet connection goes. just lie there like a boring dumb bed until things are working properly again. how hard is that?

From:

conuly

To be fair, each individual feature seems reasonable - but why do you need to be internet connected to fucking operate your bed? There's no reason it can't all be locally controlled.

From:

redbird

Some people might want a fridge that could keep track of when they were (almost) out of staples like milk and yogurt, and order more automatically--and that would actually use the internet connection. Toaster ovens, no.

From:

magid

I don’t want smart anything: I see each $SmartThing as something that can be hijacked by someone with bad intent, and haven’t yet seen anything with a compelling enough upside to consider revising my opinion. What I really want is a well designed/produced UnSmartThing that isn’t designed to fail as soon as the default warranty period is over.

From:

conuly

It didn't even need bad intent, just an ordinary screwup!

From:

cellio

This! I want more dumb things to be available, and not built like crap.

From:

hilarita

Yesyesyes

From:

ethelmay

Seems to me Ray Bradbury did write a story kind of like that (a lot more than 30 years ago).

From:

conuly

I bet he didn't anticipate the subscription aspect, though!

From:

shadowkat

Apparently some people have never seen the 1980s and 1990s horror films about having everything controlled by computers?

From:

conuly

It's not the controlled by computers, everything goes haywire part that nobody seems to have anticipated, it's the fact that nobody centrally owns control of their own stuff.

From:

kengr

I am studiously avoiding "Internet of Things". If something fails, *I* want to be the person who can fix it.

From:

conuly

Crazy idea!

From:

dewline

Same. The Internet is useful for a lot, and it's still not useful for everything. Nor do we need it to be.

From:

calimac

"engineers were racing to build an outage-proof mode in the event of a future disruption."

They didn't do that before??

From:

conuly

Apparently not! Engineers always seem to think they're smarter than they are, but this boggles the mind.

From:

jessie_c

FMEA failed.

From:

siderea

> Why does a bed need to be smart?

I think there's a kinda interesting, non-obvious answer to that.

For some reason – I know not what – about 20 years ago there was a change in how beds were typically constructed, such that memory foam was widely adopted as a key material.

Memory foam sleeps very hot. Like, intolerably so for a lot of people. So ever since, there's been this growing market in various technologies to thermoregulate beds.

(Also, I gather that quite aside from the memory foam problem, the market is also serving - or trying to - people who are trying to avoid or cannot get AC, by just cooling their beds instead of the whole room. This is a population only growing with climate change.)

So an obvious thing to do is throw a thermostat into the loop; an unobvious thing is to make that thermostat programmable.

There's two ways to do this if your bed-cooling tech uses a coolant such as water. You can put it in the cooler unit, itself, which is the less effective way. Or you need to put the thermometer in the bed somehow, and have it speak to the cooler unit.

Now, theoretically at this point you could build all this to work locally. But it would be undebuggable if something goes wrong. If the "smarts" live on a server the manufacturer controls, it obviates a certain class of customer service call.

Also, if they were to build it to function locally, they'd need to build a very sophisticated hardware remote. Instead they build a vastly cheaper phone app to operate the thing - but that means it has to talk to their server on the Internet.

So that's how memory foam (and maybe climate change) drove the market for smart beds (and smart after-market bed accessories.)

From:

dewline

We need a simpler fix, don't we?

From:

conuly

Hm. There's gotta be a lower tech solution.

From:

When I was having really, really bad hot flashes a few years ago, I would take a hot water bottle, fill it with water and stick it in the freezer. At night, I'd put it next to bed, within easy reach for when/if hot flashes hit. Then I'd just grab the hot water bottle full of slowly thawing ice and put that next to me. Surely something like that would work for people without AC.

From:

kyrielle

Fixing the "undebuggable" part is hard. Fixing the "app" part is easy. My house has 'programmable' light bulbs in it. The phone app connects via bluetooth and via the local wifi (which I used the bluetooth connection to put them on). For my control of them to fail, the power has to be out, at which point my light bulbs are also.

I do have "smart" devices in my home that will fail if their servers go down, but - and I think this is key - their failure mode is to just stop, and they are not remotely critical in any way!

From:

dewline

I really don't need or want an Internet of Things. I'm wary enough of my CPAP machine having 3G built in as it is.

From:

conuly

Just so long as it doesn't go asplode when the internet goes out. (oh god it didn't did it?)

From:

dewline

There have been issues with several models of such machines, but I don't think that internet-ification was involved in those incidents. Just bits of machine that got...inhaled.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/09/philips-suppressed-sleep-apnea-device-problems-for-10-years/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/column-sleep-apnea-device-litigation-whos-getting-11-billion-settlement-2024-05-23/

From:

kengr

My CPAP only has an SD card that it records things on. A friend whose now-replaced CPAP was the same model had a plugin cell modem.

Me, I'd rather like it if there was a way to connect mine to my LAN (preferably wired, but I could live with wireless) so *I* could track things. Like how much time I spend sleeping (and not sleeping) while wearing it.

But that's just me.

From:

dewline

That seems more useful.

From:

ethelmay

Mine apparently sends info to my doctor's office, though I don't know if they look at it any longer, or if it was just the minimum period where I had to prove that I was actually using the thing.

From:

ethelmay

I can also load the SD card on my computer and have a program track the data, but I have not bothered for months and months.

From:

kengr

I think that's what the module on my friend's CPAP did. I stripped it, as well as other useful parts from his old (replaced because of issues with crumbling foam rubber in it).

Haven't gotten around to trying the SIM card in my laptop to see if it'd work there. :-)

From:

jessie_c

Seriously, you couldn't have written this 30 years ago, nobody would ever have accepted the premise!

V'ger enters the chat.

From:

conuly

V'ger was not a subscription model, was it?

From:

dewline

No. NASA had that one built to last, and even with that in play, no one expected extra-solar intervention to further extend the lifespan of Voyager 6 and boost the machine into active sapience.

Edited Date: 2025-10-23 02:51 am (UTC)

From:

jessie_c

Well, it did return to the OEM for servicing...

From:

cellio

"Smart (sic) bed" was not on my bingo card. Even if you want fancy features like heat adjustment and special alarms and whatever, that can be done client-side! Remember the "massage" option in some hotel beds decades ago? Don't need the freaking cloud to do that!

From:

lilysea

I have an electric bed that can raise the head, raise the feet, and also vibrate on several settings (for pain).

It operates on a handheld remote like a TV remote, and has zero internet connection. The internet could completely cease to exist and it would make zero difference to my bed.

And yet, the remote control can remember the most recent position setting for the bed - if I press the M1 button, the head and feet go automatically to my saved position setting, rather than me having to adjust the head/feet gradually using the remote.

This is what the electric beds that malfunctioned due to the Amazon outage SHOULD be like.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

>> 1. Why does a bed need to be smart? <<

That may come from the growing trend of sleep tracking for health reasons. However, the use of fancy controls for beds goes back farther, with Sleep Number and such regarding temperature, hardness, etc. in search of more comfortable rest. Well, that backfired.

>> 2. Why does everything have to be a subscription nowadays? <<

It's a way to milk money out of people over the long term, and it is wrecking household budgets because it raises the base expenses per month, leaving less flexibility. Wages are stagnant or falling, but people have to pay for more things, especially in categories that used to be buy-once expenses like television and beds. It's a problem.

>> 3. Why didn't they design the damn things to just be normal beds if cut off from the internet?<<

Because they were stupid. With any smart technology, you need to make sure it can power down gracefully and safely in case of signal loss.

>> Gun safety advocates warn of a surge in untraceable 3D-printed weapons in the US <<

Well, that was obviously going to happen. I pointed it out back when 3D printers first started making it into homes. It's not even a new thing; people used to weaponsmith their own guns in metal shops. That just became less popular over time, but now there is a new method gaining popularity.

But here's the catch. You can make your own gun in various ways, but it is MUCH riskier than buying one made in a modern factory. The history of firearms development is a lot about people blowing their hands off or blowing themselves up. You are dealing with massive amounts of energy released very suddenly into a very small space. Even metal can fail, and plastic is far weaker than metal.

So if you're worried about this trend, just watch for reports of homemade guns exploding and boost the signal. It will discourage at least some idiots from trying this at home. For a more oblique approach, teach peacework skills so people have better problem-solving methods than violence.