"Bricking" should be a crime.-
Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
111–120 of 250 posts
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The account in another comments makes it clear why it's done like that: To get a refund you not only have to talk to support (i.e. spending quite some time in some chat interface), then escalate the issue (talking to another support agent once more) and THEN you might get your money. I guess only a very small fraction of people will do this, making it a very cheap way for Spotify to stop any negative press regarding…
Why isn't there an app business that automatically goes through the corporate time wasting obstacles to burn the corpo's money on support calls?
Some people have been working on using LLM's for scam baiting. I've also seen LLM's used to interact with the chat support windows. It's just a matter of time now.
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don’t need more laws. We need to repeal the arbitration act, and let things like this get resolved in court, where we can establish a precedent against this kind of stuff.
No, courts don't just make up precedent out of thin air. Courts follow laws as written, and make decisions and establish precedent whenever laws are vague, in edge cases, or when laws conflict. But for stuff like this new laws are absolutely required. Why would you prefer unelected judges to be making stuff up, instead of democratically elected lawmakers whose literal job it is to decide these kinds of policies with…
Differences of interpretation effectively are making up precedent. Circuit splits exist because of this.
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that for some reason there's a deadline for flashing the generic Bluetooth firmware onto a Stadia controller though, you have to get it done before the end of this year if you have one gathering dust. https://stadia.google.com/controller/index_en_GB.html
Yes, but that's just when Google will stop hosting the tool that lets you reflash it. The tool works without Google's servers, and is already hosted elsewhere: https://github.com/luigimannoni/stadia-controller-flasher?ta...
Well, a community effort to reverse engineer the process and deobfuscate the javascript is keeping the tool alive. If they didn't step in to archive it, seemingly the cutoff would have been real.
It would have been a better testament to their commitment to prevent these controllers from becoming e-waste if Google just hosted an open source version of the flashing tool on their github from the start.
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#115Are they just banking on people not caring enough or knowing about the refund process? Clearly it can't be better off for them to refund hundreds of thousands maybe even 1m+ people. We need laws that step in to make this impossible. Hardware should be designed so that it can be reused. Make it so that people can just reflash the memory at a minimum. There's no reason for something like this to become e-waste. And the…
Imagine, using a hacked and leaked customer database, to auto-start a refund process? Like, the victims do not even know they started one, but some chat-gpt generated letter is send in there name, making that road to curtail damages suddenly economically nonviable. And suddenly, data security and hacks, are no longer a "problem for the user" but a valid method, to sniper a careless competitor and buy the carcass.
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Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lack of care for e-waste produced makes me sick. Spotify should at least open the hardware or sponsor a contest for a smart re-use / open source firmware for the device, would probably cost them less at the end and make them look better.
The photos of landfills full of e-scooters make me physically ill.
The current U.S. economic system doesn't support or incentivize caring about those things. Would you advocate for a system or policies that does incentivize it?
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#117Doesn't Spotify already know which Car Thing devices have been used, by which people, and the contact/billing info of most of those people?
If so, then why making people contact them?
And also bumping people away from normal customer support, to "specialty advisors"?
This isn't looking like good faith.
Is Spotify's market position now strong enough that they don't have to care what people think of them?
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Car Thing was only a remote for your phone's Spotify app. It was targeted towards people that had bluetooth or aux inputs to their car's stereo, but not Apple CarPlay or Android Auto that allowed you to control Spotify directly through the radio.
I don't have Android Auto but I can at least control my phone media playback through the head unit and the steering wheel controls over bluetooth. I suspect this was mainly for people who only have the ability to send audio to their head unit without actual controls in some older cars.
I think it was more so for people who want a dedicated spotify app - as in they want to go through their likes, playlists and radios without using their phone.
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
We live in a time where AI chatbots speak way better english than outsourced support workers in 3rd world countries.
unless the bots have been trained on outsourced support worker chat threads?
They were trained on both and can do both, it's a matter of asking for either in the system prompt.
Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process
#120I am pretty bummed that they are discontinuing it and not open sourcing the hardware. I use mine at my desk every day to control my desktop Spotify and it is pretty nice having hardware controls for my music. Shame on Spotify.
I’ve been trying to buy one for months. Glad I didn’t. I was going to use it for the same purpose as you. I just love that knob. Wonder if I there’s something open source out there.
I missed buying one for $30 when they were clearing them out a while ago and recently decided I wanted one for my car so started looking on eBay - they're going for at or more than the full, original price! Maybe with this EOL announcement, the prices will drop and I can pick one up cheap to repurpose for something else.