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Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

arstechnica.com

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Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#51

Post by cwillu »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #27
bravetraveler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, stop voting for people that need coerced to their job. I know this is reductive - save your fingers. Write, but do the not-vote-thing if they don't listen. The desire to not be hoodwinked has already been expressed. Just not this specific way. Or, expressed more positively I guess, vote for those who don't need goaded to do the obviously good thing.

Why not go even farther than that? Admit political knowledge is virtually impossible, and just stop engaging in the political process at all. Save your time and energy for something easier, like cutting edge theoretical physics or becoming a billionaire. Such is the point argued by Dr. Mike Huemer in his essay In Praise of Passivity [1], and to this date I've never found a clearer piece of writing on the matter. [1]:…

Interesting read.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#53

Post by bravetraveler »

croes wrote: post #33
bravetraveler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, stop voting for people that need coerced to their job. I know this is reductive - save your fingers. Write, but do the not-vote-thing if they don't listen. The desire to not be hoodwinked has already been expressed. Just not this specific way. Or, expressed more positively I guess, vote for those who don't need goaded to do the obviously good thing.

How does the not-vote-thing help? The result is calculated on the basis of the votes cast. So if you have 10 votes of 20 possible you get 50%, if 5 don't vote it's 10 out of 15 = 66.6%

It's more... 'vote, but directed elsewhere' - I'm not really championing for non-participation. It already won.

I'm posting fairly incendiary stuff because most don't vote, yet everyone has an opinion.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#56

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

hoherd wrote: post #30
giancarlostoro wrote: post #5

I wonder if there's licensing issues with them doing so? Like I assume they didn't make all the hardware and firmware involved. Kind of a shame when companies do this. I also wonder how long till the hacker community starts hacking these things any way? Seems like a worthy device to hack, though I can't imagine there's millions of these out there. I'd love to buy a 2nd hand one and install custom software on it if so…

Spotify almost certainly developed Car Thing using license encumbered software, and this illustrates how encumbered licenses are anti-freedom and are causes of unnecessary e-waste. Thankfully folks have started organizing to reverse engineer the device: - https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineer... - https://hackaday.com/2024/05/30/old-spotify-car-thing-hacks-...

[flagged]

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#57

Post by teeray »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #28
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #9

Are 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…

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.

Yeah, but it is so much work to litigate and it takes so much time, even for small claims. We can’t really expect a reasonable fraction of the owners of these devices to sue Spotify, then maintain the wherewithal to bring that suit to a judgement, then actually collect on it. The other legal mechanism, class actions, often just enrich the lawyers litigating them.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#58

Post by micromacrofoot »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #28
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #9

Are 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…

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.

Do you have any reason to believe that "open unsupported hardware" would be a bad law? Resolving this in court every time a company decides to drop support seems worse.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#59

Post by mgkimsal »

Gasp0de wrote: post #40
dylan604 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That slightly clumsy wording is what made me think it was a chatbot

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?

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#60

Post by midtake »

Gasp0de wrote: post #40
dylan604 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That slightly clumsy wording is what made me think it was a chatbot

We live in a time where AI chatbots speak way better english than outsourced support workers in 3rd world countries.

We live in a time where AI chatbots speak way better English than most native English speakers.
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