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

It's probably not feasible to stock every piece part for every legacy product. Imagine how many parts that is just for one keyboard.

Maybe that could be subcontracted out but I can see why it's just simpler to replace the whole thing.

A counter story: The battery in a Logitech wireless headset I had died under warranty. To send a replacement, Logitech would have had me "destroy" my existing headset and send pictures as proof. Given that interaction, and how quickly the wireless headset died, I am very wary of buying Logitech products, personally.

Every few months I go searching again to see if anything can beat the Harmony remote with hub (no screen on the remote) and nothing comes close. I mean there are a few products that are decent and what I'd buy if Harmony stopped working but they are not as good as Harmony. The battery life is measured in months (like 6-12) and not having to point the remote is huge QoL improvement. Pair that with being able to script actions for on/off and it was an amazing device.

For a while I hoped someone would buy their Harmony division and keep making them but alas, it was not meant to be.

Logitech software is appalling but BetterMouse exists!

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]: https://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media/files/Studia_Humana/Studia_Hum...

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%

That's a good idea in theory but most people have dozens of issues that are important to them and there's rarely a candidate for office who is aligned with them on everything, so they have to pick which issues are their most important. And of course their position on every possible issue isn't know when evaluating candidates. Some change their position after being elected. Sometimes issues come up that weren't really considered to be an issue at the time of the election.

There are a whole bunch of "Right" things to do. How does one choose? By listening to the people who they represent in real time.

Otherwise, how can they possibly set priorities once during election season for the whole term for any possible future issue?

Democracy is closed-loop control. You need a feedback signal. It's a feature - not a bug.

This reminds me of a funny book title: "Don't Vote - It Just Encourages the Bastards" [0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Vote-Just-Encourages-Bastards/dp...

Yeah I heard that about letters like 20 years ago from a staffer so maybe I'm a bit out of touch, lol.

I would tend to disagree about civil litigation being that much work, because it takes far less effort than other approaches when measured by effectiveness. I’ve had situations where I’ve reported crimes to the authorities. Most of the time these reports go ignored. In one major instance they refused to even take a police report. I’ve put cases together will all the evidence needed for a conviction, and only once did they actually arrest the person (and even then adjudication was withheld). So yeah, leaving it up to the government is less work, but there’s a good chance nothing will happen (particularly if they’re not politically aligned on the issue / it would offend donors / etc.). Then when there is a “major” enforcement, it’s usually a slap on the wrist and no the victims get less than they would have from a class action.

Courts are pretty good at not stirring up unnecessary trouble. So they are currently “resolving” all the many cases where a company dropped support and the customer doesn’t really mind because the device is old. They’re doing a great job resolving this Spotify case where Spotify is offering refunds and people are getting their money back. The vast majority of the time, there’s no need for a lawsuit and everyone works it out… that’s better than statutes which often stir up unnecessary disputes.

“Open” “unsupported” hardware would be hard because frankly I don’t know what that means. People who have the Spotify thing are pretty much free to do what they want with it. There are some DRM and anti-circumvention laws… but those are bad laws regardless of whether the device is supported or not. Again, just repeal those statutes as well.

At least in the U.S., I (like most people) trust unelected judges much more than the (quasi-democratically at best) elected legislature.

Differences of interpretation effectively are making up precedent. Circuit splits exist because of this.

Arbitration doesn’t really create precedent. When one person wins a lawsuit, it reduces the cost for all who follow (on the same facts). The evidence gathered in one case can be re-used in another.

A million arbitrations means a million arbitrary results, where one claimant doesn’t know what evidence was uncovered in the other cases.

Most importantly punitive damages. Arbitrators almost never impose real punishments, which means more companies commit fraud / act maliciously towards customers.

https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/#mass-arbit... has some details.

I also need to some detail about how companies are trying to enforce MDL-like bellwether and mass-arbitration rules in order to further reduce costs and chance of success.

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?

imo, the appliances breaking is also a choice and one that is a real shame. No one actually wants to buy new refrigerators or dishwashers, and the improvements in that space have all be pretty marginal.

Fast fashion is shame too - clothes ought to last a bit as well.

And cardboard/particle board furniture that services .5-1.5 moves is also basically bad.

Cars have been steadily increasing in durability and reliability for decades

Over the past 10 years I've recycled all of my large appliances. My (texas) city comes and picks them up at no charge, and I don't feel that's an unusual situation.

It's not an either/or though. Anyway, all / most of the ones you mentioned have good reuse, repair and recycling systems in place.

yes. it's been obvious for a long time that "but the e-waste" is almost universally deployed as an argumentary "get out of jail free" card that is intended to be impossible to argue against, even when there isn't actually an improvement in the energy/waste lifecycle or when the improvement is overall trivial. it's funny that the tech community of all places have embraced greenwashing so heavily, particularly when most of those same individuals constantly decry greenwashing themselves/think they're on the right side of the issue, but there also clearly is an intentionally bad-faith thing where it's used to shut down debate because "you don't hate the planet, do you!?".

you see it constantly in anything surrounding apple, for example. wireless charging is bad, because using 2.5w more for the 1 hour a day your phone is actively charging is literally killing the planet. meanwhile if you sit on the cord wrong once a year and have to have amazon send a truck out with an extra cable, you have undoubtedly exceeded the pollution by orders of magnitude.

same for batteries etc, if your crappy amazon battery needs one extra replacement over the life of the phone, you have undoubtedly vastly exceeded the e-waste and pollution savings of right to repair. Let alone the impact of the extremely short software lifecycles - those android phones are basically disposable and unsupported the day they launch, and apple devices actually have supremely good lifecycles given their long support, the thriving secondhand market (long life) vs disposable phones that get rapidly cycled through, the parts lifecycle/support, and the refurb/recycling lifecycle etc. But right-to-repair is a fashion statement and people will die on the hill that sending out five amazon trucks of parts for a phone that's unsupported in 6 months and in the trash after 3 years is saving the planet.

AI is bad because e-waste and energy, regardless of whatever value it delivers. Over the next century we will probably save GW of energy due to increased efficiency in basically everything (doubtlessly introducing another jevon's paradox of course, but that's not the fault of the tech, that's a generic complaint against any efficiency improvement). Introducing AI into end-user devices is bad because users might feel compelled to upgrade, which is bad. Training smaller models that don't use so much energy in the long-run is bad, because it uses energy now. Upgrading your graphics card is bad because e-waste - even though you sell it to someone else who continues to use it, and even though the guy with a mattress on the floor and a killer gaming rig that he upgrades yearly has way lower emissions than a family who takes one vacation a year to florida (even driving etc). On and on.

people just want a foolproof "your product is bad" that can't be argued against, and e-waste/pollution is a great card to play, especially when it's selectively applied and you refuse to admit any of the foibles of the products you prefer.

also, people still don't want to admit that rossman's right to repair isn't quite the same thing as the platonic right-to-repair. rossman's interests fundamentally lie with keeping rossman group turning a profit, which isn't quite the same thing as users being able to repair their own devices by themselves etc. people don't like apple selling parts straight to end-users because "repair shops can't turn a profit at those prices" and yeah, having a multinational conglomerate renowed for its supply chain deploying low-cost labor to perform factory-line repairs on a limited selection of devices is going to be cheaper than artisianal craftsman repair, that's just the economics of it etc. Nobody has accused them of having different prices internally/externally, repair shops just can't afford to compete at the same prices that apple charges itself.

Right to repair doesn't guarantee the right of repair shops to turn a profit in the face of a well-oiled OEM repair shop operation/pipeline, but actually it's a good thing to have that brick-and-mortar repair pipeline etc, that's what you want, if you want to keep devices running longer etc. Market competitiveness is not the same thing as e-waste lifecycle, and OEMs subsidizing the repairs/running them at-cost is actually a good thing for pollution/e-waste even if indies can't compete at fair market rates. You just can't actively charge yourself less than the fair market price for the item, but even if you did, keeping devices running is the goal, right? These are contradictory goals, market competitiveness is not the same thing as keeping e-waste out of landfills, and if you really care about the latter it probably will require subsidies on repairs, or taxes on new devices, to overcome the economics of mass-production vs individual-repair.

Same for component-level repair. Obviously that is a thing rossman would like to offer as a business service, but is it a necessary aspect of phone repair given the ready availability of assemblies? If you want to drive down costs, bringing boards (via B2B/wholesale trucking) to a central place and reworking them en-masse is going to be a very efficient way to do it, you’ll even recapture some of those economies of scale vs 1-off artisanal repair. And cost of repair is obviously a major factor in whether people decide to repair vs landfill a broken device. But that’s bad because rossman doesn’t get paid as much if you just swap a PCB - it probably should be an option but it realistically isn’t ever going to be the default, to have an artisan unsolder a bga and put on a new cpu or memory or whatever, and there are strong social arguments (cost) for doing it the other way. It certainly isn’t some showstopper to overall repairability (nobody is resoldering a BGA at home anyway), just not favorable to rossman’s bottom line.

also, right to use third-party parts is not really a right-to repair issue. that is personal preference, but there's also safety (muggings/theft) and resale considerations etc. Certainly there are good reasons to explore flexibility/solutions but again, this isn't a right-to-repair issue when there are reasonably at-cost repairs available and a ready supply of first-party parts etc... if phones aren't going into landfills that solves the problem, right? it's a personal preference about the market economics/principles of a device you own (one I generally agree with, with the caveat there's countervailing concerns too). but that gets wedged into an e-waste issue too!

hell even apple making the tools available is a conspiracy to some people - "apple renting you the OEM replacement tools (which are completely optional and in no way required or forced, you can use an amazon spudger if you want too, and which they will outright sell you if you want to keep them because you're an indie repair shop or whatever) for the cost of shipping is bad because the pelican cases are too big and heavy" is a serious topic of discussion for some people. and before you think that's a strawman... someone defended the idea a couple weeks ago on here lol. like there's just no winning with a bunch of these people lol.

the whole e-waste/right-to-repair has just turned into a massive greenwashing/circlejerk and again, it's these same people who are so concerned about airpods and apple self-service who are so adamantly opposed to "greenwashing" in principle, yet they're basically engaging in a contemporary greenwashing movement themselves backing leaders with fixation on greenwashing their own business requirements as being movement goals etc.

In practice minimizing e-waste/pollution lifecycle basically boils down to keeping devices in service longer and ensuring less unnecessary road-trips over the lifespan of the device. The easiest ways to get there are good parts lifetime, good software support lifetime, accessibility of brick-and-mortar/retail repair service, a thriving secondhand market/value retention to encourage resale, etc. Everything else is optional, and you actually don't need much beyond the apple store/self-service model to accomplish those actual needs.

like, taking my old trade-in iphone and refurbing it and selling it to someone in africa or india is what you want, right? how did that become a bad thing/complaint for the greenwashing movement? shouldn't that actually be required, if the phone has a reasonable degree of serviceability why shouldn't it be mandated that trade-ins be refurbed and get another lifecycle?

Also, the actual nuclear-hot take: even lightning was not really a big deal given how long it'd been in service. Having one specific, long-running cable that is deliberately aimed at being significantly cheaper than USB-C (which it was, until very recently) is really not a big deal and probably the phase-out of lightning pushed a large number of extra trucks on the road, extra cable sales to replace the old ones, new usb-c PD chargers sold, etc. I definitely feel the user-convenience argument, I am very happy to unify everything I can onto USB-C these days, but there was a very real additional pollution cost incurred from the changeover itself, that need not have been incurred. Cables wear and break, especially phone cables that get heavily used etc, and having 3 types of cables instead of 2 (usb-c and micro-b) was not the end of the world. Now micro-B really does need to die though, I am entirely tired of that shit to a degree that I didn't care about with lightning. Reversibility has been here for 15 years now, get with the program, and the durability of the sockets is still awful (although better than mini-B, which also refuses to die).

Like a lot of green movements it just sort of is a mishmash of contradictory and often self-defeating goals, pushed by lifestyle advocates and profiteers who stand to gain by selling associated services etc. I do support the overall goal it just doesn’t feel like the current discourse has anything to do with that, it’s just people attaching their lifestyle choices/political choices to a convenient/favorable wagon. And you can easily tell this by how hostile people get over it all. It was never about the e-waste, it was about “apple bad”. And that always is the first and most powerful beat in every single one of these “right to repair” discussions. Name a single rossman video that isn't at least 30% anti-apple screed by weight lol. Like are there really no other vendors with glued batteries or unrepairable mainboards or no service manuals given to third parties? I think there obviously are... but the Samsung stuff just goes in the trash instead of sending it to a Rossman type place, so you're seeing survival bias at best, outright personal bias at worst. It's an easy, popular, large target that drives massive amounts of clicks given the wild amount of apple-hate that still exists to this day etc. They aren't your friend more than any other corp... but they actually do have a pretty green lifecycle compared to a parade of disposable android phones or $300 craptops. And people just cannot possibly bring themselves to admit that apple stepped in the right direction for a change (see also: privacy). Doesn't make them perfect, but neither are any of the alternatives, and apple generally does better in these areas (e-waste/sustainability/lifecycle and privacy).

At the end of the day people are just so credulous about a pitch that inevitably concludes with the pitcher attempting to sell you something - not just rossman but framework, fairphone, etc. And people are just so sanctimonious about it all, like they just want to dump all over everyone because they bought into a youtube personality who needs to keep doing component-level repairs to stay in business or w/e. And again, I guess what else is new with the greenwashing movement, but these are people that think of themselves as ostensibly being virulently opposed to greenwashing etc. Again, I guess what else is new.

this makes me think of what’s in the waste itself. Is a big pile of steel worse than a few box’s of rare earth elements and toxins?

It wasn’t uncommon to buy second hand AC and sell them after use in the NYC. In fact, I barely heard anyone buy new ACs. I guess not everyone has no problem throw those appliances out.

Buildings too. We should be building for repairability.

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

In my case I waited patiently because it was outsourced, so I assumed its a company with maybe 10 people running through thousands and thousands of recalls for various companies. They might be slow, but as long as they get to it, doesn't bother me.

That's seems terribly unsafe.

Since Spotify is a Swedish company, I'm sure this is why they didn't think it would be an issue.

Only businesses can create SEPA Direct Debit mandates, and they can be blocked easily and refunded at the initiative of the account holder no-questions-asked within two months.

Spotify Technology S.A. may be headquartered in Sweden, but all business in the USA is conducted via Spotify USA Inc, which is a US company headquartered in the World Trade Center in New York City.

It is completely understandable that someone like you who doesn't live or work in the USA wouldn't know how sensitive a Bank Account/Routing number is here. If you exist in a modern banking system with proper security, it is easy to assume that the rest of the world works the same way.

However, there is absolutely no excuse for the decision makers at Spotify here in the USA not to understand this.

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.

Refreshed before typing this because I realised someone might have beaten me to it! - But that's a big difference here - even though the service is gone, you got the refund and still a usable device as a controller out of it...

Spotify has taken something that could be used generically too, and just decided to brick it.

Insert something about product and consumers and how its all just some big money game or something somewhere :D

My bad, that's pretty legit on Google's part!

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

...and of course they did! I didn't actually expect it to be playable with the knob control like that, so I'm actually even more impressed. I was just expecting it to compile and run, but not necessarily play.

There must be a rule of that. If you think someone will probably make it run DOOM someday, someone already has.

You'll be better off getting something like a bluetooth to FM/aux transmitter and pair your phone to it.

    https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004704739971.html

And to avoid touching your phone while driving, you can also pair a small bluetooth remote that you can attach to the steering wheel

    https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006422066598.html

That's one use case. The other use case is people who want a dedicated Spotify display in their car. It's especially nice in a new car because you can have your Nav or something else on your car screen and have a second display for your music. Yes, you can also use your phone for that, this is just another option.

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.

Seriously. I don't know anything about mobile development, but once it's working in the first place, how hard is it to just NOT delete its API hooks from the codebase. As a developer, I can only guess that maybe the code which supports it, or the code where it has to poke its fingers into into in order to be able to draw its UI, is poorly-architected and removing the Car Thing code across the board will allow them to more easily refactor or something.

Most of the things in Spotify are done through the server. There are two major reasons why:

- customer-facing reason: Spotify Connect https://support.spotify.com/us/article/spotify-connect/ We have to be able to know which device you're playing on, show it in device pickers and even let you play stuff on devices not in the same network

- second major reason: most of the decisions of what to play cannot be made on the client. This has to do with licensing and related analytics. Even different types of devices will have different licensing applied to them. So to even simply say "play next song" you have to tell the server you're going to listen to a track. And that track might not be available for the specific combination of account/device/country/phase of moon which client has no way of knowing about.

Source: I work at Spotify, but I can't answer any questions about CarThing (didn't work on it, and it would be NDA anyway)

well I was going to use it for Spotify, but without official support it's going to be a pain. Unless someone's already hacked it.