Hacker News Reader

That's my experience as well. We got rid of our Roomba because you need to remove pretty much everything from the floor, only for it to spend 20 - 30 minutes vacuuming at incredible volume. Getting the 20 year old Miele vacuum from downstairs, vacuuming and putting it back takes 10 minutes, you just move stuff out the way as you go, and it clears better too.

I was agreeing with you on all accounts but seriously doubt they’ll be open source. I think the average person will barely clock this as mattering, and will pay up. The market has shown time and again that consumers prefer highly integrated environments that work seamlessly vs open source, especially for hardware.

I also agree it’d be worth more to me than my car, and I’d hope much like modern cars such an expensive consumer purchase will end up with similar warranty protections and eventually a third party market for replacement parts.

Much like cars, I’m guessing it’ll be a better idea to go with a large company that’ll be able to honor that warranty without being financially ruined. The first few generations will see lots of experimentation and thus be more risky for the consumer before the market settles out with a few big winners (as is often the case).

I honestly am not sure why hardware startups do not adopt the open source model more frequently. At the very least they could do a software escrow where if they go belly up, the software becomes open source. The point is that it is a huge marketing point that they could use but do not. You are right that if let's say Samsung started selling completely autonomous kitchens then it is less likely that in two years they go belly up. But they also will want to cram it full of ads and spyware. Why can't a hardware startup position themselves against this and keep hammering their marketing with how they are open source and do not want and will not to show you ads or spy on you.

I think the point is that consumers never have a choice in these things so even if they cared, what would be the outcome? For phones, TVs, laptops, cars, if I do care about not just privacy but repairability, what options do I actually have? For phones there are various attempts at libre phones but they are all unusable in some way. Dumb TVs exist and so do open source media players, but something that lets me stream all my video subscription services + local media and does not have some phone home cloud thing built in just doesn't exist at all. Laptops are maybe as close as you can get with things like Framework, etc. and I think this is where I am surprised at the lack of serious marketing. Finally, cars are a complete mess. I have seen one or two open source ECUs but it is so far from plug and play it's not even on the horizon.

Basically, consumers don't care because they aren't choosing between a libre phone and Google Pixel. They are choosing between a Google Pixel and a buggy prototype or a dumb phone.

A robot capable of preparing meals also has a similar hazard matrix to a car.

Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.

Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.

A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.

Why would the food prep robot be humanoid? There is no reason for that. And my point is that I wouldn't want it to be cloud-connected at all. No reason for that either. I don't need it to be intelligent. I need it to have recipe-following, and specific functions like measure(), chop(), dice(), grate(), mix(), etc.

For laundry, have you considered that not everything is a T-shirt? Suits, socks, onesies, pajamas, sweaters, halter tops, lingerie, long johns, bedding, etc. And drawers are only suitable storage for some types of clothes. Putting a suit into a drawer is for example a terrible idea.

Because it needs to fetch implements, access cupboards, use appliances. Otherwise it's basically a Thermomix.

I'm not talking about a long term storage drawer for the laundry system, more like a large pull-out in which dry, folder items are dispensed. And I wouldn't put a suit in a washing machine full-stop, I don't know what they have where you are but the ones in this country would wreck a suit jacket very quickly, we take jackets for dry-cleaning once a month or so.

The big thing for me was that hauling out a canister vac was just a big PITA. But I concluded that a 10 minute job with a broom vac (Dyson) dealt with 80% of the headache (and I had a monthly housekeeper anyway). A robovac just didn't really do anything for me and would have had various issue with cords or random stuff on the floor.

> The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box

This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)

> will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways.

Running my 1.2kW vacuum for <2 minutes is guaranteed to defeat the roomba from a work capacity standpoint. These products are fundamentally unserious to me.

i watched via camera 12 years ago roomba spreading my dogs diarrhea all over living room (thanks god to tile floors). I connected to camera first time in a months just few seconds before roomba took first swipe over the poop. Still remember feelings of paralysis, despair and lack of control.

Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.

latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".

The camera based object (and poop) avoidance actually works pretty well in my Roomba j7+, bought in 2022.

The cloud-based software for everything else has degraded in quality, tjough. I'll probably upgrade to a lidar-equipped competitor model if this continues to get worse after this bancruptcy.

given your requirements, I'd advice marriage.

I think anyone getting married with the intent of treating their spouse like a maid is in for a bad time with that whole "70% of marriages end in divorce" statistic.

Jokes aside, marriages don't fail because people assume roles in it, but because of stress, money, and lack of empathy and respect. I've literally met women who told me that if given the opportunity, they would not mind being housewives. Of course, this is not for everyone, but looking at what you were listing, and this is what it reminded me of.