- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
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So that’s where all the damn Pi4s went.
Well, they sure as fuck didn’t go to the hobbyist market, we’ve been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.
I mean, the cold reality is that they developed and released a perfect piece of hardware for industrial automation and sold it for pennies in comparison to other industrial computer boards.
Industry will always have deeper pockets than hobbyists.
They also bent over backwards to help industrial buyers get them while flat out refusing to help content creators and Devs of open source projects that use the pi - it was really disappointing tbh
Still love them though but not as much as I used to.
This is such a terrible application. These things would drain their battery just running the pi and electronics. Why such a high power platform for such basic functionality?
This screams of free money flooding startups. Amateur hour.
I’m not intimately familiar with the BCM2711 but I believe it’s a reasonable, albeit somewhat overpowered, processor for the application. It can be put into a variety of low power states and probably pulled out of sleep by various events like the GSM chip sending packets or accelerometer motion (frequently the peripheral chips have dedicated “wakeup” pins that you can wire to interrupts). It’s not the most cost effective option by far, there are sub $5 microcontrollers with multiple cores for handling communications and real time motor control concurrently but you’d need to hire someone like me for a few months @$200/hr to write the low level drivers and design the boards. The rpi lets random web-only devs fumble their way through hardware development using whatever GitHub Python libraries they can find. If you only need a hundred scooters it makes more sense to just yolo it and buy up the remaining supply of rpis to start your grift.
It’s not abandoned property unless the finder doesn’t know who it belongs to.
If the name of the company is on the scooter, it is mislaid property, not abandoned property.
The classic bar exam question on this involves the finder of a bag of money. In one hypothetical, it’s a plain canvas bag. In another, it has the name of a bank on the bag.
When the name is there, you have to give it back. The finder only gets to keep it if after legal notice and a waiting period, the owner fails to reclaim it. In most states there is a statute on this, and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.
honestly, I would too. even though supplies are starting to bounce back (mainly in the USA, and I’m not in the USA), a free Pi is a free Pi. I generally can find uses for more pi’s…
When the fine for littering and the cost of repair or recycling is higher than what you can recoup from this sort of lost property, it’s a win win for the police.
and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
This is probably paranoid, but I always assumed that a cop would get his cousin to come in and claim it, or that the station would just keep it and then be like “oh yeah… yeah the owner claimed that 2 days before the expiration period”.
Oh yeah, I don’t know firsthand but I’d bet it’s pretty common.
Official protocols aside; this is exactly what would happen lmao
So are rentals scooters still popular in US cities or has that trend subsided? Last I heard people were getting fed up finding them everywhere, problems with vandals, etc.
In my European city they’re still popular but imho it’s a grift to get money from investors with large pockets. I see brands popping out and go out of the market in 6 months. They just need to lose just the right amount of money in order to have the longest list of supported cities at the moment of raising capital. It’s an application that’s too expensive for every day use (1 euro unlock fee + 20 cents a minute in a city with a subway and extensive bus network???) but at the same time that ridiculous amount of money is clearly not enough to be sustainable. And they all use dark patterns. App forces you to register with email and sms verification just to see prices and you need to recharge credit that you might be never be able to use. Most they auto charge the credit card for 10 euro as soon as the credit goes under 5 euro.
Maybe the real money making activity is unusable credit in user accounts?
Not living in a city with these scooters but in a country that has 10+ different virtual wallets services. I can tell you 101% it’s all about the credit sit in the customers’ accounts that obviously easy but not straightforward to pull out and stay there a long long time.
It was never about the “convenience” for anyone. It’s the same scheme of holding people’s credit.
You can make more money with a flop than with a hit??
I hope to see the prison yard scooter industry taking investors soon.
Denver still has a ton of them. They’re still a huge logistics problem, but the city seems to be putting “protected” lanes in to help with scooters and bikes. Time will tell.
They didn’t last where I live, but my mother lives in a town about an hour away (Bloomington, Indiana) which still has them, and they appear to be popular.
My city still has them. They’re pretty widely used, but I think we’re a good scenario for them. Our sidewalks aren’t cramped, we’re a very spread out city, and our public transit isn’t stellar.
It’s a legitimate salvage.
Remember the Cant!
Let’s go shuck some scoots, boys!
Self-hosted scooter!
I swear they probably followed an instructables to found the startup…
Lime still seems to be doing business in Austin. Not sure about the other brands.
They’re somewhat popular in Milwaukee, WI too
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
