Artificial Ice
I blame Gilfoyle. Fucking Gilfoyle.
What odious turd buys an AI fridge??
Someone who finds the concept of seeing the milk getting low and adding to the shopping list manually themselves too baffling.
Isn’t it more just disgusting rich people vanity and banality?
Possibly.
Also I imagine the rich class (who dont cook themselves, be honest) like their fridge to keep itself stocked with sparkling water, charcuterie cheese and cocktail mixers itself.
NO ONE COULD HAVE FORESEEN THIS RIDICULOUS INEVITABILITY
Nothing. Is made. Correctly. Anymore. I went to school for industrial design, and I can comfortably say design and how to communicate proper use are fucking dead. Some thing or website or service is made wrong every fucking time I turn around. It is relentless and unreal.
Yup. I was always grappling with form/ function and balance that benefit the user. Seems it’s now ennshittification and subscription are the drivers.
I can see the brief now.
- Must have at least one subscription feature
- Should make the user mad
- Every aspect should have control but is… Extra bonus if does not ever en fulfil its purpose.
And don’t grey out or hide any of the subscription features, just have it not work, and let them wonder what the fuck is happening. And remove the map link. We don’t want them just, like, clicking that so they can get here easily. And make sure ads load as they scroll, so it keeps moving the page. That should happen seventeen times.
Ah i forgot the biggest requirement…exploit every device feature to extract data
A refrigerator should never need an update. Smart appliances are the stupidest shit I ever heard of. A refrigerator should not need anything but an outlet and maybe a water connection.
look, i wouldn’t mind a dashboad where i could see when the dishwasher was run, that the rinse fluid is low, the temperature in the fridge ans freezer over time, how many times the ice machine refilled, when the AC on…
smart devices could have been cool.
what we got was the ability for the power company to turn of my fridge, requiring a broken app to run cycles on a dishwasher, and spying for no benefit in every device.
The idea has promise and i hold a small glimmer of hope for home assistant. But, like so many things companies did not give anyone what they wanted.
Give me a washer, dryer and dishwasher that send my phone an alerr when they finish please.
I just set a timer
Doesn’t work for washers and dryers that use sensors to tell when the clothes are clean/dry.
Thankfully, my set is “connected” in that you can connect to it to see status updates and adjust notification volume, but everything else is manual.
My fridge also has monitoring, and tells you if the inside temperature goes outside range. It also lets you toggle the ice maker, notify you when it’s full and adjust temperature of the three compartments. I can see that last one triggering something similar to Samsung’s gaffe if a firmware update hard locked the temperatures to negative values or something.
Those sensors don’t work anyway. Just do it by time.
Those sensors don’t work anyway
Mine does… Both my washer and dryer will take longer or shorter of the alloted timer based on how actually “done” the wash is.
A 20 minute cycle on my dryer might end up finishing after 12 minutes. So it turns off.
And then you have to run it again because that sensor has a very different definition of what “extra dry” means than the rest of the world.
With home assistant we usually monitor a smart plug: instant power goes above x value -> cycle has started, power goes (close) to zero for x time -> cycle has ended, send notification. In my case I raise a flag value that reminds me periodically to unload the machine until I confirm that I’ve done it
I’ve run a household for 20 years and never needed anything like this
Need != could be useful
What would be really cool is if a fridge kept track of how fresh everything was, and alerted users when food spoiled, or was about to spoil, or on track to spoil given how seldom it was consumed.
I can’t tell you how many times yogurt or sour cream has gone bad in my fridge because everyone forgets it’s in there.
Also, detecting ice buildup and consequently adjusting humidity or water flow to the ice maker etc
i doubt it can tell that things are spoiling or moldy, decomposition, spoiling is a complex process, and may look normal ont eh surface but actually went bad if you "smell taste it.
More likely would be a system that uses cameras to see what you put in, alongside a program to identify what type of item it is, and a record of its estimated time of spoiling. Say you put in a pack of bagels, and the fridge deduces it is a new pack because you haven’t recently taken bagels out. The fridge estimates they will probably last 1-2 weeks. Then depending on how much they are removed and put back in, it might throw a reminder on the screen “bagels still good?” etc
A lot of people using Home Assistant make some of those things happen.
I do too. But most commercial appliance integrations are hacks, and having missing featurea or dont really work most of the time. Many times I suspect skirting very close to violating TOS too.
HA is great if you have matter or zigbee or zwave. Probably even some of the proprietary in building protocols too. But these one off cloud commercial systems honestly suck in my experience.
One of the reasons techies are burning out is because they are tired of seeing the promise of a new tech and watching it be used to enable surveillance.
For a fridge the functionality as an appliance shouldn’t be linked to the functionality as a device with a web browser. Ice bucket low? Sensor sends signal to app, fine. But the fridge doesn’t need to know that; it can keep using the float switch or whatever it used to before “smart”. Temperature tracking same thing - bolt a sensor and hook it to the app, but don’t use that app and sensor to control the fridge.
But to build an ecosystem like that you’d need a developer, you can’t just slop together an app, have you thought about the cost? And the shareholders!!
That’s nothing. We had to install a firmware update on a chef’s knife! 🤣
not as bad as those people buying a SMART MATRESS.
I know right? Yet people buy them.
Like SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
It is a really poor design choice to tie the smart screen to the core function of the refrigerator. They apparently haven’t heard of the idea of fail safe.
They have.
But failing safe doesn’t get them monthly subscriptions.
Can’t wait until sex toys become over Ai’d. If you don’t pay your pocket pussy subscription and you run out of time mide session; you’ll have to pay to get your dick back.
wait until they start selling your, erm, ‘habits’ to data brokers and we start seeing websites selling “what are they into” kind of data to people. (people including your employer… )
This is dumb, but what’s even dumber is making a device that can even fail in that way to start with. I’d have expected the core refrigerator function to be isolated in some way from the rest of the device.
Oh but then you would own part of the device… Can’t have that
Perhaps being able to turn the fridge off remotely was always part of the plan? We’re in the age of enshittification, where companies don’t see enforcing a mandatory subscription onto their pre-existing customers as problematic. I honestly wouldn’t put it past a modern company to keep such an ace up their sleeves just in case.
is this that 2000-3000k smart samsung fridge? most normal fridges have a lifespan of around 5years now, due to planned oblescence. earlier this week i thought our fridge died, but the control switch for fridgeaire just got turned to freezing, which has never worked(and is a known defect).
I’ve spent 20 days waiting for a part from China to (hopefully) repair my 18 year old very basic fridge because I refuse to get some stupid fucking touchscreen internet connected advertising box.
I fucking hate the modern world.
its pretty easy to get a fridge still without a touch screen. The 1st two pages on costco here (I didn’t go further) don’t have one.
even fridges within the last 10-15 years are crappy. only the ones from early 2000s, or pre-2000 last a long time.
There were a ton of crappy fridges from back then, too. It’s just that most of them have already died.
The difference is almost ALL appliances built today are designed to die around the time the warranty expires. And, yes, I realize that’s been a trope for a long time, but now it’s far more true than it used to be. It used to be a joke, because it happened rarely, now it’s not a joke because it happens often.
Twenty years from now, there won’t be any appliances built today, still running.
This isn’t survivorship bias. The internet taught us that term specifically to excuse enshittification.
You can sill get “dumb” appliances.
If you buy smart appliances, you’re a fucking retard
Wish they gave me a thousand upvotes for this.
I have smart lights that can be controlled over the internet.
If the internet connection goes down, I can also control them locally.
If the local network fails, I have physical light switches.All smart devices should fail into a safe and functional mode when the smart features inevitably stop working. It seems Samsung doesn’t subscribe to that philosophy.
All smart devices should fail into a safe and functional mode when the smart features inevitably stop working.
I’m horrified that you could possibly advocate for allowing the consumer to have any real control of their own devices. Have you considered the security implications of not requiring devices to be 100% dependent on the manufacturer’s server? Users might be able to use the device without first installing the company’s app! The user might be able to use the device without the company knowing about it and selling that data for additional profit or using it to train it’s AI.
Somehow, a billionaire will swear up and down that what you’re saying is beyond cost efficient as he donates his parent’s legacy and graves to his AI idol statues.
Of course not. Failing into a safe and functional mode doesn’t get people to buy more fridges
I don’t really understand why a fridge which needs to update for features like seeing the interior on your phone or cataloguing the cintents would fail to even refrigerate after an update.
The refrigeration should be manual so that when the digital controls fail it falls back on manual settings.
The update probably triggered something buried in the code that’s there solely to hold your fridge hostage if you don’t want to pay for subscriptions.
Why was it even able to fail that way to begin with?
It’s not like the functional software in a refrigerator needs to be updated that often at all. You’d think that if the update fails catastrophically, it would fall back to a basic operating mode like a car does.
Do they have a renting system or something in the works that’s meant to let them shut the device remotely?
My guess is they tried to save money by reducing controllers.
A smartly designed fridge would be much like a car. In a car you have a number of relatively dumb computers that handle things like the engine or battery and motors. And then you have smart connected computers for things like infotainment and app access and self driving. The smart computers have a relatively simple data path to send instructions to the dumb computers like ‘start the engine’ and get data back like ‘engine temperature is 190F’. In a fridge you would have a dumb controller that handles the compressor, defrosting, temperature control, fan speed, lighting, etc. Then whatever internet AI bullshit would be on a separate smart computer that sends the dumb controller commands like ‘set fridge temp to 37f’.
It sounds like in this case they put the smart controller in charge of everything. That is, the touch screen computer is also telling the compressor when to start and stop. This is not great design for a few reasons, and is actively dangerous in a car- imagine if the users kid slams both hands on the touch screen, the computer locks up because it wasn’t expecting 10 touch points at once, and suddenly fuel is injected during an exhaust stroke and the engine explodes. And as we see here it’s not smart in a fridge either- touch screen crashes and all your food goes bad.
Personally I think the smart play is stay the hell away from all of these smart connected appliances. They offer very little benefit for the user, but provide a pathway for the manufacturer to harvest tons of lifestyle data and sell it.
First thing I thought of!
