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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
This is definitely on the horizon and future generations won’t even be aware of a time when you didn’t pay a subscription for every aspect of life. (TikTok screencap)
Smart fridges don't even improve storing food.
I won't buy a smart fridge until they can play Tetris with the food inside.
We've seen how this goes: Eventually if you need a new fridge, you won't have a choice.
It's just like smart TVs.
Smart tvs aren't as bad of a concept as smart fridges. A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be, purely because it is smart. A fridge doesn't have that. There is no way that a fridge can be better at being a fridge by being smart.
A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be
I think that depends on what you want from your TV. If you just want it to have a video input to stream stuff from somewhere else, smart TVs are typically worse because they take more time to boot up.
There's also a longevity mismatch. The streaming device goes obsolete much faster than the display. At worst, you've got a bunch of buttons snd icons for dead services or "your device is no longer supported" tutning your home theatre into a dead mall.
It's sort of like when they used to make low-end TVs with VCRs and DVD players built in. Nobody was doing that on top of the line sets because you wanted to keep it for 10 years, and the DVD player would give out much sooner.
I think one brand tried to make a modular component to allow for smart upgrades, but without industry standards, it was a predestined dead end. Thry should have just out a slot in the cabinet sized to fit a Roku/Fire stick and let customers swap them every few years.
Also, they spy on you, can be bricked by the manufacturer, can therefore be used to extort money from you after buying it (depending on your country's laws) and lock you into one ecosystem. The profit margin off of that is so high that "smart" TVs are always much cheaper than normal TVs, even with development costs and higher hardware costs. So you are the product.
And if you actually want to stream Netsucks or smth, plugging in your Laptop where you're already logged in is much more convenient than using a native app on the TV. And ofc you don't have to use some broken, outdated YouTube unshittifier that Google keeps breaking on there, you can just use piped/invidious in your Laptops/Mini-PCs browser. Also, not having any apps on a fucking TV means not requiring Network access, so no spying, updating etc. anyway.
It’s all about marketing. “This smart fridge uses quantum AI technology to do neural scans of the contents of your fridge, allowing it to adjust the temperature and humidity perfectly for your food, making it crisp and moist!”
That fridge competes with a dumb fridge from a budget brand that costs 200 to 300 bucks. You can even get self-defrosting ones at that price point.
Unlike TVs, which need to display content, fridges can work just fine when they're just a heat pump, a thermostat, a light bulb, and an insulated box (and optionally also a fan and a heating element). The biggest technical difference between a cheap fridge today and one from the 50s is in materials and using an LED bulb.
Nope. A TV's sole job is to shit photons into my eyes. I have different appliances to tell it which photons those should be.
And cars.
Do you really want a row of your food disappeared when you arrange it neatly?
It depends on how long the food had been in the fridge...
Actually (put on fedora) a "smart" fridge is not necessarily bad.
No what absolutely sucks is lock-in and enshittification.
If you were to imagine a FLOSS OSHW fridge that used e.g. OpenFoodFacts and data from your purchases, e.g. OCRing your grocery list receipt or online purchases and genuinely helped with stock, recipes, diet, etc why not.
The WHOLE point is control, it's not the technology.
Exactly, we don't need to ditch computers and smartphones and go "back to nature" like some people say. We need control.
Yeah. People hate "smart" stuff and IOT and i sometime do too, but owning a bit of automation tech makes me realise the shitty thing about these tech is we're being forced to use it for even the basic shit and in THEIR term, which mean they can brick your stuff if they want to.
I have two aircond that comes with IOT that i can connect for extra feature, but that's entirely optional stuff, i can operate it like a normal aircond. We need stronger consumer protection and more personal control.
Home Assistant ftw
It’s come so far! It used to just be for tech nerds and privacy extremists. But it’s so easy to use now, everyone who wants to enjoy the IoT world again without losing personal control can do it!
Draper's law: Any screen a company can control will eventually display ads.
Damn it, can't get to my verification cans!
For those who have no idea what stoy is talking about, I present this glimpse into the future:
Drink verification can to access refrigerator.
Then you are stuck, cause the verification can is inside.
That's why it's important to have a redundant backup fridge with a recovery verification can.
This reminds me. I need to call my uncle and ask him about that Fridge at his country place that's been running since 1994. He's selling his place and I want that fridge!
It's been running since 1994? He should probably think about catching it!
On a related note, I was looking at RTINGS recently at their recommended TVs. One really important item for me is that I'm not subjected to ads.
It turns out that every single smart TV they tested has ads, and there's no way to opt out of those ads.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
It's not possible to "vote with your dollars" to choose a TV that doesn't have ads, because 100% of the TVs have ads now.
I know you can get a commercial flat panel intended for restaurants and stuff that doesn't have any of those features, but those are hard to find, expensive, and don't have basic features like multiple inputs.
If you think you can get around this by refusing to connect your TV to the Internet, some of them start to interfere with your use of them until you do connect them. Which ones? I wish RTINGS told me.
And, making it all worse, you know that every one of these things is going to have an EULA that allows them to enshittify it even more at some future date. And, you can't get around that either, because either they're designed to stop working if they don't a recent update, or there's a bomb planted in an update that only activates months later, so rolling back (if that's even possible) won't help you.
I know US law is never going to help consumers with this, but I do hope eventually Europe addresses this. People in Europe do still sometimes seem to have some rights when it comes to big companies.
I was in my local Lowes hardware and one of the Samsung fridges on display kept actively trying to connect to my Samsung phone. I must have gotten 5 or 6 notifications from the fridge letting me know I could connect.
meanwhile the fridge from 1986 is still running in my garage and doesn't need me to ask how it's feeling or update firmware
Is there a kind of open source dumb appliance movement out there? It sure seems like we need one.
They wouldn't be free as in beer, but it would be awesome to have widely available instructions to take existing mass produced parts and assemble a functional and serviceable appliance.
Or maybe just a control module and some sensors that you can use to retrofit smart appliances.
I'm sure the big companies would keep them from gaining mass adoption though, thanks to cheap appliances with ads and junk parts. They probably already have.
...That's a Bosch refrigerator with a tablet stuck to it, presumably with a magnet. (Yes, we ruin everything for you on the Internet.)
Still. Samsung would absolutely try to pull this if they thought they could get away with it.
We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures.
Yes. Haha. Funny joke.
...at least until it's no longer just a joke.
They stopped looking at a screen for a second to open the fridge, quick install a screen on the front! Prediction: Screens will appear inside the fridge as well.
Eye tracking integration means that each second of diverted attention adds another ad to the queue
Just don't get the screen wet, if the screen is broken, the fridge won't work for "safety" reasons.
Meanwhile some Europeans inherited a 1962 Liebherr Fridge that still works in 2050
Eye movement trackers will only count the ads you actually watch.
New gig economy side hustle arises, ad-watcher. I'll come into your home and watch all your unskippable ads for $35 an hour plus tip
2050?? Lmao. More like 2026...
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t let you get bread and butter. You and Frank planning to update your pi-hole.