memes

Smart fridges don't even improve storing food.

I won't buy a smart fridge until they can play Tetris with the food inside.

Why the heck are people buying these things in the first place?

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.

Draper's law: Any screen a company can control will eventually display ads.

Damn it, can't get to my verification cans!

Drink verification can to access refrigerator.

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!

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.

Unauthorized Bread

...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.

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.

Yes. Haha. Funny joke.

...at least until it's no longer just a joke.

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.

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.

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.

PiHole saves the day yet again.

Eye tracking integration means that each second of diverted attention adds another ad to the queue

I think there was a Black Mirror episode like this.

Did all these companies watch Black Mirror and say “great idea”?

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.

Why are we waiting 25 years for technology we have today? We shoud as a tip screen while we're at it.

2050?? Lmao. More like 2026...

Brawndo's got what plants crave!

Also the ads are taking 3x as long as normal to load because your fridge, washer, dryer, smart picture frame, and smart light bulbs are part of a botnet-for-hire, unbeknownst to you