Mastodawn

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

Apparently Samsung is putting ‘AI’ (and ads) in fridges. I am certainly not opposed to innovation and think that a lot of technologies that haven’t changed much for a long time have room for improvement (if you grew up in the US or Europe, try using a Japanese toilet and you’ll understand). But the frustrating thing is that there are a lot of useful things that a fridge could do with some computing power and a bit of electrical control that they don’t and which don’t need ‘AI’. Some examples:

It could talk to a smart meter to run the compressor when electricity is cheap and keep a reservoir of chilled coolant for when electricity is expensive.
It could automatically close the door if I leave it open for more than a minute and don’t first put it into ‘I am cleaning the fridge now’ mode.
It could record (with bar code or image recognition - the latter of which you could even market as ‘AI’ because apparently computer vision is ‘AI’ now) when I open things like milk or juice so when a thing says ‘consume writhing 5 days of opening’ and I can’t remember when I opened it, it can tell me.
It could then warn me if I’ve left something that will spoil in the fridge.
It could track when I remove / replace things so ‘are we nearly out of X’ is a question I can answer from my phone / tablet / laptop when organising a food order, without having to go and check.

All of these are features I would actually find useful. The last ones require a bit of clever computer vision and good UI design, the earlier ones are just applications of mature technology.

And I would actually pay more for these features (and the first one would likely save me more money over the lifetime of the fridge than the price delta, so everyone wins [except oil companies, but that is a feature in itself]).

I could write a similar rant about pretty much every piece of electrical equipment I own. All of these have a load of trivial improvements that could be made if you start by asking the question ‘how do people use this and how do we improve it?’ Rather than ‘how do we add {an app,AI,this week’s buzzword} that marketing wants in the next generation?’

Mark Burton Jan 10

@david_chisnall
For a freezer it could list and track what's in there.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jan 10

Right? And how long it’s been there, and maybe how often you take things of that category out so that you know how often you want to buy more. And maybe flag things that you put in there a long time ago and never take out?

And, with such a list, your fridge and freezer could expose APIs that a recipe system could use to say ‘you have X and Y that need eating soon in your fridge, have frozen Z, so you could make this for dinner’. Or, even ‘you haven’t made X for a while, but rated it five stars the last time you made it and you have most of the ingredients. If you bought Y next time you did food shopping, you could make it again’.

And, again, none of this needs LLMs, it’s all feasible with ‘90s technology. It doesn’t even need Internet access, it could all run on your home network.

But the only way of monetising it is that old and outdated business model of making stuff people like and exchanging money for it.

@david_chisnall

"eat this or that before it spoils"

"you have all the ingredients for this recipe"

"don't replenish the yogurt until Wednesday because Acme will be discounting it"

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jan 10

The last requires supermarkets to expose an API, which would be great, but they often don’t want to do because it makes comparison shopping too easy: if I can create my shopping list and a local system can query five different supermarkets to see what the price will be, they have to compete on price (and availability / reputation / quality), they don’t keep customers from inertia. This was one of the things that killed the vision of the semantic web: a load of the people who could provide the most value to users by providing semantic markup were the ones who financially benefitted from information asymmetry.

"Musty Bits" McGee Jan 10

@david_chisnall @Qbitzerre I mean the online shop portalscan't operate without an API. There are some efforts I think around Australian supermarkets to do that kind of price diffing. Now - the whole retaliation and anti consumer stuff is a different story.

@david_chisnall yup.

Same problem with advertising on refrigerators.

Control of the medium.

A corollary to the notion of the demise of public access to general purpose computing.

little bobby tables Jan 10

@david_chisnall this is more about the Japanese toilet than the fridge, but it's technology i'm missing a lot: why is there no "fuse" for water? a mechanical hose/pipe connector that turns off the water when there is too much water flowing for a certain amount of time.
i don't like toilets with integrated bidet, but i have a shower hose/head next to the toilet. and every time i leave the house i'm afraid that the (plastic) shower head might leak and set my flat under water.

ermo | Rune Morling Jan 10

This may be a really stupid question (and offering a "solution" you didn't ask for), but is it an option to put a rubber band on the handle (to increase friction) and let the handle rest on the toilet seat and close the lid (so the lid rests on the handle and the shower head is over the bowl), so that if it leaks, it at least leaks into the toilet, which will be perfectly capable of levelling its water lock in response?

@david_chisnall

little bobby tables Jan 10

@ermo @david_chisnall i've thought about such workarounds and they are "ok". i usually turn off the water supply at the pipe if i'm away for longer.
it just annoys me that something we've been having for over a century for electricity doesn't exist for water - although water supply is a much older technology :)

@david_chisnall
There is a bunch of that that I make might find useful, but not without privacy first legislation with teeth, and fundamental understanding that I get to choose what data I share, and when.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jan 10

Here’s the thing: absolutely none of that requires any connection to the Internet. It’s either entirely local to the device, or talks to other things on the local network. And a system that made that promise (‘our device never talks to the Internet’) would allay most of those concerns and also be cheaper to produce than one that had liability under the CRA and similar legislation.

Enola Knezevic Jan 10

@david_chisnall @hypostase I was about to suggest searching for recipes to use up ingredients about to go bad, but that would require internet access unless they are all in local ebooks (but I prefer physical cookbooks even if it means using the index).

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jan 10

@rhelune @hypostase The first proposed system I saw for having a searchable index of recipes in a kitchen was in the ‘90s. It had under 4 MiB of total storage and boasted that it had more recipes than an entire room full of cookery books (text only). It was on Tomorrow’s World or some similar show and I never saw it in production,

There’s no reason this kind of thing couldn’t be entirely local and also user extensible. A cheap SD card has enough space for all of that including photos of each stage in cooking. But, again, the addiction to ‘vale add’ service sales makes this kind of thing infeasible.

Julie Webgirl Jan 10

@david_chisnall @rhelune @hypostase

I don't want my fridge to be the keeper of my recipes. (What happens when it dies, or goes on the fritz?) I want it to connect to my cloud (NextCloud), to a fridge inventory app, so if I'm out at the grocery store and see a deal on something, I can see how many I already have (I want this in my pantry too) AND to integrate with my NC recipe app so that app can do the heavy lifting of finding possible recipes from MY recipes that I can make from them.

Rodrigo Dias Jan 10

@david_chisnall Fully agree. Why add AI when basic tracking features would be actually useful? Silly marketing.

Malin Dixon Jan 10

@david_chisnall

In the 1950s we could get cookers that would turn on for a certain time of day.

However, we don't seem to have managed to get washing machines, clothes dryers, dishwashers and even bread machines to manage that. All some have is a pale imitation where the delay time or the total time can be entered.

Given this reluctance of white goods makers to add this useful feature, I can't see your other useful ideas appearing soon.

@david_chisnall ads on fridge. They are desperate for us to just consume crap. Ugg! I'll use dried products instead! Ads are ubiquitous, insistant and repulsive. Even my grandson agees with me.