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

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?’

Show threadkitJan 10
@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.
Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jan 10

@hypostase

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.

Show threadEnola Knezevic
@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).
Jan 10 at 12:56pmWeb
Show threadDavid 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.

Show threadJulie WebgirlJan 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.