This came up the other day. I decided to tease everyone with an 'I told you so' about using some third party hosting service instead of the offline one I had developed years prior.
The offline service was still working, and people were doing their job.
The online service was not working, and it was causing other people to be unable to do their job. We had 0 control over the third party.
The other thing, I make software and I basically don't touch it for a few years or ever. These third party services are always updating and breaking causing us to update as well.
IB4 let me write my own compilers so I have real control.
If you are regularly updating your refrigerator's firmware or your refrigerator's firmware relies on an Internet connection to function, then I am very sorry to say this but you have lost control of your life :)
Shows you how creating and enforcing standards is the driver for stuff like this. I wonder how we could make them even more efficient, some way to stop the transfer of warm air when the door is opened? Wonder if it's possible to create some sort of air curtain at the front when it's opened to prevent warm air coming in, ie use driven air velocity to overcome the cold air wants to come out, hot air wants to come in. Hmmm.
> I wonder how we could make them even more efficient, some way to stop the transfer of warm air when the door is opened? I wonder how we could make them even more efficient, some way to stop the transfer of warm air when the door is opened? Wonder if it's possible to create some sort of air curtain at the front when it's opened to prevent warm air coming in, ie use driven air velocity to overcome the cold air wants to come out, hot air wants to come in. Hmmm.
That is an interesting idea, but I don't think an Internet connection would help with it :)
> Shows you how creating and enforcing standards is the driver for stuff like this.
Also agreed that is an interesting graph, I agree that it shows how standards and better production has led to decreased energy usage -- but notably, a lot of those standards are around better insulation and more efficient components.
Putting an extra layer of foam in your fridge or having sensors in your fridge that help regulate temperature definitely doesn't mean you've lost control of your life. But needing to download a firmware update to your Internet-enabled fridge that uses a Samsung account where you now can't access your grocery list until you finish the mandated update which changes your fridge's UI on its mobile app -- I think that means you've lost control of your life :)
Oh yeah for sure, but I think there are definitely reasons for it. The enshittification/technoshit that comes out of the iot world (and all other devices) because of corporate greed just ruins it even more.
The whole signing up for a Samsung account thing etc for your fridge. Stuff like this really just needs to be legislated under some kind of "all technology should just work, locally and with one another with at least an agreed set of features" level.
Apple should have been legally forced to use USB C (or whatever alternative was best) ages ago, even before the EU got to them. Apple were happy to use Wifi/Bluetooth/etc/etc standards yet still wanted to use other proprietary BS.
Same goes for literally everything else: all technologies should work together using at least a common method (with say options for proprietary stuff) and iot/whatever should all work flawlessly locally without any account or internet connectivity (which should all be 100% optional). Devices should work flawlessly even if the company that produces them has shut down all servers and gone bankrupt.
We need to force our governments to do this stuff for us.
Nice, looks like we finally got around to inventing refrigerator magnets!
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That is a little bit dismissive of me though. There are some cool features here:
I can now "entertain in my kitchen", which is definitely a normal thing that normal people do. I love getting everyone together to crowd around my refrigerator so that we can all watch Game of Thrones.
And I can use Amazon Alexa from my fridge just in case I'm not able to talk out loud to the cheap unobtrusive device that has a microphone in it specifically so that it can be placed in any room of the house. So having that option is good.
And perhaps the biggest deal of all, I can finally "shop from home." That was a huge problem for me before, I kept thinking, "if only I had a better refrigerator I could finally buy things on websites."
And this is a great bargain for only 3-5 thousand dollars! I can't believe I was planning to buy some crappy normal refrigerator for less than a thousand bucks and then use the extra money I saved to mount a giant flat-screen TV hooked up to a Chromecast in my kitchen. That would have been a huge mistake for me to make.
Honestly it's just the icing on the cake that I can "set as many timers as [I] want." That's a great feature for someone like me because I can't set any timers at all using my phone or a voice assistant. /s
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<serious>Holy crud, smart-device manufacturers have become unhinged. The one feature that actually looks useful here is being able to take a picture of the inside of the fridge while you're away. That is basically the one feature that I would want from a fridge that isn't much-better handled using a phone or a tablet or a TV or a normal refrigerator button. Which, great, but the problem is that I know what the inside of my fridge looks like right now, and let me just say: if I was organized enough that a photograph of the inside of my fridge would be clear enough to tell me what food was in it, and if I was organized enough that the photo wouldn't just show 'a pile of old containers, some of them transparent and some of them not' -- I have a feeling that in that case I would no longer be the type of person that needed to take a photo of the inside of my refrigerator to know what was in it.
The offline service was still working, and people were doing their job.
The online service was not working, and it was causing other people to be unable to do their job. We had 0 control over the third party.
The other thing, I make software and I basically don't touch it for a few years or ever. These third party services are always updating and breaking causing us to update as well.
IB4 let me write my own compilers so I have real control.