Samsung forces ads onto fridges; is a bad sign for other appliances(arstechnica.com)
68 pointsby speckx5 months ago14 comments
  • netsharc5 months ago
    A really smart fridge would remember what you put in it and remind you to eat that avocado before it goes bad. Or tell you maybe skip buying the salad, 80% of the salad you bought have spoiled languished in the fridge and ended up in the trash. Or it can suggest recipes from its contents plus what the crowdsourced data shows someone of your profile likes.

    But nah, smart means it can show ads...

    • grues-dinner5 months ago
      Pretty much every day Amazon advertises a film to me that I watched on the same platform's account a couple of weeks ago. Presumably it also knows enough to determine that the account isn't shared so it's not advertising to other family members or something.

      For all the billions spent on ad targeting, it's pretty coarse.

      • dehugger5 months ago
        It's not to get you to watch that specific movie again, rather its purpose is to remind you that you watched something you (hopefully) enjoyed on their platform so you are more likely to keep doing so.
        • grues-dinner5 months ago
          If interrupting a video to remind me that I watched a film (that I didn't even especially like) two weeks ago is the best modern big-data AI-leveraging advertising tech can do maybe adtech isn't worth all the data centres full of GPUs crunching the data.
    • jajuuka5 months ago
      A smart fridge only has two qualifiers.

      1. Can it run Doom?

      2. Can it run the "Suck it Jinyang" program?

    • tstrimple5 months ago
      My ideal smart fridge: "Refrigerator, who ate my sandwich?"

      shows picture of my daughter with red hands on my sandwich

    • eth0up5 months ago
      The concept of smart tools and appliances has always been nightmarish to me. I don't want a smart wrench, stove, toilet or drill. The intelligence should be in the handler of these items, and the design itself.

      I know things can be designed and programmed to do amazing things, some of them admirable. I don't need any of them. I just wonder if there will always be a choice. When I need a computer, I'll use a computer. I don't ever want to read the news on my spatula, or edit a video with my toaster.

      This shit should be beaten, severely, back whence it came.

      • neuralRiot5 months ago
        At risk of sounding like “old man yelling at clouds” I feel more and more tech-phobic by the day, sure we have amazing things and quality of life improvements thanks to it but it feels like we are giving up too much of ourselves just for a little perceived convenience. I personally love doing things the “hard way” because for every layer of automation on your life you surrender one of control as well, the hardest part is knowing where to draw the line.
        • eth0up5 months ago
          I draw the line with my computer, or dedicated computing devices. This could be quite a debate with phones, doing dozens of insidious things in the background in perpetuity. But my fucking ladder doesn't need JavaScript, nor does my freezer.

          Anyway, I admire the Amish. I'm not extremely far off. I hope to actually keep stumbling in that direction. I wouldn't expect others to though.

  • gnabgib5 months ago
    Related:

    Samsung confirms its smart fridges will start showing you ads (68 points, 2 hours ago, 52 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291107

    Samsung smart fridge displaying advertisements (32 points, 2 days ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45262808

  • holtkam25 months ago
    Sounds like this is a great opportunity for competition to enter the market with a fridge that offers the same features, without being online. Its online-required features are all things that it should be able to do offline anyway.

    > Another option is to disconnect the fridge from the Internet. Again, though, this would eliminate some core capabilities, like its meal planner, recipes, and shopping list features

    …all things that on-device LLMs can already do, for example my MacBook can run Llama 4 (albeit slowly) and it can generate recipes for me.

    Samsung will either need to shape up or competitors will enter the market to offer equally fancy but non-annoying fridges. I hope.

    • pavel_lishin5 months ago
      > …all things that on-device LLMs can already do, for example my MacBook can run Llama 4 (albeit slowly) and it can generate recipes for me.

      I've run a local LLM, and while I probably didn't do a great job optimizing things, it was crawling. I would absolutely not stand there for 20 minutes while my fridge stutters out a recipe for kotleti, while probably getting some of it wrong and requiring a re-prompt.

      Not everything needs to be a genie.

      • holtkam25 months ago
        I guess I was thinking about a smart fridge of the type you’d find in the year, say, 2031.
        • pavel_lishin5 months ago
          Why not daydream about a Starfleet replicator?
      • maplethorpe5 months ago
        How many GPUs were you running?
        • pavel_lishin5 months ago
          I'm not sure, but how many GPUs do we expect a refridgerator to have?
  • jmorenoamor5 months ago
    Unsolicited advertising is a form of violence, the sooner we agree on that, the better.
    • butterlettuce5 months ago
      We need an Executive Order banning all ads on appliances and car infotainment systems.
      • N2yhWNXQN3k95 months ago
        In this administration?

        Probably more likely to see a EO on requiring those things

  • more_corn5 months ago
    Advertising will expand to the point where consumers put their foot down. You put your foot down by boycotting this company entirely. Immediately and with no exceptions. Samsung is hereby dead to me. And it should be for you too.
  • Ancalagon5 months ago
    Can I just... not connect my fridge to the internet?

    What timeline am I living in?

    • justinlloyd5 months ago
      You can certainly do that, but then your Samsung refrigerator will not acknowledge the water filter inserted into it and refuse to dispense water or make ice.

      This is an actual thing.

      • subscribed5 months ago
        Wow, last time I was choosing the appliance I was looking primarily from the reliability angle (this is why I skipped Samsung), but THAT? This is something else....
  • liquid_thyme5 months ago
    Why pay for advertising, when you can show your ads on your own devices for free? Heh..
  • grues-dinner5 months ago
    This is just God's way of telling you that a screen on a fridge is still a stupid idea.

    If you really, really need to have your fridge manage your sell by dates somehow or give you recipes based on what it thinks it has in it (and hopefully the cupboards have the other items) or whatever the tech-brained-fuck you think it'd will do for you, the communications tool in your hand highly optimised for manual input and with a web browser that's not embedded shitware seems a sensible interface.

    Or just buy an insulated box with no electronics other than that which controls the light and temperature. And the simpler and more robust that is, the better.

  • 5 months ago
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  • quickthrowman5 months ago
    A refrigerator should be an insulated box with the following electrical items: a thermostat, an interior light wired to a door switch, and a compressor motor activated by a contactor that is wired to the thermostat, and I think you need a timing relay to prevent the compressor from cycling too much. Refrigerators are dead simple, it’s the items I just listed plus two heat exchangers, an expansion valve, piping, and refrigerant.

    Variable speed motors are icing on the cake that reduce operating costs so I’ll allow for that. What I just described is true for every single commercial refrigerator available for sale, homeowners have absolute garbage to pick from for appliances.

    Who are the psychopaths buying refrigerators with screens? Please stop, you’re ruining things for the rest of us. I know Speed Queen exists if you want sane appliances for laundry, but I’d like to know the brands for laundry and kitchen appliances that are well made and not full of insane garbage nobody asked for like screens.

  • metalman5 months ago
    things like this redeem my habit of teaching myself how to do things like refrigeration service and repair, cause I just like mechanical systems another habit is removing the logo from anything that gives me untoward trouble or issues, or anything that sits in living areas. It is easy to see a slow food, dumb home, type of movement developing.
  • exally5 months ago
    Can't wait for my Samsung Smart washer/dryer to start sounds corporate Jingles using midi.
    • slumberlust5 months ago
      Washer and dryer custom sound upgrades! Just like ringback times in the 90s
  • ablation5 months ago
    Pihole. There we go.

    But also: Don't buy a "smart fridge"

    • jqpabc1235 months ago
      Pihole. There we go

      And if they use dynamic, rotating IP addresses?

      A better approach is scissors (cut the cord) or don't buy "smart" anything --- unless it actually costs *less* and can be easily used in a "dumb" mode (TV for example).

      "Smart" means it intends to take advantage of "dumb" users. Any "smarts" will eventually be used against you by the manufacturer. They simply can't resist the extra $.

      I have a 50 inch "smart" TV that serves as a dumb display and nothing more.

  • rolph5 months ago
    you can always filter them, but if it ever became transactional, that would be problematic