- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
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A thermostat, a compressor and two heat exchangers.
We solved this problem decades ago.
show this to someone frm the 1950s
If I’d like emojis I’d use the clown emoji now.
I’ll do it on your behalf so that it’s used, but that you don’t have to say you used an emoji.
🤡
Y’all remember when Windows updated their OS and all computers without enough memory to run it were bricked?
Because we didn’t throw a fit then, when a company’s update destroyed our possessions, now we’re getting more of it.
This could actually just be more modes of planned obsolescence.
Uhhhhhhh too many times to count, yeah. Which incident are you referring to?
A fridge doesn’t need AI. Or a firmware.
Or a firmware.
So are we moving back to bi-metallic thermostats?
Remember when there was just a little dial in the top of the fridge, that you turn, from “cold” to “colder”? Yeah. That’s really all that’s required. Fancier fridges had more than one dial, that controlled individual compartments, like your crisper drawers.
There’s plenty of middle ground. We had integrated circuits embedded in circuit boards for a long time before re-programmable chips started appearing, and those ones certainly didn’t connect to the Internet and brick themselves.
PICs are cheaper than discrete ICs, even if they’re programmed only once and shipped. This is why you’ll see mainboards with un-populated sections - the processor has a software build that either excludes the un-populated parts or is designed to detect and ignore them. A discrete IC would need far more engineering to be able to selectively ignore, or each model would need it’s own discrete IC.
Given the fact my fridge regularly freezes my water, I’m reasonably confident that the bimetallic strip would possibly do a better job.
Why not? I’m sure we can easily make good ones at this point.
And here I am using the same fridge that’s been going since before the end of the Cold War.
Half of my homes appliances are from the 70s/80s, and a handful are modern. Can u guess which ones are breaking? Fuck I will NEVER get rid of my cooktop and oven they are older than me and will likely outlive me still !
Old fridges do last longer, but from what I understand they use significantly more energy to run.
Appliance repair guy here and I have only one thing to say: 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
“Mourn” is a strong word here, but also, this is why you don’t connect your fridge to the internet…
Just wondering, is it confirmed that food actually spoiled? Because making the actual cooling dependent on smart functionality seems incredibly stupid. I assumed it would just be all the smart features that stopped working, but if it couldn’t even cool anymore… woooow XD.
I mean I can sorta understand some convenience functions but it oughta have some default setting it falls back to. Especially temperature settings.
I do have a Samsung fridge but nothing that fancy. I mean I tried to get it to trigger an Alexa routine to play a message when the door opened but that didn’t work. Alexa saying “Close the door fatty, you’re not really hungry” could have been motivational.
You know, there are plenty of cheap window sensors you could just as well attach to your fridge door to achieve this XD.
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If you are so lazy that you buy a smart fridge, you deserve what you get.
It’s a fridge. It doesn’t even need an 8 bit microcontroller from the 1970s.
It can use a 32 bit microcontroller, like mine does, but it only has some pretty basic functionality like setting temperature and shutting down the fans if door opened. Anything beyond that is just overengineering.
My washing machine keeps asking to be connected to the WiFi. 2 years I’ve been ignoring it, which has been very convenient. I think it just wants to watch porn.
So that’s what it means when it asks for a full load…
Plus it keeps collecting socks. Pervert.
I caught my mother’s dehumidifier connecting to WiFi to watch porn. The damn thing was actually dripping wet.
Imagine if you could make it watch advertising for your earnings… But yes, it would need the softwares belong to you, rather than to the washing machine’s maker…
it does, for massive user convenience. however, the more you add, the less convenience is gained from each addition, sort of like a law of diminishing returns-type thing.
My washer/dryer is “smart” and there’s no convenience there at all, honestly. It argues with me, it sits and flashes suggestions freezing the entire interface, it decides to just not do things at times. It’s hella annoying.
What convenience? You open the door, a light goes on, it is cold or freezing cold inside depending on the door.
The end.
My parent’s McClary fridge from the 1960s still runs on the original refrigerant.
Don’t tell me about energy efficiency when
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We are awash in renewable electricity
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Building new fridges every five years filled with e-waste running garbage software requiring a networking infrastructure on top of it surely used a few joules as well.
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It’s not in a landfill.
I can’t wait for the global energy crash, maybe we’ll be calmer and wiser when gas is 100$/liter.
for one, beeping after you leave the door open for 30 seconds. considering the longevity of a fridge, adding a microcontroller that does that is more environmentally friendly.
I think you don’t need microcontroller for that?
Microcontrollers are cheaper then analog clocks
Yes they are, but that wasn’t the point.
beeping after you leave the door open for a few minutes, also electricity is over a quarter a kilowatt hour some places.
Y’all just leaving fridges open all day where you are? In my neck of the woods “Stop staring and pick something, you’re letting all the cold out.”
fridges don’t always close properly
Well
A) Close it properly then. We have one of those at work, old worn out gaskets, fridge pops open when you close the top freezer, and somehow we can manage to figure out how to close it back up every time.
B) Replace your gaskets.
a microcontroller, couple sensors, and a speaker are cheaper
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Might I inquire as to what the convenience would be?
beeping after the fridge hasn’t been closed for a while, or controlling the temperature, or turn on the lights when the door is open.
Yeah that can moatly be done without one. The beeping maybe not but the temp and lights can be done completely analog. Our old fridge literally had a push switch that turned off the light when closed (20yr old fridge)
Some things off the top of my head are:
- you could set the temperature to a number of degrees via a numerical display, which would be much harder to implement without a microcontroller.
- maybe you could have PID control over the compressor rather than bang-bang control, so the temperature would be more stable.
- these days, a bimetallic strip costs more than a microcontroller and a chip thermometer, despite the chip being much more accurate.
All of this only requires a really dumb microcontroller, though, not one with networking. I don’t see how that could be useful until your fridge could magically track what it contains so you could ask it if you needed to buy stuff while you were shopping. I don’t think we have the technology for that yet.
I think we probably do have the tech to track what’s in the fridge but we’d need a camera and some kind of ai watching it always…
Digital display for thermostat/thermometer is nice.
Party Mode is convenient when adding large amounts of beverages (or leftovers) as it temporarily changes the compressor setpoint/cycle for a couple of hours in expectation of heavy usage.
Night mode / vacation mode can similarly change the compressor working profile to be either more quiet or energy efficient at times when it’s not expecting the door to open for extended periods of time.
None of these are essential features of a fridge, but they can be convenient.
Trully what people really need in their lives are additional risk factors for their peace and quiet in exchange for little or no value.
I’m just happy that I’m moving in the very opposite direction, avoiding externally controlled computing devices like the plague and instead having my own stuff when I actually need some smarts on my stuff (which, at the moment, is mainly my TV media player).
We’ve recently had some big brownouts in the city and country I live in and those made me keenly aware of risks to my peace and quiet (for example, electronic payments don’t work if there’s no power, so if you don’t have actual cash on hand things can get pretty tricky) and nowadays there are way too many unnecessary dependencies on external entities in exchange for little, no or even negative value for us (don’t get me started on Smart TVs) - it’s long been the case that a big utility provider going down would be quite a pain in the arse, but nowadays lot’s of people’s risk exposure profile is so stupidly wide that “random company turning to vibe coding and sooner or later forcefully pushing an update that bricks your ‘smart’ device” or leaves your home network and digital devices one it wide open for people wanting to steal financial info from it, are maybe one of the biggest risks.
Sorry boss gotta take the week off. I’m in mourning.
Wait, so there’s not even a hard thermo in it to fail safely? Well done guys, you really saved 10p per unit on that one
