Comment by steve_avery
1 month ago
Why would I ever connect my fridge to the internet? I cannot fathom any feature on a fridge that would incline me towards giving it the wifi credentials.
1 month ago
Why would I ever connect my fridge to the internet? I cannot fathom any feature on a fridge that would incline me towards giving it the wifi credentials.
What if your fridge could do an AI thing and the groceries to refill itself would just arrive? Could be a fantastic way to control your diet by only buying foods that satiated/goal oriented you approved (as opposed to hungry you walking down aisles of product placements in the grocery store)
Sounds like a terrible idea - I don't want my fridge to decide when and how to spend money.
Ordering refills does not need to involve any decisions. And you telling it which things to refill definitely isn't it making decisions.
Why do you need a fridge to do that? An AI agent with access to your Instacart account could do it. If you only buy groceries with that it knows roughly how many calories it purchased and you should've consumed since the last order.
I'd rather my fridge observe there are no apples, than to just assume N apples have been eaten. Especially relevant once you make if a family of 4, not an individual.
I don't think it's worth it myself, but here are some of the features of the Samsung Bespoke fridge that use wifi:
Notifications and Alerts: If the door is left open, or the fridge temperature is leaving safe temps, or the water filter needs changing, it can send a push notification to your phone. (Useful if something fails; or if a kid/guest leaves the fridge open by mistake).
Remote control and monitoring: You can use the camera to see the contents of the fridge. You can also adjust the temperature remotely. (Useful if you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you have milk?) It looks like they also have "AI" try to categorize these for you.
Built-in tablet: The touchscreen is basically a builtin tablet. You can use it to display photos (pulled from your online albums), show the weather, or control "smart home" stuff like playing some music on your speakers. I imagine you could also try to put recipes or cooking videos on there. You can also easily order groceries from it or add to your shopping list (with your voice).
I'd rather have a separate device for most of this, but I can understand the appeal, especially if you're not privacy-conscious.
> I cannot fathom
That's probably because you're a developer, and as developers it's really easy for us to develop tunnel-vision for some reason, and really hard to see the perspective from a "regular person", the sort of person who a salesperson can say "You can now get alerted when you're low on eggs, no matter where you are!" and the person will think that's a cool feature with no drawbacks.
It got nothing to do with someone being a developer and having tunnel vision. In fact I would argue that many people that work in tech would be the most likely to sold on such a feature.
It has everything to do with being frugal and whether you see the utility. There is very little benefit in being alerted when I am low on eggs because I can simply open the fridge and look. I can also normally buy eggs anywhere, at any time of day.
There isn't really a problem that needs solving.
Yeah, which is easy to reason about because you're probably used to reason about stuff, sometimes even a lot.
But lots of the average person don't do much of that sort of reasoning, lots of people live life basically on impulses. They buy stuff based on their feelings, not based on "does this solve an actual problem I have that actually needs solving?".
5 replies →
How would a fridge know you are low on eggs?
At this point they start to demand it, whether that's setting up the product or registration needed for warranty protection. But you obviously can still cut them off on router.
Soon though they won't ask, LTE-M / NB-IoT, both chips and plans are becoming very cheap and unless you are living in a faraday cage it will take control away from the user completely.