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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

A smart fridge only has two qualifiers.

1. Can it run Doom?

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

My ideal smart fridge: "Refrigerator, who ate my sandwich?"

shows picture of my daughter with red hands on my sandwich

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.

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.

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.

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