Thread

1. 9cb14c1ec0 · 1790257028 · focus · HN ↗

   Meanwhile, my non-smart fridge continues to run just fine. Why do we need smart fridges? That was always a bad idea.

   1. Legend2440 · 1790258111 · focus · HN ↗

      The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.

      I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.

      1. anentropic · 1790258171 · focus · HN ↗

         Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?

         1. phoghed · 1790258979 · focus · HN ↗

            Why not do the more labor intensive, higher energy use, higher friction, less convenient version of anything? Why automate anything?

            1. jjulius · 1790259335 · focus · HN ↗

               Why the blind insistence upon automating everything?

               1. phoghed · 1790260367 · focus · HN ↗

                  It’s not blind insistence, and that framing reveals a real lack of imagination on your part in my opinion. A truly smart fridge that had an inventory of all my stuff, knew expiration dates, etc. hooked up to my chat agent would be wonderful.

                  1. applfanboysbgon · 1790260899 · focus · HN ↗

                     Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life. What is there even to automate? If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least... still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week, but something. But that's not even what smart fridges promise. They promise to automate looking in the fridge, an activity that you must do every time you withdraw or deposit food from/into it anyways. Wonderful.

                     1. phoghed · 1790262013 · focus · HN ↗

                        > still an insanely, unbelievably wasteful use of both your personal and our planet's resources to save five minutes a week

                        Actually a cheap microcontroller and a few cameras over the lifetime of the fridge that caused me to open it say 50% less would save more money than it would waste by my estimate.

                        > If you were talking about a smart fridge with an accompanying robot that automatically orders groceries, picked up the deliveries itself, and stocked your fridge that'd be something, at least

                        Yeah.

                        Step 1: fridge with smart inventory

                        Step 2: hook it up to grok bot

                        Step 3: grok bot orders your food from Walmart+ InHome

                        So every piece of this exists except the hypothetical sci-fi fridge.

                        Again, I’m stunned by the complete and utter lack of imagination and critical thinking here. You guys are the offshore contractors of HN commenting.

                        > Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what?

                        This is actually a pretty good point. Many people do have poor memory for a plethora of reasons. This would be a great accessibility feature.

                        1. applfanboysbgon · 1790264677 · focus · HN ↗

                           Perhaps you could use your wonderfully amazing imagination to imagine the contents of your fridge as you last saw it when you opened it 8~12 hours ago to retrieve food or drink.

                           1. phoghed · 1790265875 · focus · HN ↗

                              Great comment after being demonstrably wrong on all points. Again, trivial to imagine a scenario where other people use the contents of the fridge too. Or that when someone grabs the milk they aren’t doing an inventory of all the drawers, checking what’s out of line of sight because it’s hidden behind something.

                              You can’t be a software developer with such a poor imagination and intuition. Debugging would be hell for you. Even worse because you’d fail to imagine the edge cases ahead of time.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.