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Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges

323 points · 336 comments · nonfamous

  1. ryukoposting · · focus · HN ↗
    What a profoundly idiotic way to design a smart fridge. Shame on Samsung for designing their product in such a way that this was even possible.

    Granted, I think the very concept of a smart fridge is a bad idea no matter how you execute on it... but they still managed to take a bad idea and execute on it badly. Amazing.

    1. sitkack · · focus · HN ↗
      Funny that so many people in this thread are arguing that a bad idea should also be engineered well. It was already a bad idea, so no it won't be. They are a package deal.
      1. fwip · · focus · HN ↗
        I don't think this is a good argument to make in general, as the contrapositive is that if it has good engineering, it was a good idea to build.

        For example, nuclear weapons are certainly well-engineered, but I think it's reasonable to disagree on if they were a good idea or not.

        1. sitkack · · focus · HN ↗
          Contrapositive in this usage is a fancy word for, "my logic is flawed"

          No, if you are already making bad decisions, you are going to make more. I never argued that good engineering means the idea was good.

          1. fwip · · focus · HN ↗
            In logic, "if not A, then not B" is equivalent to "if B, then A." That's what the contrapositive is - it has the same truth value as the original statement.

            Perhaps I am being overly-literal here, but my failure is not one of logic.

            1. ryukoposting · · focus · HN ↗
              ¬A⇒¬B ∴ B⇒A

              Kinda unrelated: Propositional logic is one of those things I wish we taught everyone in middle school. It's not that complicated, but it's such a powerful thing to have in your literary/rhetorical tool belt. I think a lot of young math nerds and writing/reading nerds alike would have appreciated seeing their worlds collide like this.

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