cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/71343068
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.
I have a PhD in IoT technology uses (mostly medical/clinical monitoring applications). My appliances do not have firmware to update. Don’t buy that shit, it’s stupid.
You’d be surprised what kinds of things have firmware (although maybe not, if you work in IoT). A normal dumb fridge, a normal dumb dishwasher, most ovens, and definitely microwaves will have firmware. Even if they have no interface to update it. In some cases, the firmware was written using a chip programmer before the chip was soldered in. But there’s still firmware. Any appliance with a clock will have it, because otherwise, you have to implement a clock in a CPLD or discrete logic gates or something. A microcontroller is just cheaper.
Right, but that’s not firmware to update, which I interpreted as the differentiating factor.
This very much was the point. OTA updates are a fucking robot idea for anything that can burn down a house, crash a car, or keep important things safe (like arthritis or immune therapy drugs that need to be kept cold).
Years ago I had to bring 10 tons of gravel to a work site using a wheelbarrow and a shovel. By the end of it my ability to load the wheelbarrow accurately and unload it efficiently was massively improved.
I was the firmware. I got an update.
How long did it take you to do? I can’t fathom how much work that must’ve taken
Well it was maybe 200 loads or so, the pile wasn’t super far.from the site… We lifted and redid the foundation of a small log cabin near a lake, too close to the lake and it had started to sink. So basically we lifted the cottage, removed the old floor, and we installed cinder blocks and gravel under the walls before putting humidity barriers and reinstalling a new floor.
The gravel was delivered in the driveway, and I had to wheel the wheelbarrow around the cottage to the entrance of the worksite to empty it in the empty space under the floor, then I would spread it where the cinder blocks go, and then gradually after everything was laid properly, we lowered the Jacks very slowly until the bottom logs of the log cabin rested on a steel angle resting on the cinder blocks.
The whole thing basically took the whole summer but most of it I was doing by myself, including redoing the new plywood floor afterwards…
This shit takes me back, omg… Here’s an image for fun
“No WiFi” was a hard requirement for my induction range. Surprisingly hard to find.
Seriously? That’s bananas
Yeah the one I got had Wi-Fi, I should have known better
What “smart” functions does a range have?
It let’s you control it with your phone, gives you alerts, it’s stupid, none of this is necessary.
We recently had to buy a new washer/dryer. Every single set we looked at had wifi connectivity as a feature, so we did end up buying a set with that, but they will never see the light of my WAN.
If you think that is bad:
In 2020, Nature Medicine reported the story of Australian woman Rita Leggett, who’d received an experimental brain implant to treat her epilepsy. Implanted as part of a clinical trial, the device worked for Leggett: she stopped having seizures. However, mid-way through the trial, NeuroVista, the company that made the device, folded after investors became nervous about providing financial backing to such invasive technology.
Because the company was no longer operating, there was no means of monitoring the device. It was, quite literally, dead in Leggett’s head (well, not quite – the battery was meant to last three years). Her husband offered to buy the device from NeuroVista but was refused because of its proprietary components. Her only option was to have the device removed or ‘explanted’.
This is literally a black mirror episode. Stop helping these psychopaths build a world only they control.
This is unrelated?
To corporate software decisions negatively impacting people’s lives?
That wasn’t a software decision, though. It was a hardware one.
lmao. this happened like two days before one of korea’s major holidays.
I can’t play Orcs Must Die Unleashed because they turned off support even thought it was a perfectly good single player, AND NOW I CAN’T EVEN HAVE A FRIDGE THAT’S TWO YEARS OLD?!
And this is why the only Samsung products I have are RAM and SSDs.
And the SSDs are backed up daily.
Samsung should not have gotten into appliances. They seem to be singularly terrible in that field. No-one else comes even close to their level of incompetence.
I just mentioned elsewhere in this post that I had to buy a new washer/dryer set. Guess what brand I was getting rid of? They came with the house and I was on my 5th or 6th repair of the fucking dryer before I said fuck this, we are selling these before they become paperweights and getting something made by a competent appliance company.
Why the fuck would a fridge need to be ‘smart’?
Like what’s the reasoning?
Low level stuff is it can alert the user if the fridge or freezer door is open. Advanced features would be like being able to see inside your fridge remotely so you dont have to go to check what you need to buy at the grocery store.
Then you get to superfluous functions like displaying family photos, online buying of stuff like filters, logging what you have in the fridge and recommend dishes to make.
