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Goodbye non-KISS appliances

willbush.dev

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Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#451

Post by mewpmewp2 »

thfuran wrote: post #428
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me paying to disable ads is a fair deal.

I think that if the manufacturer is going to continue using the appliance for their own business purposes, they shouldn't be permitted to describe the transaction that causes you to possess it as a "sale", because you don't own it free and clear.

I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work. Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view.

If it's a huge problem psychologically for you, maybe you can just take the following 5 years or whatever time you estimate you will be using the product and calculate that into the base price to make your decision.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#452

Post by m463 »

jader201 wrote: post #273
mlrtime wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused about these fridge posts. There are refrigerators that do not have any tech that will last [most likely] longer than you stay in your home. I've had multiple Subzero basic commodity or commercial refrigerators last 15-20 years with only minor parts replacements which are easily found. Of course these are not cheap, but isn't that what everyone here is asking for? Something made well that lasts a…

I had never heard of Subzero before this post, and just looked them up. $10k-$15k for a refrigerator? I’ve only ever owned fairly “basic” refrigerators (e.g. LG or GE), that are about 1/10 of that cost, and have never had any problems with them going out or even degrading in quality (e.g. 10+ years). Maybe needed an ice maker repair, but that’s about it. Do people need to spend that kind of money for a refrigerator t…

There was a fancy kitchen design store I wandered into a few months ago, and they had a few really interesting refrigerators.

You opened the door, and there was SPACE. The refrigerator was taller than I was, and very wide. I think it was subzero, but I could be wrong.

It seemed like you could take the 30 lb turkey from thanksgiving and just set it on a shelf, without giving up much space.

Afterwards looking at other refrigerators, even the ingenious ones, I was struck by how complicated they were. You would still be fighting to find a place for something in the refrigerator, or looking for something you lost.

For computer folks, it was the refrigerator equivalent of an organized rack of servers, instead of a bunch of systems crammed under your desk with wires going whereever.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#453

Post by thfuran »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #451
thfuran wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that if the manufacturer is going to continue using the appliance for their own business purposes, they shouldn't be permitted to describe the transaction that causes you to possess it as a "sale", because you don't own it free and clear.

I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work. Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view. If it's a huge problem psychologically for you, maybe you can just take the following 5 years or whatever time you estimate you will be using the product and calculate that into the base price to mak…

>I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning

Adding advertising into the mix almost always makes the incentives align more poorly with the customer's interest. For example, the refrigerator manufacturer now has an incentive to increase food spoilage to increase ad conversions.

>Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view

So you want to pay them to show you ads in the hopes that that means they don't stop supporting your refrigerator? What does that even mean? They're not going to extend your warranty.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#454

Post by thfuran »

rpxio wrote: post #402
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should be able to decide that I don't care about this type of privacy. Sure there are people out there that could be harmed by this. I don't believe in the argument that you can't have a market with both ways, one where you can't opt in and other where you can. I should be able to choose to give my medical data to companies if there are ways to improve my lifestyle and quality from that. And to me that is exciting.…

> I don't believe in the argument that you can't have a market with both ways, one where you can't opt in and other where you can. the problem is that “the market” doesn’t care what you believe in or what you “opt out” of. there are devices that have programmed in alternate ways to phone home even if you choose to intentionally not connect it to wifi. > If things can be automated, they should so we can choose exactly…

>an appliance that will likely stop receiving bug fixes or security updates in 3-5 years when the company releases a new version

Do current smart fridges even get security updates at all?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#455

Post by rglullis »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #448
rglullis wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that all the great artists from the past were motivated by technological progress in itself? Do you think Michaelangelo would make even more impressive works if he had better chisels or brushes? Do you think that The Beatles' would be even more popular if they could compose their songs on a computer? Or even in a more mundane situation, do you think that someone volunteering on a hospital to entertain si…

At times before now there was no indication that we could be seeing an acceleration of tech as is happening now. So there was no hope for people to see what is possible for us now. They sure were trying to figure out life. They just didn't have the right knowledge at the time. But now that we do, I do think we should figure out what is going on here. I don't knownif you can call it religion or whatever, but the point…

I don't care enough to sacrifice my present to pursue some crazy Singularity and I certainly am not interested in sacrificing myself to give so much power to any single corporation, no matter how "good" their promises are.

Please, stop falling for the Kurzweil and Singularity crap. It's just the nerd version of the coming of the Messiah, with an extra dose of hubris on top.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#456

Post by Tanoc »

beAbU wrote: post #132
kmoser wrote: post #23

My parents have a clothes drier from the 1970s and a fridge from the 1990s. They have needed repairs, but they were infrequent and not so costly as to necessitate buying a new unit. My A/C is only four years old and the maintenance guy is telling me one of the fans is drawing too much power and will need to be replaced soon. Despite the part being free under warranty, they want $600 to replace it. This seems to be st…

Watch out for survivorship bias. How many of those old appliances had to break and fail in the first 10 years for these two to survive.

I've been lucky enough to live in basically the same place since the '90s with almost all the same neighbours, and when I'm invited into the houses of my older neighbours almost all of them have the same appliances they've had since the early 2000s. Meanwhile if I go into the houses of more recently moved in neighbours or younger neighbours who had to restock their houses when they moved in, often times when I enter into their houses to talk I notice that there's a new appliance every few months, almost all replaced due to poor performance or failure.

I myself have repaired everything from toasters to microwaves in the last few years as things have aged in my house, and it got me a reputation that has encouraged family members to bring things to me to be fixed. There's a stark difference in how things are made post 2010, and the quality only gets worse post 2020. Often times the cost cutting goes so beyond making manufacturability easier that it makes it impossible to use whatever it is for it's intended purpose for more than a few times.

For example older smoke detectors have the boards on legs where the screws go through them, and for high quality ones the legs have threaded brass inserts so that if you tighten things down after replacing the battery you don't have a chance of stripping the threading. Newer ones the boards just float freely inside the case and are held in by snap clips which become brittle after just a couple of years and break easily, meaning you have to glue the board back in after replacing the battery. Key fobs and remotes often suffer the exact same problem of using plastic snap clips which will break the first time you have to pry the body open to replace the CR2032 battery inside. I've had to buy a new car key specifically because of that. Showerheads use soft compound plastics for the flow rings which break down unlike their older rubber variants, not only clogging some of the showerhead's openings but also failing to function as a flow ring and allowing the full force of the pipe's throughput. Freestanding lamps no longer route the cable through the bottom and attach it via a ring inside the body as a double insulator. Instead often times the cable is just glued into a hole in the side, and if you're lucky there's a rubber ring to cap the hole and act as an insulator. I've gotten shocked from cheap metal desk lamps because of this. Clocks these days are just single chips blobbed onto a cheap board with an induction motor powered by a single AAA battery and three plastic gears to move the hands. Most have as severe a drift as minutes per week which gets worse as the batteries lose charge. Old ones used batteries to periodically wind springs under tension or the 60Hz frequency of the electric grid which would move a gear system at a consistent ratio, keeping drift under a few seconds a month.

Survivorship bias may be real, but even cheap garbage from the '90s is far better built than anything I can buy now that isn't hand made.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#457

Post by vraylle »

__loam wrote: post #322
alwa wrote: post #294

One of the happier things I’ve done for myself lately, at the advice of this forum, was to get a rock-solid, dumb, black-and-white Brother laser printer. It sits there and just does its job and I never have to think about it. Does anyone have any tips as to the white-goods equivalents? Fridge, freezer, laundry machines, that kind of thing?

Also if anyone knows a good brand for dumb TVs.

Maybe a decent short-throw projector?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#458

Post by gangstead »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #335

Let me add my gripe to over-automation. Ceiling fans that can only be controlled using a remote. No way to wire at switch. I am very much into local home automation, that is where no internet connection is required or allowed ( HomeAssistant anyone?). One thing I always watch out for is the automation must allow manual interaction. These fans have no pull chains, or switches when the remote breaks or more likely get…

I'm in the process of replacing the remote+canopy module in my hands with Lutron controls. With those you can control from both the wall and the remote.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#459

Post by hansvm »

BoxFour wrote: post #288
hansvm wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It appears there's a misunderstanding here. When smart lightbulbs lose internet connection, they still function as regular lightbulbs. That's a better way to install things, but it's not the only way that installation is done, and it's still excessive to need the internet for what could easily be a purely local operation. For device classes where "on/off" has historically been attached to the device itself (washer,…

> That's a better way to install things, but it's not the only way that installation is done It’s by far the most common. Most people just buy Hue lightbulbs and an hub to use with their existing home setup, which involves physical light switches still being present. > Pushing closer to tin-foil hat territory… For lights specifically: If this is a threat model that worries you, it’s quite easy to setup something like…

I think we're talking past each other a bit. The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them.

Your position seems actually to be though that you can make smart devices acceptable if you're careful enough. That's probably true. However, I've seen the code people write, and I still personally wouldn't want a smart oven or any number of other such devices.

> Your repudiation appears to be about centralized services, not about “smart” devices as a general concept.

There's some truth to that. I focused on that point just because smart devices usually have a markup for their extra features, even though you don't really own the product, manufacturers have a habit of shutting them down, and most of the "smarts" are just figuring out how to generate extra ad revenue. That's not _all_ smart devices, but it's a lot of them. Contrast that with a centralized service like Overleaf, where I know I'm renting server time and disk space, and it's obvious what the threat models are (they can read anything sensitive, and I should probably make sure everything is backed up). Selling living room audio recordings on a device you paid more than fair market value for just feels a bit slimy, and I thought that might be a good touchpoint to illustrate what sorts of things can go wrong.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#460

Post by BoxFour »

hansvm wrote: post #459
BoxFour wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a better way to install things, but it's not the only way that installation is done It’s by far the most common. Most people just buy Hue lightbulbs and an hub to use with their existing home setup, which involves physical light switches still being present. > Pushing closer to tin-foil hat territory… For lights specifically: If this is a threat model that worries you, it’s quite easy to setup something like…

I think we're talking past each other a bit. The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them. Your position seems actually to be though that you can make smart devices acceptable if you're careful enough. That's probably true. However, I've seen the code people write, and I still personally wouldn't want a smart oven or any number of other…

> The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them.

The person I responded to said:

> I cannot turn my lights on because somewhere, potentially thousands of miles away, some datacenters failed, even if those datacenters could, ostensibly, only give me ads and "improvements" and not any core feature.

That problem doesn't exist. Your smart lightbulbs fallback to being regular lightbulbs in the absence of an internet connection, even for the most popular centralized service ones today (Hue).

> There's some truth to that.

That seems like a separate, if related, problem. There are plenty of smart devices that don't involve centralized services. Check out homeassistant.io. Plenty of devices where you own the product and they can't be shut down.

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