The washing machine with integrated AI broke my brain. This must be the most useless thing I’ve ever encountered in my entire life.
Not just ai it could also make phone calls
We believe that the washing machine is the hearth of the modern laundry room
You really do have to be a brainless twit to work in marketing.
As a marketing data analyst, I can confirm.
But i can’t hear shit when my washing machine is on! Let alone have a fucking phone call! Who comes up with this shit…
Gives it a fallback to send surveillance data to samsung, even if you don’t connect it to a network
And it’s a Samsung appliance so rest assured it’s complete garbage
My ten year old basic units are still looking new. Nothing to really go wrong with them and I bet I can get parts for cheap. I know when they’re done because I just wait a little while after I start them, then I know they’re finished.
Cheap easy repairs on washing machines are long a thing of the past. Between proprietary digital potted control boards to 3 phase motors, the parts ain’t cheap. (I’ve bought a few to repair them before I learned better) To the sheer unavailability of the repair parts. Make fixing you washer and dryer a time consuming, expensive, and often impossible task.
By the time you figure out the time spent searching for the part you need, the availability of said part, the cost of the part, the expected life of the rest of the machine, cost of all the time spent, you can pretty much be sure it’s cheaper and faster to just buy a new one. I can’t think of one major appliance I owned in the last 30 years that was worth the time and effort to repair. And I’ve tried repairing washers, dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, and refrigerators.
The only washers I’ve ever owned and were worth fixing was those old wringer/washers your Great Grandmother had when she was young. Straight up mechanical machines run by one simple switch, a vee belt, shafts and gears. That’s the reason those machines could keep going for 30 or 40 years.
That’s nice. But those are not the parts that generally die. Now get the control board that runs the whole show-- that’s the main failure point. See what that would cost to replace. I just searched for the control board for my 12 year old Maytag front loader. One source only: $367 dollars, (they know what they got). Is a 12 year old washer with limited parts availability really worth that much money to fix to scrape a couple of more years out of it if the motor goes tits up in 2 more years? I can drive to town and buy a basic top loader and haul it home and have it installed by this afternoon for just $200 more. And it will probably be fine for the next 10 to 12 years. (I’ll probably be dead by then away).
I just replaced a 10 year old dishwasher this last summer because the pump was dying. No replacement to be had on the whole planet. I need to replace an 8 year old microwave now because the handle is broken and the door cant be be disassembled to replace it without destroying the door. If I could get it apart, I’d be 3D printing a new handle as I type. And I’m not even going to bother searching for a whole new door.
I have a regular top loader with dials on it.
Meanwhile, the new one in my flat has a soft-button to start/stop, which sometimes bugs out and/or locks my laundry away in some edge cases the devs didn’t think of.
I always dread having to replace old appliances, specifically because of the added non-features that inevitably break.
At least VLC had a neat table there
They better have had traffic cones on their heads. The mental image that creates is quite funny with the contrast to the serious businesmen trying to sell AI one booth over.
Robert’s interview with the AI home assistant robot guy this year was unintentionally amazing, the dude was dressed like Jordan Peterson (ie. an insane person) but had all the interviewing skills of a parboiled potato. And he had no clue that Robert was clowning on him so hard.
Any chance you could link to this or help me find more stuff from Robert? I am always interested in his takes.
I mostly know of him from Behind the Bastards, a podcast about prominent historical figures (usually 1800s through present). The twist, apart from their regular Christmas “Non-Bastard” episodes is of course that these influential people actually behaved questionably at best during their time. I really think Robert’s research and storytelling are great, he and the guests he brings on really can make an hour fly by sometimes. Most of the biographies are split up into a couple parts, with people like Kissinger and Vince McMahon having such dubious pasts to earn them 6 parts each.
Anyway, the interview with the AI home assistant dude was from another podcast which he frequents, called It Could Happen Here, a more news-oriented podcast. Both of the podcasts can be found on YouTube, published by Cool Zone Media. I believe they did 3 episodes of CES coverage for this year, the final part contained the interview. After all the dunking Robert talks about another interview he had at CES which was a lot more uplifting.
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24339817/vlc-player-automatic-ai-subtitling-translation
The popular open-source VLC video player was demonstrated on the floor of CES 2025 with automatic AI subtitling and translation, generated locally and offline in real time. Parent organization VideoLAN shared a video on Tuesday in which president Jean-Baptiste Kempf shows off the new feature, which uses open-source AI models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages.
Ok now that’s cool. Since it’s often all doom and gloom here, celebrating good tech is a nice change :)
Since VLC is open source, can we expect this AI subtitle generator as a separate product that could be used in, say, jellyfin?
This is something I’m very much behind. I think firefox is doing something similar if i am not mistaken. One of my favorite shows is a Japanese tv show called GameCenter CX. Fans create subtitles but its a lot of work. Lately they have been using ai to generate subtitles and while some are a bit messed up, you at least get the idea what is going on and they can work off of that if necessary.
Firefox has offline translation and image alt-text tagging (for screen readers), but people bitched about it when Mozilla introduced it.
I’m glad people seem broadly receptive of it now that VLC is doing something similar.
What no AI-enabled bidet?
Actually, I can get behind that.
I see what you did there 🍑🚽
The smart crib seems particularly dystopian to me. We don’t even need to wait for children to develop enough fine-motor functions to make use of smartphones or tablets, we can start collecting data on them before they even utter their first word!
How long before the smart cribs have ParentAI attached to them? Let the computer raise your child!
We’re already at least one generation into womb to tomb data collection.
Even ten years ago it was getting tough to find baby monitors that didn’t have video and/or Wi-Fi.
I looked up “Parent AI”, and was disappointed
Vendor Electronics Show
I think it’s consumer-electronics show, as opposed to an industrial-electronics show… Though I get your point.
So much waste.
Where’s the scam booths?
