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
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?!
Why the fuck would a fridge need to be ‘smart’?
Like what’s the reasoning?
“Convenience”
it could judge you when you throw away those vegetables you never processed
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.
Samsung is awful at software. Samsung phones for some reason insist on replacing Google or even basic Android apps with their own worse versions.
LG has entered the chat.
LG products are decent. The first washer+dryer set we had lasted 14 years with only a few minor error codes towards the end, which were trivial to research, fix, and clear on our own. Our current LG set has been running error free for 6 years now, and we honestly expect another decade of use, at minimum. Sure, some limitations are annoying - no tumble config allows me to lower the temp for longer and gentler drying. But it all works well.
Of course, our next set will be Huebsch, which is the Canadian re-badge of Speed Queen. We didn’t get this make because we only found out about this re-badging earlier this year. We had considered importing actual Speed Queen appliances (6 years ago), but went with our current set when we realized that the import costs alone would be gratuitous, and the warranty wouldn’t be applicable outside of America.
A boring dystopia.
