At least you have a charger option. The non-rich of us who rent appartments have none. The four chargers in my biulding would cost more per-mile than buying gas... if they were working. They are currently down for some random reason (new cell provider, no connectivity in our carpark.)
I just watched a youtube about cruise ships. A near-riot broke out during a movie quote quiz because the AI that made the questions confused Casablanca and Gone With The Wind. If it aint ready for quiz night, it aint ready to teach kids.
Ask a color blind person to spell "red" and "green", then ask them how many red apples are on the table.
LLMs work on tokens. They literally cannot see individual letters. Yet, unlike humans, they can instantly create a tool to solve this task for them and never be stumped by it again.
The week default is having an OS owned/run/managed/backdoored by a publicly traded company. If you are using anything other than open source, anything other than linux, consider all your communications to be availible for subpeona or outright sale to whoever wants them. Signal is great, but only as good as the OS of its host.
The fridge compressor answers to software? Idiocy. It need be nothing more than a relay attached to a thermocouple. I can see having a smart screen to deliver aps/ads and to collect data on people in the home, but why on earth would that need to actually manipulate temperatures?
In 2006 shortly after I bought my (first and still only) home, I bought the cheapest Kenmore fridge from Sears (~$600 at the time) as the one that came with the house failed soon after moving in - it was probably 26 years old with metal grill shelves. I was stretched for money for a bit due to dealing with closing costs, etc. I figured it'd last 5-10 years and I'd just get a new, "better" one when my cashflow wasn't acutely tight.
Despite having since remodelled the kitchen (again spending more than expected as one does when renovating), I kept the fridge...it's still working fine 20 years later, though the plastic drawers are starting to degrade. Next to higher-end German appliances it looks a bit well worn and out of place in an otherwise very nicely renovated kitchen, which my wife and I semi-seriously joke gives the place character.
Every once in awhile I'll wander through an appliance aisle and sigh. Similar fridges feel cheap and are much more expensive. In fancy fridges, I just see more components that'd fail. I'll I really want is a freezer and a fridge. I want need an ice maker (especially after learning how gross they can get). Ideally I'd have a standard old-fashioned sized fridge that had a good separate temperature control for the freezer and is common enough that I can get replacement parts 20 years from now.
The kicker was I now realize the old 26 year old fridge probably just needed a coolant top up. Maybe that wasn't possible as I'm not sure when freon was banned and if it would have been possible to do that.
Most non high-end samsung fridges aren't built in Korea, lower-end fridges are made in Vietnam and midrange fridges are made in China or Thailand. Regardless of Samsung outsourcing they still have to compete with outsourcing firms. There's only so much demand for fridges, 100-200 million fridges a year worldwide, and most of the consumer fridges end up primarily competing on price.
My non-Samsung fridge lets me change the temperature settings from my phone.
That’s why the compressor answers to software. How else would I change the temperature remotely if it didn‘t?
I find that the anti-smart device brigade among tech enthusiasts is very detached from the reality of what consumers want. The general public does demand smart features and they want them to work well.
The sin here isn’t that the fridge is smart, the sin is that bad software was pushed out.
My particular refrigerator also has a purposefully limited set of features. You’ll notice that real luxury brands like Sub-Zero don’t pack their refrigerators with crazy feature lists and touch screens. Their smart apps are basic and focus on essentials like “door left open” or “change filter” notifications and remote temperature adjustment. They don’t have complicated features like craft cocktail ice and even basic stuff like water dispensing is an optional extra (since it’s assumed that luxury clients may have a separate dedicated reverse osmosis and sparkling water machine for that). They don’t push out frequent updates and they keep their smart functions as modular components since it’s assumed that the refrigerator will remain installed permanently for decades (e.g., you can add a newer control system with touch screen and WiFi to your older Sub-Zero fridge).
It would be nice if non-luxury brands followed some of these philosophies a little more.
My non-Samsung fridge lets me change the temperature settings from my phone. That’s why the compressor answers to software. How else would I change the temperature remotely if it didn‘t?
I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, so I'll bite: why on Earth would you ever want to change the temperature settings of your fridge?
I don’t really appreciate being assumed to be a troll just because I’m holding a contrary opinion. That’s very much against the guidelines of this site.
I think if you are the type who is interested in digging up comment history you’ll find plenty of comments from me that show that I’m pretty much a regular person who has respectful conversations.
I apologize if I didn’t follow the popular “corporation bad” narrative. Like, I do recognize that ink is grossly overpriced and all that. At the same time, I don’t really think we are held hostage by printer companies these days. I buy ink once a year or less and it’s not even a laser printer. It isn’t a significant expense or inconvenience.
I’m away on vacation and weather reports say there might be a thunderstorm at my house with high probability of power outage, so maybe I lower the temperature setting to try and extend the life of the contents.
Kids/nanny/housekeeper changes the temperature against my wishes.
I’ve left the house for a long vacation with the fridge emptied and I’d like to change the temperature to consume less power while I’m gone, forgot to do it before I left.
And again it’s trivially simple functionality that costs almost no money or development effort to I implement.
So you spend 11k on a smart fridge, have a nanny, but maniacally control the temperature depending on contents, possible weather scenarios and and if you are vacation. Makes sense. Maybe that is why I'm still poor, imagine all the money I've wasted never once adjusting my fridge temp remotely (or even manually) in the last 14 years.
I said it above but I will say it again, if your fridge has a door open sensor it should have a close the door function. This is especially true if you spent $11k on it.
> so maybe I lower the temperature setting to try and extend the life of the contents.
Bullshit. The ideal refrigerator temperature is already close enough to freezing that any small adjustment you could make is unlikely to do any good. If this was actually a good idea then by your logic (similar to odd love for printer manufacturers) the all wise manufacturers would have already incorporated this into their “smart” fridges.
Because the temperature is adjusted and they want to be able to display the current temperature as well as the target on said display? And once you’ve done that, your bean counters will pressure you to shave the BOM.
Not saying it’s smart, just laying out a plausible sequence of events on how they reached that decision
> they want to be able to display the current temperature
Do they really? When replacing my 20 year old fridge (that had an actual mechanical temperature gauge) with a new one I specifically bought one that had a (now digital, of course) display for the current temperature.
It turned out that the temperature display is completely faked. It always shows exactly the set temperature, from the moment you power it on. I guess because of (actual or imagined) customers complaining why their fridge shows e.g. 7°C when they set it to 4°C.
Incidentally, my new smart AC does exactly the same thing. Subjectively it's worse than the old one at keeping the place not too cold and not too warm, but it makes damn sure to never show the actual measured temperature anywhere.
It probably has more to do with consumer fridges being a bang-bang controller situation where temperature will always fluctuate several degrees either side of the desired number.
Does a relay with a thermocouple get you the cycles required for no-frost features? I agree that there should be adequate safeguards at every turn but its not like computerized control of fridge temperature doesn't make sense.
Face to face, or razor wire. Barriers do work, but only if you pay for something more than chainlink. And the math is interesting as the bigger the field the less barrier is needed proportionally.
Everyone is replying to my comment to talk about social nets and failures in the justice system, but I agree that the math is a more interesting challenge. The site I was talking about is thousands of acres in an undeveloped area, and while you accurately note the barrier is more cost effective, the number of patrols and response time for incidents (including false alarms) grows with scale. The owner could lock down the site like a fortress from a James Bond movie, but let's not forget that those thousands of acres are just gathering sunlight, so at some point it stops being cost-effective.
And I mostly introduce this issue as a contrast to panels on developed land like the canals, which serve other functions and are less likely to have the risks associated with such a single-purpose site.
Its kinda like a dozen UI projects that are little more than a pretty layer above common tools. Music/voice composition, image generation and first-frame/last-frame video creation... this can all be done in comfy using free/oss tools.
Computer security =/ publicly-accessable server security.
A linux box, layered in encryption and not plugged into any network = damb secure.
A network-connected linux box with a hardened OS, firewalled, acting only as a file server, given regular updates and 24/7 monitoring = less likely to be "hacked" than struck by lightning.
A hard drive with its power supply physically switched off = 100% secure from external attack.
Not a joke. The keys for editing the world's most important files, the root zone, are kept on no-power drives in air-gapped safes. They have yet to be hacked.
An add, but no more than catching a glimps of a restaurant long after one has ordered. When standing in a shop it is normal to see prices for other products on offer.
Oldschool lead-acid batteries need not be destroyed to be recycled. They can, and are, easily disassembled and refurbished. For all the lithium hype, lead-acid remains a valid option for non-mobile applications where storage density is not relevant.
The process of dying and rejuvenation would be somewhat analogous chemically.
In this case the electrode is metallic lead and the electrolyte is water containing sulfuric acid.
The electrode-electrolyte "interphase" is a solid coating based on lead sulfate, that forms on the lead plates after extended recharge cycles. This doesn't redissolve very well during use after a while when the electrolyte has become oversaturated with lead ions, and the electrodes have been "replated" so many times. Especially when recharged from near-death.
One antique way of restoration without disassembly was to agitate the battery using an industrial vibrator to loosen up the solids, then dump out the (highly toxic lead-containing) electrolyte to physically remove as much sludge as possible. Followed by repeated filling using distilled water, agitation, and dumping until the waste water looks OK. One final fill with DI water (which acts as a very weak electrolyte at this point) and a reverse charge until an amp or two has been reached for a bit, to deplate as much oxidized coating as possible into a virgin solvent.
More agitation, dumping, rinsing, and finally replace with fresh acid.
Desperate measures for desperate times, not too economical today unless similar wastewater is already being handled in a scale that dwarfs a single battery, and fresh acid is obtained surplus or purchased at bulk pricing as well.
This sounds more complicated than the existing processes to recycle the acid and the electrodes separately and make new batteries from the raw materials.
It would be much easier if lead acid batteries were designed to allow flushing them easily. The biggest problem is the fill holes are absolutely terrible access for flushing and cleaning.
If they were easier to reuse like that and it was done more often then disposal for that lead saturated acid would likely be more available.
Yep, a big similarity to remanufacturing lithium batteries may be having more physical than chemical renewal, where the recycling process focuses on dismantling old and rebuilding new from reclaimed materials.
Restoring the functioning of the original electrodes in situ is a bit of a different ordeal. But they're working on it :)
Where can I get cheap recycled lead acid batteries?
I like them more the li-ion because they’re more forgiving to temperature changes and have a much lower chance of catching on fire
The recycling process isn’t direct battery-to-battery. The lead from old batteries is removed, purified, dried into ingots, then sold back to battery manufacturers to make new batteries. In other words, it’s likely that every lead acid battery you buy is made from recycled batteries.
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