@ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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• tft lcds got in this too because they’re so dirt cheap and capacitive touch interfaces are cheap as fuck to manufacture. Even if the parts costs are a tiny bit higher relative to physical buttons and interfaces the money saved on assembly makes up for it (and in some cases the parts actually are cheaper

  Plus in a kitchen or bathroom setting this is much easier to make water and dust resistant, which is an actual benefit tbf, but at the expense of ergonomics and accessibility

  You can literally go on Amazon right now and search LCD toaster. There’s the $4-500 ultra bougie American designed (not made lol) smart one but then there are a ton of Chinese designed ones that are like $50-60 because it’s a $20 toaster with a (when bought at scale) $0.95 lcd strapped on

  Marketing is dumb, this is why I left ui/ux/hci work. You can create an ergonomic and intuitive system that is evidence based and the ad men will be like “but can we pander to the lowest common denominator by ruining it with some useless feature that’s objectively worse to use?” And then they just dropped the pretense and said fuck ux, embrace dark patterns

  I could bitch about this for days

  on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22h ago

• We’re kind of describing the same people I think

  on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22h ago

• See that’s utility and depending on the sensors you choose that can definitely be local only

  But skimming the page for a Samsung smart fridge none of this is in the features. It’s that it can play music, you can put notes and pictures and shit, there’s an “ai camera” that can tell you what you need to buy (though something tells me that struggles if your fridge isn’t set up like a stock image and is actually loaded with like food and condiments and shit like a normal person)

  A Bluetooth speaker can do the music part likely with much better sound quality, a smart speaker can handle the typical kitchen tasks like setting timers (which can be done purely in HA, you don’t need Alexa or whatever), a dry erase board and magnets can cover notes and pictures, and the reminders app on your phone can probably do a much more accurate job of keeping a shopping list. Then you can buy a fridge that doesn’t have a 32” proprietary lcd that is a major point of failure, and you can literally save thousands of dollars (quick search shows these fridges are 3500-4k, which is insane for a fridge, even a fancy huge one).

  The market for these is people who have too much money (or are willing to take on credit debt) but also can’t be bothered to spend the 1-2 hours it takes to read up on how to do what you’ve done. Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc prey on these people

  The top of the line one can make spherical ice though, which is admittedly super cool

  on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• I just don’t see the utility. I can be pretty pro “smart” stuff, especially if I can run it without an internet connection, but what’s the point for a fridge?

  Like an oven I get, though I don’t have one. It’s laziness but there is some utility in being able to preheat the oven without getting up, or double check the oven was turned off. Although newer ovens tend to have rapid preheating that really can be quick (unlike my 1996 oven that takes 15-20+ minutes)

  But a fridge? What are you going to do? Ensure it’s running? Except when something like this happens lmao. The only real thing it could add is an advertisement and data collection vector, which is the opposite of utility. I’ve also seen smart toasters. Not toaster ovens, but like pop in two slices of bread and push the plunger. Why? You have to come to the device to load it. Do you leave bread overnight getting stale and save the 30 seconds and greatly raise the risk of cold toast? Ridiculous

  on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1d ago

• Ease really. Once the patents expired it was fairly simply to make a 3d printer, which is essentially a hot nozzle squirting plastic. It’s more akin to a pen plotter

  An inkjet printer is significantly more complex. Even if you know how it works you essentially need a semiconductor level fab to make the printhead. That’s why all these projects just reverse engineer hp cartridges. Literally every inkjet printer patent could’ve expired 10 years ago and it wouldn’t change the engineering and manufacturing challenges

  on Open Source Printer coming before 2027 in c/opensource@lemmy.ml · 6d ago

• Has to be proven that it occurs first I suppose. But it would also be a difficult thing to workaround. Like in your example the only thing stopping them is a firmware update that dictates the tv connect to as many other clients as possible and blacklist clients that can’t receive a challenge code or success packet or something

  Of course I’m sure if that happened people much smarter than me would spoof all that too, make a spoofer that creates dozens of pseudo devices, break challenges and such, etc. cat and mouse game. Luckily these things are usually super lazily implemented by the ad scum but frustratingly that’s bc dedicating resources to this is not worth it usually (eg many people, a sizable and increasing percentage of users, may simply not connect their tv to the internet but once a raspberry pi or docker container or whatever is involved you’re in strictly nerd territory)

  on Your reminder to remove the microphone from your TV remote today in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 11 Sep 2026

• This is the far easier approach, but if you live somewhere densely populated (like an apartment building) keep in mind it’s been rumored that smart TVs can make a mesh network to upload data without a connection. Though to my knowledge this has never been definitively shown to be true

  on Your reminder to remove the microphone from your TV remote today in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 10 Sep 2026

• FYI most modern TVs have a second microphone actually in the display that’s actually used for the nefarious tracking and listening for assistant wake words to save remote battery life

  on Your reminder to remove the microphone from your TV remote today in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 10 Sep 2026

• You can run Linux and steam on ps5 but jailbreaks are as of now limited to older firmwares. The ps5 is aggressive about making updates mandatory so you either need a console someone purposely did not update in anticipation of a jailbreak break years later or one that’s been sitting around not being used for a somewhat long time

  on Sony Reminds PS Users They Don't Own Digital Games in c/technology@lemmy.world · 24 Aug 2026

• Those things are not mutually exclusive?

  on Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything in c/games@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• Steam is gross, popularized the “own nothing” model (along with loot boxes), and just has a bunch of (very passionate) fanboys because it’s the least gross option (barring gog, which they often conveniently ignore), but this is more a problem of publishers consolidating and buying studios, giving some games obscene marketing budgets. The overwhelming majority of games are released by people whose marketing amounts to making (not promoted) social media posts on an account no one follows. Meanwhile Ubisoft, Microsoft, take two, etc have the capital and connections to dominate the press, social media, YouTube, etc

  Best game ever won’t make a dime if no one knows about it. Even if you can get some pull it’s hard to compete with the game that everyone is talking about. That game is also probably more expensive, which theoretically gives you an edge, but in practice much of the time probably means your game isn’t getting purchased if the consumer is also hyped about gta6 or whatever

  One measure they could take is to significantly lower or even eliminate their cut for niche games. They currently do the opposite, the largest cut (30%) comes in until your game makes 10 million, then progressively gets lower (25% 10-50m, 20% 50+m). A lower bracket that says like, 0 to 10% if your game makes under 300k or whatever. Based on this article they clearly make the majority of their revenue from heavy hitters so this would barely impact them

  on Behold, "the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture": the top 1% of games earn 84.5% of estimated revenue, and most games barely make anything in c/games@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

  The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

  What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

  This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

  on Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026

• Reddit sucks but this is asinine. The stock is down ~35% this year but still up almost 250% since ipo.

  on Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026