This is definitely on the horizon and future generations won’t even be aware of a time when you didn’t pay a subscription for every aspect of life. (TikTok screencap)
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This reminds me. I need to call my uncle and ask him about that Fridge at his country place that’s been running since 1994. He’s selling his place and I want that fridge!
PiHole saves the day yet again.
You can make your own fridge. Search icy ball.
I am not paying a single subscription and I am not about to not start.
Hell yeah!
My fridge filter looks like a subscription. $50 every 6 months. It’s getting ridiculous
2030
On a related note, I was looking at RTINGS recently at their recommended TVs. One really important item for me is that I’m not subjected to ads.
It turns out that every single smart TV they tested has ads, and there’s no way to opt out of those ads.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv
It’s not possible to “vote with your dollars” to choose a TV that doesn’t have ads, because 100% of the TVs have ads now.
I know you can get a commercial flat panel intended for restaurants and stuff that doesn’t have any of those features, but those are hard to find, expensive, and don’t have basic features like multiple inputs.
If you think you can get around this by refusing to connect your TV to the Internet, some of them start to interfere with your use of them until you do connect them. Which ones? I wish RTINGS told me.
And, making it all worse, you know that every one of these things is going to have an EULA that allows them to enshittify it even more at some future date. And, you can’t get around that either, because either they’re designed to stop working if they don’t a recent update, or there’s a bomb planted in an update that only activates months later, so rolling back (if that’s even possible) won’t help you.
I know US law is never going to help consumers with this, but I do hope eventually Europe addresses this. People in Europe do still sometimes seem to have some rights when it comes to big companies.
“there’s no way to opt out of… ads”
FYI… You want an oubliette for ads, and PiHole is your friend there. No hyperbole. Easy install & upkeep, remarkably effective, active community of devs & fans of all sorts, and just nice people all the way down, IMHE. 🙇🏼♂️✊🏻
Essentially, said ads have to come from somewhere before being presented to your eyeballs/eardrums, and a PiHole let’s the ad servers think they’re doing exactly that, but sends them into the void, instead. Clean, efficient, silent.
Fuck capitalism, but don’t tell it you’re doing so. No reason to notify it of it’s failure to inundate your household. 🤓🖖🏼
Do you really need multiple inputs? Pair it with a nice receiver and let that handle the inputs.
How much is a nice receiver going to cost me?
Whatever it takes! This is how you get the best home audio!
I don’t know if this is helpful, but I recently bought a 55” Hisense and I just plug my old-school Roku USB stick into it. The UI is super basic and ad-free. It’s not 4k or anything, but for streaming shows and playing PS5 it works like a charm.
Here’s what RTINGS says about one of the Hisense TVs:
Ads Yes
Opt-out No
Suggested Content in Home Yes
Opt-out of Suggested Content No
Unfortunately, like most TVs on the market, the smart interface contains ads, and you can’t disable them.
And someone on another site has a video showing an ad playing as soon as their Hisense TV is turned on. The person posting says it doesn’t happen every time. And, maybe it’s disabled if you have it set to turn on using “input 2” or whatever your USB stick is connected to. But, an unskippable ad on start-up means I’m not going to risk buying a Hisense TV.
We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures.
This assumes that the people of the world will submit to the capitalists, and won’t push back against this bullshit.
I wouldn’t bet on that happening
Drink verification can to access refrigerator.
Then you are stuck, cause the verification can is inside.
That’s why it’s important to have a redundant backup fridge with a recovery verification can.
meanwhile the fridge from 1986 is still running in my garage and doesn’t need me to ask how it’s feeling or update firmware
…That’s a Bosch refrigerator with a tablet stuck to it, presumably with a magnet. (Yes, we ruin everything for you on the Internet.)
Still. Samsung would absolutely try to pull this if they thought they could get away with it.
Well yeah I mean the image is a joke…
Sure, but for some godawful reason Samsung genuinely does make a series of refrigerators with a stupid touch screen in the door, it’s just that this isn’t one of them.
Another random fun fact about those, since we’re kibitzing and we’ll never get a chance to touch on this topic ever again, these silly fridges run Samsung’s Tizen operating system which at one point was supposed to be a successor to MeeGo, i.e. in and of itself the successor to the Maemo OS which ran on the venerable Nokia N900. But this categorically failed to set the world of mobile phones on fire, and nowadays is relegated to being used to making Samsung fridges and televisions annoying. Just one of those things, I guess.
Brawndo’s got what plants crave!
I think there was a Black Mirror episode like this.
Did all these companies watch Black Mirror and say “great idea”?
We’ll be drinking our pee on Twitch to be able to afford to pay for our ice dispensor.
I was in my local Lowes hardware and one of the Samsung fridges on display kept actively trying to connect to my Samsung phone. I must have gotten 5 or 6 notifications from the fridge letting me know I could connect.
Eye movement trackers will only count the ads you actually watch.
New gig economy side hustle arises, ad-watcher. I’ll come into your home and watch all your unskippable ads for $35 an hour plus tip
Won’t work if they have a serialization scheme, which all these manufacturers are doing these days, uniquely mapping the person to their fridge (its 2050 remember, everyone is neuro-chipped uniquely identified when interfacing with everything).
Additional members who can use the fridge $20/month, but you can map 3 members for $50/month (WOW best value!), and if multiple people watch the ad simultaneously, they can pool their ad time towards the countdown!
But only members from the same household are allowed. (like streaming services want these days)
Also, if you want your freezer to work, you need to pay an additional €20 for the premium plus package. Don’t see this as bad because now you can cancel that function during winter and activate it during the summer. So only pay for it when you need it. (the argument BMW gave for paying monthly for enabling stuff like seat heaters. For fuck sake, you already have the function in your car, it’s just paywalled)
Of course there will be a weird bug whereby sometimes one of the people will not be counted
The required brain chip app monitors attentional neural networks while stimulating the image centers to display ads. Common side effects are nausea, vomiting, over throwing the state, and vertigo.
You also need to purchase a minimum of 60% of what the ads promote otherwise you clearly didn’t pay attention and your fridge will stay locked or starts heating instead of cooling.
