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Praise Gaben. That's the one thing I've needed in any replacement Steam Controller and Valve finally did it before the last of my OG Controllers gave up the ghost.

I think the person you’re replying to has made a mistake: I looked extensively last night and there’s no mention of the Steam Controller having dual stage triggers.

However, the Steam Frame Controllers do. Seems weird they would add them on the Frame wands but not the actual controller replacing the controller that does have them.


Because of that keyword, "was." The conservative stance has shifted to become more aligned with fascism.

Apple's had a few bad streaks with their butterfly keyboards in terms of unreliability, and they're certainly not built for repairability, but that's a far cry from Samsung's appliances that are always looking for an excuse to detonate.

It would be. That was the original promise of the Family Hub+ fridges with AI Vision Inside™ technology.

But you won't find that here, and it's not going to be coming in an update. This fridge can't properly identify fruits and veggies, let alone anything in any sort of packaging.

As I demo the thing, it keeps taking snapshots of the back of my head and insists that the fridge is just packed full of kiwis.


Aye, the original version of my comment had "If it's reliable enough" as a qualifier.

> full of kiwis

Also this is utterly hilarious to me.


I'm working part time at an appliance showroom, it's exactly as silly as it sounds. We don't sell fruits and veggies, but we did have some pumpkins around. Put one in, it's confident I just fed it either an apple, an orange, or an onion. Some bottled drinks? Clearly a mango. Maybe an eggplant.

And it can't register anything placed in the flex drawer, freezer, or fridge doors. In order to actually take advantage of its fridge inventory system, you still have to manually enter in or correct every single item you place into your fridge.

It's inconvenient for looking up recipes, since fridges are not placed for visibility from your countertop. It can be used for music but the speakers aren't worth the extra money. Videos and movies? The screen's the wrong aspect ratio for anything but big screen TikTok. And again, fridges are not positioned to gather around.

And that last bit is the crux of the issue. I've talked to our Samsung reps and they keep talking about fridges like they're gathering points. Like people congregate around their fridges. That was the guiding principle behind this fridge, and it's so disconnected from reality that the appliance itself can't help but be irredeemably pointless.


I found it hilarious that they're bragging about how "AI Vision Inside will now recognize 37 fresh food items, including..." I don't think this was impressive even five years ago, but it's certainly not impressive now.

How does it work in practice? Do you have to scan an item when you put it in or take it of the fridge?

Because in practice, fridges look nothing like in the commercials. Very few people would put a whole apple and a carton of milk on a shelf and nothing more. That would be highly uneconomical, because there's far too much air that will escape when you open and close the door.

It is normal to have lots and lots of small boxes and other stuff stacked on each other which would make it hard if not impossble to operate a camera inside.


I've never used one other than demoing the features, but not well. The camera can't actually see what's inside the fridge. The camera sits between the two doors on the top bevel, pointing down.

As you cross the threshold of the fridge with your item, you have to pause to show the camera what you're putting in or taking out. If you don't pause, or if it just nondeterministically decides you weren't holding anything, it won't work. It has no idea where items are in the fridge, as soon as the threshold is crossed it loses sight of them.

There is one exception, and that's the fridge doors. The camera can't see that far up and out, but it takes multiple snapshots of the doors as you're closing them and bringing them within its field of view. The results are heavily distorted, incredibly low fidelity, and most likely very motion blurry. Too low quality for the fridge to even attempt to discern what's inside the door, it'll just show you the snapshot it took and let you figure it out by navigating Home > AI Vision Inside > Left Door/Right Door to see the low quality reconstruction of your door... or you could take that time instead to just open the door.


> Like people congregate around their fridges

In my experience they do. At least at parties, cause that's where the beer is kept.

A smart fridge tracking the contents and doing facial recognition on who's opening it sounds awesome.

Then it can alert everyone Tom just stole Bob's IPA sounds very useful, to avoid those awkward "who stole my beer" moments.


That would be great. That's not what's being sold nowadays. There's no tracking of who did what, the camera points pretty much straight down and it only even works if you pause and explicitly show to it the object that you are putting in/taking out.

I put fliers for our store warranty inside, and just hid them under my wrist while taking them out so they show up in the AI Vision Inside app without actually taking up space in the fridge. The only time it ever saw me is when I leaned too far in and it took a picture of the back of my head. Got classified as a kiwi.


Those Kindles, which I am also (mostly) okay with, are also $100 devices whose price is subsidized by those ads.

These fridges are $3500 typically, and theoretically an MSRP of $4700. They're at the high end of consumer appliances.

I don't believe it's a lawsuit in the making, this is (at least partially) America, land of freedom from consumer protections, but it is horrid.


Kindles didn't always have ads at the same price.

A VPN and a privacy-focused browser have similar practical usefulness to a private search engine. They cannot be used to create a private search engine.

Yes, they can. You use the browser with the VPN to search sites like Bing and then scrape the search results.

You don't need a whole browser for that, just a VPN. And that'd likely get their servers blocked for their users if Google's cracking down on them already.

>cracking down on them already.

If they crack down on it then the suggestion to use a VPN and privacy browser won't work either.


Your circles might have a little more technical literacy than most. I'm working part time in retail at a hardware store currently and the amount of people who come in looking for parts specified exclusively by a single AI overview is mindboggling. People repairing car engines come in looking for bolts with specific lengths, materials, and thread pitches that AI told them they needed. I haven't had anyone come back and explicitly tell me that AI led them wrong, but I'm sure they've had to make multiple trips back out here.

Hardware repairs done by AI recommendations sounds really scary and dangerous.

TBF: people overconfident in their DIY fixing skills are precisely the sort replacing searches with an LLM query.

This is getting faded out, but this is absolutely right. For very few use cases do you truly need the bleeding edge. So many things do not have such strict requirements, and will meet all necessary requirements on an older node. An ATTiny85 is still an incredibly useful microcontroller even today.

There's an interactive story that has elements of this[0]. Many of the simpler objects don't have much capacity to think or feel on their own, but the corru equivalent of elevators are fully sentient beings capable of conversation and problem solving, and they're just kind of built to be quite satisfied helping move people around. Corru computers are capable of hosting entire communities of distinct intelligences, each program sentient and (mostly) dedicated to its role. Not all of them can be chatted up, the authorization/access control program understandably isn't very chatty, but it is an intelligent being.

It's a pretty enjoyable experience, and all of the graphics are ordinary HTML elements with 3D CSS transformations, which makes it super hackable and fun to crack open in an inspector.

All that to say, if the best chairs required intelligence, it'd be in everyone's best interest to make that intelligence real thrilled about ass.

[0] http://corru.observer/


In one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books there was a bit about the company that makes Marvin, the depressed robot, also making sentient elevators. These elevators had issues with getting depression, and the companies using them in their office buildings would hire psychology students to talk to them on the basement levels and convince them to go up again.

But not too thrilled, mind you

one word: chairdogs

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