Time to ban all adverts everywhere. I'm not the only one who is fed up with ads.
I don't see ads, thanks to ad blocking tech in browsers and smartphones. Any time that happens to fail and I get to endure an ad, I am amazed that regular people without ad blocking tech can endure this onslaught.
The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past. Let's not even entertain that idea.
An acceptable middle ground could have been designated areas for ads, which you have to seek out to see them. Think of the Yellow Pages.
Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves. They are lobbying against all limits and controls. The only solution is to eradicate ads entirely and to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.
One that is really insane to me is Ads when driving on the highway. I can’t recall seeing that in Europe, but now in Canada when I take the highway there’s Ads everywhere. Some of them rotate.
Ironically they also have a sign that changes, one of the updates is “don’t drive distracted”… and like, I wasn’t distracted until the sign flashed at me lol.
Legal ads in product catalogues only. Product catalogues are actually useful and nobody is subjected to them unless they chose to seek one out and pick it up willingly.
Wait, what? I'm confused. Is the entire product catalogue considered an ad? Or do you mean parts of a product catalogue can contain adverts? I'd argue a product catalogue is not advertising at all.
I consider each product listing in a catalogues to be ads, or perhaps the whole catalogues is one big aggregate ad. Either way, I'm fine with them. Product catalogues are mostly innocuous and usually provide more empirical product information than other forms of advertisement.
No there aren't. There are not billions of people motivated for the total elimination of all advertisements everywhere. The vast majority of humans do not care one way or another, and most of those who dislike advertising probably wouldn't support banning them entirely.
To be clear, Dems are about as unlikely to do this as the Trump administration is. This is the sort of generational reform that requires a redefining of a political party.
If you have a router you control, many routers allow you to take away internet access from a device while keeping it on your local network. Some (all?) Asus routers can do this from their UI.
This won’t help with devices that require 24x7 internet access, but it’s great for things you want to access the local network but don’t trust not to send info to a third party. (TVs, music amps with built in streaming, home surveillance systems [1], etc.)
Also handy for briefly turning on Internet access for software updates or one time activation.
[1] while making a surveillance system available online safely and with software you control isn’t hard, it’s not trivial. Turning Internet access off for your cameras without a plan will mean you can’t monitor your home or get alerts when away from your local network.
Also because just because something is done "willingly" doesn't mean they fully understand that it may not be in their best interest, long-term. This is why drugs are illegal.
That might sound strange at first, but we've seen enough now to know that this will inevitably mean that a lot of manufacturers will follow this model.
I can imagine deals where you get a huge 'rebate' if you permanently enable the ad-feature (the on-screen wizard will blow one of those tiny fuses as its final step, locking the device to that setting). That effectively mandates that the price for the device is its selling price minus the huge rebate, and the whole market will adjust to that.
"Telly" [1] is a real 55" TV that is available for free. It is designed to always, constantly be running advertisements.
> To reserve a Telly, you must agree to use the device as the main TV in your home, constantly keep it connected to the internet, and regularly watch it. If the company finds that you violate these rules, Telly will ask you to return the TV (and charge a $1,000 fee if you don’t send it back).
From another posts recently, just the fact some of the greatest minds in our planet are mostly working in advertising and trying to squeeze the most out of consumers just tell us everything. Our society is so rotten. This time of the year it gets even worst.
Hmm, maybe there's a simple legislative fix for this problem. Basically vendors that want to make you "rent" devices would have to allow termination for convenience at any time by customer including repayment of any fees paid by the customer for the device.
Termination for convenience is a standard term in contracts, hence well-understood by corporate lawyers. The repayment could be reduced using a depreciation schedule so the longer the device is in your hands the less that's returned.
I think this would work. The legal machinery is already there. The market would work out the details.
Already done! You agreed to it in the Terms and Conditions - you did read them, right?
But yeah I agree with you, there needs to be a way for people to get away from ads without relying on the existence of some benevolent alternate company
Terms and conditions can't just force anything on the buyer. like, you can't enslave people and point at the terms and conditions. It should also be outlawed to enshittify products with terms and conditions.
Despite what the average multinational will have you believe, terms and conditions usually don't hold up in court. If they write some illegal bullshit into it, it's just that, bullshit.
That may be true but doesn't help if not accepting the terms prevents you from using the device.
On a practical level you then at best have a battle to get a third party (the retailer) to give you a refund and most people faced with the option of removing and returning a huge expensive device like a fridge with no guarantee of a refund are going to just leave it.
It does need some stubborn and tenacious people to make a stand and set a president - perhaps backed by a consumer rights group but it's an uphill battle.
Sure, but that depends on the thing actually being illegal first. Genuine question - how often in practice are terms and conditions successfully challenged? My thought is that companies like that would be able to drain plaintiffs out before it getting that far very often
Outlawing this specific scenario sounds pretty hard. I can see only two reasonable options:
* Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)
* Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads
Forcing ads onto stuff we pay money for is not okay. Ads to fund free content is probably unavoidable, but even then, it needs to be clear up front what you're subjecting yourself to. Unexpected ads on devices you don't expect them from, can be confusing and disorienting for many people. For people with schizophrenia, it can clearly be dangerous.
And I think this is not just true for smart fridges, but also for those billboards at bus stops that seem stationary at first until they suddenly start to move or talk to you. Ban those please. Or make it clear upfront that they're video. Don't spring this on unsuspecting people.
> Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads
The other way around — make it clear that the devices are capable of showing ads, and provide instructions on how to opt-in to them (and no cookie-like prompts either)
Can we talk about billboards too? As in, giant, increasingly bright ads intended to catch our attention while we're supposed to be carefully operating giant speeding hunks of metal?
And are only the visible part of the iceberg. The part you don't see is the collection of personal data. That is linked to habits - and to deviations from habits - and that is shared with third parties.
I'm going to keep this sort of on topic and this will not be a popular opinion.
No, this does not need legislation. If you don't wants ads on your refrigerator, how about not buying a refrigerator with a screen built in, it's not necessary.
People said the same thing about cars. People said the same thing about smart TVs. Do you know any cars currently being manufactured that respect your privacy?
Try to buy a new TV without « smart » features. It’s nearly impossible and all of them will come with some kind of ads on it.
I fear it will become impossible to buy a fridge without screen and ad if we don’t find a way to stop this. It’s pure profit for manufacturers and the consumers are fucked since fridge are basic necessities.
My last two televisions both came from the "Sceptre" line at Walmart which seemed to be the last holdout of non-smart TVs. I don't know if they're still holding the line; the model I checked just now says it has "V-chip" but doesn't say anything about a "smart TV" operating system or any of that nonsense. It's not very well-advertised but it's still around. I don't know of any way to find a normal TV that isn't from Walmart or a thrift store, though.
No one can force you to watch ads, they're your eyeballs. There will always be a solution to this problem; if it's in your domicile then no one can stop you from spending time coming up with solutions
And what if the manufacturers decide to sue you for disabling the screen? Or decide to simply disable your fridge? This isn't a far out scenario either, the whole right-to-repair movement was based on a company not allowing you to do things with the tractor you bought.
I've long wondered what would happen if, say, NYT sued me for blocking their many ads (despite being a paying subscriber). My argument would be that I'd never click on the ads anyway out of principle, so the ad blocker is just me delegating the ignoring of ads that I would've done myself regardless. Also that if I couldn't turn off ads, I wouldn't have subscribed and they'd make even less revenue.
That said, I doubt these companies would sue because of the risk of setting a precedent in favor of the consumer. Scary legal letters (e.g. cease & desist letters) perhaps. But given enough customers, at least one will have the resources to hire a good lawyer and fight it all the way to court.
It would be with merit, because it would be part of the contract you signed when you bought the damn thing. We already live in a world where any attempt to bypass DRM on things you've bought is tantamount to a potential legal battle if they really wanted to be assholes about it. Where you don't really own the things you buy.
Drm is one thing, taping construction paper over a screen is another. That contract would be unenforceable. Shit is dystopian lately, but you're being hyperbolic.
It's a bit trite, but also true -- a significant portion of reddit is totally made up. It's worse than it was a few years ago, but I have no way whatsoever to measure it. Occasionally I bump into youtube videos which are just narrations of reddit posts which tell some interesting or controversial story. They all really sound fabricated. There's no way for me to know with certainty, but I think extreme skepticism is the safer assumption for any large reddit.
On Reddit? It should...
These were historically almost always made up after people looked into it.
To be clear, the picture is likely real. The backstory to it probably not.
The people that actually feel like they've had the episode would almost certainly not go on social media with it.
The venn diagram of people sharing such content, having the money to buy such a gigantic smart fridge and suffering from schizophrenia is miniscule
The ads for this TV show are real and do look like that.
Honestly, a trigger for paranoia in someone of the same name as the show's protagonist, or stealth marketing, are equally likely scenarios to me. We don't know.
I did now and am even more certain it's made up now.
I'm not sure how anyone can honestly think this is a person talking about their family. This is like a textbook made believe story people have been doing since Reddit got popular in early 2010s.
For this story to be real, you'll have to add a fourth and fifth circle to the diagram with a family member being close enough to the person suffering from the illness to be confided in and being so karma hungry to utilize their personal story which is likely shameful to them for going viral on Reddit.
> the schizophrenic sister's name happens to be Carol ...
Obviously made up.
Why? because no-ones' sister is ever called "Carol" ? Or because people of that name don't get schizophrenia?
I consider myself sane, but if I saw a billboard addressing me by name, I would do a double-take at least. I can easily understand how it would have an impact and look like a schizophrenic symptom.
The TV show advert with that text actually does exist, I've seen it.
Given that, what are the odds that some day a) it is seen, b) by someone called Carol, c) who is susceptible to being affected by it. I would say substantial.
Carol is a very uncommon name, it was last popular in the 40s and 50s so almost every Carol you find today will be in an old folk's home. The odds of two truly independent instances of somebody named Carol appearing in this manner of circumstance is extremely small.
Also, it came from reddit therefore it is fake. Reddit is a dumpster fire, if we're being generous it's a website for playing around with creative writing exercises. The not so generous interpretation is that reddit users are deranged internet point addicts who habitually lie to get their fix.
Yeah so this hypothetical sister doesn’t work, lives by themself, is severely disabled by schizophrenia but at the same time can afford a £2000 fridge. That’s a crazy amount of money to splash for someone who doesn’t work. Especially as amazing fridges are sold for £600-800. Oh, on top of all that, the persons name is Carol. It wouldn’t have worked with any other name.
I don’t think the story is real. But people who want it to be true are easily convinced.
It's also true that illness and disability can come to any of us. Carol could have been a software developer who made a good bit of money before being unable to work anymore.
> is severely disabled by schizophrenia but at the same time can afford a £2000 fridge.
The fridge has been on sale for a few years and schizophrenia can come on very suddenly. People's lives can change in a day because of it. You and I don't know the truth of it and can't reasonably jump to conclusions like that.
I recently had an obviously disturbed man come to the window of my Tesla asking for help. He did not specifically say money, but that's what he wanted. Long story short, he sees that the Tesla has identified a human standing next to the car, but the Tesla showed four people. The man asked how does the vehicle know there are people there, I told him that the Tesla has eight cameras around it. He then asked how does it know there were four people, I explained that the Tesla does not know there were four people, rather the Tesla has a hard time figuring out where something as small as a human is - it is designed to detect larger things like other vehicles. The man was obviously extremely affected, and walked away without another word.
Only later did I understand that the Tesla may have just confirmed what he had suspected all along - that there are in fact four people in the place where he is standing.
I used to follow a few personal finance and FIRE subs. Pretty much all of them had surprising number of creative writing exercises too:
"I just inherited $10 million from a dead relative I never knew, what should I do?"
Or:
"I sold my online business for $37 million, is this enough to retire on?"
These daydreamers always create fresh throwaway accounts and usually never come back to answer clarifying questions. If they do, their answers are vague and unhelpful.
Because it's internet + social media. You should assume 60% of it is made up, every time. People are either saying things they know to be untrue, or things they think are true but or not.
It’s not genuine. The fridge doesn’t show full-screen ads, the original Reddit post and image of the ‘Carol’ ad is staged. At best, this is a parable about the slippery slope our ad-ridden society is sliding down.
Update 11/14: Samsung has commented on the image posted to Reddit, noting that the ad format shown on the smart fridge display is not one that would appear over the cover screen. Any ad shown would be limited to the cover screen widget, which displays news, weather, and calendar events. Those slides rotate every 10 seconds or so, and an ad is looped in around every 40 seconds.
It appears that the ad shown in the Reddit photo is of the fridge’s Samsung Internet app. Through that, an ad seems to have shown up organically through a third-party website.
Samsung notes that full-screen ads do not appear as part of these recent software updates, and users shouldn’t expect to see ads that take up the entire display.
‘Shown up organically’ seems like a very generous interpretation to me - it seems far more likely that someone viewed it deliberately for the purposes of staging the photo.
It's an unsourced paragraph of text posted anonymously to Reddit by a 4-day-old throwaway account.
And yet, here we are.
Remember these incidents, when you see them. This is HN/social media's default degree of critical thinking applied to exciting stories that validate readers' prior beliefs. (To think, HN thinks you need $100 billion supercomputers generating frame-perfect artificial videos to effectively deceive everyone. Nope; free Reddit account, and 5 minutes with a PC keyboard).
Been there and absolutely can see this happening, it is sometimes a prodromal symptom called a 'sign of reference' [1].
I recall during my first psychosis episode thinking a TNT logistics van contained a bomb and was being used as a terrorist vehicle to blow up a building (or maybe at the time I think it could have been targeting myself directly).
Also, in that same episode, the train stations in Sydney were being plastered on every possible space and surface with high contrast white on blue posters that said "HEY TOSSER!" [2]; it was an anti littering ad campaign bringing some levity to the situation. My mind was overwhelmed by both its alerting nature and the fact that everywhere I would turn I'd see a poster, and in my infirmity it felt like someone was pointing a finger an inch from my forehead arresting me to say I should stop being a tosser in the derogatory (Australian slang) sense (though my mind was contending with the many multiple meanings).
On one hand you're correct, but on the other hand Carol is a very common name and this is a very reasonable reaction. I'm split, and I think this is plausible enough to take seriously.
Manufacturers for 100 years didn’t try to wrap their fridges in ads, or tune the compressor sound to a commercial jingle. They sold mostly honest products to cool your food efficiently.
But when they add an LED display and Internet connection, suddenly they forget about cooling your food and impulsively add a bunch of adversarial functionality, meaning functions that monetize the consumer rather than keeping the food cool.
It’s like the Internet advertising ecosystem is a virus intent on infecting anything and anyone with an Internet connection, making them do bizarre customer-hostile things they never would have done otherwise.
You are way off: it's just about money. For a long time, making appliances was an ok business, making good stuff, selling them, factories running, employment, margins ok, ... and there was progress/innovation to do.
Now that there is not much to update or innovate with, and companies have already squeezed workers in Bengladesh to the max, the only current innovation and additional money source are "connected" and "ads".
I don't see any contradiction between the two takes; I suspect capital pressure will force us into an inhumane dystopia where baseline existence is miserable, and quiet rational thought is a luxury.
I read [Unauthorized Bread (exerpt) by Doctoro](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...) this year which was pretty approachable read on the topic. Not severely interesting or mind blowing if you're already here hopefully but did make me wonder how I could sneak it into my mums reading list.
"I just saw something incredibly cool! A big floating ball that lit up with every color in the rainbow, plus some new ones that were so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried."
"Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?"
"Yeah..."
"They have a college kid wear that to attract customers."
"Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!"
As an aside, having scroll that thread, Reddit is a shambles. There's more deleted comments and related justification comment than actual comments. Make for a jarring experience.
Another example: r/AskHistorians is so heavily moderated almost every comment gets deleted.
Their standards of quality are very high. It's not a sub to push your views or argue, it's a sub for historians or people who can back an answer with academic references. So most comments and answers will get modded.
It's oddly refreshing. No flamewars, no junk comments, no "everybody knows the reason X did Y is Z" because that won't be accepted by the mods.
AskHistorians is far and away the best moderated sub on the site, but it relies entirely on guidelines that you can understand and agree with. Moderation on other subs (no clue about this one) is so heinously biased it makes them unusable. Very common on political and news oriented subs....
It's a legal advice subreddit; they tend to have stricter moderation because their primary goal is to get the OP an answer to their question or advice on how to consult a legal professional about their issue. Posts like the one linked here tend to be a magnet for people more interested in the drama than the actual legal principles, so they end up being a wasteland of removed comments.
Exactly. There are reasons for those many deleted comments. It's specific to this subreddit for very good reasons and not something you can use to disparage all of reddit. Many subreddits have their own rules and culture.
It's not disparaging to point out a fact. The whole delete comment content but keep the comment and then add a reply comment with wordy reason for deletion of comment content is a shambles. And irrespective of whether it's on every subreddit or not, doesn't make it less so. It's basically just spam at this point.
My solution would be to simply delete the comment and PM the OP. If another user had already replied, replace the original content with a *short* reason for deletion, and PM the OP, leaving the replies in place unless they needed deleting.
Absolutely- I can't understand why it still has such a loyal base considering how low the quality is- I see more insightful discussion on facebook half the time
Because Reddit != Reddit and each subreddit has their own audience and moderation style. Most of Reddit might be a cesspit, but that doesn't mean all of it is.
I can't understand why cigarettes have such a loyal fanbase. They're smelly and expensive. Costing roughly 4k a year, I can't understand why someone wouldn't buy a nicer car or massive TV or something.
Whenever a platform is popular these days I just assume it is more addictive.
I knew using ad blockers is good for your mental health but this is plain creepy and unfair. Especially when advertisers know more and more about you as more and more everyday items are spying on you and serve you ads without any additional core functionality. Appliances don't get better, they are getting creepier to increase the return of investment for the manufacturers. The schizophrenics are just more sensitive to this enshittification of everyday items because they are quick to assume deliberate agency in chaotic events where there is none. But this is changing, for everybody.
The problem is today you can't really tell anymore whether this "Carol" the ad was addressing is the advertiser knowing that it's your name or just a random "clever" reference to a character in the TV show, I mean even after getting the resolution that it's the latter, nobody can be sure if this excludes the former, like the algorithm decided to send Carol an ad about a show with a Carol in it. It's not good to have to make up your mind about it even when you are not suffering from schizophrenia.
It's annoying, it's intrusive, it wastes your time and ruins your day. And it makes you hate your new tech, makes you hate tech in general, because it's a big "fuck you we can do what we want with you now" towards the customers. No wonder Luddites are making a come back, that's just self-defense.
Open source, as in corporate outsourcing software maintenance to free labour? No. Free software, as in four freedoms? Yes, because you could install your own firmware that doesn't show advertisements.
That's what the whole GPLv3 debacle was about after all.
Stallman may have not imagined this specific scenario, but he absolutely did conceive of owner-hostile software that could not be replaced.
You could, but would most people? Most people voluntarily subject themselves to garbage adware-ridden SmartTVs even though this is a problem you can solve with a £12 dongle and no software installation at all. If the humble HDMI cable defeats the average person’s technical ability, what difference would it make if they could technically install their own firmware?
As a schizotypal person, I'm unsure how more people aren't exhibiting paranoid schizophrenic symptoms in this wildly untrustworthy digital age.
Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.
Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.
It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).
My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.
Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
Society, in a sense, is highly dependent on trustworthy interactions. Credit, ownership transfers, banking, etc. all depend on trust. If we go back to only being able to trust in-person interactions, we'll be stepping back to a financial system from over 100 years ago.
Because of this, I believe that solutions will be developed. Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the government depends on a solution being found.
Because their old fridge died and they need a new one now, and this is all that's in stock.
Because they didn't buy the fridge, their landlord did.
Because the fridge is installed at a workplace, or community centre, or other location at which the individual has no effective choice.
Because there are no new fridges with other desired features which don't have screens.
Because, at some future date, absent legislation or crushing litigation, no non-screen, ad-free fridges exist.
Substitute for "fridge" and "ads" any of number of other consumer / general appliances: stoves, washing machines, dishwashers, phones, televisions, thermostats, doorbells, petrol pumps, etc., or features: cameras, microphones, speakers, iris scanners, thumbprint readers, facial recognition, etc., etc.
I recently tried this for a new TV - buying a regular “non-smart” TV without the internet features without being “AI-enabled” (whatever the fuck that means).
It wasn’t possible - there was literally no TV available that didn’t have a small computer built in to connect to the internet and send all my usage data somewhere.
I probably have to find a second hand one somewhere or just continue to live without one.
Not saying that it’s the same with fridges - but who knows a few years down the line it might be…
If there is one appliance in my house that does not need a LCD screen and «smart» features, it’s my fridge. It was installed maybe 6 years ago, I adjusted some temperature settings and I’ve never touched the dials again.
If modern ad tech and future holographic display technology makes schizophrenic symptoms indistinguishable from regular waking consciousness in our Bitchun society...does that make us all crazy? or all sane?
When I first saw somebody complain about the Pluribus smart fridge ad I immediately knew something like this was going to happen. How did Apple/Samsung not think this through?
if you read the entire reddit thread, OPs sisters name actually was Carol. That's why it wigged her out so much and triggered her schizophrenia to kick in I suppose.
Back in the day we asked webmasters to run their web sites through Bobby for accessibility checks.
I am curious if any LLM work like this is being done. If it were really a smart fridge, it would moderate its users content appropriately. Eg I don’t want haram ads, don’t freak me out, I’m color blind.
Every time I see an article on HN about a "smart" device doing shitty things, my first thought is why would someone (especially from this crowd, who's supposed to be enlightened about the state of enshittification of tech) buy any IoS device in the first place ?
What good could you expect from an appliance that's permanently communicating with its non-giving a f*ck about users, profit driven, immoral and unethical mothership ? Would you really expect your life to be better after buying such a product ?
There's an old joke that a tech enthusiast will have "smart" everything in their house, while someone who works in tech keeps a shotgun in case their 10 year old laser printer makes a funny noise...
I work in the IoT industry and delight in making things work automatically.
I live in a log cabin in the back woods with minimal technology and drive an older car with actual knobs and physical switches for controls because I've seen how the sausage is made.
Don’t buy appliances with anything but a small screen. Any large screen on any appliance will be used to show ads. If not now then eventually.
It’s also a gimmick, and gimmicks on things like appliances and cars are red flags for poor quality. Appliances in particular are best when simple and designed for their function. “Feature” means “thing that will break.”
this post is a meme (or an attempt to shed light at the problem) referencing a video by louis rossmann who foreshadows that something like this could hypothetically happen
FYI, the slogan ""WE'RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU, CAROL" on a yellow background is from the Apple TV Show "Pluribus" (Or "PLUR1BUS"). It would be an ad for that show. It is indeed creepy at times.
The main character is called "Carol". As also, it seems is the person who saw it here.
1/2500 .. What is the probability of being born blind?
1/100 .. What is the probability of having schizophrenia?
1/250000* .. What is the probability of both?
1/250000* .. What is the probability of both + having resources to have it diagnosed?
[*] Assuming genetic blindness (born this way) and schizophrenia (elevated genetic risk) are not somehow inversely linked.
So, in the US:
340MM people -> 1360 who are blind+schizophrenic.
Reduce that by half or so, since schizophrenia tends to emerge in or after adolescence. And since it may be confusable at older ages with other brain degradation (is this true?).
So call it 700 people in the US alone. This is plenty for statistical significance.
I chose the US because all people will have adequate access to this level of medical care. This is also true in many many other countries, but certainly not all.
The US has 4.1% of the world population. Figure 50% of the world does not have this level of medical access. It's probably less than that, but maybe not.
This suggests about 10,000 people around the world who fit the criteria.
>Any ad shown would be limited to the cover screen widget, which displays news, weather, and calendar events.
>The ad shown in the Reddit photo is of the fridge’s Samsung Internet app. Through that, an ad seems to have shown up organically through a third-party website.
Here's the docs that talk about ads on the cover screen:
The gut reaction of too many geeks is "I can't believe you'd install a smart fridge in your home". But we need to think about this differently. Imagine if vehicles had no mandatory safety checks. How many people know anything about car safety? You'd get people barrelling down the highway with broken suspension, bald tyres or worse. We are the professionals. It's our responsibility to keep the public safe and stop shit like this happening. The software engineers who implemented this at Samsung should be struck off. Well, we could start by having something to be struck off from. I'm done with assuming individual developers will be scrupulous. We need real consequences to come from higher up. It's way past the point that this is fucking with people's lives.
It also falls apart over when more and more products become "smart" to the point where you can't really even buy one without things like this, like TVs now or cars for that matter. I'm dreading the day where I end up forced to watch an ad before starting my car.
I do think some kind of ethics training/education/licensing/organization is long overdue for software devs.
It's the smug superiority too many "tech smart" people have.
"Why would you buy HP? Everyone knows that it stands for Horrible Product."
"Serves you right for getting a TV with built in Netflix, everyone knows that it's a backdoor to botnet!"
I don't think it's apologetics for dogpoop corporate behavior, directly. But it has that effect because those of us with knowledge enjoy being smart asses or belittling those whose ignorance rewards trends we disagree with.
People should be able to go into a store and buy a thing without researching how evil it has become in the decade or two since the last time they did. Or move into a house pre-furnished. That is a failure of legislatures, not of average Joe.
Real consequences from higher up... for ads on a fridge? Corporate execs only care about money. Engineers aren't going to get themselves fired every time someone asks for a feature they don't agree with. Government? We don't need more nanny laws.
What we need is for people to think for themselves. The powers that be aren't going to save you from all the bad things. Call out the bad things to educate people, and vote with your wallet.
There's a whole growing class of people that do not have the ability to vote with their wallet. Fridges, TVs etc will all be at their cheapest because they're subsidized by ads. Or worse, if you're a renter then there's a big incentive for apartments to put up smart fridges in every room both as a selling point and for ad revenue.
How would you propose to deal with apartments having every fridge be a smart one?
> You'd get people barrelling down the highway with broken suspension, bald tyres or worse.
You have this in most of the US, and people rail against any attempt to bring it in because they're frightened that garages will not give them their cars back if they think it's got something wrong with it.
I've seen people driving cars in the US that you wouldn't even be able to get a scrapyard to take in the UK, they'd tell you to just sweep it into a bag and put it in the recycling.
Unless this is satire, one of the most frightening comments I have read here in a while. Not because of any intended malice, but precisely because of its very absence in advocating something that is the psychological version of eugenics. Much like the Formics in Ender's Game (or the protomolecule in the Expanse), the scariest type of monster is the one that genuinely has no malicious intent, but simply cannot comprehend our individuality, our desire to live and be free, and our fear of pain.
If it is satire, it's very good. They pointed out exactly how their proposed dystopia is consistent with policies that already exist.
Withholding autonomy from anyone with a diagnosed mental/neurodevelopmental disorder or an IQ below 100 is the logical conclusion of banning drugs, alcohol, or prostitution. It's all the product of a mindset which presumes that adults aren't sufficiently competent to make their own personal life decisions, and need to be forced into the correct decisions through threats of violence.
I know that sounds like a horrible violation of individual freedom, but we already treat children and cognitively impaired elderly people that way. Maybe to graduate from childhood to adult-who-can-sign-contracts, have sexual relationships, vote, etc. everyone has to pass a test, and it's retested periodically in case you regress.
if its harmful in some way to some person the “obvious” solution is to means test the entire population for their competency to vote or have sex? i dont own a samsung fridge, but okay sure. sign me up for some weird battery of invasive tests and write me out of life so Samsung can sell hardware and ads.
maybe samsung can even serve me some personalized ads based on my test results.
everyone in big tech is guided by “CAN we do this?” and never “SHOULD we do this?” and theyre totally unaccountable for all of it.
it doesnt matter who it hurts or how it hurts them. thats why they they do whatever they want.
and if something goes wrong, hey i know! lets just turn the screws even tighter on every man woman and child so Samsung can do whatever it wants.
Id tell you to go hell but it sounds like we’re already all in it.
im sorry if thats rude but it actually was the most polite thing i could come up with.
Sounds reasonable to test them as well. You shouldn’t be allowed to build home appliances if you’re disabled to the degree you fail this test. Executives, other employees, etc.
Children and the elderly are often not treated as human, and it's not a good thing. We should be looking at restricting corporate freedom a little bit before jumping to creating another explicit legal underclass of people.
Why can't I read it too? Replies act like it was something over-the-top great, yet HN isn't showing it to me?
Which brings us back to the topic: why would anyone use HN when it is not good for its single purpose: sharing text between users? It's not even like a fridge with ads, where an ad is an additional annoyance, but fridge functions still work. HN sucks at its very purpose.
I don't see ads, thanks to ad blocking tech in browsers and smartphones. Any time that happens to fail and I get to endure an ad, I am amazed that regular people without ad blocking tech can endure this onslaught.
The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past. Let's not even entertain that idea.
An acceptable middle ground could have been designated areas for ads, which you have to seek out to see them. Think of the Yellow Pages.
Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves. They are lobbying against all limits and controls. The only solution is to eradicate ads entirely and to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.
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