[mewpmewp2]

If you have an image of the fridge you could have GPT vision interpret it and offer you recipes or what is missing.

I personally like the idea of smart home things and everything connected. It feels like it opens up so many possibilities or ideas.

Do I need it for survival? No. But I do like the idea and how it triggers my imagination.

[arter4]

>you could have GPT vision interpret it and offer you recipes or what is missing

What is missing and what I should buy are different things. If my fridge has yogurt, bacon and some hamburgers, you might say "well, you are missing eggs". Except maybe I don't want eggs. I may be even allergic. Or maybe I like eggs but I'm in some low-protein diet for whatever reason.

The goal of a fridge is not to have literally everything, is to store everything you think you need for some days.

As for recipes, yes, that's more creative, but I guess I would just actively Google that (or even use an old fashioned recipe book!) if I were looking for original recipes. Of course, you can also ChatGPT it, but the direct fridge -> ChatGPT interaction is a bit weird because maybe I don't want original recipes or maybe I'm going to eat out.

So a hypothetical (?) app that sends me notifications about what recipes ChatGPT suggests by looking at my fridge wouldn't be very appealing unless you're always looking for new recipes. If you're mostly cooking ordinary things, continuous "You could cook X" would count as spam, much like a lot of people skip (or try to skip) ads on Youtube and ignore random "buy this at 70% discount" emails. And if you're that passionate about new recipes I guess you're probably interested in cooking and don't need the fridge to tell you what's missing.

[midasuni]

“You are missing Evards brand milk, buy Evards for that fresh taste, I’ve added it to your list for you”

Any potential benefit from such a device would be destroyed by the cancerous advertising industry.

[arter4]

Exactly. This would turn a fridge into yet another thing serving ads. No thanks.

[Liftyee]

This is why we can't have nice things. Any new technology is instantly leveraged to shove ads down people's throats and get them to buy more things they don't need.

[mewpmewp2]

There would be alternative market for ads free for sure or open source alternatives where you could connect with your own selected LLMs.

[thfuran]

Like how there's an alternative market for dumb tvs, except they're more expensive and have worse screens?

[mewpmewp2]

TVs are a different type of product than a fridge though. With fridge once you have the basics covered you can be set.

[4RealFreedom]

And major brands would force you to pay a fee to disable advertising.

[mewpmewp2]

To me paying to disable ads is a fair deal.

[mewpmewp2]

I mean more interactive way, not notifications being sent.

E.g. you start interaction by asking the fridge - I am a bit tired, what is an easy thing to cook based on what I have in the fridge and I am stopping by the store, is there anything I should buy to have a few more options.

So GPT vision takes image of what is in the fridge and then tries to solve for that question. If user is allergic to something that would be in GPT's prompt.

[arter4]

Ok, but if it's interactive I can open a fridge, take a picture of it and upload it to ChatGPT. You wouldn't need a smart fridge for that.

You would need a smart fridge if you wanted to directly connect the fridge with ChatGPT. Which is what I assumed in the previous comment.

[mewpmewp2]

You may be at work, and store is on the way to work. Also what you described is quite many steps, and the images have to be taken at certain angles to capture everything.

It would be directly connected to GPT and you can either use it as mobile app or with other devices or fridge itself directly.

So for example you are at work, about to leave home, store is on the way and then you ask this question from the app. Fridge takes photo, forwards it with certain prompts to OpenAI APIs and then gives you the response.

[arter4]

So you're saying a fridge takes a photo (of itself, essentially... a selfie?), forwards it with certain prompts to a GPT and then gives you the response. But as I said earlier I might not like certain foods, or I may actively avoid certain foods for medical or religious reasons.

Now, if this was an explicit user-GPT interaction, you could prompt the GPT with "hey, I'm Muslim, what can I cook with this stuff?" or "hey, I'm lactose intolerant, what else could I buy?". You do need to trust the OpenAI provider, but not the fridge.

Instead, the fridge automatically talks to GPT. So if you want to avoid "dumb" suggestions you wouldn't be able to follow, you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?

I'm not "tinfoil hat" paranoid, I don't think people are out there to get me. But a certain dose of skepticism when it comes to data usage should be healthy, especially when many companies have been known to mess up this aspect (from Cambridge Analytica to Roomba employers sending pictures of a woman on the toilet to Facebook, and much more). You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?

[mewpmewp2]

In fridge it takes images from different angles, and different floors to make sure it is possible to identify all the items that exist in that fridge.

If you don't like certain foods, you can just customise the prompt that fridge sends to OpenAI. You can customise it through a web app or mobile app.

> you would have to tell your fridge you're Jew or Muslim or lactose intolerant or diabetic. Don't you see an issue with this?

What's the problem with storing your food preferences somewhere? People use dieting apps all the time on mobile.

> You cannot avoid this 100% unless you go to extreme lengths, but if you can avoid sending data to one more company, why not?

You are already sending your data in thousands of different ways and exposing yourself at any moment. I'm not saying you should do more of it, but food preferences seems like a very minor drop in the bucket of all that you are already exposing.

Most people store their images in a cloud, which already indicate amazing amount about them. Just using a smartphone is 1000x worse than having food preferences stored somewhere.

[rglullis]

It also (literally) opens up your home for many ideas and possibilities for attackers. Not just for the "haxxor" types, but the far more sneaky, sweet-talking ones.

It should not trigger just your imagination, but your paranoia.

[mewpmewp2]

Yes of course, but for example you already have your phone, laptops and computers with many things built in them. If you are ok with those, then it should be possible to build those smart devices with similar security and potential for attack.

[rglullis]

> If you are ok with those

I'm not. My phone, laptop and computers all run software that I get to install down to the OS (Linux, /e/OS), and I would never install something like the ChatGPT app on my phone.

> it should be possible to build those smart devices with similar security

It should be possible, but they are not. Don't forget: the "S" in IoT stands for "Security".

In any case, this is not even what I am talking about. What I am talking about is the "attack" being done by corporations into your house. It pains me to hear that people are willing to give so much of their privacy in the name of "convenience" and don't even show any slight concern over the thought of having so much data going to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and (now) OpenAI.

If you went to someone's home and they told you "by the way, my home is full of microphones and video cameras which are always on and used to power my digital assistant", how would you feel?

[mewpmewp2]

> by the way, my home is full of microphones and video cameras which are always on and used to power my digital assistant

Everyone are already walking around with smart phones that are perfectly able to do all of that.

> I'm not. My phone, laptop and computers all run software that I get to install down to the OS (Linux, /e/OS), and I would never install something like the ChatGPT app on my phone.

Fine if you do that.

> What I am talking about is the "attack" being done by corporations into your house. It pains me to hear that people are willing to give so much of their privacy in the name of "convenience" and don't even show any slight concern over the thought of having so much data going to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and (now) OpenAI.

I personally am not concerned about this, although I understand how people can be. I don't want to go my whole life avoiding things, concerned about what is being done with my data, and then I die. I have long dated option calls really out of money in all those companies (except OpenAI of course), in case one of them gets a massive data advantage and happens to discover singularity from this, so I would benefit from it anyway. Before that happens, they just use it to optimise ads for you, and I prefer optimised ads over random ads. Otherwise I'll do my best to block them, but if they get through, I prefer something I might actually be interested in and that might help me.

I prefer to see inventions and technology. At certain point humans will be outlived by technology anyway, and that's bound to happen. New inventions and tech are what is exciting and why I like living, seeing those things coming together.

[rglullis]

> Everyone are already walking around with smart phones that are perfectly able to do all of that.

Being able to do it is not the same as actually doing it.

The rest of your argument, sorry but I can not respond without feeling angry. It just feels like the rationalizations of a selfish, too-clever-by-half neomaniac.

[mewpmewp2]

> Being able to do it is not the same as actually doing it.

You could have smart devices similarly only react or go to active mode when you press a button on your watch etc.

> The rest of your argument, sorry but I can not respond without feeling angry. It just feels like the rationalizations of a selfish, too-clever-by-half neomaniac.

Okay, I agree that your words can describe me well, but what do you think the end game for humans or tech is? Why do we exist here? Are we just here to reproduce over and over again with no change? And if there's always change, aren't you curious what will happen in the future?

[arter4]

Yes but while you can install Linux on your own, or even build your own computer if you're interested, you don't get to build a fridge or its operating system, and you most likely don't even have a valid way to see how it's configured (you may be able to hack it somehow, but it would probably void any warranty).

So...

do you upgrade your fridge OS? Maybe, maybe not. What happens if you do and an upgrade fails?

does it talk to the Internet? If it has to (by design), then all bets are off. You could try to mirror traffic and take a packet capture, but a fridge OS could easily use HTTPS over a "smart.myfridge.com" domain and you wouldn't know what's going on.

How does it even authenticate to whatever remote server they have? If it uses tokens or client certificates, what happens when they expire?

I'm a sysadmin, I know things fail. Even laptops and phones. But, while I can see valid use cases for laptops and phones, I still fail to see the actual appeal of most "smart home" appliances, outside of security systems. And I don't want to have nightmares about my fridge certificate expiration or not being able to turn your light on because my fiber connection went down.

[mewpmewp2]

> Yes but while you can install Linux on your own, or even build your own computer if you're interested, you don't get to build a fridge or its operating system, and you most likely don't even have a valid way to see how it's configured (you may be able to hack it somehow, but it would probably void any warranty).

You could install open sourced things to that fridge. E.g. the fridge could either come with sensors immediately available or just have convenient mounts to place your own cameras.

Maybe the fridge could have a simple linux box, raspberry PI or whatever set up. There could be a market where you can flexibly pick how immediately available solution you want or if you want to put in everything yourself and control, depending on how concerned you are about privacy and how technical you are.

If you want to have full control, you can just do that.

> do you upgrade your fridge OS? Maybe, maybe not. What happens if you do and an upgrade fails?

Most smart home devices in my experience update through a mobile app connected to your WiFi.

> What happens if you do and an upgrade fails

Fridge itself would still work, just the picture taking and ai guidance wouldn't.

> How does it even authenticate to whatever remote server they have? If it uses tokens or client certificates, what happens when they expire?

Through mobile app can update, reset everything.

> And I don't want to have nightmares about my fridge certificate expiration or not being able to turn your light on because my fiber connection went down.

These basic things like light and other base features you make sure can work even if smart software fails.

[arter4]

>These basic things like light and other base features you make sure can work even if smart software fails.

Even ignoring the potential privacy concerns, you're assuming too much in terms of reliability.

When an AWS region went down a couple of years ago, a lot of smart fridges and lights didn't work properly (https://financialpost.com/technology/personal-tech/pitfalls-...).

[mewpmewp2]

That sounds like a problem with the developers of smart fridges. You just have to be able to use it without any connectivity as a baseline.

[thfuran]

It is possible, but it mostly doesn't happen. And even when it does, "similar security and potential for attack" means needing regular security updates, which they tend not to receive.