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2 years later, Amazon discontinues updates on the toaster. No one notices, but it still toasts. 8 years later, people hack them and cause them to burn down some houses. Of course, it was the owner's fault - they were running a discontinued toaster that wasn't receiving software updates anymore.

Thankfully my seven year old iToaster hasn’t succumbed to the same fate.

Yet.

The iTailer will shutdown all servers for that model on Jan 10, 2021, rendering it a glorified paperweight. Sorry.

They said the next newer model of that will no longer receive updates at the same time.

Jan 10, 2021 - back in the good old days when see-through glass was still the norm.

This sounds eerily like the WD hard drive debacle going on right now.

Yeah, and the fault clearly is that, after discontinuing updates, they still supported the device in their cloud. They should have bricked the devices, removing write support ;-)

I’m not sure whether to add that smiley here. That would have been a big middle finger to their customers, but the alternative they chose turned out to be worse for many customers. Maybe, the rule should be “if a product requires a subscription, the product should be free”?

In WD’s case, it surprised me their cloud still supported a device they stopped supporting in 2015.

WD's My Toaster

"We used to toast your data, now we can toast your bread!*"

* Contains forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future performance or result expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Although forward-looking statements contained in this presentation are based upon what management of the Company believes are reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management’s estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

WD My Toaster Live!

The My Toaster is just a regular USB toaster.

5 years later they are unsupported, Amazon gets hacked, and all your bread gets deleted.

You forgot the part where it refuses to toast your unlicensed bread.

For those unaware, this is exactly the main point of the story "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow. I liked the story and would recommend it.

A link to an exerpt: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

(The excerpt contains the story in its entirety. It's excerpted from a book that consists of multiple stories.)

Radicalized (2019). Four novellas, including the bread one. I just happened to have read it last week; it's a solid collection of stories. Model Minority from that collection is a good story as well.

That was a great story. Thank you for linking it.

Seconded. Well worth reading.

Thank you for sharing this!

Also the part where the toaster version is outdated and it won't start toasting before it's up to date.

Also the part where the toaster version is 6 years out of date and someone gains root access and deletes all your data

As an avid toast data-logger that would really put me over the edge. I have 9 years of daily toast data and I graph it in interesting ways a la Mr. Wolfram

But you don’t store your toast data in the toaster do you?

The cloud is just somebody else’s toaster.

It's because it mines Bitcoins to generate heat, so it must be connected to the Bitcoin network.

Every slice has unique nooks and crannies to create a 2D pattern, allowing for DRM and personalization!

Personalization so they can never be returned, right?

---

Pepperidge Farms.... D: NOOOOOO

https://www.heb.com/product-detail/pepperidge-farm-original-...

My grandmother made those in her Sunbeam toaster before loading them with room-temperature butter and Laura Scudder's smooth peanut butter. (Yes, my grandmother kept butter at room temperature but refrigerated the eggs. Go figure... grandmothers.)

How you gonna spread cold butter? :)

Yeah, standard American kitchen: butter on the counter (in a semi-airtight butter tray) and eggs in the fridge.

I have never seen anyone in America keep their butter on counter and not in the fridge. I have lived in 7 states in both coasts and upper Midwest.

Generally, I assumed if it’s in the refrigerator in grocery store (which butter is) then it goes in refrigerator at home.

How do you spread the butter then?

Or do you mean something else than butter?

I grew up on a farm and the first first 15 or so years of the life ordinary butter was the onlh alternative.

It had to be kept in a jar at the counter or it would become unusable.

Thin slices, then spread those.

Take out the butter you need beforehand to thaw. Or I’ve seen people microwave for 5 seconds. My family stopped using butter outside of occasional uses years ago though due to saturated fats.

Generally, I see people using the spreadable alternative to butter though.

One cube goes in the tray, the rest stays in the fridge. Otherwise making toast for breakfast would be impossible because you'd have to wait an eternity for the butter to soften, at which point you'd be late for work/school/etc.

City folk vs country folk? Wagering a guess, chilled butter won't squash during handling so manufacturers, transporters, and retailers keep it cold? I think it's odd to keep open sticks of butter in the fridge. Spreading cold butter is a pain. Ghee is seen in stores outside of refrigerated sections.

Butter starts to go off after a few weeks at room temp, which is plenty for a single stick in the butter dish at home but mildly inconvenient for shippers and retailers, or people who like to buy staple ingredients in bulk. It lasts for many months refrigerated, though.

You don't keep all the butter on the counter, just one stick in a butter dish at room temp so it's spreadable.

I assume that's what you're talking about. Keeping the butter dish in the fridge at all times would be pretty strange--butter is good for weeks at room temp, far longer than a single stick is likely to last.

I don't spread it. I put it on like a slice of cheese. So I prefer it to be really cold as it's easier to slice. Damn, I love butter on hot toast XD

> My grandmother made those in her Sunbeam toaster before loading them with room-temperature butter and Laura Scudder's smooth peanut butter. (Yes, my grandmother kept butter at room temperature but refrigerated the eggs. Go figure... grandmothers.)

American commercial eggs (and this has been true for a long time) need refrigeration because thet are washed, which reduces surface pathogens but compromises the eggs natural resistance to environmental pathogens and spoilage. Meanwhile, in most climates, butter is safe out of refrigeration. So, your grandmother was doing it right.

Get yourself one of these: https://www.butterbell.com/

We buy the single brick of European butter for toast and daily use. It stays in the butter bell on the counter. We also buy sticks of unsalted butter for cooking and baking. Those live in the fridge until needed. Thaw on the counter in the morning if you need it soft when cooking.

…Are they selling NFTs for the finished, unique works of “art”?

Non-fungible toast?

I'd buy toast that can't grow fungus.

I'm sure there are FDA-approved additives that'll achieve that.

Toast is licensed, not sold. You are given a perpetual non-exclusive license for use of resultant toast. Upon termination of contract, you are to return all toast in its original form to the licensing entity (whoever it is this week).

I self-chip my homemade gluten-free bread with Doritos Flamin' Hot Limon.

> You forgot the part where it refuses to toast your unlicensed bread.

The RFID chips make the toast taste better!

A QR code is baked on the backside on it in the bakery. People with too much time (and bread) on their hands soon figure out which spots you need to darken with a clothes iron so the checksum still matches and the toaster accepts the slice.

The toast is coated with special chemicals which will cause the body of anyone whose genetic code does not match the license owner to reject it.

>The toast is coated with special chemicals which will cause the body of anyone whose genetic code does not match the license owner to reject it.

welcome to paradise!

Later, when it's discovered that the toaster occasionally catches on fire, users are encouraged to pay $9.99 per month for "Toaster Plus," which causes an alarm to play before the fire starts, so that you know to get the extinguisher.

Then they let you customize the alarm noise, so that you can choose how to be alerted of the future house fire. Soon, companies get rich selling $3 "toaster fire ringtones."

Eventually, even after fire-less toasters are "invented," people prefer the old, "still catching on fire" ones, since "toasters have always worked that way."

Toaster plus is 5.99 if you subject yourself to an add prior to toasting.

Note that our Face Detection technology will be ensuring that you pay attention during the full duration of the ad.

"A watched pot never boils, but watched toast finishes faster." Black box testing has found that the toaster's heating coils are throttled when eye tracking doesn't find anybody watching the ad.

It's like the Xbox Verification Can story.

This was also after a massive recall due to an incident with a high end Peloton toaster and a small child. All of the $9,000 FedBucks™ units were recalled and the "Just Toast" feature removed

Toaster Plus sounds a bit like Xerox's "Scorch Eliminator" from the 1950s, which was a small fire extinguisher for when the photocopier overheated.

I enjoyed reading your story.

All the while I couldn't help but want to share how good pan-fried/toasted bread is. It's the butter of course, just generously butter up a pan, spread the bread so it soaks up the butter. Takes a little longer, but you also get to feel like a cook.

and no ads

Stovetops haven't been a thing in most homes in over a decade. Everyone either heats up frozen meals or "cooks" separated ingredients in a special MealWave oven. True chefs are underrated for some reason that I still don't fully understand.

Luckily the world is burning, so many people just cook on the sidewalks. The smart cooks learned that the solar panels get pretty damn hot, so they've been hijacking the roofs. Electricity prices now vary with meal timings (as well as everything else).

Citation?

Every home I've ever seen has a cook top. Everyone has pots and pans. What am I missing?

Pretty much everything, sadly.

The future life and times of consumer us.

I read the same exact thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27638473

It's a fictional story about the future, like the one starting this thread. Took me a second too.

You forget the Amish.

And Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalog is looking better than ever.

Second this. Another nice technique if you have a toaster oven (or presumably any oven) is to toast the bread a bit first, then pull it out and butter it, then put it back in. Way better toast.

I just had this for breakfast, with scrambled eggs, mushrooms and cheese. Much recommend.

> and no ads

Is this not an ad for pan-fried bread?

I use to be so enthusiastic about technology. Now I almost dread the next innovation for how it will inevitably find it’s major use case in advertising. I swear I’m turning Luddite.

You're not alone.

As a 28 year old in tech for the last 7 years, I am definitely a Luddite.

Its heartbreaking some of the most talented minds in software engineering are just making ads appear.

The internet is an ad network with content at this point.

Smart people have failed to outsmart business people.

What solidified this in me was when Microsoft announced Trusted Computing, some 15 years ago[0]. I was scarred with the fact that technology enables so much abuse and that the companies will spin it until it sounds like a plus for the customer. And later, it basically became the Zeitgeist. We kind of returned to remotely managed thin clients, instead of Computing really being Personal.

[0] https://www.mcpressonline.com/programming-other/microsoft/mi...

That's only the first iteration. Next, they'll only load individual packed proprietary toast-pods. Budget third-party pods will work, until the manufacturer rolls out a silent firmware update to brick your toaster, on the grounds of violating the EULA

You forgot the part where this toaster is free. Nobody except DIY hobbyists and tinfoil privacy weirdos actually pay for a toaster in 2050.

This is perhaps the existential crisis that engineering in all its forms has to deal with. Much of the Western ethos and certainly engineering culture in general is about making life better. Instead, our only task now is making it more profitable.

Fact is probably worse than fiction here:

Samsung fridges have machine vision systems to catalog their contents, then combine the data with data from samsung smart TVs. That way, they can be joined against your tv watching habits. This is all to better target ads.

If you disable it, then it breaks the demand response function on the fridge, indirectly killing polar bears and other living things.

They cost as much (or more) than non-connected versions.

Got a source for this? A quick search didn’t turn up anything for me.

They’re really years ahead of the pack in this villainy, so I don’t doubt that it’s true.

You would have to ask the polar bears.

Except they all got killed by people who tampered with the safety features in their refrigerators.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/11/samsung-is-using-computer... says

”There is no planned release date for Bixby Vision for refrigerators, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. It’s more of a concept than a feature today”

On the other hand, that’s from over 2 years ago, and https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00062803/ says

“Did you ever think the day would come when you could talk to your refrigerator, and it would actually listen? With Bixby on Family Hub, you can ask to see the contents of your fridge or even start playing music without lifting a finger.”

So, the camera is there. Whether it has machine learning to detect contents and connects that with you tv, I wouldn’t know.

The picture in the article is so laughable. 6 plates each with one perfect item, left uncovered for the camera. My fridge is absolutely crammed with items, almost all of which are in a Tupperware or plastic bag, or shoved into the crisper drawer. Leftovers, chopped veg, etc. But it's okay that this is a hard CV challenge … there is no useful feature to be created here anyways.

The ads unfortunately are all for mobile game scams, which have little to no correlation with the contents of your fridge

WiFi password? Even by 2035ish it’d come with integrated mobile data so the user won’t have to worry about ensuring it has consistent network access to the mothership.

Of course! It'll come preconfigured with your Amazon account, so it'll automatically integrate with other Amazon Home appliances that you have.

Except the bread bin your mother gifted you for Christmas is a Google device, and the two do not work together. As such your toaster is always adding a reminder to buy bread onto your Amazon Fresh grocery list. Your fridge is constantly reminding you about this, whenever you are more than 2m away, and it is in "suggested products" mode.

Compared to the adverts you saw before - often for processed junk food even though you are trying really hard to be on a diet - you actually find the bread adverts a relief and less distracting.

So I noticed this week that my Canon printer was able to connect to my "secure" Wi-Fi during its initial setup without at any point prompting for a password. How worried should I be? Did it steal the keys from my computer?

That... sounds really really odd. Are you sure you (or someone else in your household) didn’t put in the key at some point? How did you notice that it connected? Which model number? What kind of WiFi security?

I'm sure, because I took it out of the box and did the first time setup. WiFi is standard WPA2. Printer is a Canon Pixma TR4527.

Here's the process, for those interested. And I did work hard to see if there's any other way.

1. You download the printer "install software" from Canon's website.

2. Run the installer. It makes you read a long legal agreement, including that you won't use the printer for any antisocial purposes.

3. And then asks for your permission to install monitoring software to collect data from your printer. Probably including whatever confidential documents you print? Apparently in China all this stuff gets sent automatically to a "research firm". Oh yeah, and if you don't agree, it installs the software anyway but they say they won't use it.

4. The printer initially acts as its own WiFi access point. Your PC disconnects from its router and connects to the printer. What if your neighbour has the same printer? Who knows. Maybe you'd connect to that too.

5. The PC then connects back to the router's WiFi network... And the printer does 's too. Somehow. Never gave it the WiFi password. But I'm guessing it just asked my PC very politely.

Scary stuff.

This is already happening. Expect it to be mainstream in a few years.

The toaster is free, subsidized by burning advertisements into your toast.

Animated ads where the skip button doesn't work.

Unless you apply Skippy™ Brand peanut butter to the toast.

The ads are all encoded as animated Jifs™.

It won't be free, it will just be subsidized - the exact amount the unnecessary hardware cost.

Nah, it's just a bit cheaper until non-ad supported toaster makers go out of business, and then you both pay, and watch ads. Like with cable television.

A 3 year old account that's been waiting for this moment.

Ever read Ubik? I think the only thing missing is that it should charge your for each piece of toast you make and remit the payment to either the manufacturer or your landlord. If you are behind on rent, you can’t make toast.

Ubik was one of my favs. He has to put in a coin to get out the door of his apartment in the morning, right? 5th Element stole that with the cigarette dispenser.

Only use the recommended dose!

They sure do not make them like they used to!

The obligatory Technology Connections link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

It’s fiction like this that makes me less afraid of a reduced life span.

The opening of the Philip K Dick story Ubiq has a scene very much like this.

Cool. It reminds me of one of the characters from Shooting Fish (1997) who has a penchant for "psychoanalyzing" mid-century electric appliances so he can repair them. And, Brazil with needless complexity everywhere.

So I just hit up Amazon and found this: https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Cooking-R180-High-Speed-St...

Not sure if we have to wait until 2050

AI enabled toaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

(from Red Dwarf)

Man at that point I'd just make my own and keep a fire extinguisher handy. Making stuff hot with electricity isn't exactly rocket science.

But can I cancel my pro subscription without calling a support number? If so I may accept my dispotian fate with Grace and resignation.

You will be billed only 19.99/month for life and continue receiving the complementary Modern Strokers' catalog at no additional charge.

Edit: or you can switch to The Daily Cannibal. The freedom of choice is yours to enjoy.

The most unrealistic part is saying it took a few hours for it to arrive. I think delivery will be much faster by then.

The Oculus VR goggles (who has a TV anymore?) serving you Facebook ads also has attention sensors (hey it's already on your head, so it was easy to add that 5 cent brain-wave sensor!), and if your brain ever thinks "Hey, that looks interesting", they'd just tell the poor Deliveroo "contractor" to drop off the device at your house, for a "Free 7 day trial. Throw it in trash if you're not interested!".

Don’t give ideas - someone will actually start a startup and we’ll all suffer. Your 2050 will become 2025.

Late to comment, but couldn't resist the comparison with Ubik. The door that refuses to open until the protagonist deposits a coin, and threatens him when he begins to bypass it, could well be the AI toaster that berates you for not using approved bread.

Why can’t you just crumple some wires and make a toaster yourself?

(Because outlets require certified chips with power-certificate-chain validation on both sides of a power cord, if you ever get your hands on such an old-fashioned hardware.)

This sounds like one of Cory Doctorow’s short stories in his Radicalized book.

The is reminds me of the centrifugal bumblepuppy in brave new world.

It’s a contraption that exists because there a rule that each new version of a thing must consume more resources than what can before.

You know, for the economy.

Thank you, it's the most depressing thing I've read in a week . However, I find it wildly optimistic this won't be our world before the 30s are over.

This made me sad.

By 2050, the out of control inflation has made bread too expensive for everyone except the top 1%. Toasters sold to normal folks scan barcodes on bread slices to check if the bakery is part of their bread insurance network. After playing the 5 minute ad, your toaster happily announces that your bakery is no longer covered, and asks if you want to make a $350 co-pay, with "Sign Up" and "More Details" buttons.

Relevant username.

(thanks for your dystopia, they sometimes show up on HN and I love them. This one is very well written)

I'll put this up in my favorite short stories section, along with the Verification Can and the Libertarian Police Department[0].

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

Avoid the loginwall at https://archive.is/j65k3

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow's story "Radicalized." https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/

Not to worry, we'll be in WW3 by then, as states try to respond to mass upheavals caused by our failure to stop catastrophic climate change. Toast will not be a primary concern.

Toast will not be a primary concern.

Bread will be though.

...let them eat toast!

come on now, it wouldn't be a red "Go" button, it would be "slide finger downwards to start toasting"

A series of photos of ever darkening toast. Swipe right when you find one that looks appetizing.

And then you have to get to know the quirks of your particular toaster to know in which direction you need to adjust by two shades to get what you actually want.

no camera on the toaster? no dystopian enough.

This is suck

I don't want an ESP32 or an ARM in my toaster.

I don't want bluetooth in my toaster. That shit is hard to clean.

I don't want a flashing OLED emoji on my toaster judging my diet. I do plenty of that myself: flashing emoji.

I don't want a toaster with a "personality." I want it to toast, only toast, and nothing but the toast, so help its electronic soul.

Sunbeam Radiant Control: ride or die. Anything made after the 60's is junk by definition.