Until the day it starts asking your support contract number…

Can you recommend any particular sellers?

My oven stops working with some nonsensical error message when I try to use it above 350F, so I'm in the market for a new one.

I think they're designed to be more durable too. A consumer microwave / food processor isn't intended to run 8 hours a day.

Any particular brands on the induction stoves? I may want to move on from gas someday.

Commercial induction is pretty solid in a home. Microwaves too if you have a spare 220v hanging around in your kitchen. Mostly just because of the better controls as you mentioned though. A non-commercial appliance with a free spinning knob would be about as good.

Other than that though, and I have a lot of professional cooking experience, I wouldn't. They're generally uninsulated, made of just sheets of stainless steel. Touching them can burn you, they can have sharp edges and corners that can badly cut.

Their safety assumes frequent and thorough cleaning regimes. Where a residential system will have safer failure modes if not maintained correctly, a commercial one may just become a grease fire instead.

Also the dimensions and their dynamics just are often not good for the kinds of cooking you do at home. It takes an hour to heat a full-size uninsulated commercial stove's oven to baking temp. Commercial gear is generally built around that assumption: that you will turn it on once, every single day, and run it for 12-18 hours straight. That completely changes the design, efficiency, and maintenance constraints in ways that may not work at home.

I used to want a big two-basic stainless commercial sink with sprayer. I stayed in an airbnb with that once, and it turns out it takes several gallons of water to fill that even a few inches, a minimal amount to wash dishes. A restaurant's water line can do that in seconds, it can take minutes on a home one, depending.

There are definitely specific, individual pieces where the commercial versions are easily adapted to home use and superior. There are many more cases where they aren't. A blanket "buy commercial" is not good advice imo.

This. When my Cuisinart food processor bowl broke for the 2nd time, I went and got a RobotCoupe professional model. The cheese grater attachment I got for it says that you shouldn't run it for longer than 4 hours! at a time. Once you start going commercial, you will not look back. Pay more (if you buy new), work forever and if they do break, there are people/places you can get them serviced.

Aren’t they too big for a regular home kitchen?

I have found that Alexa does things randomly once a week or so, e.g. start playing music or responds to a question I didn't ask.

I would be concerned that Alexa would turn on the faucet silently without me knowing, potentially causing a flood.

I wouldn't buy one. Especially at that price point. But I admit that a faucet which could reliably do things like "dispense 6 ounces of water" is kind of a neat idea. But I wouldn't want it tied to Amazon or anything like that. It'd need to be self-contained, with it's own computer, speaker, mic, voice analysis, no internet connection required, and a reliable failure mode that never interferes with the handle working. In other words, something which will never exist.

That's incredibly stupid. The onion article writes itself.

It has been increasingly difficult to do that, probably because a lot of these "smart" appliances sells for more and thus have more "vote".

Last time I went to buy a refrigerator, there maybe only one or two that were freed of the extra features that I did not want, compared to the 30 or so that were on display. And TVs without wifi were nonexistent.

Thermostat companies are too busy selling remote administration connections to power companies to allow them to control your thermostat to care about what you, the end user, wants.

Many Texans discovered this the hard way.

Dont worry, by 2035 or manufacturers will buy laws requiring all appliances to last only 5 years at most. It will be like the right to read, but for physical artifacts.

Once a hardware interlock safeguard requirement is put in place by a regulatory body it’s rarely removed. See British fused sockets for instance.

My threat model allows me to be completely cavalier with a dishwasher. I would be considerably more serious with safety concerns were I to put a chemo machine in my garage. My suspicion is that people who haven’t shipped home appliances connected to mains are not aware of how much of the engineering effort goes into making these machines safe relatively to how little it does for adjacent categories and are mis-indexing risk over bigger issues like vendor lock in as with the Sonos upgrade fiasco a few years back.

My experience is with making a few consumer electronics products and running through the UL/CE gauntlet. In those cases, the ‘materiel’ required to make sure you don’t shock your users to death is a bigger lift than what happens if one of nine I/O lines are held high or low or fuzzed in interesting ways when there are secondary layers of fusing built in.

From what I recall your background was in industrial machines and I concede the point that if sent an inappropriate signal, disaster would ensue. I don’t connect my CNC machines to my network but I meant to scope this discussion to home goods which are meant to have a lot of protections built in - specifically against the “user” - which compared to “internet” or “electricity” will always trump unpredictableness :-)

I agree with you. But it's just the oven, so the risk is just wasting some gas and heating my house up a little until I notice. The cooktop burners can't be operated remotely, so there's no risk of unintended open flames.

Also, because of the crappy WiFi it's almost never connected anyway.

Agile was in use for many years before this craziness started, I think you need another explanation.

I don't think "Agile" is responsible, but it is a supporting character here for sure. Let me give a little history from my perspective.

I got involved in that movement before the word "Agile" existed; I was really interested in the ideas coming from the Extreme Programming folks and had tried them out on a small project in 2000. All of the people I met early on really wanted to do software well; the question was how to do it well and responsively. Unit and acceptance tests were just part of the process [1], and Kent Beck also wrote Test Driven Development By Example [2] around then. So in my view there was strong early interest in quality.

But this was all happening during the rise of the internet, which changed people's expectations for software delivery. Previously, releasing every 18 months was seen as reasonable. Suddenly the web was changing people's expectations. (Although not as fast as you'd think; a consultant pal told me in 2004 that Weight Watchers still had an annual release cycle for their website.) Executives and managers were under pressure to deliver faster.

As I wrote about elsewhere [3], that created a need for Agile that was filled not by the humanistic culture and quality-oriented practices of my end of the Agile world, but by consultants and certification programs watering down the material until executives could slap some new labels on their same old bullshit and call it Agile.

It turns out that bullshit long predates Agile. If you go back to Royce's original 1970 paper on Waterfall [4], one of his big points is that it doesn't work. Why, then, did it become the predominant way to organize software projects? Because it feels good to managers. For most of the project, it gives them a feeling of control and competence. That feeling is false, as it just delays all of the real-world feedback until near the nominal end. But they can perform confidence and competence to their boss, which is vital in managerialist [5] organizations.

So I totally agree with you that Agile on average has mutated into a garbage pipeline. And that happened through a whole industry that produced manager-friendly process theater that threw out a quality focus and most of the Agile values, while using the Agile labels. But I think the real responsibility lies in our management culture and values, which both precedes Agile and whose harm extends well beyond it.

[1] http://www.extremeprogramming.org/map/loops.html

[2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/test-driven-development...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170923232057/http://agilefocus...

[4] https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a...

[5] See, e.g., https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781...

I don't think that the problem is unique to software engineering - manufacturers have been skimping on engineering quality for centuries. I believe that the problem is worse with software because (a) it's harder to judge quality for software than for physical goods and (b) most consumers seem to have been brainwashed into having much lower standards for software than for hardware.

> If the grid is very slightly over 50hz it means demand exceeds supply and vice versa.

Not to be too pedantic, but it's actually the opposite. Frequency drops as demand goes up, which requires more supply to compensate. This is because the generators physically spin more slowly as they are put under more load.