Comment by jdiff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdiff | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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