When you see Georgia maga minions accusing a Hyundai battery plant of using up all the Georgia farmers' water, but welcoming data centers, you question if they are on the correct medications.

If you've never had the experience of having to close and reopen the door while you're putting a huge load of groceries away, then your refrigerator is an antique! (I'm still not clear why "fridge" has a "d" in it, but "refrigerator" does not. No, I'm not saying I want the D!)

Obvious post was karma-whoring for a "Score:5, Insightful". Obviously!

I am trying to set up Matter in my home (Google Nest speaker(s) in every room.) My oven is on WiFi (useless feature), but not my fridge, it only has a beeper. The oven/stove talks Bluetooth to the over stove microwave/light/vent fan; that actually is a useful feature. The WiFi Kohler Faucet is also a useless feature, other than that is should eventually turn the faucet off if someone leaves it one. Which of course begs the question: why not build refrigerators that can close their own doors?

My GE Cafe fridge does have a beeper. That only works if I am withing earshot of it.

How do I train an LLM on Feng Shui?

I think we should focus more on garden bots that kills both pests and weeds. They already have a commercial farm robot that destroys weeds with frickin' laser beams! It uses AI to identify the weeds, and "learns" by compiling pictures of weeds.

AI

7b gemma nano models are... not terrible. I can see having a 30b model that uses 15gb on a phone that outperforms early (1H 2024 era) GPT 4 models by the end of the decade. Maybe in a year or two. Things are moving pretty fast. GPT4o mini was good enough for almost anyone already.

The "tablet in a central location" is useful as a message center to other members of the household. I live by myself, and I prefer retro. Of course, I have a Google Nest Speaker in every room of the house, so not THAT retro.

Never bought one because I don't consider the $1000 markup for the display to be worth it. The only real use I can think of is to have a camera on the inside of the door so that I don't have to open the door to see what is inside. I believe Samsung does a fridge that does that. But the benefit is not worth the cost.

My GE stove connects to me GE microwave/vent fan, but that is only so it can turn on the light and fan when I turn on the stove, and it only needs Bluetooth for that anyway. It has WiFi, but I haven't discovered any use for the WiFi, other than to tell Google Home that my stove is on. My Kohler faucet also has WiFi, not as useful as I thought it would be, as it sucks at measuring water, and occasionally sends false notices about the faucet leaking.

I want my thermostat to connect to Wifi, so I can monitor environmental controls while I'm working 415 miles away, and turn the heater on during my trip home. My hot tub takes over 24 hours to home up to 104 degrees, so I want WiFi on my hot tub too. Maybe the hot water heater as well.

Kevin should get a job a Mod Pizza instead. They don't appear to disapprove of smoking pot in the stock room there!

Most fridges, even Amana, only last 10 years now. Budget on replacing all your appliances every 10 years. Of course, almost every US appliance manufacturer is Whirlpool now; I think GE is still a separate company.