I have a whole collection of obsolete tablets that are newer than my fridge. My fridge keeps chuggin' along fine, keeping food perfectly chilled, while the tablets are just e-waste that I've been procrastinating on taking them to be disposed of properly (except for my 5th gen iPad mini, which is still somewhat useful for checking the Ring cameras and responding to texts - it's otherwise too slow to do much else). It seems like if someone really wanted a smart device stuck to their fridge, they should just attach it with magnets. That way when the tablet becomes too long in the tooth, you replace it and don't have to scrap a fridge that otherwise still works just fine at its primary function.

I feel pretty much the same way with infotainment systems in cars. If I was stuck with whatever homebrew app system GM implemented in 2018 in my Bolt, that'd be miserable, but it has CarPlay and Android Auto support.

A tool. A very useful tool, if you know what to use it for and how to use it.

This. An occasional app crashes, but the OS? Never.

NASA has sent up several nuclear powered craft. The Voyagers, for example, and they were certainly interplanetary.

A few companies have tried this with products that cost less than a car. Usually you're on the hook for a service plan if you want the connectivity to continue working, or in the case of what Bird did with a scooter they used to sell, they just announced one day that everyone is losing their connectivity and too bad if you weren't expecting that. Back in the day, Amazon used to offer Kindles with free cellular connectivity, but they discontinued that awhile go.

I don't think we're quite at the point where the economics really work out in favor of the manufacturer (unless they figure out a successful way to monetize it), so smart fridges will probably be reliant upon home WiFi for the for foreseeable future.

They discontinued their old school design for the home/consumer market a few years ago. Their current offerings aren't meaningfully different from what other major appliance manufacturers are selling.

On a related note, I used to think the same thing regarding washing machines - that the "built like a tank" designs from my childhood were the best. Turns out they actually use a shit ton of detergent (which has become expensive in recent years) and are rough on your clothes. I switched to a modern front-load high efficiency washer a few years back, and somewhat recently also upgraded to a heat pump clothes dryer. Even if they don't last 20 years like the old school beasts, I'm saving money by using a lot less detergent, water and electricity, and my clothes aren't getting destroyed.
 

You were saying?

Maybe if we were talking about screens in cars, where it's a different way of getting information and interacting with the vehicle controls, but this is a refrigerator. It has one job - to keep your food cold, and nowhere in that mode of operation is a ginormous display part of the equation.

It's like putting a margarita mixer on a toilet. You could, but you shouldn't.

If you're trying to avoid ads and vendor-lock in, your only realistic choice is to roll your own with a cheap TV and a Raspberry Pi. Or just go old fashioned with a magnetic whiteboard.

Your wallet is tiny next to the investors and shareholder's wallets

If you're buying a online computer you can't control what is installed on it, you should expect it to not work for you.

Chipping animals isn't unknown in America.

In fact, they do it often enough to make me question if "AI" is the generic clickbait additive in this story about a search script.

Yeah, they created a plasma. You can too if you light a candle

Sure, it is not a big problem for SSH. It is a problem when you connect to a web site, especially as certificate lifetimes get shorter: you need the whole certificate chain from a root (that your browser trusts) to the web server, which means at least two public keys and signatures and often more.

The NIST-approved post-quantum options and PK/sig sizes (in bytes, for "security level 1", which is the lowest) are Crystals Dilithium 2 (1312 / 2420), Falcon-512 (897 / 666 but computationally expensive) or SPHINCS+-SHA2-128s (32 / 7856 for the smaller but more computationally expensive signatures; same for SPHINCS+-SHAKE-128s). This compares to 32/64 or 64/48 bytes for 256-bit ECC algorithms and 256/256 bytes for 2048-bit RSA. If you are fetching a few kilobytes of text or CSS, this additional overhead is huge.

... in my $20/mo account.

(Well, except very occasionally for their own services.)