> We have had refrigerators for 100+ years [citation needed]
If you’re thinking about the domestic appliance, apparently since 1913 [1], so close enough (what a stupid name, though). AFAICT the first one with something that looks like the modern cooling loop is the first Frigidaire from 1916. But the concept of refrigeration to keep food for longer is older.
> Buy Miele for a washing machine, nothing else, they said. I didn't had the money for that, so I bought a washing machine for 250 Euro. It has been going for 11 years, moved two times and doesn't show any signs of going out.
Washing machines are a solved problem and it does not need a high tech solution. A good, reliable motor and good weights is pretty much it. No need for brittle over-engineering, fragile touchscreens or temperamental sensors.
When I had to buy one, I got a basic Beko* because they are usually good with replacement parts, and it had the bare minimum in terms of electronics. It was also one of the cheapest, but that’s a consequence of the other criteria more than something I optimised. I would be reluctant to get a no-name Chinese one, even if it is cheap. Anyway, it’s been going for 5 years now just like on the first day. Very happy with it.
> He has got the third Samsung fridge in 10 years now.
Fridges are also a solved problem. It’s just a cooling loop with a radiator on one side and a pump in the middle, and good thermal insulation. Using three of them in 10 years is not very impressive, decent ones should go forever. There is no reason why one should fail before 10 to 15 years.
> Yeah, that's anecdotal but I haven't really found the part where buying something more expensive really helped with expanding its lifespan, rather the contrary where "high tech" broke earlier or more often.
Definitely. But I would not say that going for cheap is the best strategy. Going for simple and sturdy is, and it is usually correlated with being cheap. But there’s also a lot of cheap disposable crap.
* I am not sure how well they are known around the world, it’s a Turkish brand. Their stuff is built mainly in Turkey and in my experience sturdy and easy to fix and repair, if a bit bare bones features-wise.
The curious thing about fridges is RV fridges run off propane/DC/AC, have no moving parts, and when in use are constantly jarred due to road motion, and never break down -- nothing to break. Unfortunately, these absorbtion fridges tend to retail for high prices.
I saw a Brazilian made one running off unscrubbed digester gas fed from the excreta of two immense pigs on a farm in Belize in 1996.
My 2004 RV has one and runs whenever I need it. I'd insall it in my house but I'd need to build a cabinet, chimney and gas piping for it first... so instead I have to listen to a compressor spinning when it runs.
No obsolescence, no spare parts, no breakdown, no posibility for continuing profit. Bad ideaQ
They’re also substantially less efficient. No full size fridge would ever use them because they’d chew tons and tons of power to cool in a residential house.
Awesome tech! Just generates heat and is inefficient compared to a compressor so it is less popular in the US. There are also electric absorption fridges.
> I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that.
Yeah. I think what happens is that the implied group of things in which the castle belongs changes. "The town has the castle" could be understood as “there is only one castle and the town has it” (the group is that of all castles). But it’s nonsense. Your understanding seems right to me, but I am not a native English speaker. It is something along the lines of “among the things the town has, the only notable one is the castle” (it’s the only castle in the set of things the town has).
What is tricky is that the group in which the castle is unique is implicit.
FWIW all that is barely different from German (I'm a German native speaker). These implied groups seem like a nightmare if you have to learn how they work. Since I "just know", I've never had to think about it much.
Native English speakers, please correct me if I'm wrong about the "the castle" example.
How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
You can see it here in the discussions for about half the stories. It gets sidetracked into people talking past each other.
The thing is, people are really bad at judging this, except for the most stereotypical cases. You have people crying wolf the moment you use "genuinely" or a dash. Different people use different criteria for their personal heuristics and the result is threads full of tedious, completely irrelevant comments from people in a crusade. People don’t seem to realise that we are very good at tricking ourselves and that a lot of the patterns we think we recognise are actually just noise.
Yes, we are. Basically, for any scientific problem worth any funding, there is someone using AI on it. That said, for materials science it’s usually not LLMs, or even transformers (unless the AI used to write slop papers count). But there is a menagerie of AI or deep learning models that people are trying to use.
> I’ve have had enough bookmarks fall out of the book that I have changed my strategy.
I solved this with small post-it notes I use as bookmarks. Some of my textbooks and recipe books have dozens of them, colour-coded. Very convenient.
For novels I just stopped using bookmarks. I open roughly where I left off, read a sentence. If the book is new or I read it last recently, it’s accurate to within a page or two. If I remember the sentence, I skip forward a couple of pages, otherwise I skip back. Occasionally I reread a paragraph I forgot. Otherwise it just reminds me of what was happening before a new reading session.
If you’re thinking about the domestic appliance, apparently since 1913 [1], so close enough (what a stupid name, though). AFAICT the first one with something that looks like the modern cooling loop is the first Frigidaire from 1916. But the concept of refrigeration to keep food for longer is older.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOMELRE
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