Tech

I feel the same way. I do everything I can to make my life an ad-free experience, even if that means I miss out on certain things.

And the unnecessary apps can take a hike, too.

When I buy a product these days, one of the key requirements I look for is the ability to use all the features without needing an app.

I don't want a neck fan with bluetooth, or an oven with monthly firmware updates or a dishwasher where certain functions only work when you have a cloud account

I don't want to see your ads, and you aren't having any telemetry from me. Get ~~off my lawn~~ out of my life.

Have to say though, my almost-ad-free existence has made me realise how pervasive advertisements are, and how accepting of them we have become as a society. My dad still watches broadcast TV packed with ads, and while that was normal to me as a child I now find it almost unbearable any time I visit.

Why should corporations get to shove 5 minutes of their garbage into my brain for every 15 minutes of content? My answer is they don't, and I'm not going to subject myself to it ever again.

"I should've been less ok with it at the start" to your credit you recognize that now. Many people are still oblivious and if you point it out they just double down.

I could see a use for a screen on my fridge. Display my daily calendar, weather (I have a MagicMirror in my kitchen for this, but putting on the fridge would save space). However it needs to be for me, not for someone else.

@the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world @throws_lemy@lemmy.nz

Just like there are virtually no more brand-new non-smart TVs to be purchased (exceptions are getting increasingly rare), I can foresee a (not so distant) future where there are no more brand-new non-smart fridges, so consumers would need to purchase either the brand-new smart fridges, or trying to find increasingly-scarce used appliances (while they still work and can be fixed when they eventually get broken, because, you know, it relies on spare parts).

Also, I can see governments allied to corporation interests (it's called "lobbying") using the flag of "protecting the environment" (it's called greenwashing and it got nothing to do with actually protecting the environment) to push laws requiring people to ditch their old appliances, similarly on how governments have been using the flag of "protecting the children" in order to push laws requiring people to disclose their faces/IDs to access anything they deem "adult" (not just adult entertainment).

For example: governments around the globe start decreeing "it's now illegal to power on old refrigerators as they don't meet the new environmental requirements"... we see how those laws spread across multiple countries, see this ID/face law: UK, then Australia, France, among other countries and some USian states.

And the same moral fallacy will happen if people started to complain about the ads on fridges: they'll face something in the lines "Don't you think of the environment? Are you pro-pollution?". Again, it would have little (if anything) to do with environment (just like multi-national laws requiring ID for accessing internet content has little (if anything) to do with children), it's just the frog used by scorpions.

Yeah. Future is made of big corporations (General Electric, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, etc) and governments (no matter their political leanings, for it's just their current circensis to gaslight people), long married, seeing 1984 and Cyberpunk as handbooks.

Yet people attack other people (e.g. your statement that "dumb people buy a fridge with a screen in it" is an attack on other consumers as if they were the ones to blame for this problem in the first place) instead of pointing to the actual common threat.

man shit like this makes me glad that my state has a forced warranty on purchases. If my fridge failed after 2 years if I didn't have that protection I would be livid.

I'm surprised they can still sell fridges. They have long had a terrible quality reputation, but still people keep buying them.

I just recently moved house, had to buy a fridge freezer for the first time, I went with the cheapest, dumbest Beko fridge they had, because all I want it to do is keep food cold. The delivery/installation man said that these models last for years and years, whereas the smart ones barely last 4, in his experience. He said he's constantly replacing smart fridges, but the dumb ones are usually ancient when they get replaced. Happy with my decision there.