The most striking incongruity with our modern era to me is that the family was all outside when the blast occurred. With pervasive screens, we just don't get outside like we used to.
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
Man, if only I wasn't so burnt out. I've still been day-dreaming about architecture and design for my side-projects. I haven't had a chance to sit down and get into the flow state like I used to.
I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
> But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.
Most of which you don't need IMO. When a bunch of stuff had to be redone after a kitchen fire, I told my electrician that I wanted everything to be dumb.
Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming (see: Hal Lindsay).
I'm born in Norway in 1975, and in the early 80's, while we didn't have "duck and cover" we had regular air-raid siren tests and my primary schools basement was a bomb shelter that doubled as an activity space.
The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
I've always thought, easily, we humans were our own worst enemy. But that's nothing new, it's been known for many different eras. What gets me is we don't seem to care. Obviously many do, but why not enough?
Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)
Is it? There are lots of wonderful US Christians who believe in kindness and compassion and love. There are also lots of US Christians who are deep into end-times insanity, like Christian Zionists. Perhaps the 25% number is high, but this is a very real thing.
> Anywhere from 6 to 35% of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how "evangelical" is defined.
> In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls reported that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
> Evangelicals generally view the Middle East through a dispensationalist biblical framework and strongly support Israel. Often perceived as the most vocal supporters of Christian Zionism in the West, they believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that the U.S. will be blessed if it blesses Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was seen by many American Protestants as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reinforcing their commitment to Zionism as a religious duty.
> Where do you see there that 25% of the U.S. population cheered for nuclear annihilation?
Anecdotally; Growing up in the NorthWest USA, I knew entirely too many (crazy to my mind yet considered perfectly "normal" by most "average" folk back then) people in the 1980s who genuinely believed that Revelations' "rain fire from the Heavens" in the bible meant "Nuclear War" and Jesus would arrive momentarily thereafter "leading a host of angels" to "rapture the faithful" and/or "smite the wicked" who survived that initial "rain of heavenly fire".
What scares me even more than that kinda craziness bein' way more common back then than it should'a been is that too many (still crazy people IMHO) still believe such madness today and some of those people are in charge of (or at least in positions of significant power) entire nations with huge stockpiles of WMDs at their disposal.
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand
One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.
I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.
There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.
> it could show you what's inside before you open the door
I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?
I wonder if you could use two sheets of glass, and have a double-paned system. Maybe even with vacuum or some gas that's an even poorer conductor of heat than air in it.
This is one for windows --- unfortunately, even the best such windows have a markedly lower R-factor than the much less expensive typical door construction.
Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.
I hate that I'm being an advertisement for the corporate appliance dystopia. I'm sure it's somehow loaded with a whole bunch of surveillance, ads, and other anti-features. And I'm pretty sure it was from a brand where repair parts are essentially nonexistent. But I was shopping for appliances recently and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a fridge like this. I think the shaded glass was based on an LCD mechanism.
As far as I can tell, many “regular” people do care and alter buying decisions based on privacy concerns. They use words like “creepy” instead of technical ones, but the underlying discomfort is the same.
This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
> When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".
I doubt the vast majority of people objecting to ads are doing it because creepy privacy invading reasons compared to just simply who would actually want ads running on a screen on the fridge? Who would actually just stand in front of the fridge watching an ad? Unless they really do something stupid like keep the fridge locked until the ad finishes, but really, who do they think is going to pay attention to it?
If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.
> A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.
Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".
The thing I stumbled over was that the house owner was out mowing the lawn, something that we actually do have robots for nowadays.
But then again, I do enjoy a good, meditative lawn mowing.
We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.
Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.
In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".
I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.
Only new models of robots are banned, FCC approval of previous devices still stands and therefore we can continue to purchase those models. They will just get additionally out of date.
> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”
And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.
And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.
The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.
Loading dishwashers has been solved. Instead of moving the dishes from the storage place to the cleaning place, you just make them both the same place.
I do know at least one couple who have two dishwashers and just alternate which is being used for loading dirty dishes and which is being accessed for clean.
My mother loves fridge magnets, and there was a functional magnet on the dishwasher. It consisted of two oblong wooden signs connected by a chain. The top had a magnet and the bottom dangler was reversible. The top read "DISHES ARE", and you could swap the bottom to read "CLEAN" or "DIRTY"
Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.
They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.
I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".
Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
> What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.
People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.
With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...
It's not expensive, it's an unsolved problem, the main issue for many years has been the modeling of cloth behavior. They already have a folding robot that means they have solved a significant chunk of it.
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
I accidentally started a reread of Octiva Butler's Parable of the Sower in late 2024 (I'd read it many years ago, but forgot the timeline). It was eerie...
I thought this might have been the one about the lush (but dangerous!) Venusian rainforest!
(In Bradbury's time, we knew Venus was covered in thick clouds, and could only speculate about what might be beneath the clouds. Clouds = rain = lush vegetation?)
There are many ways this could all end, a nuclear war is still on the list.
"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.
I suspect the real answer is that between decoys and Russian intel agencies hiding him, and his grip on power that currently means he's going to be in range of useful air defence and a good bunker even if it's literally the last system Russia has left, they likely literally cannot at the present time.
(Not that it changes what I just wrote, but IIRC most of the Russian personel losses are short-range (20 km) antipersonel drones, the long-range stuff is currently targetting materiel, logistics, and whatever you count oil as, in so doing they only incidentally hit people).
We have determined that no major nuclear power actually WANTS a nuclear war. Except for Donald Trump personally. I'm not sure if he genuinely believes that he can launch a nuclear strike that will go unanswered and lead to the complete surrender of the other side, or if he just cares more about his own stature and legacy than the fate of the human race.
this version seems to be missing large sections compared to the other posted version, like how the mice throughly clean up the debris after the dog's entrance, the dog smelling food through the kitchen door and scratching at it, etc etc
It's interesting to look at the short a story and see where we are still behind on home automation. We still don't have robot firefighting or accurate robot cooking, for example.
He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "enjoyably lost" the way people can exploring cities. The since-closed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego had an odd layout and the architect even claimed inspiration from Bradbury for it.
My impression was that it had happened several days to a few weeks prior. Enough time for the house through ordinary daily activity to largely exhaust its water reserves. Of course most of today's actual houses don't keep that much on hand, but it sounds like this one had a sizable store at one point.
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone."
- Sara Teasdale, 1918
Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.
It is really an anti-war poem rather than anti-humanity or about nature in general. Sara Teasdale was forced to write her sentiments obliquely. From Wikipedia:
> "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem."
If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.
Fun to witness all the things it got right, which we can now remark wasn't close at all. The dystopian robotic future exists somewhere in a Chinese factory if anywhere at all.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.
> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.
I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
The most striking incongruity with our modern era to me is that the family was all outside when the blast occurred. With pervasive screens, we just don't get outside like we used to.
And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?
To be alone for an hour.
this guy gets it
The things we enjoy doing, we prefer to do ourselves. For example: coding.
Man, if only I wasn't so burnt out. I've still been day-dreaming about architecture and design for my side-projects. I haven't had a chance to sit down and get into the flow state like I used to.
To smell fresh cut grass. It can be quite enjoyable.
I've got a neighbor who I'm pretty sure would still be out there.
I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception.
But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
> In the living room the voice-clock sang, Connecting to Brand(tm) servers... Connecting to Brand(tm) servers... Connecting to Brand(tm) servers...
The fridge dispensed a verification can.
> But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.
It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.
IoT works just fine with Zigbee that can be 100% local.
Most of which you don't need IMO. When a bunch of stuff had to be redone after a kitchen fire, I told my electrician that I wanted everything to be dumb.
We're closer to the stove, kind of. At least with things like Tovala. I've never actually met someone with one though.
Check out Home Assistant.
Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming (see: Hal Lindsay).
I'm born in Norway in 1975, and in the early 80's, while we didn't have "duck and cover" we had regular air-raid siren tests and my primary schools basement was a bomb shelter that doubled as an activity space.
The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
I've always thought, easily, we humans were our own worst enemy. But that's nothing new, it's been known for many different eras. What gets me is we don't seem to care. Obviously many do, but why not enough?
Egomaniacs seem to always be the problem, but when one pops up in a country, the people, whether they have a choice or not, protect/ignore them. Your disposable remark, to me, is the key. Most need to wake to this fact and at least talk about it. (As for Hal Lindsay, he's just like any other nutjob author who uses grains of some truth to create fear and anxiety to promote his narrative.)
"as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet because Jesus was coming"
Come now, this is A) not true B) anti-religious bigotry.
Is it? There are lots of wonderful US Christians who believe in kindness and compassion and love. There are also lots of US Christians who are deep into end-times insanity, like Christian Zionists. Perhaps the 25% number is high, but this is a very real thing.
I do not disagree that there are some, but 25% is a massive overstatement, not merely "perhaps" high.
> Anywhere from 6 to 35% of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how "evangelical" is defined.
> In the 2016 presidential election, exit polls reported that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump
> Evangelicals generally view the Middle East through a dispensationalist biblical framework and strongly support Israel. Often perceived as the most vocal supporters of Christian Zionism in the West, they believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews and that the U.S. will be blessed if it blesses Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was seen by many American Protestants as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reinforcing their commitment to Zionism as a religious duty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism_in_the_United_S...
His source and claims seem backed up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth
Where do you see there that 25% of the U.S. population cheered for nuclear annihilation?
> Where do you see there that 25% of the U.S. population cheered for nuclear annihilation?
Anecdotally; Growing up in the NorthWest USA, I knew entirely too many (crazy to my mind yet considered perfectly "normal" by most "average" folk back then) people in the 1980s who genuinely believed that Revelations' "rain fire from the Heavens" in the bible meant "Nuclear War" and Jesus would arrive momentarily thereafter "leading a host of angels" to "rapture the faithful" and/or "smite the wicked" who survived that initial "rain of heavenly fire".
What scares me even more than that kinda craziness bein' way more common back then than it should'a been is that too many (still crazy people IMHO) still believe such madness today and some of those people are in charge of (or at least in positions of significant power) entire nations with huge stockpiles of WMDs at their disposal.
25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.
how can bigoted comment-material like this get a pass, while references to other groups are strictly enforced?
It's factual. With receipts.
What do you find unreasonably hateful in the statement?
Because those other groups are not privileged. Criticizing the people in power is always okay and it should be encouraged.
cute justification
It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
Reading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.
One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand
One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.
I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.
There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.
> it could show you what's inside before you open the door
I've always thought it would be cool to have transparent doors so you could see inside without needing to open the doors. Obviously, most people do not have "neat" fridge interiors and would be considered ugly and not a good look. But having those cool spy room windows that go frosted or mirrored or some other opaque look with the flip of a switch could solve that. Which tech is less expensive: dimming glass or cameras and monitors?
It would necessarily let heat leak in
I wonder if you could use two sheets of glass, and have a double-paned system. Maybe even with vacuum or some gas that's an even poorer conductor of heat than air in it.
This is one for windows --- unfortunately, even the best such windows have a markedly lower R-factor than the much less expensive typical door construction.
Such refrigerators are available for commercial applications --- where the on-going energy usage is offset by the need for customer access, but it would be a huge impact on one's electric bill.
I hate that I'm being an advertisement for the corporate appliance dystopia. I'm sure it's somehow loaded with a whole bunch of surveillance, ads, and other anti-features. And I'm pretty sure it was from a brand where repair parts are essentially nonexistent. But I was shopping for appliances recently and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a fridge like this. I think the shaded glass was based on an LCD mechanism.
HN crowd is not representative of the world at large. consumers don't care. cost and convenience are primary motivators.
As far as I can tell, many “regular” people do care and alter buying decisions based on privacy concerns. They use words like “creepy” instead of technical ones, but the underlying discomfort is the same.
> They use words like “creepy”
This is common for useless products, like smart glasses or pendant-style AI devices. When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
> When consumers have clear utility, however, most give away privacy quite willingly.
Exhibits 1, 2, and 3; "Smart" phones, "Smart" watches, and pretty much 90% or so of "apps" people install on either from their respective "app stores".
I doubt the vast majority of people objecting to ads are doing it because creepy privacy invading reasons compared to just simply who would actually want ads running on a screen on the fridge? Who would actually just stand in front of the fridge watching an ad? Unless they really do something stupid like keep the fridge locked until the ad finishes, but really, who do they think is going to pay attention to it?
Onve again it's been shown that consumers do care when they are properly shown the extent of data collection and/or are allowed to opt out.
E.g. when iOS introduced "ask apps to not track", 96% of users clicked "do not track": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
If consumers didn't care, companies wouldn't go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are tracking you, and to invent craxier and crazier dark patterns to trick you into giving up your data.
What about when it's "accept all" and "reject and subscribe for $1.99"?
A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.
> A screen with an ad on it is objectionable enough, even if the ad is untargeted.
Especially these days when pretty nearly the entire advertising industry has a whole library of "dark patterns" and psychological trickery they've effectively outright "weaponized" against the "consumer class".
The thing I stumbled over was that the house owner was out mowing the lawn, something that we actually do have robots for nowadays. But then again, I do enjoy a good, meditative lawn mowing.
We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.
Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.
In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".
MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN
> Washing the dishes is boring for the human
I feel like the only person in the world who doesn't mind doing dishes. When we lived in the city, I feel like most of my friends would rather have an in-unit dishwasher than in-unit laundry. For me, doing dishes feels almost meditative.
(But I do hate folding/putting away clothes.)
Fire safety is real. Ever seen a burned out house with an untouched bedroom because the door was closed?
Only new models of robots are banned, FCC approval of previous devices still stands and therefore we can continue to purchase those models. They will just get additionally out of date.
> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”
https://www.weaverobotics.com/
And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.
And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.
The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.
Loading dishwashers has been solved. Instead of moving the dishes from the storage place to the cleaning place, you just make them both the same place.
I do know at least one couple who have two dishwashers and just alternate which is being used for loading dirty dishes and which is being accessed for clean.
Yes. This is also called dish drawers. It's a dishwasher sized unit split into two independent parts.
My mother loves fridge magnets, and there was a functional magnet on the dishwasher. It consisted of two oblong wooden signs connected by a chain. The top had a magnet and the bottom dangler was reversible. The top read "DISHES ARE", and you could swap the bottom to read "CLEAN" or "DIRTY"
Now some may ask why anyone would need a sign for such an obvious status. But my parents are boomers, and they maintain a pipeline of dishes such that Dad licks his plate clean, then they are scraped into trash, then rinsed in the sink, then placed in the dishwasher. So perhaps the dishwasher may only be cutting grease and sanitizing, but to the uninitiated, we are thankful for that magnet-sign to tell us whether the dishes are clean, or just look that way.
They also rinse and clean many things before putting them in the trash or recycling. They don't even drink sugary sodas, but every Diet Coke can is meticulously restored to pristine metallic gleam before Dad stomps and crushes them.
I was pleased to augment Mom's magnet collection by traveling to Europe via London. Now there is an official TfL notice on her refrigerator to "MIND THE GAP".
It'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China.
I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.
I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.
Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US.
Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.
What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.
> What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.
Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!
(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)
Sorry, in the US it's, AFAIK, now not allowed to come from anywhere but the US: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/fcc-bans-future-roomba...
The admin seems to have a tendency to fearmonger over China and then ban or tariff globally. Allies don't exist apparently.
the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.
People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.
With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...
It's not expensive, it's an unsolved problem, the main issue for many years has been the modeling of cloth behavior. They already have a folding robot that means they have solved a significant chunk of it.
But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.
I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?
Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.
Amazon Alexa. You're a decade late.
Fair point.
I find the presence of a microphone sufficiently creepy that that was a non-starter for me, and I didn't pay attention after the initial launch.
USSR animated version (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
The bird scene at the end where it repeatedly smashes into the window really hit me... something this version does better than the original.
This clip is what introduced me to this story.
This adaptation is heavily modified, but I think it adds to the whole thing. Soviet artists had an uncanny talent for making everything that's unsettling even more so.
Thanks for sharing. Soviet era animation was creepy in its own right. This adaptation doubly so.
Where'd the Turkey dinner come from if it's a nuclear wasteland?
All joking aside; an excellent animation
I think the idea is that the house had large amounts of storage and freezers that it could use to get ingredients for meals which it then cooked.
Bradbury actually anticipated this on the Martian side and explicitly calls out frozen dinners.
They just died that night in the video, being woken up destroys the remains.
A rendition of this was aired on X-Minus One
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said,
over and over, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …”
I accidentally started a reread of Octiva Butler's Parable of the Sower in late 2024 (I'd read it many years ago, but forgot the timeline). It was eerie...
That is about the most prophetic scifi book I have read. Not in getting all the details right but in general vibe and direction.
I thought this might have been the one about the lush (but dangerous!) Venusian rainforest!
(In Bradbury's time, we knew Venus was covered in thick clouds, and could only speculate about what might be beneath the clouds. Clouds = rain = lush vegetation?)
[delayed]
already posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162653 which is itself a dupe but that was the first one posted today
I feel like the modern version of this would have the neighbourhood largely intact, but humans killed via miniature drones.
Drives home the point how few anticipated that batteries would advance so much.
There are many ways this could all end, a nuclear war is still on the list.
"Wireheaded by social media so hard you're unemployable" is at least as plausible as a city-scale antipersonel drone strike; even Ukraine's strikes against Russia are around 1200-1800/day.
Why don't they strike Vlad with one of them?
I can think of many possible reasons.
I suspect the real answer is that between decoys and Russian intel agencies hiding him, and his grip on power that currently means he's going to be in range of useful air defence and a good bunker even if it's literally the last system Russia has left, they likely literally cannot at the present time.
(Not that it changes what I just wrote, but IIRC most of the Russian personel losses are short-range (20 km) antipersonel drones, the long-range stuff is currently targetting materiel, logistics, and whatever you count oil as, in so doing they only incidentally hit people).
We have determined that no major nuclear power actually WANTS a nuclear war. Except for Donald Trump personally. I'm not sure if he genuinely believes that he can launch a nuclear strike that will go unanswered and lead to the complete surrender of the other side, or if he just cares more about his own stature and legacy than the fate of the human race.
you say that like trump wasn't stopped from launching nukes at iran by one of his military advisors.
Come to think of it, why hasn't Israel launched any? We know they have them, Iran knows they have them, and they're not as restrained.
One of my favorite versions is read by Nimoy. https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075956/https://www.youtu...
this version seems to be missing large sections compared to the other posted version, like how the mice throughly clean up the debris after the dog's entrance, the dog smelling food through the kitchen door and scratching at it, etc etc
The original was published as a one page story. It was later reprinted in a longer format.
Why does the linked text end with "Today is August 5, 2026"?
I'm struggling to imagine how that typo could happen. Maybe changes are deliberately made on this site to evade copyright? Mysterious.
Presumably, the fire burned through the night and the lone chared wall announces the next day, August 5.
Is it not in the original?
It's interesting to look at the short a story and see where we are still behind on home automation. We still don't have robot firefighting or accurate robot cooking, for example.
Fire sprinklers are robot firefighters.
I liked Ray Bradbury's thoughts on the internet when it first came into existence
He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maze-like layout so that people could get what he called "enjoyably lost" the way people can exploring cities. The since-closed Horton Plaza mall in San Diego had an odd layout and the architect even claimed inspiration from Bradbury for it.
No nuclear apocalypse yet.
Nice.
Maybe it happened while we were sleeping and this is just some radioactive psychedelic dream
The day is young!
It happened the day before, since children were still playing. We are safe.
My impression was that it had happened several days to a few weeks prior. Enough time for the house through ordinary daily activity to largely exhaust its water reserves. Of course most of today's actual houses don't keep that much on hand, but it sounds like this one had a sizable store at one point.
Can't wait for all the inductive backdoors that will appear today thanks to this, LOL!
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone."
- Sara Teasdale, 1918
Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.
Nice imagery, but feels like a bit of a put down of humanity. Humans are also nature, let's not leave ourselves out.
https://youtu.be/mTEUrdKehSg
It is really an anti-war poem rather than anti-humanity or about nature in general. Sara Teasdale was forced to write her sentiments obliquely. From Wikipedia:
> "The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem."
If you think about it, Bradbury's story is also anti-war.
This poem is in the short story.
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162653
I'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours.
Amazing story, though.
I had to replace a fire alarm last week, so sometimes they do shriek at us at all hours!
"I'm glad our homes aren't shrieking at us at all hours."
We have phones to do that for us.
Growing up, I hated this guy. Boring! Now, I can recognize writing talent.
Fun to witness all the things it got right, which we can now remark wasn't close at all. The dystopian robotic future exists somewhere in a Chinese factory if anywhere at all.
I love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.
So is The Pedestrian...
> So is The Pedestrian...
It's set in November, not August, and another 27 years further in the future (at least the version currently linked to on the front page).
Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
Or perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.
I care and I'm part of Nature.
The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.
"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.
> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.
I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)
It's common for spammers to use an LLM to post a short summary of a thing in the thing's comments, to attract upvotes.
Oh! I didn't even think it could be a spambot. You may be right :(