I cannot think of any way a coffee
massivemachine could be improved by connecting it to the Internet.The built in computer is mining bitcoins and the generated heat is used for boiling the water.
Back when it was actually worth it, I used a mining rig as a space heater in my shed, made from some 2nd hand gpus. It paid for the electricity it used so it was good. Gpu mining is pointless today though.
There was at least one company selling this sort of thing as a product back then. It was more efficient than conventional electric heating, if I’m not mistaken, even without the income from mining.
Is your startup still in the VC stage, or are you looking to IPO soon?
You can’t be serious right? Right?
i wonder if it could actually make economic sense, instead of burning the electricity directly in some heat spiral.
Move into a cold climate, and buy a house that has only electric heaters. Those were popular in the 70s, and nobody wants them now, so you can buy one with pocket change. Build a mining cluster in one bedroom and install air ducts to distribute the warm air throughout the rest of the house.
Since it started getting cold about two weeks ago, I started Folding@Home 24/7, and it keeps my office temperature just right.
yeah, that is nothing new, friend uses heat from small datacenter (i don’t think that 20 racks constitutes datacenter, but i am not sure if there is better word 😀) he has in a basement of that building to contribute to its heating.
i really mean if you could make bitcoin coffee-maker and if it could eventually pay for the price difference between normal and bitcoin one and how much coffee would you have to drink to make that work.
It’s doable, but you’ll need at least four heat pumps in series. Each one would bump up the temperature of the water, until you get 165 °C steam. The last few steps aren’t very efficient, but it’s still cheaper than using electrical heaters. Those heat pumps will take a fair bit of space and money. Oh, and those machines make as much noise as a big freezer. Other than that, it should be fine.
There’s a space heater called the Trio and a few furnace replacement things. And in general, waste server heat can often directly plug into central heating systems, be it mining bitcoins or Google datacenters.
You mean you dont need your machine to tell some ad brokers to contact you about needing to buy more coffee soon?
I guess some kind of home automation setup could start coffee brewing when you wake up or just before you get home.
It does seem like a pretty marginal benefit.
That being said, I have a hard time understanding why so many people own other IoT things, say, smart speakers. Like, I just don’t see the problem that they’re solving.
I remember having a coffee machine that worked on a timer, like 25 years ago, it didn’t need the internet
I’d love my hifi to have the possibility to be controlled from say my phone, because sometimes it’d be neat. But that’s about it. I actually set it up but it’s more of a hassle than a benefit so I just dropped it.
If it wasn’t for all the snooping and crap, we’d already have a super home control system, but today is not yet the day…
It’s not the snooping, it’s companies making their own incompatible proprietary system and jealously guarding it to force you to only buy their stuff, except everybody else is doing the same thing so the actual result is that getting things working together and keeping it all working is a pain in the ass.
And every time an open standard is adopted it opens the market and is better for all those businesses that resisted it. Yet they always resist. It’s so infuriating.
Hence “and crap”
Coffee machines have had programmable auto-start at X time for decades at this point, no app or internet required, just a digital clock and simple, dumb electronics.
We’re still talking about marginal, unnecessary things, but with a “smart” coffee pot, you could in theory start the pot when you’re a few minutes away from home, if you like some after work. A pot connected to something like home assistant (which I have no idea if it exists) can brew the pot only on your workdays, or you can start it after you leave the bedroom, regardless of time. You could probably do quite a few “neat” things.
In my case, throwing alarms on it instead of my phone…
Saves the room for an alarm clock and my ass in case the phone is out of battery.
Also controlling music via voice while cooking/with dirty hands or from the phone…
All of this said, my speaker isn’t smart yet, maybe I’ll try 1an IR bridge tho. But these use-cases should be achievable with homeassistant
I’ve seen a few espresso maker models on James Hoffman’s channel that allow users/roasters to share brewing profiles online. Not that the feature requires internet, but it does make it easier.
I can only think of negative things that could result frankly. WTF.
It’s probably running a proxy server so the company can sell your internet connection to the AI scrapers.
Or vibecoded firmware that is sending every piece of telemetry Claude decided it needed to some hard coded local ip address and NO HUMAN has ever looked at the code or the network traffic.
He found that while the coffee maker had generated 1TB of traffic, most of it stayed within his parents’ home network rather than being sent over the internet
So probably pinging the entire network with discovery packets multiple times per second and doing nothing with the result.
Not doing nothing, actively searching and sending infrequent updates, as what appears in these networks in sellable data as this can track who is in the home, how many people, who lives there who just visits who lives nearby, what kind of smart tv or other iot devices are connected etc…
Funny how they write all surprised, and then request permission to track and serve advertising by 1746 of their closest business partners 🤣
1T is not even a full season of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
It is a premium quality show, after all.
This might be the best example of a non-news story I’ve ever read.
It literally was nothing.
Maybe, but what could have that machine been spitting on the LAN constantly?
Probably broadcasting to try and find a phone running the control app, except a software bug set the broadcast delay to zero so it was sending thousands of broadcasts per second.
Then don’t buy “smart” appliances, none of them need to tell that they are done with washing or what the temperature is in the fridge all the goddamn time.
“Smart” appliances don’t make your home “smart”, it just means you’re stupid and your brain has rotted away to the point of you not being able to manage your own goddamn household!
Certain things being remotely controllable is great. Garage door opener, thermostat, some lights, doorbell camera.
Fridge, toaster, coffee maker, washer/dryer? Completely pointless.
Washer/dryer getting their signal to start from an outside source according to electricity price (with a dynamic plan) or weather (with your own solar) actually makes sense. I really don’t care when it does my laundry as long as it’s done between me leaving the house in the morning and coming back in the evening.
The main point is that even smart appliances barely ever need their own connection to the internet. Getting (meaningful) communication from inside your home network (including from the one device that acts as your access point from the outside that has a connection) is absolutely enough.
It is not pointless, the point is to spy on our dumbasses.
I don’t want a smart TV, but there’s only a couple non-smart brands left, and neither of them seem to have the best quality product on the market.
While the consumer carries blame, more of it goes to these data mining companies
For those wondering why this is on my network, this belongs to my parents. I don’t police what they buy. I just help with their network, but this is a learning experience for them.
Fridge temperature sensors are super useful to notice if you accidentally left the door open.
Similarly, sensors in a coffee machine are useful to detect limescale buildup, water level, etc.
The issue isn’t the data but the fact that these “smart” devices aren’t local-first.
In the 1970’s I had a smart toaster that would pop the bread up to let me know it was finished with it’s toasting task. /s
I have a toaster that is smart enough to perfectly toast any bread you can fit into it, regardless of density, thickness or even if it’s frozen, and it’s from the 1950s.
The video is missing that in cowboy coffee you should add coffee untill a horse shoe floats (but seriously, he’s pouring it all down the drain??).
He’s not pouring the coffee down the drain. He was demonstrating that adding cold water to the top forced the grounds to the bottom.
I guess he served the coffe first, but it sure looked like he poured it all away lolol 😂.
Hey you’re not alone. I, too, was lost in the sauce and confused.
An aeropress and electric kettle is the way to go, quick and super easy to press out the grind, then a quick rinse and you’re done cleaning
I can feel the coffee snobs crying out in pain from here
It’s because now that HDDs are needed for AI data centers, they put them on coffee machines /j
What I’m somewhat curious about is that typically to what degree are smart appliances usable without their app & the network.
I have a smart air fryer & a smart scale. Neither has been set up to connect to wifi or my phone & both work just fine …
I think in most cases it’s added functionality and convenience at the cost of privacy, sure the scale is still gonna tell you how much you weigh, but what if it automatically saved that to an app so you can track your weight loss progress without writing it down manually (as long as you’re OK with some company also having that info so they can share ads with you for weight loss products to help you reach that goal faster without allowing you to build the habits to do it right.
Isn’t it nice that you can just ask your fridge if there’s milk in it while you’re at the store rather than hoping you have milk, or assuming you dont? Disregard the fact that Samsung is using that fridge to know whether or not you’re home right now, if you have an iPhone, or what kind of smart TV you have. It’s still a fridge, it still keeps things cool, until a firmware update breaks that of course, guess you just need to buy a new fridge, it’s been a couple years anyway.
Sometimes (though not often) the smart appliance is cheaper since they know they’re gonna make money on the data.
There’s going to be a market for pre-AI, pre IoT stuff. I’m convinced.
for about two years since they were sold
Going to be? The vast majority of appliances are still sold without this nonsense.
Yes. It is a guess. I’m using TVs and kitchen appliances as a basis for that guess.
Which, shame on me, I should go look for data on this. Someone has to have some statistics on it.
