Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.
Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.
You don’t even need separate controls. Just have the compressor and temperature controlled by a simple microcontroller which gets commands from the touch screen. Thus if the touch screen crashes the microcontroller keeps the food cold.
That of course requires adding a microcontroller rather than just putting a couple of relays attached to the touch screen…
It doesn’t matter.
If they vibe code their software, even the most stupidly stable parts of the code that once made nobody should touch, ever, like say the part that decides when to turn on the compressor to reach the desired temperature, can be changed by the code generator everytime they decide to add a totally unrelated feature, and end up with bugs, possibly the stupidest shit imaginable of the “nobody would ever make this mistake” kind.
If they can push fresh firmware into it externally, they can fuck up ANYTHING at ANY TIME. It’s the ability of replacing the code in it at any time that’s the problem - if firmware can be updated by the manufactures at any time your food and your health (if you end up eating food that spoiled without you noticing) has a constantly active risk vector which is linked to the quality of the software development process of that manufacturer.
If shit isn’t exposed to the Net, shit doesn’t need firmware updates for security reasons and if a user wants to update the firmware to get some new feature then they will do it willingly in their own time, knowing that the firmware was updated and thus much more likely to notice things not working properly (and much less likely to keep on doing firmware updates in the future if the software development process of the device maker is shit and their firmware updates keep fucking up their devices).