> An engineer with no such customer awareness and instead an incessant obsession with optimizing everything that can be optimized, might try to optimize for speed… when it’s likely the consumer cares more about: cleanliness, energy rating and capacity.
That is a fair point, although I wonder how long this will hold true considering the ever increasing prevalence of heatpumps, sun-boilers, and other such equipment.
Stuff you should know did an episode on dishwashers and I believe if you washed your dishes for a minute, you've already used more water than a dishwasher. It was pretty mindblowing. They did, though, go through some studies that made it seem that dishwashers were too sterile and getting a little leftover or germ from your handwashed plates was better for your immune system.
That is precisely why you should let your $0/hr spawn pick up this menial task rather than doing it yourself - assuming your time is worth more than theirs, obviously :)
If your spawn is only worth $0/hr., they won’t have the capacity to handle it. If they are worth anything more, they would be more productive elsewhere. The income they produce for you will more than pay any dishwasher costs.
I don’t want more energy efficient things. I want more clean energy so that the things I use can work better by using as much energy as they need instead of cutting corners for efficiency.
That's the current tradeoff in dishwashers (and washing machines), more energy efficiency means lower temperature, and then the detergents take longer to work. This is why we have 3:30 eco programs.
They do which is why they have special industrial dishwashers. I worked in a restaurant many, many years (decades?) ago. There was a room dedicated to dishwashing. There was a manual pre-rinse area and the washer itself would blaze through a rack of dishes in minutes. A guy manned it full time during the busy hours.
yup! i used one once in my life and the amount of pressure they create is absolutely crazy. the one i used could clean + pre-dry everything in like, 90s.
Having washed dishes for a while, actually no. A commercial dishwasher only takes ~2 minutes to cycle and dry. They run hot as all fuck. It's the people like me you wanted to be faster.
Commercial dishwashers are not as good at getting food off plates. Any crap left on the plate will get spread on everything else, so you have to pre-wash everything first. You should really do it at home too, but most of the reason a home dishwasher is slow is because it is actually trying to spray every dish, knock stuff off, and then grind it up enough to go through the exit filter. Also, you should clean your filter.
> Not really. It’s ground up and goes down the drain with the waste water.
It depends. What you describe is common with American dishwashers. European dishwashers typically don't grind anything up, they just collect it in a sieve.
If you buy a dishwasher with that feature. It's not standard. I know because my parents went cheap on their last dishwasher purchase because "they're all the same." About two years later I got to help troubleshoot why their dishwasher wouldn't get anything clean... the bottom of it was basically a solid layer of rotten food particles.
You don't have to wash the dishes first. Just rinse them under the tap before you put them into the dishwasher. I'm assuming you don't let the dishes pile up before you do that - if you do, you'll get dry dirty plates and 'ware and then yes you would essentially need to wash them by hand.
I always rinsed my plates before putting them into the dishwasher (when I had one), it took all of a few seconds. I hate the gunk piling up in the filter, and I definitely felt that the dishes didn't come out as clean as I wanted either, unless I hand-rinsed first.
Commercial dishwashers sterilize dishes with high heat and steam. It's expected for dishes to be sprayed first by the person doing dishes with a high pressure hose to rid solid food before wash cycle.
Consumer dishwashers instead let enzymes do the work.
Restaurant dishwashers are a different beast to what you have in your kitchen. Gets the job done in seconds. Of course, they are also very expensive, really loud, uses very hot water, are really large, and probably use harsher chemicals.
I worked in a hotel kitchen as a teenager in the early 70s. I don't think we used any chemicals at all in the dishwasher. But we did rinse the dishes first. They were so hot when they came out of the washer that they dried instantly and were too hot to handle with bare hands.
> . They were so hot when they came out of the washer that they dried instantly and were too hot to handle with bare hands.
This is not far off how your dishwasher at home works either - open it when it switches to "dry" mode and you'll notice that everything is hot as hell. The "dry" time is relaly "cooling down" time.
Oooh, yes. Though the "done in seconds" commercial dishwashers are a good number of model & feature upsells above the most basic ones. Might need 240V and serious amps, too.
Back in college i spent a year working part-time as a dishwasher for the school cafeteria. That amounted to me using a high-pressure sprayer to pre-clean some of the dishes and utensils (watch out spraying those ladles though!), and then putting them on a conveyor belt that would wash and dry them very quickly. Much like this one:
Same idea as every restaurant I've worked at, though some were smaller.
But yeah basically high pressure hose + conveyor belt.
The dishwasher's job was mostly to scrape and spray everything beforehand, pull forks out of the trash, etc. Some glassware had to be done by hand, too.
You're supposed to let the dishes cool before using, but in practice they went out almost immediately. Could cause problems if they were chilled rapidly, hot glasses used for sodas with ice, etc.
Restaurant dish washers are already extremely fast and efficient. They wash dishes in a couple of minutes. They also consume a lot of power and water, and take some time to heat up in the morning when starting work.
As others have mention, commercial dishwashers are faster. With cycle times well under 2 minutes.
The primary purpose of a commercial unit is to sterilize. Cleaning off stuck food is secondary for the machines, as a by hand pre-wash is assumed.
There are two main styles to achieve sterilization:
1) chemical systems. These need a water source of around 130F, use a series of harsh chemicals for cleaning, sterilization and speeding drying. While a home water heater is usually set to a high enough temperature, the commercial dishwasher requires its compartment water to be at this temperature. This usually requires a near by instant water heater.
2) hot water systems. These rely on a water source that is around 180F and do not typically rely on additional chemicals. To get water hot enough requires an attached heater. In North America, this often requires a Three Phase electrical connection.
All of the commercial systems use vastly more energy and water. They produce huge amounts of noise. And far more steam than a home owner would want, they often require ventilation systems to deal with the steam.
This covers the basic styles of dishwashers that would be somewhat recognizable to a homeowner. In fact there are a vast number of specialized systems, depending on specific task and operational scale.
Pro tip: you can open the dishwasher at any time during the cycle. It's not a washing machine. There's not a lot of water in it, it'll just fall at the bottom of the dishwasher, and you can take whatever you need (or add things you forgot)
> Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big ... But other markets, like decentralized social media, make no money, because very few people care about their social media being centralized. They care a lot more about it being entertaining and insightful.
He's perfectly described Mastodon. A magnificent solution in search of a problem aimed at catering to ants. Hence the dominoes of instances shutting down one after another.
I don't know, Mastodon seems to do what it intends to do quite well. I don't find the fact that it's not taken over the world that big of a problem.
Mastodon is in my view ideological in the design and of course most attractive to people who share that particular ideology. And that's quite a lot.
I find it very refreshing compared to Twitter: it doesn't want to maximize engagement, it doesn't want me to follow more and more people. It's a boring tool that does a job quite well, which is exactly what I want from it.
Only bad for residential users. They are actually totally OK for commercial users (in America rights and restrictions get split into different classes for different groups of users now).
You can blame detergent regulations for this. About a decade or so back phosphates were banned from detergents. The problem is that was the thing that made them work really well. In order to compensate for less effective detergents, cycle times have gotten longer.
Phosphate detergents are still available in commercial soaps, but I don't recommend skirting the regs here as they had some solid reasoning (algae blooms). Instead you can get away with shorter cycles by doing 2 things.
First - run your tap until the water is hot before starting the cycle, and second, use a booster powder instead of only using a pod or the main detergent door. These 2 things will get significantly more gunk off your food during that first rinse phase. As a result you may be able to get away with the "quick" cycle.
I think the long cycles are more related to energy efficiency regulations, most dishwashers default to a 3h 'eco' cycle with 50 degC, but also have a 1h 65 degC cycle.
The hot water tip does not apply in most parts of the world I think as the heating is done in the dishwasher (hence the temperature settings).
I wish HN had a forum signature like function so I could just put a "all of my comments written through the lens of living in the United States".
Most US dishwashers require you to hook up to hot water supply line. Problem is since they only use a gallon or two of water, if you don't run the tap first you are very likely feeding it lukewarm water. There are indeed heating elements but they don't get the water up to temp immediately - so starting things off already hot tends to help.
You only throw fertilizer down on the lawn a couple times a year if at all and of course most of it is taken up by the plants you are feeding it to, whereas most people wash their dishes at least once a day and all of that water ends up down the drain.
That's a whole other animal. I mean why is California always dealing with water shortages but still growing almonds? My comments here are talking about residential stuff. I think I mentioned above that commercial detergents also still have phosphates. The whole 2 sets of rules thing is pretty common in the US shrug
Well but this is my point. I don’t know the ratios resident/industrial for phosphates, it was an honest question. But for water, I do know the numbers. Indoor residential use isn’t even a rounding error. So why are Californians taking crappy showers with low flow showers when it doesn’t even make any difference?
If we really want to solve these problems and not just feel good about ourselves we should have a different set of policies.
Removing phosphates from dishwasher detergent was stupid because phosphates are measured in the discharge water from the waste treatment plants where it is regulated, and they can be dealt with chemically. All removing phosphates did was save a tiny amount of money on water treatment. Zero effect on the environment. Total greenwashing like plastic wish-cycling.
If you want zero effort spotless dishes, just mix STPP in a 1:4 ratio with cheap powdered detergent.
Dishwashers contain a heating element no? Not sure if booster powder is a specific product but yeah detergent on the little lip of the main detergent door is a significant help.
For those interested, here is a wonderful 30min deep dive by none other than Technology Connections about dishwashers and detergent usage: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04
Funnily, if you ask around outside America, you'll get the opposite advice: a cold water connection gives better cleaning, because starch and protein do not coagulate in the initial rinse[0]. I suppose conventional wisdom only serves the status quo. Which effect is actually greater? Have yet to find a scientific test.
[0] Compare what you find with
dishwasher hot water site:reddit.com
dishwasher hot water site:forums.whirlpool.net.au
spülmaschine warmwasser forum
PS: dishwashers with condensation drying cool the tub with water for the next run stored in a tank beside it. This is probably why European brands have a reputation of not drying in the US.
I love how you just gloss over 'solid reasoning' and 'still available in commercial soaps'. If it's bad enough to be taken out of residential use it should be taken out of commercial use. There should not be separate classes of what people are allowed to do in America. Things like this previously drove me to be an a*hole libertarian out of frustration.
Not sure what you're putting in your dishwasher, but FWIW I have a 30 minutes / 60°C cycle on my dishwasher (off-brand) that I use when I forgot to run it at night. Dishes come out clean as new.
The eco cycle I use at night is 50°C and longer (not sure how long, that's why I run it at night) and everything always come out clean as well.
Whenever anyone complains about how appliances are getting worse and worse in the name of eco friendliness there’s always someone that pops out of the woodwork to say that actually they are great.
If this was true we wouldn’t need bans in the first place. CRTs weren’t banned and where are they now.
Do you want me to say my dishes are dirty since they banned phosphate? It's not the case.
Honestly the fact phosphates are banned even in the US shows the impact they have, given the crap this country doesn't ban, including in food products.
Maybe if CRTs had had a major impact on local water quality they would have been banned too (and I sure hope so)
Sure. Acknowledge that the new dishwashers (washing machines / stoves / toilets / grocery bags / etc.) suck but we need to save the planet. Then show me the evidence they we are actually saving the planet and not just peacocking. I’ll be there with you.
Don’t try to tell that we live in a perfect world where there are no tradeoffs and those that I’m seeing are just in my head.
You may or may not have seen Technology Connections' many, many videos on the subject of dishwashers.
The tl; dr is:
* use the basic powder stuff
* put some of the basic powder stuff in the "pre wash" section
* if your washer doesn't have a prewash, sprinkle a little on the inside
* turn the sink water on hot until it's producing hot water before starting the dishwasher
* if your dishwasher has a filter for food, check that it's empty
* you're probably using too much detergent
I found this to be bad advice. I switched to the basic powder stuff for a while and my dishes were always horrible. Went back to Cascade Platinum pods and I've never had a problem.
I've switched over to using Cascade Gel in the prewash and a Platinum pod in main wash after watching the video a couple months ago. I felt the powder stuff gets kinda messy amd the gel is easier.
I don't need to pre rinse and scrub anymore. Silverware, dishes, and pots go straight in even with food residue dried on, so I save a bunch of time.
Everything comes out perfectly spotless and squeaky clean. Older GE dishwasher on auto.
As America's Test Kitchen said a very long time ago, use the pods that have as many different colors as you can find. Those Cascade Platinum pods are great.
I just go with most expensive and most marketing filled one. It is not that much more expensive for me and I usually try to wash dishes with really dried food. So it works well enough for most of them.
Check out the Miele G7000 series, I got the Miele G7156 (entry-ish model for the 7000 series) and exclusively buy their consumables (except for water conditioner salt). Calibrate your water hardness and double check your install (just in case, install techs where I live will just breeze through menus and do really dumb stuff they shouldn't like run it with the softener dry). Then set it to Quick + Intense Zone and never mess with the settings again... It just works and the time estimates are dynamic, we get ~1h4m full cycles with three washes per cycle. You can make it faster, but only by reducing intensity or reducing the wash count per cycle. It's amazing and possibly my favorite appliance purchase. As I said entry-ish, but only for their latest series, it's still luxury, and the steps up are mostly AutoDos (automatic consumable discs at a premium price), connectivity, and touchscreens. The G7156 is basic non-connected, has push buttons, has a water softener and will auto-open for faster drying (can be turned off, but I suggest keeping it on).
My dishwasher has a beeper for when it’s done like a microwave. It drives me up a wall!!
I don’t care when dishes are done, I don’t need to attend to them urgently. They can sit there clean until I’m ready for them.
There is no way to disable this beeper and it goes off every minute after the cycle is complete. Thank god the dishwasher has a wall switch to the circuit so I can just kill it but oh man. Never buying Bosch again
(Edit) I say all this to say my dishwasher was engineered by the same kind of engineer who 1) has obviously never used the product or washed dishes and 2) optimized for “dishes are clean out them away RIGHT NOW” even though nobody uses a dishwasher like that
So yeah, all three invented the dishwasher it seems, but thanks to Josephine Cochrane (and Butters), we actually have a working and reliable dishwasher, something Joel Houghton was unable to build.
One can be happy that something exists while at the same time lamenting that the design isn’t ideal
(Edit: though incidentally, it turns out that the inventor of the dishwasher — or at least one of the earliest working designs — was a woman, as the sibling post pointed out; didn’t know that)
Good for your wife and I hope you have some snappy retort. Then, again...
Imagine if someone here said something similar about some dysfunctional piece of equipment:
Designed by a woman!
Either both of these made-in-jest sayings should be accepted - which is fine by me - or neither of them. Have a look at the way men are portrayed in commercials to see how far this imbalance has gone: Men are smelly badly-dressed clumsy idiots who would not make it far in the world were it not for all those smart women who... [1].
So, ladies, what's it gonna be? Free for all like it used to be with women making fun of men and men making fun of women or shall we have this boring speech-policed culture where each word has to be weighed and approved by the experts?
[1] ...fall in the trap of buying useless products?
You are over-thinking this. My wife's remark was almost invariably directed at goods and machines that were either aimed specifically at women or roles where women are overrepresented or at things the design of which clearly had not involved thinking that women would use them.
One classic example of the latter is car seatbelts and other safety features of cars. Examples of the former abound in the kitchen which in most families is still the domain of the woman of the house; for instance packaging that cannot be opened unless one's fingernails are clipped short.
It's still casual sexism though, because being bad at market research and design isn't an integral feature of being a man. It's like if you said Theranos failed "because it was led by a woman".
Which is not to say your wife is an awful person or anything, casual sexism is common and often goes unrecognized. But it's good to call it out when you do see it.
Being bad at anticipating the needs of a woman is an integral feature of being a man. At least, when compared to women. And while this is changing, women still do most of the dish cleaning (at least in the U.S.)
"Look at how men are portrayed in commercials" feels like a 20-years-out-of-date stereotype that immediately lets you know the person who said it hasn't watched live TV in decades.
Wanna link all those ads you think are running all the time? Cause I haven't seen many. I remember the nice man with the electric car saving the poor robot dog with low batteries, though...
(Ironically, a dishwasher detergent commercial just ran on my TV here, featuring both men and women extolling how great their new pods were, without any different roles by gender or anything...)
If you have a clock that shuts off when the power is cut, you don't need to worry about drifting:
Most of those are synchronized to the grid, and the grid keeps time really, really well. They actually synchronize the grid to atomic clocks etc for that purpose.
I have clocks in various mains powered devices that will drift noticeably over a couple of months. Some survive small brownouts, some don't, I have one which will last for a decent length cut.
I'd wager all of them get timing from an internal oscilator driven by a low-voltage DC supply and have no mains frequency or voltage anywhere near them.
I guess, if they survive any power cut at all, they are probably not taking their time cues from the main's frequency. I agree with your wager that they probably run on low-voltage DC and perhaps have a capacitor somewhere to bridge short outages.
Where do you live that you have frequent enough brown outs to notice these things?
I have a time switch. It looks entirely mechanical, but I suspect it gets its time signal from the mains: it doesn't seem to drift at all. If there's ever a power outage (which happens from time to time when our breaker trips, not because the real mains is down) it just stops advancing the time, but doesn't reset, because it's all mechanical.
The grid? As in power lines? How in the world would that even work? I've seen a clock that could reset its own time using radio signals. I don't think radio counts as the grid however.
Some clocks use the mains frequency as the input reference. They aren't talking about the time of day being synchronized, just time intervals. I wonder how common that is among modern appliances.
I kinda wish mine had a clock (though I agree it's a pain having to adjust for DST). The power company has a lower rate after 9pm so I'd love to be able to set the dishwasher start time. Instead mine had a start delay, which technically works but is just more klunky.
Cycle Completion Signal
The cycle completion signal alerts you when a cycle completes and the dishwasher has washed and dried the dishes. You can choose to disable the tone or adjust the volume.
NOTE: The unit must be powered OFF before activating.
To activate:
• Press and hold the right "Cancel Reset" button then press and hold the ON/OFF button.
• When the light on the "Cancel Reset" button you are pressing illuminates and the tone goes off, release both buttons.
• Press the far right "Cancel Reset" button until you achieve the desired volume or until there is no tone (to turn off).
• Press the ON/OFF button. The setting is now saved.
Even if it didn't have the option, all you'd have to do is open up the front panel and rip the beeper off the board. That's what I do to my microwaves that can't be muted.
Many home appliances have hidden codes you can use to adjust settings like this, including making them silent. They usually come up if you search for “Sabbath Mode”.
--------------------
You can cook on your stove when it’s in Sabbath Mode, but
additional features and functionality are disabled. Here are
some common features and functions of stoves or cooktops with
Sabbath Mode:
Cooktop burners can still be operated.
Sounds such as tones or chimes are disabled.
Displays will not indicate temperature changes.
Timers are disabled.
Cooktop Lockout, a feature that prevents unintended
use of the cooktop, is disabled.
Energy Save is disabled in select models.
Start, Cancel and Off keys, as well as Warming Zone on/off
(select models), remain enabled. All other keys are disabled.
--------------------
Does that sound rational to you? God is happy if the cooktop burner works, but not if an alert tone sounds?
It's OK to cancel the cycle or adjust warming zones, whatever that is, but temperature displays and child safety interlocks are right out?
Yeah, I've heard of the wire thing. But that's literally confined to a small area of New York, three thousand miles away. I don't expect them to share my culture or my values. But the notion that I might have to add "Sabbath Mode" to a piece of equipment I design just struck me as hilarious, horrifying, and depressing in equal measures.
I mean, I can just picture myself sitting in a cubicle somewhere at the Whirlpool Corporation. This comes up on my Jira. My jaw hits the floor. I pick up the phone, and hopefully I pause before dialing: what I do in the next 30 seconds determines whether or not I will still have a job tomorrow. I honestly don't know what I'd do, and that bugs me.
Once upon a time I earned some major brownie points with a husband and wife by disassembling their child's electronic toy, inserting a piece of kleenex between the speaker and the grill, and reassembling it, now 30dB quieter.
Initially they suggested I just cut the wire but I figured I could do something a little easier to reverse.
I'm sure you are sarcastic here, because I have 4 (four) Bosch kitchen devices which might look similar (a rotating button with little displays left and right) but function WILDLY different - emphasis mine. On one the rotating button can be pushed, the displays are touch sensitive except on one, on one two increment by the touch displays not by rotating, on one the settings are reached by long pressing the info area, menus are a jungle different every time and can be reached by touch controls OR rotating the button... No, Bosch has zero coherence (just in design ok). And don't start me on the sound signals like the stove complaining it got a drop of water on its sensitive touch buttons placed right next to the pot. I'm sorry but I'm 110% behind the OC, no Bosch decision maker EVER used those appliances.
Actually I was mostly surprised by the parent comment, I thought that even in the subset of just dishwashers they had at least three different sets of controls/menus/settings.
>I'm sorry but I'm 110% behind the OC, no Bosch decision maker EVER used those appliances.
Well, I would extend that to most other manufacturers, I believe each one needs to show "something new" at the annual fair, and since - after all - there is not much to invent anymore in a dishwasher or a microwave, they add (senseless) features in the UI that only - say - 1% of users will ever use, inconveniencing the 99% of them.
>And don't start me on the sound signals like the stove complaining it got a drop of water on its sensitive touch buttons placed right next to the pot.
I believe this is actually a safety feature: When a pot boils over and spreads water on the touch panel, both the pot and the touch panel may be too hot to touch, leaving no way to turn off the stove. So, to be on the safe side, the stove turns off and beeps.
My crazy ones are same series and same year, but they are an oven, a steamer, a warming drawer and a microwave. Looks like the *washer teams work better together than the kitchen appliances.
It's the oldest trope since BBS's, if you want free expert information how to do something, just go on any forum and say it wrong, and 20 neckbeards will step all over each other to provide the most correct most efficient most elegant directions.
I'm guilty myself. It's a fine tradition I have no problem with. ;)
If you ask a question usually few, if any, people attempt to help. When you outright say something wrong, everyone will be telling you the exact solution to your problem
Some people do it out of generosity, but for some it's a special subset of passive-aggression, a way to say you're wrong and I'm better, but indirectly and deniably.
I'm pretty sure I do it for both reasons at different times and in different cases.
No idea why I didn't think to look into this more - but my bosch dishwasher has been driving me crazy since I moved into my current house. Thank you! I can now start a load of dishes right before bed without knowing I'll be incorporating a periodic beeping from the kitchen in my dreams!
It can be useful because if you open it while the dishes are still warm, they dry better.
Usually you can turn off the beeping with some button combination, just google it for your model.
I've got a couple devices that are useable from my phone only. My first reaction to your comment was "why not have a wifi status page for my dishwasher?" Hell, you could put a 90 cent weight sensor on the racks to tell you when they've actually been unloaded vs. the door has just been opened.
On the other hand I don't want another damn app. Why is all that crap bluetooth and phone-only? Why can't I install these things on my router?
I feel like a simple email would be a much cleaner and cheaper solution than literally everything else that "smart" appliance manufacturers do. It might be a really "disconnected from the average person" opinion though.
The LG washing machine in my apartment has a lot of chimes (even on the ZZZ quiet mode). And it doesn't appear there is a way to disable them. It's really irritating.
Interesting. I recently admired the creative engineering of my neighbor’s dishwasher which simply, and quietly, projects a small status light on the floor.
Well... there is certainly a way to disable that beeper, but it may void your warranty.
I've been strongly considering cutting out the beeper in my refrigerator, which will aggressively beep after a mere 20 seconds of being open. One way I like to cope with this frustration is to subscribe to the conspiracy that it is an intentional anti-pattern designed to motivate me to upgrade to a more expensive model that has a (stupid) window. I'm very comfortable with the idea that I'm going to stand there and stare mindlessly into my fridge, basking in indecisiveness. I don't think I waste as much energy doing this as the glass does, being a poor insulator.
Our new(er) Bosch dishwasher beeps three times at the end of the cycle. I like it because it alerts me to open the door a couple of inches to promote drying.
All the dishwashers[1] I had previous to this had a real drying cycle that actively vented the humidity and was effective. My Bosch doesn't vent the compartment so the dishes take forever to dry if you don't open the door.
[1] Said dishwashers all manufactured over 20 years ago, before draconian energy efficiency requirements came into effect.
If I was buying a dishwasher I would definitely require this feature.
My current model takes 2h to clean and if you open it right away it is usually dry in another hour. However if you forget to open the door right away it cools down and can take 4-6h to dry fully (if there are small pools of water on top of things). Having an auto-open to get the reliable 3h cycle time would be fantastic.
Obviously if I'm in a hurry I can dry manually, but that defeats a lot of the point of the automatic machine. We also put everything in the dishwaster so if we have people over on the weekend then cook lunches for the week we can have quite the continuous stream of dishes for a couple of days. Getting in an extra load or two in that time would be super helpful.
When I was dishwasher shopping last, this feature alone cost almost $200. As in I could get exactly the same dish washer with exactly same features, other than the auto open, and pay $200 less.
Buy the cheaper one, get the extra part - probably a movable door latch, at least that is how my mother's Miele does this - and build it in the device yourself. You may have to add something to actually make the thing move since the firmware in the controller probably does not have this function enabled on down-specced versions [1] either by changing the firmware or by adding a simple circuit (hooked up to that beeper...) which actives the moving latch at the right moment.
[1] ...like our Bosch washing machine which clearly has the display and touch buttons for more precise program options (custom temperatures etc.) but does not enable these by means of a different piece of firmware. There will be a day when I'm bored enough to hack the thing to do my bidding...
In the time it would take to procure all necessary parts and tools, and perform the labor, most people could've earned enough wage to just pony up the $200 for a streamlined solution.
Not to mention avoiding the risk of voiding the warranty on a brand new appliance, or a house fire by mucking about with electricity in a device that also has water shooting around in it.
By all means though, to all the tinkerers out there, knock yourselves out...
> a house fire by mucking about with electricity in a device that also has water shooting around in it.
If a corporation can do it properly, there is no reason to assume OP cannot. It is a little over the top to insist their house will catch fire just because they added a latch to a dishwasher (on the outside of the shell, which is what contains the water).
Because corporations have giant amounts of resources under their control, and are able to spend hundreds of millions to create something large like Disneyland. I don't know about you, but the resources I have access to don't have anywhere near that level of money.
This is not about Disneyland, it is about a single dishwasher. I don't see how the scope is insurmountable for a single person when that is the subject.
What water pump and heater do you use? do you just grab some lame thing off the shelf that's the same as existing machines (at which point, what's the point of building your own if it's just going to be the same), or do you spec out expensive custom hardware with a custom motor that has bespoke winding arrangement that manages to accomplish what you set out to do? and an induction heater that's exactly right for the expected water for? And then, what do the panels and buttons look like? Is it a Janky looking electrician's special with protruding wires and buttons that aren't suitable outside of industrial use, or do you injection mold buttons that are right?
Okay, fine, none of that adds up to Disneyland money, but we're still talking some 6-figures for this project that may never be recouped. Maybe that's an amount of money that you're able to swallow without a corporation's help. Seems a lot easier with help though.
Here's a question I have been meaning to ask many times but refrained from doing so: what makes people like you so scared of the idea of creating or modifying hardware for personal use? Why does the simple prospect of adding a movable latch to a dishwasher lead to the above hyperbole which seems to be related to the design and production of a complete dishwasher instead of simply adding a moving latch to an existing one? Add to that the comments related to the enormous size of corporation needed to undertake any design work, the prospect of houses burning down because someone did something to his dishwasher and the picture becomes clear: thou shalt not think outside the box and be scared.
Now back to the prospect of adding a moving latch to a dishwasher which will have been prepared for something like that already given the fact that another model in the same series comes equipped with one. If you have a look at the mechanism you'll probably see the latch itself being built into the door with the bar mounted on the housing of the machine. In the 'cheaper' version this bar will be a grey piece of plastic, screwed down against the machine. In the 'expensive' version the bar is a longer piece of the same gray plastic which can slide in and out, moved by a motor of some kind (most likely a rack and pinion with end stops, could also be a servomotor). To add the moving latch to the version without one you'd take the screwed-down latch and either add it to a bar which can be moved using a servomotor (which can be had for a couple of € nowadays) or make a longer version using one of the many methods available to do such. Next you´d check whether the controller provides the control signals for the latch drive in the 'cheaper' version, if it does you can simply use those. If it does not you'll have to use an existing 'ready' signal to trigger the latch, the mentioned buzzer being a good candidate. Get a cheap microcontroller, program it to drive the motor when the 'ready' signal is given and to retract the bar when it is pulled from the latch or when the door is opened past a certain point and voila, you have a self-opening dishwasher. If you count the time spent to create your own version as billable hours it is probably not worth the effort but that is the wrong way to look at it. If you count the time spent cooking your own food, riding a bike instead of a faster mode of transport, reading a book or simply looking at the clouds as billable hours those things suddenly seem to be very expensive so why bother? Well, because there is more to life than billable hours. In this case it may simply be the joy of creating something, of overcoming an artificial hurdle, of one-upping the bean counters who decided to overcharge for such a simple feature or just because you think you can.
I can't say for sure which dishwasher I have since it came with the house, but knowing the previous owner it's from IKEA and one of the cheaper models.
I can totally see manufacturers try and segment the market with a convenience function like this though.
I have to say, very likely overpriced, but worth every cent.
Right now I need to set an alarm to go open the door when the dishwasher is hot to avoid it cooling down and then taking forever to dry. With the auto-open you never forget, are never busy (you can start it at night and it is dry in the morning) and don't need to be distracted from what you are doing.
Current Bosch dishwashers are packed full of something that absorbs water as it cools. So, that’s solved. As a bonus, there are no heating coils above the top rack to melt plastic stuff.
I'm pretty certain that's not an engineer's feature but rather the great idea of a product manager answering to marketing concerns wanting to make the product more "human" or some shit like that. The engineer sighed, implemented the thing, kept his job and moved on.
BTW, my Samsung _played a 30 second song_ (loudly beeping) when it was done. I think it was Schubert or something? And again, no documented way to shut it up permanently. Super fun at 2am to be when woken up by a machine that you bought because it's supposed to be quiet.
It was possible to disable it on mine with the Smart things app. You can even tell it to send a push notification instead. I absolutely hated the sound but loved the notification as it will remind me and I would just dismiss it when I did it.
This feels like it's just nagging you to install the app and hook it up to wifi. I've worked for $big_appliance_company and let me tell you... You don't want to connect your appliances to the Internet.
Samsung has started meshing their stuff. Worst case your washing machine forwards on a video feed from your fridge of you in your undies binge eating spray cheese at 2am while watching a Taylor Swift concert.
You’ll be doing this as a direct result of years of careful psychological conditioning via maliciously placed ads chosen by some 4chan group.
Which reminds me about where I worked back in the neolithic.. we had an intruder alarm horn in the corridor, which was supposed to sound if someone didn't enter the magic sequence at the entrance door.
But it had some issues, so sometimes it just went off. It was very loud and annoying. One day our tech manager couldn't take it anymore and came running out of his office, with a nipper in hand, and, as he was a really big guy, reached up to the horn up at the ceiling and cut the cables.
My decades-old washing machine has a clearly labeled "cycle end signal loudness" knob. It ranges from off to so loud I can hear it from the other end of the house on a different floor.
The other reply with the instructions on how to adjust the volume of the signal shows just how far UI has regressed. Instead of twisting a knob, you need to know some obscure key sequence.
The problem with poorly designed menus is that they can also be activated accidentally. Then you need to discover not only how to disable a feature, but also what the feature even is in the first place.
For example, once my headphones stopped playing sound whenever I would clear my throat or talk to the cats. It seemed like a weird intermittent failure, because I wasn’t expecting the microphone to have any effect when listening. And because it was an entirely new behavior. Turns out, if you triple-touch the right speaker and hold for three seconds, it will enter “speak to mute” mode. This can happen when taking the headphones off, so you don’t even hear any announcement about the mode.
Long ramble, but non-discoverable interfaces are a bit of a pet peeve.
My dishwasher (LG) plays a cheerful tune to let you know when it has finished its cycle (60 mins) At least its not too obtrusive, and it only does it once.
But.... then it has a cooldown timer, and if you open the door within the next 30 mins it LOSES ITS SHIT at you, beeping and carrying on because the dishes haven't finished drying.
I mean... Why play the happy tune to announce to the world that you've finished... when you actually haven't.
Our LG oven plays all sorts of fucking tunes for preheat, timer done, etc. The only tones you can disable are button presses and microwave done.
Also, it is a dual oven, and the top half is also a microwave. The problem is that the top half oven functions insist on being given cooking times after baking modes preheat. (99h99m is my usual go to, which causes it to round down and demand a second “start” keypress).
The final cherry on top is that it has a fucking modal UI. Like vim, but on a kitchen appliance. The terminal state for most actions is where it says “program complete”, and you have to press “clear” before it will accept any other keystrokes.
I’m pretty sure the people that set the meat thermometer to aggressively cool the oven at target temperature (instead of just beeping out a god awful unmutable song) have never actually cooked. I suspect they don’t even understand what “human food” is.
Yeah for an oven I want on/off and temperature setting. I can time what I’m cooking separately. For a dishwasher I want one button: start. So many things are overengineered with useless or even annoying features.
That makes sense. If you disable the beeper on the washer, your clothes will get all smelly and moldy when you forget to unload it. At that point you’ll probably turn it back on.
The poor little beeper on the dryer is defenseless by comparison. If you leave it disabled, how will it find meaning in its life?
I saw a model house which had two dishwashers. One for extracting clean dishes, one for inserting dirty ones. Switch forth and back.
Obviously you wouldn't want dishwashers with alarms for that.
As for microwaves.. the good old ones had a simple spring-driven timer, turn the wheel and when it hit zero it hit a bell, physically.. a single "pling". Perfect.
But the new one I bought as a replacement would beep five times, and keep beeping even if I opened the door. Crazy and totally useless. I want to have a.. word.. with industrial designers sometimes.
The microwave I have now also annoyingly beep five times, but at least it stops when I open the door.
I have the same hate. I had a nice Bosch dishwasher I chose and bought in my last home, but I left it behind for the new owners. It would beep 3 times, 5 minutes apart and then stop. The beeps were gently.
My new home has a Kenwood, and it will beep few minutes, forever. If I start a wash before bed, I will literally hear it all night, no matter where I am in the house. Some nights I'll go downstairs just to turn it off if it's particularly bothering me.
Like you, I don't give a shit when the dishes are done, they can stay in the dishwasher until I'm ready to empty it, the stupid forever-beep is terrible design that like the linked article, makes weird assumptions about how you use your kitchen and dishwasher).
My dishwasher is quiet, bit my washing machines and the dryer are talkative. Both have a setup AND a dedicated quiet mode button to silence them. Maybe you should invest some time to RTFM?
Now you mention it, I will. I literally had no clue it could/would/might have such a feature, its interface is very simple compared to the Bosch I had before, so I never even thought to look for an STFU mode.
My dishwasher has a setting that finishes in 1 hr. I always use it and would use a faster setting if available.
First order reasoning often fails in light of actual experience. It isn't that the reasoning was faulty, it was the underlying knowledge of reality was incomplete.
I use the 1 hour setting when I have too many dishes for one load and I would like to solve the problem today instead of tomorrow.
It uses about 4L more water than the 3 hour 'eco' setting. All winter long my house uses hot water anyway, so this is only a technically measurable savings in summer. In practice it is swamped out by other variations.
Pro tip about your home dishwasher: Run hot water out of your faucet until it’s extremely hot before starting your dishwasher. (Considering the faucet and dishwasher use the same plumbing to pipe water in)
The reason why is dishwashers line to do a rinse in the first cycle and for most people the water isn’t hot enough. So it fills up with lukewarm water and isn’t as effective.
Another option is to have a hot water circulator installed so you always have instant hot water.
Depends where you live, houses here usually have separate hot and cold water feeds and the dishwashers take only a cold input, relying on an internal heating element if they need hot water.
This assumes your dishwasher is hooked up to the hot water feed in the first place, most aren't. Most have a cold water intake and a heating element that heats it up internally to the correct temperature, so actually your tip is just wasting water (potentially hot water) for anyone who has a modern dishwasher.
I thought it was the reverse today. They used to heat hot water but now rely on hot water I put due to energy efficiency requirements. They keep water warm but don’t really heat it.
My dishwasher only requires the water to be 30c, and combined with a longer wash cycle does an excellent job of cleaning the dishes.
My hot water tank heats to 60c, so my dishwasher would still need a thermocouple and a heating element to mix it to 30c, as there's no guarantee that my hot water tank is actually full.
That's an American thing. Not world-wide. As others have said, outside America the common way is to connect to cold water and use internal heating only.
You can install a 240v outlet. Many people have them for certain appliances. but you wouldn't need that to heat water, silly.
European dishwashers have to use cold water because of the way they dry the dishes. In America hot air is used to dry the dishes so we can hook up to hot water. In Europe you can't do that because of the Kyoto agreement. So you use condensation to dry your dishes by piping in cold water.
There's not really much difference between them today. Because Europeans have very small homes by American standards (especially British people that live in sad, tiny, little things) the need for quiet dishwashers was also needed which means lower power. Also power costs more in Europe so more energy efficient appliances were needed so you didn't have food grinders, etc.
But today it's almost all the same. But the Kyoto agreement forces Europeans to hook up to cold water and heat internally and not use a fan to dry but rather cold water.
Sadly, modern dishwashers are not only are slow, they also suck at this too. I don't mind the slower performance since I get why, but the number of times i open the dishwasher to find half the detergent in the dispenser and all the bowls with stuff cooked on kills me.
The HP-ificaton of major appliance brands is so infuriating.
I've watched that actually. I since started using the pre-wash dispenser, and done routine cleanings (and if your appliance requires routine cleanings, making you disassemble the thing to access the filter is inexcusable). It's improved things a little, but not enough.
Considering that all 3 Maytag appliances I bought at the same time are defective in various ways, I'm treating it as another instance of a major brand strip-mining their reputation by selling cheaply built garbage until consumers finally give up on them.
For the record, we are still extremely pleased with our Miele washing machine and dish washer that we bought about five years ago.
A bit pricey, though. Never heard of Maytag. If I saw it in a store, I would probably guess it's a brand from China. But given your description, it sounds like you are in the US or so? At least that's whence I usually hear the complaints about brands selling out.
Canada. Maytag is one of those ancient 19th century American brands, like Westinghouse or Ford, except now they're apparently just a sticker for low-quality garbage since they got swallowed up into the whirlpool appliance business family.
It doesn't matter how carefully you chose your examples, internet is so big that exceptions will happen and people like to voice their contrarian opinions (nothing wrong with that).
Actually, no. Because you see, we have many discussions here on HN where a substantive post doesn't get sidetracked by it. The article isn't even about dishwashers!
No surprise it sparked these comments, it's a terrible example. Plenty of people (myself included) want a faster dishwasher, and many people (restaurants) need a faster dishwasher.
A funny way to look at this, is to go the other direction in the logic. The logic in this article is basically all these products have this property, oh and he's a reason would result in this. Well let's apply the same to web3 social media start ups. As the author correctly points out, for the average user these products are pointless. So what's going on? It's as if an entire industry has sprung up of super fast dishwashers (ignore the fact that this exists for commercial businesses).
What is actually happening is crypto/web3 is a scam, and social media is a great fake product because your "customers" think you're trying to get them onto your new social media site whilst what you're actually doing is selling them worthless tokens with the promise of some future value that'll clearly never come.
>Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs.
Yeah, and that's really hard, which is why they're not doing it!
I think this is going a bit too far. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to serve an ideological need, because there's enough people with that particular ideology.
Eg, things like Mastodon are great if you want to find a community that best fits you, because you have a rare interest or some characteristic controversial for a reason or another that makes existing on some place like Twitter difficult. So you can find a community that enforces standards that are very close to your ideal, and delegate that to them, and just do your own thing.
Not everything has to be like Twitter or Facebook, aiming to swallow the entire planet. There's room in the world for places like Hacker News that are only relevant to a small segment of the population. What's important though is to have a good sense of perspective about what need you're serving and how many people are there who need that. If you're aiming for something like decentralization that will have some costs to it that means you're unlikely to ever go world-wide. But so long you're happy enough with that, there's nothing wrong with it.
> I think this is going a bit too far. Sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to serve an ideological need, because there's enough people with that particular ideology.
The author would probably agree.
> Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big.
This is a fantastic analogy for something which has bothered me for years! One example which comes to mind is pushback received on a pull request for a cron job. This script did some heavy lifting so it took a few minutes to run.
The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.
Glad you liked the analogy! Yes, keeping this in mind is useful for developers, not just product people. It's tempting to fix or automate things that don't need it. I think there is a meme that goes "I could have done this in 2 minutes, but I chose to spend 2 days automating it instead." Sums it all up :-)
After nearly destroying a General Electric we got a Kitchen Aid dishwasher. Quiet, works well, and quick. I've never given my dishwasher much thought. If it cleans then it works. Right?
Most people probably don't need a faster dishwasher - but it's a handy feature to have to sell dishwashers.
"Cleans just as well, using the same water & power, in half the time?" - well that sounds like you've just created a premium dishwasher you can sell to people who want to own a premium dishwasher.
I think it's much the same with all the wifi-enabled, app controlled appliances.
Their purpose isn't to be sold as useful features - they exist to add a half-dozen bullet points next to that item, that the other nigh-identical products you're comparing it against (or god-forbid, already own) don't have. $5 of extra parts that can be sold to you for $100
Decades back all appliances where white powder-coated. Then we decided they should all be built in and hidden. Then we decided they all needed to be brushed -aluminium feature appliances... except we didn't all decide this.
The manufacturers are just always looking for differentiators.
Of course you can opt out of this obvious cash grab, and kit out your kitchen with Miele 'quality' and the like (Did you know Miele is one of the few remaining brands that doesn't outsource manufacture to a Turkish third party? I did, I'm special)
Or reject all this modern stuff and buy a Speed-Queen (When pick-up truck owners get to decide what laundry brand to buy and maintain with the same set of spanners)
My dishwasher takes about an hour. If it took 50 or even 40 minutes, that wouldn't change things materially. But if it took 10-15 minutes, it would change the way I plan and execute work in the kitchen quite a bit.
well if I tell you that here in Austria dishwashers, washing machines and dryers (some of most energy hungry systems in a household) get a separate input that allows them to run when lot's of cheap energy (read solar power) is available - that might change again :)
The author seems to be making an assumption that the average person cares as little about preventing centralization of power and having any semblance of online privacy as they do about the speed of their dishwasher and that the projects that focus on improving these things fail to gain a large user base because users don't care.
That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.
The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.
There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.
Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.
*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes
I'm not sure anyone truly is attempting that kind of tech. Making a private communication platform that people would actually use goes against the hacker mindset. People who care about privacy like simplicity.
Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature.
The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance.
Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns.
That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them.
Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't.
It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street.
It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication.
There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break.
.
Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it.
I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts.
I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it.
And then when the "better engineered" product doesn't do as well in the marketplace, because it didn't address actual customer needs, the engineers cry that the product addressing actual customer needs only succeeded because of "better marketing."
To be fair, we needed to do two round of dishwasher yesterday and I wished we had a faster one (we were out of dishes and stuff).
Yes we could have washed by hand but it was one of those days where we didn't want to do anything...
The truth is that products are made to make money for the business first and meet customer need/wants second.
For the dishwasher example, most dishwashers are far too noisy. Unless you live in a large place with many rooms, it will matter. The problem is that quiet isn't a highly visible/marketable and cheaply made feature, so isn't prioritized. After purchase, many would want a quieter dishwasher but very few will bother to uninstall/return/exchange it.
Most businesses make money by answering customer needs.
I actually believe that when shopping for kitchen appliances recently, dishwashers had a sticker advertising noise levels.
Yes, I actually do need a faster dishwasher, thank you. Last 3 dishwashers I've owned have taken between 2 and 2.5 hours to do a load. Between my large family and frequently hosting people I am constantly waiting for the dishwasher to finish.
> But in no clear way do these products actually improve on what’s existing in a significant enough way that users may consider a shift
This article is apparently shaming engineers for making products that are being sold, but aren't selling well enough. Don't improve products. Don't be concerned with privacy if consumers are not. Just do whatever is going to sell.
This kind of thinking would have prevented the seat belt. Seat belts weren't going to sell more cars, they were going to raise costs. And why? Only to save human lives! Waste!
It doesn't matter unless you can convince people to use it, )or legally force it on them, causing them to hate all technology because you didn't make it good enough people chose willingly).
Private and decentralized stuff needs to get feature parity, be free as in beer like Google is, and then get a killer app that makes people want it.
I've always thought p2p offline lan messaging would be it, but Blockchain trashed all research on that aside from new tokens for like 10 years. Maybe they'll figure it out, but I suspect AI filters and random games will be more important.
Unfortunately, people who like making private apps hate most features, and think privacy is enough of a killer app for people to switch, but it doesn't seem to be.
The article's main point stands only to a certain degree. Speeding the dishwashing cycle from 120 minutes to 60 minutes, or even 30 minutes will almost always be a "who cares?" feature; None of those scale of speed-up change that basic work cycle of load, go away, and come back at another mealtime.
But speeding it to less than 5 minutes or 5 seconds per dish could be a very attractive feature, because it would change the entire work cycle such that the whole meal and kitchen could be cleaned up and put away in minutes.
Now, can you do that feature and have a great ROI is another question, but it's often nonlinear.
I generally agree, except for the "Some people need cleaner dishes than others". I can't imagine someone actually accepting "washed" dishes with food stains on them. Either they're clean, or they're not. Presumably you could do a scientific test to figure out the amount of bacteria left, but I assume we're not talking at that level.
I think it depends on how you feel about water spots and streaks. Some people can't stand them, others don't even see them. Each side thinks the other is wrong.
> I can't imagine someone actually accepting "washed" dishes with food stains on them.
A charitable reading of my comment would find no such assertion. "Clean" is not binary. A restaurant might get in trouble if 1/100 plates have a smudge on them, but that might be perfectly acceptable in a home. Or not.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] thread> An engineer with no such customer awareness and instead an incessant obsession with optimizing everything that can be optimized, might try to optimize for speed… when it’s likely the consumer cares more about: cleanliness, energy rating and capacity.
Like 1 to 2 kwh, probably substantially less if you dont use heated dry.
https://www.coolblue.de/en/advice/energy-consumption-dishwas...
This wouldn’t be practical in a home.
This guy has one at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnKAVFBIH1c
https://github.com/dekuNukem/bob_cassette_rewinder
Wow we are setting the goals low these days.
Commercial dishwashers are not as good at getting food off plates. Any crap left on the plate will get spread on everything else, so you have to pre-wash everything first. You should really do it at home too, but most of the reason a home dishwasher is slow is because it is actually trying to spray every dish, knock stuff off, and then grind it up enough to go through the exit filter. Also, you should clean your filter.
Why? If I have to wash my own dishes, that would defeat the point of a dishwasher..
The Technology Connections YouTube channel has some nice, in-depth looks at dishwashers and soap.
It depends. What you describe is common with American dishwashers. European dishwashers typically don't grind anything up, they just collect it in a sieve.
Consumer dishwashers instead let enzymes do the work.
So, different applications.
This is not far off how your dishwasher at home works either - open it when it switches to "dry" mode and you'll notice that everything is hot as hell. The "dry" time is relaly "cooling down" time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCM13eOWVgY
But yeah basically high pressure hose + conveyor belt.
The dishwasher's job was mostly to scrape and spray everything beforehand, pull forks out of the trash, etc. Some glassware had to be done by hand, too.
You're supposed to let the dishes cool before using, but in practice they went out almost immediately. Could cause problems if they were chilled rapidly, hot glasses used for sodas with ice, etc.
The primary purpose of a commercial unit is to sterilize. Cleaning off stuck food is secondary for the machines, as a by hand pre-wash is assumed.
There are two main styles to achieve sterilization:
1) chemical systems. These need a water source of around 130F, use a series of harsh chemicals for cleaning, sterilization and speeding drying. While a home water heater is usually set to a high enough temperature, the commercial dishwasher requires its compartment water to be at this temperature. This usually requires a near by instant water heater.
2) hot water systems. These rely on a water source that is around 180F and do not typically rely on additional chemicals. To get water hot enough requires an attached heater. In North America, this often requires a Three Phase electrical connection.
All of the commercial systems use vastly more energy and water. They produce huge amounts of noise. And far more steam than a home owner would want, they often require ventilation systems to deal with the steam.
This covers the basic styles of dishwashers that would be somewhat recognizable to a homeowner. In fact there are a vast number of specialized systems, depending on specific task and operational scale.
Source: I own a coffee house/bar/bakery
More info
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/620/types-of-commerci...
He's perfectly described Mastodon. A magnificent solution in search of a problem aimed at catering to ants. Hence the dominoes of instances shutting down one after another.
Mastodon is in my view ideological in the design and of course most attractive to people who share that particular ideology. And that's quite a lot.
I find it very refreshing compared to Twitter: it doesn't want to maximize engagement, it doesn't want me to follow more and more people. It's a boring tool that does a job quite well, which is exactly what I want from it.
Phosphate detergents are still available in commercial soaps, but I don't recommend skirting the regs here as they had some solid reasoning (algae blooms). Instead you can get away with shorter cycles by doing 2 things.
First - run your tap until the water is hot before starting the cycle, and second, use a booster powder instead of only using a pod or the main detergent door. These 2 things will get significantly more gunk off your food during that first rinse phase. As a result you may be able to get away with the "quick" cycle.
The hot water tip does not apply in most parts of the world I think as the heating is done in the dishwasher (hence the temperature settings).
Most US dishwashers require you to hook up to hot water supply line. Problem is since they only use a gallon or two of water, if you don't run the tap first you are very likely feeding it lukewarm water. There are indeed heating elements but they don't get the water up to temp immediately - so starting things off already hot tends to help.
If we really want to solve these problems and not just feel good about ourselves we should have a different set of policies.
If you want zero effort spotless dishes, just mix STPP in a 1:4 ratio with cheap powdered detergent.
https://www.amazon.com/Sodium-Tripolyphosphate-Super-Cleans-...
For those interested, here is a wonderful 30min deep dive by none other than Technology Connections about dishwashers and detergent usage: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04
[0] Compare what you find with
PS: dishwashers with condensation drying cool the tub with water for the next run stored in a tank beside it. This is probably why European brands have a reputation of not drying in the US.The eco cycle I use at night is 50°C and longer (not sure how long, that's why I run it at night) and everything always come out clean as well.
If this was true we wouldn’t need bans in the first place. CRTs weren’t banned and where are they now.
Honestly the fact phosphates are banned even in the US shows the impact they have, given the crap this country doesn't ban, including in food products.
Maybe if CRTs had had a major impact on local water quality they would have been banned too (and I sure hope so)
Don’t try to tell that we live in a perfect world where there are no tradeoffs and those that I’m seeing are just in my head.
The tl; dr is:
https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/search?query=...I don't need to pre rinse and scrub anymore. Silverware, dishes, and pots go straight in even with food residue dried on, so I save a bunch of time.
Everything comes out perfectly spotless and squeaky clean. Older GE dishwasher on auto.
I've never used it in a full load, but it works well when I have a smaller load.
I don’t care when dishes are done, I don’t need to attend to them urgently. They can sit there clean until I’m ready for them.
There is no way to disable this beeper and it goes off every minute after the cycle is complete. Thank god the dishwasher has a wall switch to the circuit so I can just kill it but oh man. Never buying Bosch again
(Edit) I say all this to say my dishwasher was engineered by the same kind of engineer who 1) has obviously never used the product or washed dishes and 2) optimized for “dishes are clean out them away RIGHT NOW” even though nobody uses a dishwasher like that
However it seems those early dishwashers where pretty different to modern ones, least of all not being automatic: https://www.homestratosphere.com/dishwasher-history/
> The first mechanical dishwashing device was registered for a patent in 1850 in the United States by Joel Houghton
> The device was both slow and unreliable.
> Another patent was granted to L.A. Alexander in 1865
> Neither device was practical or widely accepted.
And finally
> The most successful of the hand-powered dishwashers was invented in 1886 by Josephine Cochrane together with mechanic George Butters
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher#History)
So yeah, all three invented the dishwasher it seems, but thanks to Josephine Cochrane (and Butters), we actually have a working and reliable dishwasher, something Joel Houghton was unable to build.
You're all right, in your own way.
(Edit: though incidentally, it turns out that the inventor of the dishwasher — or at least one of the earliest working designs — was a woman, as the sibling post pointed out; didn’t know that)
Imagine if someone here said something similar about some dysfunctional piece of equipment:
Either both of these made-in-jest sayings should be accepted - which is fine by me - or neither of them. Have a look at the way men are portrayed in commercials to see how far this imbalance has gone: Men are smelly badly-dressed clumsy idiots who would not make it far in the world were it not for all those smart women who... [1].So, ladies, what's it gonna be? Free for all like it used to be with women making fun of men and men making fun of women or shall we have this boring speech-policed culture where each word has to be weighed and approved by the experts?
[1] ...fall in the trap of buying useless products?
One classic example of the latter is car seatbelts and other safety features of cars. Examples of the former abound in the kitchen which in most families is still the domain of the woman of the house; for instance packaging that cannot be opened unless one's fingernails are clipped short.
Which is not to say your wife is an awful person or anything, casual sexism is common and often goes unrecognized. But it's good to call it out when you do see it.
No more than being bad at anticipating the needs of a man is an integral feature of being a woman.
Wanna link all those ads you think are running all the time? Cause I haven't seen many. I remember the nice man with the electric car saving the poor robot dog with low batteries, though...
(Ironically, a dishwasher detergent commercial just ran on my TV here, featuring both men and women extolling how great their new pods were, without any different roles by gender or anything...)
Most of those are synchronized to the grid, and the grid keeps time really, really well. They actually synchronize the grid to atomic clocks etc for that purpose.
I'd wager all of them get timing from an internal oscilator driven by a low-voltage DC supply and have no mains frequency or voltage anywhere near them.
Where do you live that you have frequent enough brown outs to notice these things?
I have a time switch. It looks entirely mechanical, but I suspect it gets its time signal from the mains: it doesn't seem to drift at all. If there's ever a power outage (which happens from time to time when our breaker trips, not because the real mains is down) it just stops advancing the time, but doesn't reset, because it's all mechanical.
Where do you live, and how old are your oldest electronics?
Anything that uses DC would likely have at least some capacitors in them.
https://hackaday.com/2018/03/29/ask-hackaday-is-your-clock-t...
The US doesn’t mess with time in some states, including where we live (Arizona).
So no visible clock... But also no visible indicator of how long it will go on... I might prefer the incorrect time to that...
Cycle Completion Signal The cycle completion signal alerts you when a cycle completes and the dishwasher has washed and dried the dishes. You can choose to disable the tone or adjust the volume. NOTE: The unit must be powered OFF before activating. To activate:
• Press and hold the right "Cancel Reset" button then press and hold the ON/OFF button.
• When the light on the "Cancel Reset" button you are pressing illuminates and the tone goes off, release both buttons.
• Press the far right "Cancel Reset" button until you achieve the desired volume or until there is no tone (to turn off).
• Press the ON/OFF button. The setting is now saved.
You're welcome :)
It's OK to cancel the cycle or adjust warming zones, whatever that is, but temperature displays and child safety interlocks are right out?
I mean, I can just picture myself sitting in a cubicle somewhere at the Whirlpool Corporation. This comes up on my Jira. My jaw hits the floor. I pick up the phone, and hopefully I pause before dialing: what I do in the next 30 seconds determines whether or not I will still have a job tomorrow. I honestly don't know what I'd do, and that bugs me.
Initially they suggested I just cut the wire but I figured I could do something a little easier to reverse.
Out of curiosity, how do you know the make/model of goblinux's dishwasher?
At least then Bosch is coherent.
Actually I was mostly surprised by the parent comment, I thought that even in the subset of just dishwashers they had at least three different sets of controls/menus/settings.
>I'm sorry but I'm 110% behind the OC, no Bosch decision maker EVER used those appliances.
Well, I would extend that to most other manufacturers, I believe each one needs to show "something new" at the annual fair, and since - after all - there is not much to invent anymore in a dishwasher or a microwave, they add (senseless) features in the UI that only - say - 1% of users will ever use, inconveniencing the 99% of them.
I believe this is actually a safety feature: When a pot boils over and spreads water on the touch panel, both the pot and the touch panel may be too hot to touch, leaving no way to turn off the stove. So, to be on the safe side, the stove turns off and beeps.
But I would like a confirmation that a different series/different year still are similar, which is was I doubt.
I'm guilty myself. It's a fine tradition I have no problem with. ;)
Some people do it out of generosity, but for some it's a special subset of passive-aggression, a way to say you're wrong and I'm better, but indirectly and deniably.
I'm pretty sure I do it for both reasons at different times and in different cases.
For other bosch owners out there - older models label the button as cancel/drain. This article was helpful for my model https://www.fixya.com/support/t24500578-want_disable_beep_wh...
Back on topic - if this thing could wash a load in under an hour that would be amazing. No idea what the author of the article is talking about...
Definitely need to get out more.
On the other hand I don't want another damn app. Why is all that crap bluetooth and phone-only? Why can't I install these things on my router?
Surely just opening the dishwasher a crack would be simpler than cutting the power?
It’s a Bosch.
I've been strongly considering cutting out the beeper in my refrigerator, which will aggressively beep after a mere 20 seconds of being open. One way I like to cope with this frustration is to subscribe to the conspiracy that it is an intentional anti-pattern designed to motivate me to upgrade to a more expensive model that has a (stupid) window. I'm very comfortable with the idea that I'm going to stand there and stare mindlessly into my fridge, basking in indecisiveness. I don't think I waste as much energy doing this as the glass does, being a poor insulator.
All the dishwashers[1] I had previous to this had a real drying cycle that actively vented the humidity and was effective. My Bosch doesn't vent the compartment so the dishes take forever to dry if you don't open the door.
[1] Said dishwashers all manufactured over 20 years ago, before draconian energy efficiency requirements came into effect.
Edit: apparently some brands already have dishwashers with automatic doors, so cool!
My current model takes 2h to clean and if you open it right away it is usually dry in another hour. However if you forget to open the door right away it cools down and can take 4-6h to dry fully (if there are small pools of water on top of things). Having an auto-open to get the reliable 3h cycle time would be fantastic.
Obviously if I'm in a hurry I can dry manually, but that defeats a lot of the point of the automatic machine. We also put everything in the dishwaster so if we have people over on the weekend then cook lunches for the week we can have quite the continuous stream of dishes for a couple of days. Getting in an extra load or two in that time would be super helpful.
[1] ...like our Bosch washing machine which clearly has the display and touch buttons for more precise program options (custom temperatures etc.) but does not enable these by means of a different piece of firmware. There will be a day when I'm bored enough to hack the thing to do my bidding...
Not to mention avoiding the risk of voiding the warranty on a brand new appliance, or a house fire by mucking about with electricity in a device that also has water shooting around in it.
By all means though, to all the tinkerers out there, knock yourselves out...
If a corporation can do it properly, there is no reason to assume OP cannot. It is a little over the top to insist their house will catch fire just because they added a latch to a dishwasher (on the outside of the shell, which is what contains the water).
Okay, fine, none of that adds up to Disneyland money, but we're still talking some 6-figures for this project that may never be recouped. Maybe that's an amount of money that you're able to swallow without a corporation's help. Seems a lot easier with help though.
Now back to the prospect of adding a moving latch to a dishwasher which will have been prepared for something like that already given the fact that another model in the same series comes equipped with one. If you have a look at the mechanism you'll probably see the latch itself being built into the door with the bar mounted on the housing of the machine. In the 'cheaper' version this bar will be a grey piece of plastic, screwed down against the machine. In the 'expensive' version the bar is a longer piece of the same gray plastic which can slide in and out, moved by a motor of some kind (most likely a rack and pinion with end stops, could also be a servomotor). To add the moving latch to the version without one you'd take the screwed-down latch and either add it to a bar which can be moved using a servomotor (which can be had for a couple of € nowadays) or make a longer version using one of the many methods available to do such. Next you´d check whether the controller provides the control signals for the latch drive in the 'cheaper' version, if it does you can simply use those. If it does not you'll have to use an existing 'ready' signal to trigger the latch, the mentioned buzzer being a good candidate. Get a cheap microcontroller, program it to drive the motor when the 'ready' signal is given and to retract the bar when it is pulled from the latch or when the door is opened past a certain point and voila, you have a self-opening dishwasher. If you count the time spent to create your own version as billable hours it is probably not worth the effort but that is the wrong way to look at it. If you count the time spent cooking your own food, riding a bike instead of a faster mode of transport, reading a book or simply looking at the clouds as billable hours those things suddenly seem to be very expensive so why bother? Well, because there is more to life than billable hours. In this case it may simply be the joy of creating something, of overcoming an artificial hurdle, of one-upping the bean counters who decided to overcharge for such a simple feature or just because you think you can.
I can totally see manufacturers try and segment the market with a convenience function like this though.
Right now I need to set an alarm to go open the door when the dishwasher is hot to avoid it cooling down and then taking forever to dry. With the auto-open you never forget, are never busy (you can start it at night and it is dry in the morning) and don't need to be distracted from what you are doing.
BTW, my Samsung _played a 30 second song_ (loudly beeping) when it was done. I think it was Schubert or something? And again, no documented way to shut it up permanently. Super fun at 2am to be when woken up by a machine that you bought because it's supposed to be quiet.
You’ll be doing this as a direct result of years of careful psychological conditioning via maliciously placed ads chosen by some 4chan group.
Not officially, but there's always a wire that could be snipped, or a speaker that can be smashed..
But it had some issues, so sometimes it just went off. It was very loud and annoying. One day our tech manager couldn't take it anymore and came running out of his office, with a nipper in hand, and, as he was a really big guy, reached up to the horn up at the ceiling and cut the cables.
The other reply with the instructions on how to adjust the volume of the signal shows just how far UI has regressed. Instead of twisting a knob, you need to know some obscure key sequence.
Of course, I’ll eventually be unable to read all the necessary tiny print, and will then need to get the kids to fix the settings…
For example, once my headphones stopped playing sound whenever I would clear my throat or talk to the cats. It seemed like a weird intermittent failure, because I wasn’t expecting the microphone to have any effect when listening. And because it was an entirely new behavior. Turns out, if you triple-touch the right speaker and hold for three seconds, it will enter “speak to mute” mode. This can happen when taking the headphones off, so you don’t even hear any announcement about the mode.
Long ramble, but non-discoverable interfaces are a bit of a pet peeve.
But.... then it has a cooldown timer, and if you open the door within the next 30 mins it LOSES ITS SHIT at you, beeping and carrying on because the dishes haven't finished drying.
I mean... Why play the happy tune to announce to the world that you've finished... when you actually haven't.
Also, it is a dual oven, and the top half is also a microwave. The problem is that the top half oven functions insist on being given cooking times after baking modes preheat. (99h99m is my usual go to, which causes it to round down and demand a second “start” keypress).
The final cherry on top is that it has a fucking modal UI. Like vim, but on a kitchen appliance. The terminal state for most actions is where it says “program complete”, and you have to press “clear” before it will accept any other keystrokes.
I’m pretty sure the people that set the meat thermometer to aggressively cool the oven at target temperature (instead of just beeping out a god awful unmutable song) have never actually cooked. I suspect they don’t even understand what “human food” is.
Interestingly, my Bosch clothes washing machine has a button to disable the beeper. But not the dryer, even though they come as a stacked pair. ????
Edit: yes, I did read through the manual and entered the magic cheat code to make the dryer silent. Still a befuddling and frustrating experience.
The poor little beeper on the dryer is defenseless by comparison. If you leave it disabled, how will it find meaning in its life?
You'd hate my LG then - it texts me to tell me it's done.
As for microwaves.. the good old ones had a simple spring-driven timer, turn the wheel and when it hit zero it hit a bell, physically.. a single "pling". Perfect.
But the new one I bought as a replacement would beep five times, and keep beeping even if I opened the door. Crazy and totally useless. I want to have a.. word.. with industrial designers sometimes.
The microwave I have now also annoyingly beep five times, but at least it stops when I open the door.
My new home has a Kenwood, and it will beep few minutes, forever. If I start a wash before bed, I will literally hear it all night, no matter where I am in the house. Some nights I'll go downstairs just to turn it off if it's particularly bothering me.
Like you, I don't give a shit when the dishes are done, they can stay in the dishwasher until I'm ready to empty it, the stupid forever-beep is terrible design that like the linked article, makes weird assumptions about how you use your kitchen and dishwasher).
First order reasoning often fails in light of actual experience. It isn't that the reasoning was faulty, it was the underlying knowledge of reality was incomplete.
It uses about 4L more water than the 3 hour 'eco' setting. All winter long my house uses hot water anyway, so this is only a technically measurable savings in summer. In practice it is swamped out by other variations.
The reason why is dishwashers line to do a rinse in the first cycle and for most people the water isn’t hot enough. So it fills up with lukewarm water and isn’t as effective.
Another option is to have a hot water circulator installed so you always have instant hot water.
https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/do-dishwashers-use-hot-w...
> Water temperature: cold water.
> If water is warm: max. temperature 60°C.
My hot water tank heats to 60c, so my dishwasher would still need a thermocouple and a heating element to mix it to 30c, as there's no guarantee that my hot water tank is actually full.
https://www.maytag.com/blog/kitchen/do-dishwashers-use-hot-w...
It they were installed wrong. The heating element just helps keep it warm. It won’t make it hot enough.
European dishwashers have to use cold water because of the way they dry the dishes. In America hot air is used to dry the dishes so we can hook up to hot water. In Europe you can't do that because of the Kyoto agreement. So you use condensation to dry your dishes by piping in cold water.
There's not really much difference between them today. Because Europeans have very small homes by American standards (especially British people that live in sad, tiny, little things) the need for quiet dishwashers was also needed which means lower power. Also power costs more in Europe so more energy efficient appliances were needed so you didn't have food grinders, etc.
But today it's almost all the same. But the Kyoto agreement forces Europeans to hook up to cold water and heat internally and not use a fan to dry but rather cold water.
Sadly, modern dishwashers are not only are slow, they also suck at this too. I don't mind the slower performance since I get why, but the number of times i open the dishwasher to find half the detergent in the dispenser and all the bowls with stuff cooked on kills me.
The HP-ificaton of major appliance brands is so infuriating.
Considering that all 3 Maytag appliances I bought at the same time are defective in various ways, I'm treating it as another instance of a major brand strip-mining their reputation by selling cheaply built garbage until consumers finally give up on them.
A bit pricey, though. Never heard of Maytag. If I saw it in a store, I would probably guess it's a brand from China. But given your description, it sounds like you are in the US or so? At least that's whence I usually hear the complaints about brands selling out.
Choose your motivating examples carefully.
What is actually happening is crypto/web3 is a scam, and social media is a great fake product because your "customers" think you're trying to get them onto your new social media site whilst what you're actually doing is selling them worthless tokens with the promise of some future value that'll clearly never come.
>Businesses exist to make money by serving customer needs.
Yeah, and that's really hard, which is why they're not doing it!
Eg, things like Mastodon are great if you want to find a community that best fits you, because you have a rare interest or some characteristic controversial for a reason or another that makes existing on some place like Twitter difficult. So you can find a community that enforces standards that are very close to your ideal, and delegate that to them, and just do your own thing.
Not everything has to be like Twitter or Facebook, aiming to swallow the entire planet. There's room in the world for places like Hacker News that are only relevant to a small segment of the population. What's important though is to have a good sense of perspective about what need you're serving and how many people are there who need that. If you're aiming for something like decentralization that will have some costs to it that means you're unlikely to ever go world-wide. But so long you're happy enough with that, there's nothing wrong with it.
The author would probably agree.
> Or they’re only better ideologically, and in that case, only valuable to those who share the same ideology. Which is fine if the market for that ideology is big.
The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.
I think it's much the same with all the wifi-enabled, app controlled appliances. Their purpose isn't to be sold as useful features - they exist to add a half-dozen bullet points next to that item, that the other nigh-identical products you're comparing it against (or god-forbid, already own) don't have. $5 of extra parts that can be sold to you for $100
Decades back all appliances where white powder-coated. Then we decided they should all be built in and hidden. Then we decided they all needed to be brushed -aluminium feature appliances... except we didn't all decide this. The manufacturers are just always looking for differentiators.
Of course you can opt out of this obvious cash grab, and kit out your kitchen with Miele 'quality' and the like (Did you know Miele is one of the few remaining brands that doesn't outsource manufacture to a Turkish third party? I did, I'm special) Or reject all this modern stuff and buy a Speed-Queen (When pick-up truck owners get to decide what laundry brand to buy and maintain with the same set of spanners)
My dishwasher takes about an hour. If it took 50 or even 40 minutes, that wouldn't change things materially. But if it took 10-15 minutes, it would change the way I plan and execute work in the kitchen quite a bit.
That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.
The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.
There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.
Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.
*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes
Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature.
The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance.
Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns.
That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them.
Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't.
It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street.
It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication.
There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break. .
Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it.
I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts.
I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it.
For the dishwasher example, most dishwashers are far too noisy. Unless you live in a large place with many rooms, it will matter. The problem is that quiet isn't a highly visible/marketable and cheaply made feature, so isn't prioritized. After purchase, many would want a quieter dishwasher but very few will bother to uninstall/return/exchange it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063208
This isn't just another Howl-like lament. Quite the opposite!
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/
> But in no clear way do these products actually improve on what’s existing in a significant enough way that users may consider a shift
This article is apparently shaming engineers for making products that are being sold, but aren't selling well enough. Don't improve products. Don't be concerned with privacy if consumers are not. Just do whatever is going to sell.
This kind of thinking would have prevented the seat belt. Seat belts weren't going to sell more cars, they were going to raise costs. And why? Only to save human lives! Waste!
Private and decentralized stuff needs to get feature parity, be free as in beer like Google is, and then get a killer app that makes people want it.
I've always thought p2p offline lan messaging would be it, but Blockchain trashed all research on that aside from new tokens for like 10 years. Maybe they'll figure it out, but I suspect AI filters and random games will be more important.
Unfortunately, people who like making private apps hate most features, and think privacy is enough of a killer app for people to switch, but it doesn't seem to be.
Some I would be neutral on and have no problem with if they weren't just candy coating to deliver lock-in and data collection.
- Some people genuinely need a faster dishwasher, because having clean dishes in a timely fashion is important.
- Some people need cleaner dishes than others. Cleanliness isn't binary.
- Some people need a more energy efficient dishwasher.
- Some people need a smaller/bigger/more corrosion-resistant/quiet/heavy duty/etc. dishwasher than the market norm.
The trick is figuring out which of these axes have a high ROI.
The article's main point stands only to a certain degree. Speeding the dishwashing cycle from 120 minutes to 60 minutes, or even 30 minutes will almost always be a "who cares?" feature; None of those scale of speed-up change that basic work cycle of load, go away, and come back at another mealtime.
But speeding it to less than 5 minutes or 5 seconds per dish could be a very attractive feature, because it would change the entire work cycle such that the whole meal and kitchen could be cleaned up and put away in minutes.
Now, can you do that feature and have a great ROI is another question, but it's often nonlinear.
A charitable reading of my comment would find no such assertion. "Clean" is not binary. A restaurant might get in trouble if 1/100 plates have a smudge on them, but that might be perfectly acceptable in a home. Or not.
Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs
[https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-...]