I hate this fucking reality. The other day my microwave started acting weird, the little 7 segment LED display that shows the time started showing random combinations of segments that clearly aren't numbers. I looked it up, and it's a known issue. There's a teardown online of this model and of course the front panel board has one of those fucking Pilot chips in it. Someone couldn't be assed to write a couple hundred lines of C and instead spent, somewhere between $2-3 per unit to put a fucking LLM in it. Apparently it works fine for a couple months or so, and then starts going off the rails. Fortunately they used one of the volatile state SKUs, so you can just unplug the microwave for a minute and it'll go back to normal. But Palm2 is discontinuing everything but the flash models next year, so expect this type of thing to get a lot worse.

Or like remember the Panasonic Adaptect recalls? So, what's important to remember is that Panasonic were the ones who invented the adaptive smoke alarm. (side note: despite everything, it is pretty fucking wild that we can super precisely identify different types of smoke with like, 6 LEDs, that weird vibrating disc thing, and a bunch of math. As much as they fucked it up later it's pretty neat that this exists!) Everyone else was still making threshold style devices, so they had like a full year where they were the only ones on the market that wouldn't like, trigger a full alarm if you burned something in the oven or whatever. And then there was some vague AI drama and now you can't buy them anywhere.

But did you hear about what actually happened with the recall? Because, oh boy. Turns out, in 2029, after 3 years of a very successful product, they just fired all their R&D people, bought an off-the-shelf clone of their own sensor, and hooked it up to a SensorTPU with the out-of-the-box GPSense model and called it a day. Someone dumped the EEPROM and they literally just had like, a couple sentences describing the pin mappings, one of those weird prompt engineering sounding poems, that seemed to be vaguely about smoke, all full of typos and spelling errors. The initial recall was because the new models would go off if you, like, baked something with too much cinnamon in it, or if your cat sheds too much, weird stuff like that.

BUT THEN later it came out that if you had either 5, 6, or 9 of them networked, every now and then they would just spontaneously "fight for dominance", and whichever device "won" would just permanently stop working with no indication this had happened. (and yes those are the terms they used in the recall document, it's fucking bizarre).