14 ms·

For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

130 points by tomayac 1y ago

amelius 1y ago
> LanguageModel is not supported. Fail.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
Most AI agents and chatbots should be a web form. Make it easy to self service!
Mistletoe 1y ago
If I had to guess, they don't want to leverage the web because calling the phone number to get the 10 year warranty is a dark pattern they hope most people give up on. And they know the current version of the Electrolux washer is hot garbage that won't make it 10 years, compared to the previous one that made it 20 years. Now this is not great long term for the brand, but Yannick Fierling, the new CEO, just started in January 2025 after stepping down from being CEO of Haier Europe in March 2024, a job he kept for 9 years. The previous CEO, Jonas Samuelson, started on February 1, 2016, so why would Yannick care? Yannick will probably be out with a nice golden parachute and have a shorter life than the washer. Yannick is 54 years old and I guarantee the only thing he thinks about every day is retiring soon with as much money as possible. This enshittification cycle runs every day in the world and I don't know how we can stop it.
- taeric 1y ago
  My guess would be more that they don't have a support org in house. Were likely running very lean on a manufacturing pipeline and are adding a lot of other services on through partnerships.
  - toyg 1y ago
    But they don't have in-house capabilities precisely because of the above-mentioned enshittification cycle: CEO-monkey does not care about long-term. CEO-monkey lowers costs today. CEO-monkey moves on to new job soon.
    - taeric 1y ago
      Maybe? It is as likely that the company focused on manufacturing for so long that they decided to keep their focus there.
      - toyg 1y ago
        Electrolux has existed for almost 100 years, and on its way it acquired a lot of other companies. The chances that none of those companies ever developed any sort of in-house assistance, over that time, are close to zero.
        taeric 1y ago
        That is precisely a path that would lead to you not having a coherent support network, though? My assertion is that they did mergers to consolidate manufacturing. Any support orgs that they acquired along the way were not the aim of the acquisition. Quite the contrary, they complicated things in ways that are not as easy to work with as getting new manufacturing expertise.
- rlpb 1y ago
  They may also try to use the warranty registration as an opportunity to sell insurance products, such as "protection" for other white goods. I had this with a new boiler (American English: "furnace"). They took the registration but wanted to sell me a further warranty on related heating system components not directly part of the boiler. Interestingly, it was a different company that specialises in such products. I think they probably have a business arrangement with the manufacturer to handle the warranty registration admin and possibly the warranty servicing too, presumably at a discounted price compared to the raw cost of merely servicing the warranty itself, in return for the opportunity for upselling their own products.
ale42 1y ago
For such an operation like an ownership registration for a washing machine, this is totally true. But for some things (e.g., asking details about an invoice) I need to speak to someone, not to fill a form I receive an answer to in 3 days (and possibly not what I need). I say this because some companies are actually removing the option to call them in the first point, or hide it so it's very hard to find the number to call.
- hedora 1y ago
  I’ve dealt with multiple companies that hang up after hearing what your issue is, before and after AI became common. Since it is standard industry practice, I think draconian regulations are appropriate. Off the top of my head, if you are caught having a policy to do this, you pay all customers $100/hour retroactively for the total time they spent on hold (clawing back executive comp if necessary). An amount equal to the total automatically goes to the whistleblowers that reported the behavior (even if they engaged in it).
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    > even if they engaged in it I can't imagine any way that could be abused... (Cue "I'm going to write me a new mini-van this afternoon.")
    - hedora 1y ago
      Yeah; to avoid trouble, the call centers would need to avoid the appearance of impropriety, which is a higher bar than not engaging in the behavior.
Liftyee 1y ago
Not criticising the article or the decision to buy a new washing machine (20 years is a long time), but just noting that the old machine was likely fixable. If spare parts are even still available, that is. Whether it's deemed worth fixing is another matter. This must be the case for so many discarded appliances these days, especially underengineered ones with common issues. Also, not using the QR code protocols properly is a pet peeve of mine. I recently scanned one that was just a URL in plaintext (no web link protocol). If I was on an iPhone or using a simpler QR scanner, it would not work at all.
- hn_throw_250903 1y ago
  As someone who just replaced the bearings on a washing machine motor (carbon-commutator), I uhh… agree? The old machines are absolute workhorse beasts and they can work indefinitely as brand new with some maintenance here and there. However my expectation of people doing this are basically zero. So this is an anomalous post. By the time you write a blog post complaining about how a machine has a required IoT thing, you could have fixed a handful of issues short of soldering in new relays or triacs on the control board.
  - hedora 1y ago
    Conterpoint: We had a new samsung washer dryer pair with a 90 day warranty; they advertise something like 10 years, but it is a lie. The electrolux in the article is probably similar. Anyway, it said it lost communication between two boards. I opened it up, checked the wiring harness, and found zero visible problems. I replaced both boards. Same error code. There are 3-4 other computers in that model, so I guess the next step was to replace all of them. The first two were already a substantial fraction of the price of a new washer, so the entire setup went to the dump (or, hopefully a parts reuse company, but I doubt it). Most technicians refuse to touch Samsung appliances because they are impossible to debug. Anyway, we replaced the pair with a brand that’s supposedly repairable. Fingers crossed. I wonder if they ever made front loaders that were affordable, energy efficient and reliable/repairable. There’s no reason these things shouldn’t last more than 20-30 years on average. Maybe there’s a market for such hypothetical old machines.
Telemakhos 1y ago
I tried hitting the "identify" button but got the error "LanguageModel is not supported." This is on latest Safari, iPadOS.
- toyg 1y ago
  PromptAPI seems to be the usual fire-and-motion Chrome move.
  - john_minsk 1y ago
    It doesn't work for me in Chrome either. Oh irony.
- microtonal 1y ago
  Same on Vivaldi, macOS.
- monkaiju 1y ago
  Same on Fennec
- kraig911 1y ago
  I believe it's the nightly build on windows currently. Actually just looked and came back I'm mistaken it's on mac looks like too. Not sure why it's not working.
- Spoom 1y ago
  chrome://flags/#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano to enable this on current Chrome (at least on Linux). It worked after I enabled that flag and restarted Chrome, though it required two tries (apparently it needed to download a model). I tried to figure out if this stuff was available in other browsers but unfortunately came up short. Googler, opinions my own.
  - johnfernow 1y ago
    The Prompt API [0] works in Edge, though it uses the Phi-4-mini model instead of Gemini Nano. [1] Currently it doesn't work in Brave (at least on my machine), and I can't find anything online suggesting whether they plan on supporting the Prompt API. You can go to brave://flags/ and it shows "Prompt API for Gemini Nano" and "Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input", but it doesn't seem to actually work. 0. https://chromestatus.com/feature/5134603979063296 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5134603979063296 1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platform/prompt-api https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platfor...
LauraMedia 1y ago
I fail to see a useful usage for AI in this case. Couldn't you just print the product number as a barcode/qrcode and let a "dumb code scanner" read it, instead of having to download a multifunctional LLM?
- crinkly 1y ago
  Yep. When the only tool you know is the hammer you're going to hit inappropriate things with it.
- shellac 1y ago
  The author works in Google developer relations, and while devrel aren't quite marketing they will use the latest and greatest Google hammer.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    His demo is pretty slick, though. Less than 100 lines of code to get “the box I want on literally every customer service site.”
    - mrbombastic 1y ago
      Yeah maybe it is overkill but this would be a semi hard computer vision task not too long ago, it is pretty amazing you can get it that easily nowadays
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      Less than 100 lines of code to give the overwhelming majority of consumers "LanguageModel is not available." and a free snipe hunt for 0.5% of them to try to figure out how to enable it via chrome flags or snapshot browsers.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Provided one is using ChromeOS "standards".
  - keybored 1y ago
crinkly 1y ago
This stuff really annoys me but the problem is really well solved elsewhere. When you buy an Apple product it has a number on it Axxxx and a serial number somewhere. That's all you need to identify your product to anyone. That includes service manuals and spare parts. And as far as warranty registration goes, they register it at the point of sale/activation as the warranty starting. Job done. No humans / lookups / anything required. It just happens.
- Citizen8396 1y ago
  Product/warranty registration is often a way to collect more data about you as a first party.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- bux93 1y ago
  I mean, the thing is, the warranty starts automatically, there's no need to register or activate anything. As per EU consumer protection laws (the author lives in Spain). As for finding service manuals and user manuals - maybe what they need isn't the web but FTP. I mean, if it were still supported by browsers. I remember when some vendors just used to have folders with PDFs you could browse. The problem with "the web" is that this is no longer a website, but a content management system, or worse, a "customer engagement platform" that is hostile to creating a folder full of PDFs that have stable links. They probably still have that FTP site in a webified form somewhere for service partners, just not for Joe Public.
leoc 1y ago
Inside the heart of every customer support department there are two wolves. One is "do whatever we can to prevent them from phoning us: use every resource, every trick and every stalling measure to try to make sure they don't call". The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre".
- dj_gitmo 1y ago
  > The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre". I worked at a large insurance company and this was definitely the approach. There was a website, but you had to call to realistically get almost anything done. One product manager's big innovation was to completely remove passwords. Every time you wanted to log in, you had reset the password and be sent a link via email. Of course the didn't announce this, so you would be probably spend 20 minutes frantically looking for your password that didn't exist.
exabrial 1y ago
Why not just print a $.0001 sticker and stick it the machine listing all of the info needed to fix the machine... instead of building a $86million datacenter and burning through $100,000 of clean electricity every month that could have been used to power homes, but was instead used doing this?
- Nevermark 1y ago
  As long as, and some suppliers seem to find this onerous, the sticker can be peeled off cleanly. (I once bought a grass rake with 2 or 3 dozen metal tines, and it arrived with a huge sticker across all the tines. Which when I attempted to peel off, left a scattered layers of paper hard glued to all the tines. Not happy. Same with a rolling hot dog cooker. Glued “temporary” sales sticker covering half the transparent hinged top. Not happy.)
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Fender did this with my bass guitar. Trying to get the sticker off without scratching it was impossible, and even after using alcohol there's still some residue D-:
    - hedora 1y ago
      Goo Gone is your friend. My usual flow chart: Nothing, water, alcohol, goo gone. I’ve never ended up with a marred surface.
      - Nevermark 1y ago
        Tried that on the transparent cooker cover and it took off just enough of the cover surface with the sticker to look horrible. Otherwise, yes!
      - 1970-01-01 1y ago
        +hair dryer heat, between nothing and water, can make a difference in a difficult peel.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
I wonder if I could register the display washers sitting in Home Depot
observationist 1y ago
The point isn't to make it easy to register warranty for a product. The point isn't to make it easy to talk with customer service. The point isn't to make it easy to communicate with the company. The point isn't to make it easy to obtain service or replacement parts. The point is to "technically", and therefore legally, offer those things and minimize the cost of offering those things. All of these things are working precisely as intended. The company is not optimizing for customer experience or product quality, they're optimizing for profit.
- Printerisreal 1y ago
  YES and I feel like "Planned obsolescence" needs to be taught to every engineer and web developer and tech people. They will understand why or how some corp. decisions are made and what is the aim.
  - nativeit 1y ago
    I agree with you, but is awareness among that cohort really the problem? “Planned obsolescence” is engineered by tech people, after all. It certainly wasn’t divine intervention that came up with internal Li-Ion batteries (IMHO the most brazen example, where manufacturers effectively stick a 3-year timer inside your gadgets).
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      It wouldn't matter so much if they were standardized. With all the billions of devices sold, there could easily be a standard set of a hundred sizes. Someone petition the EU...
- nativeit 1y ago
  100% Customer support representatives, with very few exceptions, are just going to tell you whatever they think will get you off the phone. In I.T., this is generally accomplished by blaming whatever adjacent equipment/services they can plausibly pin the issue on.
mdavid626 1y ago
You could just add the serial number directly to the URL in the QR code too.
user3939382 1y ago
I have a better proposal. Let's scrap the web. It's corrupted and broken, it hasn't been fun since MySpace. We serve native apps like VNC over kitty graphics protocol + mosh/ssh + ios/android/windows/macos mosh/ssh client. Even if we need to distribute a customized terminal to make it work. Get rid of the browser and the app stores at the same time.
- pphysch 1y ago
  How is your "customized terminal" not yet another browser?
  - user3939382 1y ago
    Because it has no HTTP or HTML
    - pphysch 1y ago
      So you're replacing HTTP with SSH and HTML with a VDI. How are these technical changes supposed to fix the non-technical corruption of the Web?
toastal 1y ago
> Electrolux washing machine I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a significant discount. I cherish that machine for its dumbness. …No such luck for TVs.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  They are called "Commercial TVs", selection is more limited and the cost a bit higher, but no smart-TV BS.
  - toastal 1y ago
    Do they come in OLED now?
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Yup, at least from LG: https://www.lg.com/global/business/oled-signage https://www.lg.com/global/business/oled-signage
      - chipotle_coyote 1y ago
        The parent post saying they “cost a bit higher” is, AFAICT, understating it a wee bit. LG’s consumer 65-inch 4K OLED TVs run between $1200 and $2500 at retail, from a quick search; the 65-inch 4K OLED “professional monitor” linked on that page—e.g., the one that’s closest to an actual TV—retails for around $8000 at B&H. The cheapest OLED commercial TV I could find at b&H was a 55” LG for $3K…and as far as I can tell it’s really just a Smart TV, complete with all internet connectivity, for twice the price because it has the word “commercial” in its name.
        seany 1y ago
pbhjpbhj 1y ago
How about a minimum warranty period on white goods of 10 years mandated by government? Convince me it's a bad idea?
- etothepii 1y ago
  Define white goods. Define warranty. Would this guys experience meet your criteria? What are the consequences for failing? Is it 10 years of normal use or still 10 years if you basically run a laundrette. What if you never used it at all. What if (and where I live this is a serious use for a washing machine) you only used the washing machine for making a special rum based cocktail?
joaomacp 1y ago
The actual reason they tell you to register for warranty via a phone number is for a salesperson to pick up, and upsell you on "enhanced warranty" or "insurance". It's proven that people feel awkward saying no to a salesperson, and agree to pay extra much more often than they would do online (they'd just tick "no" on the enhanced warranty paid product). That's also why the author went on a queue: the call-center is not for the washing-machine company, it's an insurance-selling center that works with multiple companies.
robertlagrant 1y ago
For all that's holy, can you just say use instead of leverage, please?
- tomayac 1y ago
  [Author here] Hah, our tech writers make me replace this word every single time with "using" in our company blog posts. But this is my blog, my rules ;-)
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Your tech writers are correct. Almost never see this word used properly.
nickff 1y ago
Quite ironic for someone at Google to be complaining about a lack of long-term support for customers, when Google seems to have basically no customer support at all.
tziki 1y ago
I'd say this goes for a lot of developers too. The amount of push back I see online when Chrome implements something that was previously only available in app land is weirdly high. Like do you seriously want to write separate ios app for everything?
yomismoaqui 1y ago
One of the better things about the web is it's staying power. A thing you do today with HTML, plain JS and CSS will work the same after 10 years. Contrast with apps that force you to update and redeploy every few years.
Tronno 1y ago
Author chose a brand based on loyalty instead of doing research. Leverage the web indeed - Google Search would have quickly revealed Electrolux is mediocre. Plus, the manufacturer can't run a simple website to look up serial numbers, so author prefers their AI-based solution? And then builds one himself? This post reads like satire.
soperj 1y ago
Or, since they're already printing something unique when they print out the product number with the qr code, just print a qr code that goes to a website with the product number already encoded. No AI necessary. edit: I see a number of people have already suggested this. Clearly a very obvious answer.
PaulHoule 1y ago
I hate the word "leverage" as a substitute for "use". I remember this being absolutely endemic in the Microsoft world in the 00's but the first time I heard it was in the 1980s when the current commander-in-thief was a young upstart punk who leveraged the word "leverage" every chance he could get. For him the real use of leverage in business (e.g. "debt") rapidly turned a moderate-sized real estate empire into a hole in the ground and he recovered by becoming a television performer.
nullbyte808 1y ago
I was thinking the samething about subway. Ideally everyone would just order a sandwich online and by the time they arrive its ready to go. You scan a QR code(or enter a code) and your sandwhich pops out of hole. Having the option to make or in front of you slows down production and is awkward talking over fans and such.
philipwhiuk 1y ago
AI? It's just a QR-code
skwee357 1y ago
There is something I can't seem to understand in the relationship between technology and non-tech people / companies. As a tech-savvy person and someone who relocated recently, I rely a lot on tech solutions for daily problems. When I was choosing my medical insurance company, I concentrated on one that has a good app and English interface. When I need a barber, I search Google Maps and look for barbers who have a website where I can book an appointment. Same for doctors, workshops, or leisure activities. And most of the websites are crap. It's some obscure reservation system, or a generic website with poor design built on Wix or something. And from one side, I feel like there is an untapped potential here. Any good developer who can build and design a website, can just offer this to their barber or dentist. But on the other hand, I also understand that I'm not the only one who came up with this idea, so there must be a different reason why non-tech people / companies seem to neglect their digital presence. Could it be because they still think that digital presence is not important (and only tech-savvy people like me search for a barber on Google Maps)? Or maybe it's because most small businesses can't / don't want to pay a few thousands for a website and a Google Maps presence (but rather pay $39/mo for Wix), meaning that despite the fact that we are basically surrounded by tech 24/7, the general population still expects tech to be free, or nearly free.
- wonger_ 1y ago
  Some thoughts based on talking with small business friends: - most business comes from local word of mouth, so digital presence is not a priority - existing solutions are good enough; contact info and maybe a scheduling flow is all the website needs, regardless of UX polish - changing tech solutions (e.g. website migration) is painful; they have more important things to do with their time and energy - will investing a few thousand dollars in a website pay off? Probably not, and hard to convince them even if true; they have more important things to do with their tight budget - I think there's a lot of mediocre devs and agencies offering mediocre work; the talented devs delivering great, user-friendly work are probably not pursuing these projects
jamesnorden 1y ago
Pay for an ad, Google.
Cyphus 1y ago
The author's example serves as a counterargument to their point. Relying on a feature that requires enabling an experimental flag in the latest version of Chrome to work is "leveraging the web" in the worst way.
- tomayac 1y ago
  [Author here] The AI feature is their implementation on the server. I was just trying to see if the same could be implemented client-side as a good use case for the, as you say, experimental, Prompt API. (It's in origin trial, so you can use it already on production sites.) Downloading a model for just this use case is obviously stretching it. You'd use it if it's there, but not download it on purpose just for this convenience.
inetknght 1y ago
> For all that's holy, can you just leverage the Web, please? Don't make me talk to people! Twenty years ago I would have agreed with this sentiment. Today... definitely not. Leveraging the web is an unfortunately-implicit invitation to all kinds of tracking about me, my computer, my stuff. I already get too much spam, no I don't want your f***ing newsletter that I will not read when you send it to me after I already declined receiving it. > They could still offer to register the machine by telephone as an alternative They "do". You had the experience of that call. They literally do not want you to actually call. That's a tragedy because even in 2025 there are plenty of people who don't have smartphones, don't have computers, and many of them don't even want one. I certainly don't want to have to install some f***ing app on a smartphone just to register a washing machine. Do you?
mvdtnz 1y ago
Your demo just returns "Identify product number LanguageModel is not available".
rsynnott 1y ago
Huh. I bought an Electrolux washer/dryer (about 10 years ago) in Ireland, and it came with a QR code for registration for the extended warranty that just went to the website.

130 points by tomayac 1y ago

amelius 1y ago

> LanguageModel is not supported. Fail.

datadrivenangel 1y ago

Most AI agents and chatbots should be a web form. Make it easy to self service!

Mistletoe 1y ago

If I had to guess, they don't want to leverage the web because calling the phone number to get the 10 year warranty is a dark pattern they hope most people give up on. And they know the current version of the Electrolux washer is hot garbage that won't make it 10 years, compared to the previous one that made it 20 years. Now this is not great long term for the brand, but Yannick Fierling, the new CEO, just started in January 2025 after stepping down from being CEO of Haier Europe in March 2024, a job he kept for 9 years. The previous CEO, Jonas Samuelson, started on February 1, 2016, so why would Yannick care? Yannick will probably be out with a nice golden parachute and have a shorter life than the washer. Yannick is 54 years old and I guarantee the only thing he thinks about every day is retiring soon with as much money as possible. This enshittification cycle runs every day in the world and I don't know how we can stop it.

taeric 1y ago
My guess would be more that they don't have a support org in house. Were likely running very lean on a manufacturing pipeline and are adding a lot of other services on through partnerships.
- toyg 1y ago
  But they don't have in-house capabilities precisely because of the above-mentioned enshittification cycle: CEO-monkey does not care about long-term. CEO-monkey lowers costs today. CEO-monkey moves on to new job soon.
  - taeric 1y ago
    Maybe? It is as likely that the company focused on manufacturing for so long that they decided to keep their focus there.
    - toyg 1y ago
      Electrolux has existed for almost 100 years, and on its way it acquired a lot of other companies. The chances that none of those companies ever developed any sort of in-house assistance, over that time, are close to zero.
      - taeric 1y ago
        That is precisely a path that would lead to you not having a coherent support network, though? My assertion is that they did mergers to consolidate manufacturing. Any support orgs that they acquired along the way were not the aim of the acquisition. Quite the contrary, they complicated things in ways that are not as easy to work with as getting new manufacturing expertise.
rlpb 1y ago
They may also try to use the warranty registration as an opportunity to sell insurance products, such as "protection" for other white goods. I had this with a new boiler (American English: "furnace"). They took the registration but wanted to sell me a further warranty on related heating system components not directly part of the boiler. Interestingly, it was a different company that specialises in such products. I think they probably have a business arrangement with the manufacturer to handle the warranty registration admin and possibly the warranty servicing too, presumably at a discounted price compared to the raw cost of merely servicing the warranty itself, in return for the opportunity for upselling their own products.

ale42 1y ago

For such an operation like an ownership registration for a washing machine, this is totally true. But for some things (e.g., asking details about an invoice) I need to speak to someone, not to fill a form I receive an answer to in 3 days (and possibly not what I need). I say this because some companies are actually removing the option to call them in the first point, or hide it so it's very hard to find the number to call.

hedora 1y ago
I’ve dealt with multiple companies that hang up after hearing what your issue is, before and after AI became common. Since it is standard industry practice, I think draconian regulations are appropriate. Off the top of my head, if you are caught having a policy to do this, you pay all customers $100/hour retroactively for the total time they spent on hold (clawing back executive comp if necessary). An amount equal to the total automatically goes to the whistleblowers that reported the behavior (even if they engaged in it).
- sokoloff 1y ago
  > even if they engaged in it I can't imagine any way that could be abused... (Cue "I'm going to write me a new mini-van this afternoon.")
  - hedora 1y ago
    Yeah; to avoid trouble, the call centers would need to avoid the appearance of impropriety, which is a higher bar than not engaging in the behavior.

Liftyee 1y ago

Not criticising the article or the decision to buy a new washing machine (20 years is a long time), but just noting that the old machine was likely fixable. If spare parts are even still available, that is. Whether it's deemed worth fixing is another matter. This must be the case for so many discarded appliances these days, especially underengineered ones with common issues. Also, not using the QR code protocols properly is a pet peeve of mine. I recently scanned one that was just a URL in plaintext (no web link protocol). If I was on an iPhone or using a simpler QR scanner, it would not work at all.

hn_throw_250903 1y ago
As someone who just replaced the bearings on a washing machine motor (carbon-commutator), I uhh… agree? The old machines are absolute workhorse beasts and they can work indefinitely as brand new with some maintenance here and there. However my expectation of people doing this are basically zero. So this is an anomalous post. By the time you write a blog post complaining about how a machine has a required IoT thing, you could have fixed a handful of issues short of soldering in new relays or triacs on the control board.
- hedora 1y ago
  Conterpoint: We had a new samsung washer dryer pair with a 90 day warranty; they advertise something like 10 years, but it is a lie. The electrolux in the article is probably similar. Anyway, it said it lost communication between two boards. I opened it up, checked the wiring harness, and found zero visible problems. I replaced both boards. Same error code. There are 3-4 other computers in that model, so I guess the next step was to replace all of them. The first two were already a substantial fraction of the price of a new washer, so the entire setup went to the dump (or, hopefully a parts reuse company, but I doubt it). Most technicians refuse to touch Samsung appliances because they are impossible to debug. Anyway, we replaced the pair with a brand that’s supposedly repairable. Fingers crossed. I wonder if they ever made front loaders that were affordable, energy efficient and reliable/repairable. There’s no reason these things shouldn’t last more than 20-30 years on average. Maybe there’s a market for such hypothetical old machines.

Telemakhos 1y ago

I tried hitting the "identify" button but got the error "LanguageModel is not supported." This is on latest Safari, iPadOS.

toyg 1y ago
PromptAPI seems to be the usual fire-and-motion Chrome move.
- john_minsk 1y ago
  It doesn't work for me in Chrome either. Oh irony.
microtonal 1y ago
Same on Vivaldi, macOS.
monkaiju 1y ago
Same on Fennec
kraig911 1y ago
I believe it's the nightly build on windows currently. Actually just looked and came back I'm mistaken it's on mac looks like too. Not sure why it's not working.
Spoom 1y ago
chrome://flags/#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano to enable this on current Chrome (at least on Linux). It worked after I enabled that flag and restarted Chrome, though it required two tries (apparently it needed to download a model). I tried to figure out if this stuff was available in other browsers but unfortunately came up short. Googler, opinions my own.
- johnfernow 1y ago
  The Prompt API [0] works in Edge, though it uses the Phi-4-mini model instead of Gemini Nano. [1] Currently it doesn't work in Brave (at least on my machine), and I can't find anything online suggesting whether they plan on supporting the Prompt API. You can go to brave://flags/ and it shows "Prompt API for Gemini Nano" and "Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input", but it doesn't seem to actually work. 0. https://chromestatus.com/feature/5134603979063296 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5134603979063296 1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platform/prompt-api https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platfor...

LauraMedia 1y ago

I fail to see a useful usage for AI in this case. Couldn't you just print the product number as a barcode/qrcode and let a "dumb code scanner" read it, instead of having to download a multifunctional LLM?

crinkly 1y ago
Yep. When the only tool you know is the hammer you're going to hit inappropriate things with it.
shellac 1y ago
The author works in Google developer relations, and while devrel aren't quite marketing they will use the latest and greatest Google hammer.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  His demo is pretty slick, though. Less than 100 lines of code to get “the box I want on literally every customer service site.”
  - mrbombastic 1y ago
    Yeah maybe it is overkill but this would be a semi hard computer vision task not too long ago, it is pretty amazing you can get it that easily nowadays
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Less than 100 lines of code to give the overwhelming majority of consumers "LanguageModel is not available." and a free snipe hunt for 0.5% of them to try to figure out how to enable it via chrome flags or snapshot browsers.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Provided one is using ChromeOS "standards".
- keybored 1y ago

crinkly 1y ago

This stuff really annoys me but the problem is really well solved elsewhere. When you buy an Apple product it has a number on it Axxxx and a serial number somewhere. That's all you need to identify your product to anyone. That includes service manuals and spare parts. And as far as warranty registration goes, they register it at the point of sale/activation as the warranty starting. Job done. No humans / lookups / anything required. It just happens.

Citizen8396 1y ago
Product/warranty registration is often a way to collect more data about you as a first party.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
bux93 1y ago
I mean, the thing is, the warranty starts automatically, there's no need to register or activate anything. As per EU consumer protection laws (the author lives in Spain). As for finding service manuals and user manuals - maybe what they need isn't the web but FTP. I mean, if it were still supported by browsers. I remember when some vendors just used to have folders with PDFs you could browse. The problem with "the web" is that this is no longer a website, but a content management system, or worse, a "customer engagement platform" that is hostile to creating a folder full of PDFs that have stable links. They probably still have that FTP site in a webified form somewhere for service partners, just not for Joe Public.

leoc 1y ago

Inside the heart of every customer support department there are two wolves. One is "do whatever we can to prevent them from phoning us: use every resource, every trick and every stalling measure to try to make sure they don't call". The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre".

dj_gitmo 1y ago
> The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre". I worked at a large insurance company and this was definitely the approach. There was a website, but you had to call to realistically get almost anything done. One product manager's big innovation was to completely remove passwords. Every time you wanted to log in, you had reset the password and be sent a link via email. Of course the didn't announce this, so you would be probably spend 20 minutes frantically looking for your password that didn't exist.

exabrial 1y ago

Why not just print a $.0001 sticker and stick it the machine listing all of the info needed to fix the machine... instead of building a $86million datacenter and burning through $100,000 of clean electricity every month that could have been used to power homes, but was instead used doing this?

Nevermark 1y ago
As long as, and some suppliers seem to find this onerous, the sticker can be peeled off cleanly. (I once bought a grass rake with 2 or 3 dozen metal tines, and it arrived with a huge sticker across all the tines. Which when I attempted to peel off, left a scattered layers of paper hard glued to all the tines. Not happy. Same with a rolling hot dog cooker. Glued “temporary” sales sticker covering half the transparent hinged top. Not happy.)
- freedomben 1y ago
  Fender did this with my bass guitar. Trying to get the sticker off without scratching it was impossible, and even after using alcohol there's still some residue D-:
  - hedora 1y ago
    Goo Gone is your friend. My usual flow chart: Nothing, water, alcohol, goo gone. I’ve never ended up with a marred surface.
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      Tried that on the transparent cooker cover and it took off just enough of the cover surface with the sticker to look horrible. Otherwise, yes!
    - 1970-01-01 1y ago
      +hair dryer heat, between nothing and water, can make a difference in a difficult peel.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

I wonder if I could register the display washers sitting in Home Depot

observationist 1y ago

The point isn't to make it easy to register warranty for a product. The point isn't to make it easy to talk with customer service. The point isn't to make it easy to communicate with the company. The point isn't to make it easy to obtain service or replacement parts. The point is to "technically", and therefore legally, offer those things and minimize the cost of offering those things. All of these things are working precisely as intended. The company is not optimizing for customer experience or product quality, they're optimizing for profit.

Printerisreal 1y ago
YES and I feel like "Planned obsolescence" needs to be taught to every engineer and web developer and tech people. They will understand why or how some corp. decisions are made and what is the aim.
- nativeit 1y ago
  I agree with you, but is awareness among that cohort really the problem? “Planned obsolescence” is engineered by tech people, after all. It certainly wasn’t divine intervention that came up with internal Li-Ion batteries (IMHO the most brazen example, where manufacturers effectively stick a 3-year timer inside your gadgets).
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    It wouldn't matter so much if they were standardized. With all the billions of devices sold, there could easily be a standard set of a hundred sizes. Someone petition the EU...
nativeit 1y ago
100% Customer support representatives, with very few exceptions, are just going to tell you whatever they think will get you off the phone. In I.T., this is generally accomplished by blaming whatever adjacent equipment/services they can plausibly pin the issue on.

mdavid626 1y ago

You could just add the serial number directly to the URL in the QR code too.

user3939382 1y ago

I have a better proposal. Let's scrap the web. It's corrupted and broken, it hasn't been fun since MySpace. We serve native apps like VNC over kitty graphics protocol + mosh/ssh + ios/android/windows/macos mosh/ssh client. Even if we need to distribute a customized terminal to make it work. Get rid of the browser and the app stores at the same time.

pphysch 1y ago
How is your "customized terminal" not yet another browser?
- user3939382 1y ago
  Because it has no HTTP or HTML
  - pphysch 1y ago
    So you're replacing HTTP with SSH and HTML with a VDI. How are these technical changes supposed to fix the non-technical corruption of the Web?

toastal 1y ago

> Electrolux washing machine I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a significant discount. I cherish that machine for its dumbness. …No such luck for TVs.

Workaccount2 1y ago
They are called "Commercial TVs", selection is more limited and the cost a bit higher, but no smart-TV BS.
- toastal 1y ago
  Do they come in OLED now?
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Yup, at least from LG: https://www.lg.com/global/business/oled-signage https://www.lg.com/global/business/oled-signage
    - chipotle_coyote 1y ago
      The parent post saying they “cost a bit higher” is, AFAICT, understating it a wee bit. LG’s consumer 65-inch 4K OLED TVs run between $1200 and $2500 at retail, from a quick search; the 65-inch 4K OLED “professional monitor” linked on that page—e.g., the one that’s closest to an actual TV—retails for around $8000 at B&H. The cheapest OLED commercial TV I could find at b&H was a 55” LG for $3K…and as far as I can tell it’s really just a Smart TV, complete with all internet connectivity, for twice the price because it has the word “commercial” in its name.
      - seany 1y ago

pbhjpbhj 1y ago

How about a minimum warranty period on white goods of 10 years mandated by government? Convince me it's a bad idea?

etothepii 1y ago
Define white goods. Define warranty. Would this guys experience meet your criteria? What are the consequences for failing? Is it 10 years of normal use or still 10 years if you basically run a laundrette. What if you never used it at all. What if (and where I live this is a serious use for a washing machine) you only used the washing machine for making a special rum based cocktail?

joaomacp 1y ago

The actual reason they tell you to register for warranty via a phone number is for a salesperson to pick up, and upsell you on "enhanced warranty" or "insurance". It's proven that people feel awkward saying no to a salesperson, and agree to pay extra much more often than they would do online (they'd just tick "no" on the enhanced warranty paid product). That's also why the author went on a queue: the call-center is not for the washing-machine company, it's an insurance-selling center that works with multiple companies.

robertlagrant 1y ago

For all that's holy, can you just say use instead of leverage, please?

tomayac 1y ago
[Author here] Hah, our tech writers make me replace this word every single time with "using" in our company blog posts. But this is my blog, my rules ;-)
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Your tech writers are correct. Almost never see this word used properly.

nickff 1y ago

Quite ironic for someone at Google to be complaining about a lack of long-term support for customers, when Google seems to have basically no customer support at all.

tziki 1y ago

I'd say this goes for a lot of developers too. The amount of push back I see online when Chrome implements something that was previously only available in app land is weirdly high. Like do you seriously want to write separate ios app for everything?

yomismoaqui 1y ago

One of the better things about the web is it's staying power. A thing you do today with HTML, plain JS and CSS will work the same after 10 years. Contrast with apps that force you to update and redeploy every few years.

Tronno 1y ago

Author chose a brand based on loyalty instead of doing research. Leverage the web indeed - Google Search would have quickly revealed Electrolux is mediocre. Plus, the manufacturer can't run a simple website to look up serial numbers, so author prefers their AI-based solution? And then builds one himself? This post reads like satire.

soperj 1y ago

Or, since they're already printing something unique when they print out the product number with the qr code, just print a qr code that goes to a website with the product number already encoded. No AI necessary. edit: I see a number of people have already suggested this. Clearly a very obvious answer.

PaulHoule 1y ago

I hate the word "leverage" as a substitute for "use". I remember this being absolutely endemic in the Microsoft world in the 00's but the first time I heard it was in the 1980s when the current commander-in-thief was a young upstart punk who leveraged the word "leverage" every chance he could get. For him the real use of leverage in business (e.g. "debt") rapidly turned a moderate-sized real estate empire into a hole in the ground and he recovered by becoming a television performer.

nullbyte808 1y ago

I was thinking the samething about subway. Ideally everyone would just order a sandwich online and by the time they arrive its ready to go. You scan a QR code(or enter a code) and your sandwhich pops out of hole. Having the option to make or in front of you slows down production and is awkward talking over fans and such.

philipwhiuk 1y ago

AI? It's just a QR-code

skwee357 1y ago

There is something I can't seem to understand in the relationship between technology and non-tech people / companies. As a tech-savvy person and someone who relocated recently, I rely a lot on tech solutions for daily problems. When I was choosing my medical insurance company, I concentrated on one that has a good app and English interface. When I need a barber, I search Google Maps and look for barbers who have a website where I can book an appointment. Same for doctors, workshops, or leisure activities. And most of the websites are crap. It's some obscure reservation system, or a generic website with poor design built on Wix or something. And from one side, I feel like there is an untapped potential here. Any good developer who can build and design a website, can just offer this to their barber or dentist. But on the other hand, I also understand that I'm not the only one who came up with this idea, so there must be a different reason why non-tech people / companies seem to neglect their digital presence. Could it be because they still think that digital presence is not important (and only tech-savvy people like me search for a barber on Google Maps)? Or maybe it's because most small businesses can't / don't want to pay a few thousands for a website and a Google Maps presence (but rather pay $39/mo for Wix), meaning that despite the fact that we are basically surrounded by tech 24/7, the general population still expects tech to be free, or nearly free.

wonger_ 1y ago
Some thoughts based on talking with small business friends: - most business comes from local word of mouth, so digital presence is not a priority - existing solutions are good enough; contact info and maybe a scheduling flow is all the website needs, regardless of UX polish - changing tech solutions (e.g. website migration) is painful; they have more important things to do with their time and energy - will investing a few thousand dollars in a website pay off? Probably not, and hard to convince them even if true; they have more important things to do with their tight budget - I think there's a lot of mediocre devs and agencies offering mediocre work; the talented devs delivering great, user-friendly work are probably not pursuing these projects

jamesnorden 1y ago

Pay for an ad, Google.

Cyphus 1y ago

The author's example serves as a counterargument to their point. Relying on a feature that requires enabling an experimental flag in the latest version of Chrome to work is "leveraging the web" in the worst way.

tomayac 1y ago
[Author here] The AI feature is their implementation on the server. I was just trying to see if the same could be implemented client-side as a good use case for the, as you say, experimental, Prompt API. (It's in origin trial, so you can use it already on production sites.) Downloading a model for just this use case is obviously stretching it. You'd use it if it's there, but not download it on purpose just for this convenience.

inetknght 1y ago

> For all that's holy, can you just leverage the Web, please? Don't make me talk to people! Twenty years ago I would have agreed with this sentiment. Today... definitely not. Leveraging the web is an unfortunately-implicit invitation to all kinds of tracking about me, my computer, my stuff. I already get too much spam, no I don't want your f***ing newsletter that I will not read when you send it to me after I already declined receiving it. > They could still offer to register the machine by telephone as an alternative They "do". You had the experience of that call. They literally do not want you to actually call. That's a tragedy because even in 2025 there are plenty of people who don't have smartphones, don't have computers, and many of them don't even want one. I certainly don't want to have to install some f***ing app on a smartphone just to register a washing machine. Do you?

mvdtnz 1y ago

Your demo just returns "Identify product number LanguageModel is not available".

rsynnott 1y ago

Huh. I bought an Electrolux washer/dryer (about 10 years ago) in Ireland, and it came with a QR code for registration for the extended warranty that just went to the website.