Estefannie Builds the Button-Free, Crowd-Controlled Microwave of the Future
Estefannie's most recent project is the perfect clap back to misogynistic trolls: a button-free microwave.
If you attended CES this year or saw coverage of the event, you know that AI is the hot thing right now. Every company on the planet is a panic, scrambling to find some half-baked use case that would justify the inclusion of AI in their products. But even if some enterprising young exec can find a viable application for AI, can we trust it? That’s a lot of power to give to a learned machine. So, instead, Estefannie gave all the power to a social network with this button-free, crowd-controlled microwave.
As a woman working online in a traditionally male-dominated space, Estefannie receives quite a lot of hate from angry men. A great deal of that tends to mention women and kitchens — quips that are exactly as clever as you would expect. This project was Estefannie’s way of raising a big middle finger to those cretins.
The joke that anchors the project is that Estefannie, despite being a woman, is incapable of even operating a microwave. They’re just too complicated with all of those buttons! To simplify her microwave, Estefannie first removed the pesky buttons. Closing the door added 30 seconds to the cook time, so longer cook times required opening and closing the door several times.
That was fun and original, but it got old quick. That led Estefannie to quite the upgrade: crowd-sourced cook times.
When Estefannie put food in the microwave, an interior camera would snap a photo and upload that to a dedicated Twitter account. Helpful users would then have five minutes to reply to the tweet with a recommended cook time. After the five minutes elapsed, a script would scrape the replies for times, average them, and set the microwave with the result.
The outcome of that experiment was predictable. People are gonna be silly, so a lot of the replies were outrageous — some even recommended negative cook times (a feature not yet available in consumer microwave ovens).
Estefannie’s final upgrade would make this year’s CES presenters green with envy. Instead of tweeting photos of the food, the Raspberry Pi that controls the microwave uploads the photos to ChatGPT and asks for cook time recommendations. That isn’t perfect by any means, but it works surprisingly well. ChatGPT is even able to identify objects that shouldn’t be microwaved at all (like Sharpie markers) and set a zero-second cook time.
Not only is the video entertaining, but it is also the perfect clap back to misogynistic internet trolls.
