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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Amazing to think that this speaker, which has never and will never say literally anything other than "BEEP" and "WALK", in fact reaches out across the internet every day to fetch that message.

What a world we have built.

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Cross signals in the city often say the names of streets and other words

Unless they are located in the stairwells at Hogwarts, it does not seem like those names would change often enough to necessitate adding a network connection as a point-of-failure for this sort of technology. (Which I consider the most important aspect. This is life-or-death tech for a subset of our population, and networks are fundamentally unreliable even if you get the security 100% correct.)

Is there an actual indication that these are connected to a network? Depending on how these devices work, some failure may have caused them to get reset to a factory default, requiring a password to be set before accepting settings like a message.

Why would they all fail at the same time unless they're networked? Exactly the same bug triggered by the system clock?

They shouldn't even know the time. All they need to do is count to the same number over and over.

Cities do all sorts of syncing / timing of lights in order to optimize traffic patterns, to do that they need a network connection.

Makes sense, but I'm replying to a comment that wondered if the assumption that the lights were actually networked was a good one. I thought it was, because they all went out at the same time.

> Why would they all fail at the same time unless they're networked?

Because temperature swings in the area over the weekend caused some physical issue in the devices? Because someone figured out how reset them, and reset a bunch for laughs? I agree that network is a likely root cause, but it's also an assumption.

If you're ever in the flatiron district of NYC, I adore the signals at 23rd street. "The walk sign is on across 23rd street," is a simple message, but the gentleman who recorded it sounds like they remembered at the last minute and pulled whoever from the install team wanted to do it (as opposed to some voice actor or something). The gravelly queens accent makes you feel right at home in the city.

Love this one. There is a similar one in Charlottesville, Va to cross Water Street, which has a delightful southern accent. Pronounces it Wooter and everything :)

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/nyregion/a-new-york-voice...

NYC once bought some street sweepers that played a feminine voice saying something like "Please get out of the way of the sweeper". This was replaced with a gravelly voice saying something like "Move it, sweeper coming through".

It's been a few years, but I thought NY's subway voice was more sarcastic-sounding than other cities, and I figured that was because it was more effective. "Please stand clear of the closing doors (dumbass)".

That voice actor was recently featured in a song. https://youtu.be/TA13bQExrh8

Thank you, my life is now just that little bit better. :)

At 3:00, if you're curious

They say "Wait." and "Walk sign is on to cross 23rd St. South" too. These are in Amazon's neighborhood.

is there any reason to think that this is a message from the internet rather than something built into the machine?

> What a world we have built.

That struck me on the Snowden revelations - I was happily building smartphone apps before.

But also miserable: the installers of the traffic lights never seem to have tried them.

it doesn’t actually reach out to get that message, it’s preprogrammed to get the installers to change the default

A world of centralized control and surveillance. A great world if you own it.

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