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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

A 9 second delay for a radio channel? So they can't do some interactive things like phone calls without a 9s delay anymore either?

It really seems modern tech doesn't care about delay at all, while personally I do care about it. Modern tech should be better, but on the delay it's getting worse instead. Bluetooth audio is another example, with top tier headphones no longer supporting lower latency bluetooth codecs like aptx, and GPU's being ok adding delay to insert some "AI" frames, and delay between moving a camara and seeing the updated image on screen. Plus this love that designers have for "long-press" on/off buttons rather than immediate clicky ones.

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Delay is something I imagine isn't regulated by much. For example, in the US all cars have to have reverse facing cameras so when you put the car in reverse, you can see if you are about to back over someone.

If I turn my Jeep on, it has such underpowered infotainment hardware that I can easily shift to reverse, disengage the parking brake, back down my driveway, shift into drive and start cruising down the street before it FINALLY turns on the reverse camera, which then displays me driving forward. That's also if the Accept button lets you press it, which it ignores a lot.

At what point should regulated functionality ALSO have some level of regulated performance?

    So they can't do some interactive things like phone 
    calls without a 9s delay anymore either?

These were almost never truly live. They have to build in a delay in case you start spewing obscenities or something. There were are also various latencies involved anyway. That's why they always tell you to shut the radio off when you're on the air.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/290129-REG/Eventide_B...

But at any rate, this has zero effect on live call-ins.

I recently switched from smart lights that used a cloud service to local ZigBee lights controlled via Home Assistant. One of the first things I noticed was just how snappy they are. You tap the button and they immediately turn off, almost like you're just killing the power with a physical switch. Plus they're more secure & private to boot!

That's one of the things that immediately turned me off much "smart" home things. Not only is a round trip to a server completely unnecessary, it makes the functionality significantly worse (to say nothing of security/privacy).

When you phone in, they tell you to turn the radio off and the radio plays through the telephone. Otherwise you would get feedback.

In the US, many “live” call ins are actually recorded off air (like during commercial breaks) and then played back later.

This gives time to censor, edit or cancel the caller completely. They can also tell the caller to turn off the radio to eliminate noise on the call, but can still hear themselves come on after the call is over.

the talk radio I'm aware of generally runs on a 10 second delay - short enough to be considered live, but still enough delay that if someone swears (illegal in the US) they can hit the beep button afterwards and overwrite the bad words. I've heard someone call in the next room and that is how it was, plus at various times the host has talked about this.

Things like sports games are generally fully live, but they don't have call in portions and a trained host can be trusted to use clean language.

> swears (illegal in the US)

What's actually keeping that beeping thing still alive in the US? Just inertia of the existing law with no reason to perform the work needed to remove it, or are there people who genuinely feel actual emotional pain upon hearing such language in the US and they are the majority voters?

Many like to listen to the radio (etc.) with children present. Many would prefer their children not be exposed to cursing on a regular basis.

I think this is the biggest one, particularly if you're listening in the car and just scanning up and down the dial— it's easy to stumble across whatever station and not really be aware what it is or who is talking.

If there was a way to send "ratings" metadata then that would change a lot, as you could trivially configure your car radio to just skip those channels (same as how the playstation profile my kids use unsupervised hides M-rated titles).

> If there was a way to send "ratings" metadata then that would change a lot, as you could trivially configure your car radio to just skip those channels.

I image that it should be possible. Many channels already send song information, perhaps that same functionality could be used.

But there's no such law in European countries, yet radio/TV is not a continuous swear-fest. Bleeps don't exist (except when on purpose making it look like the US, or imported). I'm sure there are some guidelines here too, but the US system just gives such condescending impression and the bleep, if anything, draws more rather than less attention to it

One of the biggest ironies is how puritanical we Americans are regarding swearing and the naked body, but extreme violence such as showing people brutally murdered, that's fine.

Yes, the religious voting bloc that still cares about such things for some reason is very powerful.

I still have a delay using Bluetooth between phone and car. Video/audio out of sync.

I have a cheap $20 Bluetooth dongle off Amazon that hooks into the audio port and cigarette lighter for power and it isn’t out of sync.

I'll be that person. There are no top-tier bluetooth headphones, only mid-tier at best, and they're grossly inferior to wired mid-tier headphones in terms of acoustics. (Which is obvious, when you spend 80% of the budget on processors, batteries and electronics, that you're spending less on audio hardware at the same price point).

With such disposable mediocre technology replacing such a superior predecessor, I really do think I get what I deserve when I buy them.

I often wonder what chromecast is doing in the 10 seconds it takes to start streaming something. Especially on hardware and software developed by google.

Buffering and waiting for TCP slow-start to get up to speed. While the amount of buffer time needed can be debated, given that in a long stream it is likely that a packet will be lost and resent via normal TCP (or just sent via a different route and so arrive late), you should have a few seconds buffer, and that means a few seconds at the start before the stream starts. It is a technical thing.

You don't have to implement things as above. For live video you probably should use UDP and design your protocol so that you can handle a few missed packets - that is have your video become fuzzy in those cases. This is a lot more complex to design though and so not would you should do first. Even if you have Google's engineers, the first solution is better for not-live video since a few more seconds of delay mean you can keep clear video.

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