Objects should shut up
dustri.org
dustri.org
It's a fun balance between "possibly don't warn the pilot about something they should know about", and "don't warn them if they are busy doing something important".
More devices should have a "squelch" switch!
More seriously, I have a garmin watch that displays notifications for things, but they automatically disappear and you cannot figure out what they were.
I think being overwhelmed by alarms should be matched with the confidence that you can find the alarm if you accidentally dismiss it or something important comes up.
Not yet, though I suspect that time will come.
How about an alarm with a mute button. Then everyone can be happy.
Android phone, do not disturb enabled...
"learn what new things Android has to offer!". System notification from Android/Google (probably some new Gemini highlight).
I also hate the mobile apps that designed to be always on, always listening or nagging. So, I have the policy: if the app is only useful occasionally and it is active but I didn't start it - I disable it. And I'll enable an app when I need it, not whenever it wants me to use it.
Is this a recent change? The last time I used an Android was many years ago and I did not experience anything like that.
I consider any notification for something I did not explicitly sign up for an ad. So if I get a notification like "use Gemini" or "heres a tip:", that's an ad.
Unfortunately that makes, like, half the default notifications on Android ads. But you can disable all of it.
Cases in which this can happen. - I orient myself before overtaking another car on the highway or motorway. - I position my hand wrong on the steering wheel and the camera can no longer see me. - I put on sunglasses when I am driving against a low sun.
It can be turned off, but if you live in the EU it is required to enable itself once the car has been turned off/on.
It will also happily warn me if it thinks I am speeding based on errornous gps data. This feature also turns itself back on once the car has been turned off.
I've been driving a family member's new Nissan. Nice car for the most part, but it has this "safety" feature (that's on by default and cannot be permanently switched off, thanks to the EU) which watches out for the white stripe on the right-hand side of the road and JERKS THE STEERING WHEEL when it thinks you're "too close".
Where I often drive, there are many narrow roads. No yellow line in the middle of the road. The only way to avoid hitting oncoming traffic is to drive with your wheels on the white stripe when you meet another vehicle. This can be stressful enough in itself, especially when the other vehicle is some huge bus or semi truck. Not exactly the time you want alarms going off AND YOUR STEERING WHEEL TURNING BY ITSELF. I've taken to calling it the car's auto-crash feature. Always gotta remember to disable the auto-crash. Every time I start the car.
I got so annoyed I looked up the relevant directive. Turns out new cars are required to have a lane assist feature. It is required to turn itself on automatically, and it is required to warn the driver using at least 2 out of the 3 methods: sound, visuals, haptic. So the steering wheel jerking isn't even just a bad implementation, it's the law.
Sigh.
The damn thing tried to kill me every time we came up on a construction area on the freeway, because it got completely flummoxed by the lane realignment. I couldn't turn it off until we parked the car, and we were on the freeway. Fighting that piece of crap for an hour made for the most exhausting drive of my life.
Far from being mandated, I can't believe that safety regulators allow _anything_ to jerk around the wheel at 60MPH.
But then I rented a Kia which had it. The nudge was very gentle and balanced and it felt pretty much like if the road had a groove or incline. Now, I'm used to driving in places with very bad roads so the feeling was very natural and my instinct was to overcome the steering wheel resistance with a gentle pressure just as you'd do when driving on roads that present those features.
But my eyes were telling me something different: the road was well paved and flat, so I realized it must be this smart feature. I was pleased at the Kia engineers for calibrating the physical response to be not surprising.
My main concern is that you can get used to this feature. The feature is not perfect and doesn't recognize the ends of the lane in many cases so you quickly learn that you can't trust it. But as technology gets better and better the risk of ending up relying on something that can fail occasionally is a serious one
I still find it crazy that these are supposed to be safety features.
You might be able to do similar in the Nissan.
Of course, you have to do this every time you start the car thanks to EU and UK law.
Everybody who first encounters this feature (including me) seems to have the same reaction.
However, if you give yourself some time to get used to it, you'll probably realize that it doesn't actually "jerk the steering wheel" with any significant force.
It's more like a gentle nudge, similar to the effect of highway rutting. If you are properly holding the steering wheel, it will not actually affect the steering direction.
1) use sound + visuals
2) use any other form of haptic feedback. Vibrate the steering wheel. Vibrate the driver's seat. Anything but jerking the steering wheel.
Then, Volvo, with blue lights filling the cabin and these types of safety features.
Each time I've come away thinking what a shit-show the car was, and how that seems to be the opinion of the entire company line.
I'm still driving my 15 year old diesel with manual controls and dim orange status lights at night. I just want a simple EV with aircon and speakers with media controls by the steering wheel. Minimal extra bullshit.
E: A 2022 subaru I rented for a long drive was by far the least worst of anything I've driven. I go out of my way to try something new every time I get to rent a car
More like Bike Overtake Prevention System. Unbelievable.
- Adaptive cruise control would randomly slam on the brakes on the motorway (just passed a 30 kph exit, the speed limit must be 30 now!), or match speed with a car in the next lane that was I trying to pass
- Emergency braking would trigger if I got too close to a car that was turning out of my lane, or a shrub while parking
- Lane assist reenabled itself every time I started the car
- Radar system would fail every ~3 starts, which would disable adaptive cruise control (ok) and blast a warning sound (bad)
At least now I know that if I'm shopping for a car in the future, one of my criteria needs to be "won't actively try to kill me".
But worse was it would use a camera to read speed signs and therein we had these issues:
- Misreading signs - Reading signs that didn’t exist - Every time it read a new sign it would “helpfully” yell that I was over the speed limit if for example I was coasting down from a 45 to 35 zone, along with scary flashing visuals on the dash
Also, I pretty much wear sunglasses 100% of the time I'm either outdoors or driving. That attention detection is not fit for purpose. Squinting through road glare literally makes me tired.
The dangers imposed on self and society by driving are poorly matched to the requirements of getting a license. Unfortunately participation in much of society requires the ability to drive one's self from one place to another; it's been built around this requirement.
Most of them are one-click nowadays, just as intended. (Still bad on phones tho, especially javascript disabled.)
Can you find any big sites that don't have one? They're effectively a mandatory CYA, the Prop 65 warning of websites.
A safety feature takes my eyes and ears off of the road to let me know that it is not keeping me safe for the moment.
The one that annoys me the most is the one right near where I live where a wider street becomes a narrower street, which makes my car think I’m going to rear end parked cars at 30mph and always beeps loudly. Even when I know it’s coming, it startles me and makes me lose focus, sometimes when there’s pedestrians trying to cross the street. Very dangerous.
In any case, it's law, there's no coming back from this.
I think this is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KQ0g_-qJs
Keywords: 737 MAX MCAS trim
Only the slightly annoying beeping one seems to be mandatory, the extremely dangerous steering wheel locking one isn't. Otherwise I wouldn't have bought the car at all.
My car just gently applies a tiny bit of force on the steering wheel, to keep the car in the lane. It's very easy to override manually. In fact, it feels quite similar to moving out of pretty shallows ruts in te road, and could even be mistaken for it.
If you use the turn signal it won't lock the wheel, but if child suddenly runs into the road and you will try avoiding a collision, you'd better remember to use the turn signal first.
Get an older car. Screw panopticon tyranny.
That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.
Same with touchscreen controls in a vehicle.
I hear a lot of people do that for the auto start/stop feature on cars in the US. And the INEOS Grenadier, which has an alarm go off if it detects you are going above the speed limit. Every time you turn the car on, you have to navigate a touchscreen menu to turn that off.
It was downright dangerous, jerking the steering wheel at seemingly random times when it gets confused.
I really just didn't have the imagination to think that it could possibly be a problem. Even the manual says that it stays turned off once disabled.
It's the kind of flaw we don't notice until after we've bought the products and lived with them for a while. Therefore, it doesn't hurt sales and therefore, there is no pressure for manufacturers to change.
It sucks.
As a workaround, these work great. Note that these particular ones are partial blackout stickers. They are 50-80% opaque. You can still see the light, but it won't be bright enough to annoy. If you want to darken even further you can just layer two of the stickers.
https://www.amazon.com/FLANCCI-Blocking-Stickers-Dimming-Bla...
If you need total blackout, there are similar ones available that are 100% opaque, although at that point I'm not sure why a person would buy a specialty product instead of just using regular tape...
I dunno. There is an increasing amount of products announcing "no led indicators" as a feature. And I've seen plenty of reviews with people saying things like "the on led is too bright".
They're so bright, you can see the damn blue circles on the ceiling. Blue moon rising, invited by no one.
If they're going to do LEDs, at least do red ones, which don't obliterate night vision. Making them togglable is the ideal unless they're literally a life-or-death piece of equipment.
But the things that irritate me even more are the infernal modals and alerts on my computing devices. It is hard enough maintaining focus without having to spend an entire work session playing whack-a-mole at random intervals for a hundred different things that aren’t relevant. I never want to know that my scanner software has an update available.
I realized that at its core, this problem is caused by developers and product managers mistakenly believing that I care as much about their product as they do.
It would be nice if the gatekeepers had mechanisms that punished this behavior. Search engines should lower the rankings of every site with random modals. App stores could display a normalized metric of alert click through — “this app has an above average number of alerts that are ignored”.
But it's sure as hell annoying to have unsolicited popups randomly appearing ("Java update available! Apple Music now 50% off! GeForce Experience driver update! Windows Defender scan results! USB drive not ejected properly!..."). They're also often embarrassing when screen sharing.
The flashing icons in Windows are far less obtrusive, and I was just looking at the latest insider preview for 11 where they are making it so the icon will only flash a few times and then change the little "application is running" bar that sits under the app icon from white to red to indicate that it wanted your attention. Which sounds like an excellent way to handle it to me.
The only notifications I have on are direct messages on whatsapp (no group messages) and slack during work hours +-30min only.
Isn't it opposite. They know you don't care and try to spam you to care or remember to use them. It is like an advertisement for self.
Now that the dominant economic model is driven by attention and engagement, even systems that don't benefit from it in the slightest are nonetheless infected by that aesthetic. I keep expecting to see a toaster that asks me to "like and subscribe" or a toilet that has pop-up notifications.
Toilets occasionally do that, but dismissing it requires a plunger and mop.
Needless to say I didn't buy it.
The policy of this hospital is that all alarms, beeping, etc. should be disabled except in limited circumstances. Particularly at night.
I always tell people though that being in the hospital doesn't make you healthier, mainly because you can't sleep. The hospital should be the absolute last resort, and your first priority on finding yourself in one should be to figure out how to get out of it, even if it involves nursing care at home.
* Absolutely never any beep or sound
* Direct controls, no "programs" (i.e. microwave has two knobs: power and time, etc.)
* No network connectivity of any kind (obviously)
With a strong brand identity and good marketing these would sell like sliced bread.
I don't think we will ever see it though, at least not en masse. No startup would be able to afford the sheer number of lawsuits filed by the companies we have slowly allowed to become fat by selling products rife with consumer-hostile "features". Not to mention traditional advertising platforms would refuse to promote their products. Too much money already flowing in from the usual bad actors.
It seems to me the market for "no bullshit" appliances is HUGE, and waiting for a company to grab it and make billions.
Whether or not you agree with it, joe next door is going to go to someplace like Best Buy or Menards for their new appliances, and they carry brands like Samsung and Maytag, and they are going to buy display models of the ones that draw attention to them.
That means it's purchased less. That means it's in fewer big box stores, where most people buy their appliances. That means it's purchased even less.
It's also much harder to differentiate whether an appliance is more expensive because it's solid or because it's bullshit.
* Noise cancelling earplugs
* Smart glasses with blink/strobe/seizure-filters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ1FBp-zDYI
Note: I did not follow up as I'm not in the market for a Microwave at the moment. I'm only frustrated the one built into my apartment makes too much noise. Also, the channel's design seems to be to make high quality videos but leave some of the info on their website which requires sign up so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I have not signed up.
It's the best microwave I've ever used. Meanwhile at work we have one that has a touch button for opening the door, and a touch slider to increase time. If power cuts, your food rots in there.
Pressing those is still tactile, although locating a distinct button by feel would require something else, like adding raised ridges.
I'm not complaining about the package I got with the rental: like any packaged service you have to take the good with the bad. But when things are packaged, a lot of the bad wasn't up to the consumer.
Must be activated when the ignition switch is energized and reverse gear is engaged. Must not be energized when the vehicle is in forward motion.
Seems that should be amended to not allow use when the vehicle is in park, just as they are prohibited while in drive. I'm tempted to write to the NHTSA and propose this change.
[0]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
They aren't meant to have a specific meaning, they're just headlights, but when going in reverse. So if the car has a feature to "turn on the headights" it makes sense to activate the ones on the back too.
Though that's just pedantry that kicks the can down the road to the question, why are the headlights turning on with nobody in the car?
The dwell time on these modes is so long that you need a welding mask to protect your eyes if you make the mistake of waiting in a supermarket parking lot for someone who is running a quick errand. Just a constant stream of large, unattended SUVs blasting ridiculous light into surrounding cars. By the time one turns itself off, the next one is ready for duty.
But in this case (a $50 device rather than a washing machine or something) why wouldn't you just get a different pair made by a different company?
2) There are many factors which go into how good earbuds/headphones are. While incredibly annoying and unnecessary, the quality of the "low battery" warning's implementation is realistically gonna be very low on the list of priorities for pretty much anyone. It's likely that the overall best product (when considering audio quality, Bluetooth implementation quality, battery life, price, comfort, weight, extra features like water/sweat/dust proofing, etc etc) is gonna have an annoying "low battery" warning.
If only that were still a thing.
This led me to discover that there is no setting to disable sounds, you must take it apart and rip out the speaker, which I happily did.
I've switched to another brand of robot vacuum since then and that poor experience makes it pretty unlikely I'll use a Roomba again.
Just to nitpick...
"You know, the alarm telling me that my clothes are dry… There is no reasons, let alone urgency, that I should get any form of audio notification about this. I could spent 6 months in the hospital after a car crash because of the aforementioned LPG seven trumpets, come back to my place, and find my cloths still impeccably dry."
Removing your clothes when they are still warm reduces wrinkles, enough so that you can avoid ironing things like t-shirts, which is just annoying. (I recognize that some slobs are okay wearing a shirt that looks like it's been yanked out of the jaws of a dog, but I am not interested in addressing the pathological case.)
This is why I really appreciate my GE washer which has adopted the Japanese aesthetic of a happy little jingle when it's finished instead of the ear splitting BUZZZZZZZZ of traditional American washers.
I honestly think that some thought needs to be put into these alarms, and maybe take a note from Japan when it comes to the _tone_ of notifications.
They should have advertised on the box: wakes your kids and your wife at 2am!
Note that it actually won't cool the room. It'll heat the room. The fridge works by putting hot air out the back. The more the fridge cools, the more hot air it puts out. The hot air is always more than the cool air.
If the fridge was vented outdoors, like A/C, then it would cool the room.
Whats measured is whats managed, and so we have a bunch of unnecessary crap to click on because that pushes the engagement metric up.
It reminds me when I get into my car. Ding ding ding ding to put on your seatbelt. Yet I haven't even put the car in drive.
My phone is constantly sending me messages trying to get my attention to buy something (even though on iOS there should be a per-app marketing opt-out, it's not enforced at all)
Or spamming 10 emails if you abandon a cart...
I don't like the idea of 'levels' where we can set which messages to get (like TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR), because that inevitably changes how these companies set their levels. After all, marketing affects their bottom line, so that makes it ERROR for them.
This is often communicated as too many project managers involved with a program. Hilariously visible in something like GMail. I can quickly count about 5 badges on my page of numbers that I don't think I'll ever actually care about.
Gets more difficult with things like disaster alerts. These are, generally, life saving. But, as we have gotten better at detecting things, it can feel silly if we have them too often. (My favorite is the alarm people have when they start to learn that coyotes are always passing through the yard.)
Oh, I just noticed a few minutes ago that Watsapp has 4 main-screen tabs now. Not that any one besides "chat" is useful for anything...
And the "search for contact" functionality didn't go into any of them, apparently it was just replaced with "talk to AI".
And it's not like those machines are silent when they are running, so you would need some sound to identify that they are not...
If anyone inside the auto industry wants to spill the beans anonymously, please do!
An afternoon soldering a red one + a resistor solved it. I genuinely can't fathom how people without electronics knowledge survive in this world. They must be just suffering constantly being unable to fix these things.
I think what people want is light pollution customization controls so they're not kept awake with LED Christmas trees.
I much appreciate Ubiquiti APs being able to turn off the LED ring.
Oddly, that song is a lot like one they used in the 1970s in pantyhose commercials.
> May the gormless cock-up who created this absolute potato of a device spend his entire life walking on legos.
This one cracked me up.
Also the author is absolutely right: whether it's my car, my washing machine, my oven, my fridge, an app on my phone, w/e it needs to stfu about anything that is non-critical. I do my best to enforce a rule where if I'm using a tool for a workflow and that tool interrupts with information or options not critical to that workflow I just stop using that tool. Difficult in the case of a car but at least in the case of apps I can usually enforce it via a three strikes mechanism. No, I don't want to sign up for email alerts. No, I don't want a tour of your new features. I'm using your old features, they're why I downloaded you. If you stop me from doing what I need to do in order to ask me for a rating in the app store, I assure you that you do not want my rating in that moment.
To quote a meme someone posted in this thread (and make myself at least slightly guilty of the reductive, screenshot-oriented, thought-terminating type of dialog I railed against above), "I am a divine being. You are an object. You have no right."
I have a house with ~15 fire alarms and when one is making an intermittent chirp every 30 seconds, it takes forever to figure out which one is low on battery. This could be solved with an LED that is lit when in a good state, and turns off when the battery is running low (or vice versa). For some reason I can't find a fire alarm with such a feature.
It's quite loud, I had assumed it was an improperly installed HVAC system...
Without it, suddenly you can hear every conversation happening all the way on the other side of your open plan office. It becomes extremely distracting.
It only lasts a couple of minutes, and it's a frustrating reminder of how fucking loud the baseline office noise is as a result of just the air movement of the HVAC.
I prefer low-heat, “delicate” settings for most everything (and even that, only in the rare cases where I don’t have time to line-dry). And I favor heavy natural fibers. So it routinely takes much longer than the upfront estimate for a light load of polyester dainties.
But I’m happy to accept the error now that I understand it’s the same tradeoff I’d choose: doing a proper job of things, instead of cranking up the heat or something to hit the time target!
That infernal 30-second end-of-cycle jingle, though… I’d much prefer an assertive but ambient kind of droning sound or something.
I waited next to her until it was about to beep then knocked her arm out of the way so she missed the perfectly-timed door opening and the microwave beeped its hideous beep.
Sometimes it's OK.
Why is anyone bothering to ruin such a great design?
Otherwise it’s great, I’ve only ever heard it once or twice, when I was /really/ taking my time.
PS: Coincidentally, I have the rare 33 box set and common 45's set too. Good tunes.
Renaming the title is just losing information for no reason.
That includes apps (games) that spend a minute screeching their godawful "mood music" during a loading screen. Or worse, won't allow you to shut the "music" off during a forced minutes long tutorial.
Why Android doesn't have a permission system for sound, I don't know. I'd love to be able to just forbid every app from making any kind of noise.
Good technology doesn't.
I liked the car in other respects but I'm sure glad to be rid of that. It can only be disabled by someone with the correct obd interface.
Edit: never mind, an obviously better solution is to just de-"the fuck" the original.
Everything is configurable if you're determined enough. ;-)
I need the model of this thing! Mine fires 5 deafening beeps when it's done and theres no option to turn it off. It has woken me up in a panic many times off the sofa.
I mean, my rice cooker is from Japan and plays "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" when it starts. Was that a requirement of mine when I bought it? No. Does it bother me? Also no. It's kind of cute, actually.
Same with other newfangled annoyances where the car is trying to have an opinion, like "lane assist" and speeding complaints.
If the car is having an opinion on things like this, then the manufacturer should carry some of the burden when there is a crash because they are actively trying to take responsibility and influence the driver.
Noises on home appliances is something else, and while they can be annoying they can also help blind people access their functions.
The rice cooker gives me a notification and requires nothing from me.
The microwave sounds an alarm that requires me to attend to it like an emergency.
Imagine how your comments would sound if X were something like racism or unwanted sexual advances instead of noise.