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Comment by skhr0680 | Hacker News Reader

> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.

It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".

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Those alarms are pretty much mandated by law. So it's politicians/law makers who "design" those alarms. This smells like inexperienced engineers designing something and then being surprised by side effects. Sadly there's a severe (temporal) disconnect between making the law and seeing its results in person.

I suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.

The thing is, the "walking experience" can be pretty miserable as well. Road fatalities still are unacceptably high in Europe, even if we're better than the US.

Cycling then? The cycling experience is pretty good around here.

Surely they would be interested in making more infrastructure compatible with not driving then?

In the EU? done!

The irony there being the "cars are evil" politicians are typically the strongest advocates for EVs, but EVs (being new) are the cars most likely to be affected by these annoyances.

I would love to replace my 2007 GTI with something cleaner and quieter but I genuinely don't see anything new as that big of an upgrade - my car has physical buttons for every feature, it doesn't (intentionally) make any stupid noises, and it's a stick shift in the US so it's essentially theft-proof.

Unless it is malicious compliance?

Why would they want to spend money on all these alarms unless it is to drive people to complain to their representatives about the amount of them.

I distinctly remember that there was an article years ago about this. Automotive bodies have been mandating features for decades, and were doing followup studies.

The introduction of seatbelts, ABS, ESP all came with noticeable drops in accident rates.

However it was noticed, that these new driver assist features didn't reduce the number of accidents accordingly. These systems are not new. We know they don't really help.

Why do this?

It's a moat. If you're afraid of losing market share you want your competitors to be busy finding out ways of passing these kind of rules you already figured out how to implement. That's why quality doesn't matter, only compliance does.

It would be nice if they first proved that it actually improves safety. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has some doubts about that.

> It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer.

It's the same culture in which product teams default install a background task that runs at every logon and checks for updates multiple times a day (for a program I used twice in the last year) or teams that default enable every possible notification (and in every update re-enable the ones users have explicitly turned off). Then they wonder why people don't try new apps and won't update the apps they have.

If you're in that meeting... speak up. I do and sometimes it even gets people to re-consider annoying defaults that don't even benefit the company very much.

Let’s not talk about cookie consent popups…

I used to work on a military base in the US. They have a similar culture, but with warning signs. Where I worked there were glass doors that were so festooned with signage that you couldn't see the other side. Floors are slippery when wet. Smoke free facility. Phone calls are monitored. Etc, etc.

Every few years they do a study and realize you quickly get to the point that people simply ignore all the signage when you do that, and they take all but the most important signs down. Then the sign creep starts again. It's a cycle.

I know when I drive I ignore all the beeps and dinging noises my car makes. I haven't even bothered to find out what they mean.

Yeah I don't like alarms and random beeps. I now have a Peugeot 106. The only thing that beeps is the cd player to remind me to remove the front plate. I need to sort that. Grrr.

I disagree, It's about treating people as sheeple that the politicians need to supervise and teach.

Basically these brainrotten politicians consider themselves the only responsible ones that need to remove choices for the simpletons they administer because they (the politicians) know better.

That's the core of our current woke culture that has become the zeitgeist since the 2010, especially in Germany - and it's especially strong on the left side of the spectrum ... But can be observed across all current parties to varying degrees.

That causes the politicians to think more about what "should" society be like (from their "I know better" perspective), instead of looking at reality - consequently ignoring that what they're trying to create isn't even within the bounds of our technical capabilities right now. Yes you can get close, but close is not enough for such features

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