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Comment by whh | Hacker News Reader

I loved the writers giving every firewall its own LED indicator, so we knew exactly how far the toasters had got.

Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers have the right of it. They need to show what's going on in the computer to a distracted audience in a heartbeat. When they pull that off on screen, I wonder if us software devs should be taking notes.

Isn't that what dashboards are for? They may not look like simplistic LEDs, but being able to "see" what the automation is doing is something everyone that's ever made automation wants to do. It starts with making logs before migrating to live dashboards.

Its basically that staring at the log patterns in graph form or system stats you get a pretty good idea of what 'normal' looks like and anomalies stick out pretty quickly.

Though having a person interpretingthe degradation progress and relaying it to the rest of the team could be a usable scene.

This is what Grafana was made for...

A guy I went to high school with used to do that for a living. I have no idea what they call it, but it's basically theatrical UI, where the screen has to act and usually deliver a bunch of exposition.

SCADA? Like simplified GUI animations of the actual physical processes going on in a plant instead of just toggle switches, progress bars, etc?

e.g.

https://ubidots.com/blog/content/images/2024/10/siemens-sima...

I've always called it "tvOS" or "MovieOS". Like, "oh, a lot of flashing lights on tvos today!"

It would be a fun exercise trying to recreate a lot of the screens from movies and tv shows. "This is unix! I know this!"

I can't recall where I saw it, there's at least one company working on this issue specifically for nursing staff. Everything beeps in hospitals, but there's no rhyme or reason to it, so room call responses are delayed, serious alarms can be missed, etc.

IIRC, the company's idea is to create a harmonious sound bed when everything's fine, and make different kinds of "out of the norm" alerts use a variety of sounds so that nursing staff get more info about what's wrong before finding the thing thats sounding an alert and looking at its screen.

This company's goal is to ... change an aspect of hundreds of different million-dollar highly regulated machines made by dozens of different multi-billion-dollar worldwide companies? And somehow make money doing this? Good luck, I guess.

In real life, malware turns the MacBook camera on and off so fast that the user doesn't even see the LED light up.

Could this be resolved with a capacitor? LED can stay on for at least a second or two once the camera is off? Not sure on exact components but this feels solvable and only problem may be slim design of their laptops.

I'd prefer if they just gave us a physical shutter that we could open and close with our thumbs.

The LED doesn't prevent the privacy invasion, it just notifies you of the privacy invasion… and only if you were looking at it.

The physical shutter that other manufacturers offer, is the superior solution.

And yet, in real life, we have our grafana dashboards :)

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