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'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!
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
It seems to me the market for "no bullshit" appliances is HUGE, and waiting for a company to grab it and make billions.
More generally, it's sort of like how on auto enthusiast forums people are like "why don't car companies make cars for us anymore, manual, V8, rear wheel drive" and the answer is that, while there are enthusiasts, their numbers aren't enough to make the economics work compared to churning out a boring crossover that will sell significantly better.
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.
* Noise cancelling earplugs
* Smart glasses with blink/strobe/seizure-filters
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.
With all public debate around the effects of blue light on sleep, it's weird more people haven't found that concerning.
They're so bright, you can see the damn blue circles on the ceiling. Blue moon rising, invited by no one.
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...
If anyone inside the auto industry wants to spill the beans anonymously, please do!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
No one wants to do that but for a relatively low ticket item which one uses for hours every day it seems masochistic not to do so.
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.
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.
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.
That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.
Same with touchscreen controls in a vehicle.
In any case, it's law, there's no coming back from this.
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.
- 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".
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."
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.
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.
Oddly, that song is a lot like one they used in the 1970s in pantyhose commercials.
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?
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.
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.)
They should have advertised on the box: wakes your kids and your wife at 2am!
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.
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