In safety industries, particularly aviation, "alarm fatigue" is a really big deal. You recognize that pilots have limited situational bandwidth, and you REALLY don't want to be bugging them about things you can avoid. I worked in collision avoidance systems (TAS/TCASI/TCASII), and spent nearly a whole year just working on figuring out when and how we could avoid warning pilots in cases where "we're not sure exactly what is going on, so tell the pilot just in case" could potentially annoy pilots in cases like take off and landing (where they have important OTHER things to be doing!)
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".
But alarms drive engagement. Also, display a company logo and complete product name™
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.
Chemical companies could allow vendors to sponsor various alarms in their plants: "the Flowserve(tm) High-Level alarm on T102 is active!"..."the Flowserve(tm) High-Level alarm on T102 is active!". Then there could be a contractual minimum for the number of times that ad needs to be served to operators and engineers, otherwise the chemical plant would need to refund Flowserve for the unused ad campaign credits. Lowering the threshold of the high-level alarm would optimize ad revenue!
Uhm, my recent washing machine purchase involved actively looking for not needing an app. They did try hard though, for example by offering 3 more years of warranty when you install the app.
Either the cost or repair/replacement during those extra 3 years is really low or your data is really valuable. Adds flavor to the challenge in designing it to last just long enough to leave warranty.
Data is probably not the only advantage they get from the app. For example, you are more likely to purchase other appliances from the same vendor so that you can have them all in the same app.
My washing machine doesn't beep when it is done. My dryer does. So I some times don't time the emptying of the washing machine and have to wait a couple of minutes and the dryer annoyingly beeps when done.
How about an alarm with a mute button. Then everyone can be happy.
That's why the first thing I do on my new phone is disable the Google app.
It does absolutely nothing useful for me, but never sleeps, eats resources and shows you advertisements.
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.
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.
Which one contributes more to alarm fatigue, spoken announcements like "bank angle" or beeps and buzzes like the autopilot disengage theme tune? Why is the latter so prominent?
If it's something that happens often (like on every trip or most days), a spoken announcement is more tiresome. If it happens rarely, the beep-encoded one is way more tiresome and can reduce situation awareness.
Curious if there's research - I'm sure there's tons, I just don't know that literature - but personally, in my experience as a professional aviator and as a spacecraft operator, the fatiguing alarms are the ones that are triggered in normal situations. If you start blinking red and squawking at me when I'm doing something nominal, you are training me to ignore you.
Autopilot disengage is heard every single flight and is completely benign... unless neither pilot was expecting it in which case it is very effective at getting our attention.
Squelch is a dial that changes a threshold below which analog radio signals are silenced so you can ignore noise. The dial allows you to dig into the noise when you want or be more conservative and only pass strong signals through.
Not quite. More like signal-to-noise-ratio gate. In radio transmissions, there is white noise when no active signal is received. Radios mute themselves when there is white noise, as to not annoy the user. On 2 way radios this is very important otherwise the radio will be hissing at you most of the time.
The squelch setting determines the threshold of signal to noise allowed through. If the incoming transmission signal strength is really bad, the radio might not unmute itself. So you turn down the squelch, which might completely open the radio bringing in white noise, but you can then receive the transmission.
Isn't they exactly what a noise gate does? You set a level of loudness below which it mutes all sound. If sounds levels go above that then it plays whatever sounds goes above it.
My brand new car has a feature called forward attention warning which is driving me insane. It is essentially a small camera located at the steering wheel column which emit a series of high beeps and have an eye icon blink in the dashboard if the car doesn't think I am looking forward.
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.
There is truly a scourge in the EU of increasingly intrusive "safety features" which I truly believe are making cars less safe.
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.
I recently got back from Europe; rented a car. This "feature" is _insanely_ dangerous. Whatever idiot bureaucrat decided that having crappy machine vision software jerk the steering wheel around while you're driving should be sent to an island somewhere.
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.
Or you could look at some of the research, which suggest that this feature may in fact reduce fatalities significantly (I'm finding estimates in the 20 to 25% range). Well done idiot bureaucrat!
"Lane departure warning and prevention systems could address as many as 23% of fatal crashes involving passenger vehicles."
That appears to be something like a stat about how many fatal crashes involve unintentionally leaving a lane. It provides approximately zero evidence in favor of specifically mandating haptic feedback from the steering wheel.
The second article is marginally more on point - 24% fewer crashes for vehicles with lane keeping assist (so my guess at the meaning of the 23% stat may have been wrong). But the 95pct confidence interval is 2-42% and the study acknowledges that its efforts at controlling for confounding factors in the type of cars that have this feature are imperfect. It also took place in the US, so there's certainly no mandate for haptic feedback and I suspect very few cars had it. This is marginally more helpful evidence but not very good, I think--it seems very plausible that audible lane keeping features are helpful and moving your steering wheel (which sounds terrifying) is unhelpful.
As an anecdote, I crashed a car as a teenager thanks in part to panicking (unnecessarily) when a rough highway started moving the car's wheels (which I noticed of course via the steering wheel) without my intending it. Fortunately there were no injuries.
Surely they could've found a better way though than to make the car automatically swerve into oncoming traffic?
I'm 100% on board with the idea that the lane assist feature might, on average, improve safety in many conditions. Maybe enough to be a net win. But I'm absolutely certain that its terrible implementation (in legislation, not just in cars) leads to situations where it reduces safety. When I'm driving on small country-side roads without a center line, no amount of "but it reduces traffic fatalities on highways" will convince me that automatically swerving towards the oncoming semi trailer is safe.
> When I'm driving on small country-side roads without a center line
My guess is that people drive these types of roads a lot less often than they swerve on highways. Hence the statistics working out. Steering into oncoming traffic does indeed sound, uhm, suboptimal though. :-/
My Honda Ridgeline (2021, USA spec) has two modes…
Default is “sticker shaker” mode - if it senses lane departure, it shakes the wheel and displays a warning on the dash. On by default, but can be disabled after start-up.
The other mode is “lane-centering” - has to be turned on after start-up, and actively steers car to the center of the lane. Really only makes sense on a highway/interstate - clear lanes, no sharp turns, etc. On dual carriage way, it gets a bit “stupid” when turn lanes appear with a gap or change in lane marking - it thinks the lane got extra wide and tries to center, pulling me half into the turn lane.
But, like I said, it’s 100% optional, so I use it on the highway/interstate, but nothing smaller.
Sounds like the EU mandates “lane centering” all the time that can’t be easily disabled, which is pretty silly (if it behaves anything like the Honda system, whcih is only really designed for true interstate use).
> Sounds like the EU mandates “lane centering” all the time that can’t be easily disabled
I'm in EU, on my 2023 Civic it's off by default and needs to be enabled after every car start if you wanna use it. Also works pretty well, other than when driving straight into the low sun or in heavy rain at night. The collision warning and road departure warning are on by default, the last one can be disabled until car is restarted.
In fairness, I haven't done much experimentation. It jerks the wheel and that terrifies me. I don't know if it's a jerk back and forth to make the wheel vibrate or if it's a jerk to steer the car to the left, either would probably give me a feeling that the wheel is moving by itself and would probably be scary enough for me to disable.
This entirely tracks to me but hints at a different problem. I suspect if this really does reduce traffic incidents and fatalities in general, it's because a large number of people are driving while tired and drift into adjacent lanes without realizing it and the lane-assist jerks them awake. Problem being this is a blunt force instrument that annoys or even endangers drivers who are not impaired and know what they're doing.
Thankfully, every car I've ever driven that has this feature allows it to be turned off and I have it turned off on my own car, which I drive for maybe ten miles a month in the middle of a Saturday when I'm wide awake.
This just goes to show how bad at driving a large number of people on the road are. Driving test standards are way, way too low.
Personally speaking I felt like I somehow accidentally cheated or something when I passed my test. It was too easy. Even now I sometimes question if I should really be trusted with piloting a 4k+ lbs steel box at highway speeds.
I agree that my comment was a bit snarky. Thing is, I'm getting tired of people dismissing 'bureaucrats' that easily. I know little about road safety legislation, but I know enough about the EU to state that they commonly have very smart subject matter experts work on legislation. Does that mean things always turn out perfect? Far from it. But 'idiot bureaucrat' is way too cynical for my taste.
EU has a huge revolving door problem, especially in automotive, which is a major industry in its (now declining) economic champions.
They might have people with credentials working for it, but the implementation described falls into the category of "some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe it." To an external observer, incompetence and malice are hardly distinguishable, especially when there is a huge economic incentive for both the automakers and legislators to be evil.
It's safety profiteering, squeezing millions in the name of saving lives.
The motivation of a bureaucrat isn’t the effectiveness of the policies they produce, but instead the political ramifications of those policies.
The safety minded “take no risks” at all approach has been if not popular, tolerated because it’s hard to argue against safety, even if the safety gains are dubious, and expensive. And so they keep their jobs.
Fast forward a few decades of this, and now nothing much new can be developed.
But of course the bureaucrats are “smart” so they’re never to blame.
Frankly they deserve the ire they get for being part of the problem. When is the last time they got rid of an ineffective rule in the EU?
I was very annoyed about this feature when I first read about it. I don't have it in my car.
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
My Renault Megane is a bit inbetween I think. You definitely notice it trying to get you where it wants.
But if you're holding the steering wheel normally, ie not just with two fingers, you're easily able to keep it steady.
Another feature I think is suboptimal is the auto emergency breaking. It gets confused when there is strong shadows from an overpass or similar, or winding roads with wide vehicles like campers in opposite lanes, and stomps on the breaks. However when it works it can be a positive...
It's true, mine has that as well. While I can't turn off the default mode, it is thankfully only visuals and sound. It does however also have the assisted suicide mode, where it will either jerk the wheel or prevent the wheel from turning. Thankfully that can be turned off permanently.
I still find it crazy that these are supposed to be safety features.
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.
In Hyundais this can be disabled by long pressing on the lane keep assist button on the steering wheel. Its the one with a couple of white lines and a steering wheel between them.
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.
In the Nissan, you can customize all of these things and the car stores your configuration, you just have to press two buttons on the steering wheel every time you start the car to load it. And with those custom config loaded, I find the car really nice to drive. We (I and the family member) have gone through all the safety feature options and made a config which we like. Which mostly means just turning off a bunch of stuff, including the auto-crash and the obnoxious beeping which tells you you're going above (what the car thinks, sometimes incorrectly, is) the speed limit.
Doesn't help when you haven't driven the car in a while so you forget to push those buttons and the car reminds you by automatically turning the wheel towards oncoming traffic :(
Realistically, car makers are going to find the cheapest way to comply. Adding motors for vibrating the driver's seat costs money. Ditto with adding vibration motors to the steering wheel. Using the motors you already have in the steering mechanism is just software.
So there's a clear incentive to involve the motors which control steering, which is inherently going to feel terrifying.
Lane assist works perfectly fine on my Skoda (or I have learned to live with it). Basically it doesn't do anything under 50km/h and then above that it will mostly lightly shake the steering wheel if you drive on the line, and it will steer only in extremes to keep me in my lane, eg. driving fast and crossing a double white line or something, which saved me a few time when I was distracted. Also, sometimes I use my blinker when I think it will engage, eg. road works and I need to cross the solid center line into the oncoming lane.
A family member of mine's car has that, I've had similar experiences where (living in a rural area) I've been driving down a 2 lane road with no one else about, seen a puddle or pothole, not wanted to hit it, tried to put the car a bit over the line for that reason and got shoved back by the bloody car thinking it knew better than me.
I've test-driven 2 cars in the last 2 years (because I'm environmentally interested in swapping my diesel for an EV), but each time has put me off that entire brand. First was Tesla, I can't stand the full iPad console with no physical controls. (And Elon... but that's a side thread).
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.
I'm driving an 11 year old diesel, the main annoyance I have is that its rear proximity sensors pick up on the trailer hitch (which is detachable, but I prefer to have it attached -- besides, it's probably rusted in place or something now after 11 years). So I always have to disable proximity sensors when backing up. An awkward design, but not really a big issue in practice. You get used to it.
I'm not looking forward to getting a fancy new car with government-mandated always-on systems which try to steer the car into oncoming traffic. The insanity is genuinely unfathomable to me. It is, without exaggeration, a fuck-up of such proportions that it's making me question the whole idea of the EU, as a Norwegian whose position on the EU has historically been that Norway should join it.
Although I suppose being outside of the EU isn't exactly saving Norway from its harebrained legislation.
You won’t get it. The tickytacky safety bs is lobbied by car companies who can now sell you more systems on margin. Hold onto your current car for dear life. They won’t ever make them like that again.
I love when you're trying to navigate through some zig zag construction bullshit and the lane assist keeps fighting you to eat some cones/barrels. It's also fantastic when the lines on the highway are wobbly and it starts trying to drive like a drunk person. All because of people who can't help but use their phones while driving...
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
I rented a car in the UK a few years ago and by the end of the trip I was ready to set it on fire.
- 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".
I rented a car in the states last time I visited family and it was mostly ok - the touchscreen controlled all the heat/cool through convoluted menus but thankfully had dedicated buttons to kind of control climate?
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
A friend of mine spends the first minute of all trips in their car turning off all the auto-safety BS loaded in by regulation these days. All on by default the next time the car is switched on.
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.
I'm generally pro-EU but they sure know how to not fix things by annoying people as much as possible. C.f. the cookie laws, headphone volume warnings, etc.
I understand the spirit of the law, but any implementation by the EU feels like making a wish to a monkey paw these day. I would love for people to stop watching tiktoks on their phones while driving on the motorway, but the implementation means that I now get to be constantly distracted by my own car while driving.
passenger seats already have an occupancy sensor that you could probably hook into to make a passenger seat bypass somehow.
don't get me wrong, this would probably be horribly unpopular, but otoh deaths from cars are up ~50% in the last decade, bringing us back to ~1985 in car safety. Something fairly drastic is needed
Amount of driven kilometers are also up massively compared to 1985, meaning that per kilometer we did fine on the safety record.
Stop trying to make cars safer, and reduce the amount of driving you need to do. There is a way to have more liberties and have it improve safety instead of fewer. The liberty to commute, do groceries, and go to the gym by bike is huge life improvement, whilst taking nothing away in terms of car liberties.
The EU didn't force the banners. They restricted opt-out data collection without consent, which is a good thing to do. The banners is malicious compliance.
And they are getting better. I don't remember when was the last time a cookie dialogue forced me to uncheck 10+ switches, and making me angry that they give my browsing history to 1000+ random ad companies--I unironically miss that daily dosage of anger (against ad people and not the EU).
Most of them are one-click nowadays, just as intended. (Still bad on phones tho, especially javascript disabled.)
My Tesla often beeps loudly at things I have my focus on completely to let me know that I don’t have focus on them, thereby forcing me to look around to see if I missed something and making me lose focus on the thing i needed to focus on.
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.
On my spouse's 2019 model, I could disable that alert in the menus. Even after I disabled every alert in the menus, the car still emits an urgent tone with an unknown meaning.
The thing is that I like the safety feature itself. It’s just asinine that it distracts me to tell me that for the next 1 second it’s not keeping me safe. Also the fact that there is absolutely nothing it changes in my driving behavior when it is off. I’m still the one driving.
I just drive with lane keeping enabled. The car will keep itself in the lane without audibly alerting me. If I really wanted to depart the lane, e.g. to avoid debris or to give a cyclist more space, the blinker or a slight nudge of the steering wheel will override it.
I really did like the actual lane-keeping function of my Mom's Subaru when I drove it on narrow two-lane roads, intentionally hugging the outside of the lane when appropriate. The sound it made wasn't annoying or startling, and quickly became another form of situational awareness to let me know that I was indeed near the edge of the road like I wanted to be.
I've found that disabling the lane assist in my 2020 Civic permanently disables that too. It's an EU model. For anyone looking for a solution, try if this solves it (if you wouldn't miss the lane assist, of course).
Unfortunately as I've later learned, it's a requirement in all cars in the EU from 2025, so there is no way to disable it permanently. Thank you for the suggestion though.
My understanding was that it is only required for lane assist/cruise control, unless i misunderstood. Hopefully if you deactivate those, your car will allow disabling this "feature".
No, it is mandatory for all new cars in the EU since 2025 and while you can turn them off, they will turn themselves on again once the car has been turned off. It doesn't matter if you use lane assist or cruise control.
My dealer suggested that I cover the sensor with electrical tape, since that is what all his other customers were doing. It will then just give off a single warning when you start the car telling you, that the forward attention warning is disabled.
I have since learned that you can put some tinfoil between the sensor and the tape and seemingly disable it completely without any alarms going off.
With that in mind I wouldn't be surprised if there was a market for a gadget that remove all the hassle. I am definitely not alone with this issue.
I’ll keep my stupid, non-digital 2010 car running until the day I die. They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I’d rather register it as a vintage car and keep driving it.
Mine is over 50 years old. It's been upgraded with a few "modern" features like distance sensors, rear cameras, and a GPS, but those are actually useful and won't actively fight me.
In a lot of places in the world you can return new cars. I would return one that did that. Manufacturers won't get the hints until they start seeing returns wreck their bottom line.
They could try to cheat! That's actually what Volvo did in the Dieselgate. The EU regulation mandated the impossible duo of lower NOx emission and higher fuel efficiency. Diesel engines get higher efficiency by increasing compression ratio, which also increases NOx production.
possibilities:
(1) they get lots of angry customers and bad press, and are tired of being made to look bad because of gov req's
(2) it costs them more to manufacture all the fancy nanny tech, so their bottom line would be positively impacted by rolling back the requirement for it
I don't know the law in your country but most forms of credit have a 'cooling off' period where you can return the money or asset and reset the credit agreement within a certain time but I'm not sure if doing it a lot in a small period of time would flag to a future creditor though.
The assist to keep you in the lane that also auto turns on has been the only cause of 3 near crashes I've had, when renting cars. Never have I even had a slightly dangerous situation other than this bullshit turning the fucking wheel for me. Who the heck thinks that a machine knows best if it should turn the wheel than a human, with eyes, driving? I cannot understand how it ever helped anyone and it's much worse than just a beep, literally trying to steer against you.
This reminds me of how Boeing introduced an automatic nose-down feature in the 737 MAX, meant to compensate for its higher-mounted engines causing nose-up during takeoff. According to a video I saw, they didn't make pilots aware of this change from the older 737, nor train them in how to recognize it or turn it off, and its behavior in response to a bad angle of attack reading turned out to be deadly.
I actually knew about this one going in, since it's been a requirement for a bit longer. My Hyundai has two modes, one where it simply beeps if you cross the lines without the turn-signal and the dangerous one where it locks the steering wheel.
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.
Steering wheel lock? Is that seriously a thing, or is that a strong exaggeration?
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.
No, it will actively prevent you from turning the wheel if it means you will go outside your lane. It does have threshold if you struggle enough, in which case it will simply undo the lock and you get to jerk the wheel dangerously in that direction.
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.
Thanks, looks like I'll be repairing my 2010 Honda Fit (Jazz in EU markets) forever to avoid getting anything of the sort of antifeatures you describe.
That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.
Honda was still good in recent years. I drive a 2024 Honda CR-V. No tones that annoy me. No interior cameras. All of the important controls are still physical.
It sounds like some of these things need to be disabled by pulling a fuse, or else disabled via button every time the car is on, like a takeoff checklist for an airplane.
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.
I would, but once I fully understood the problem it was too late to return it. When I got the car I simply turned off the features, and because I don't drive a lot I didn't notice that the car would turn them on again until I was outside the return period.
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.
Obviously the reason will be revealed as you get into questions like what year was your car manufactured and at which stage of integration is your country.
Catalytic converters are required by law too, yet I know plenty who have done a "cat delete" on their vehicle. As a simpler example, pulling the seatbelt chime fuse was a common mod long ago when I grew up. You may want to check if the modding scene has any solutions for your make and model.
Because it's otherwise a great car. I did notice the problems during the test-drive, but I figured it wasn't a problem, since it could be turned off in the console. So I turned them off and forgot all about it. I would never have imagined that some obscure EU-regulation, that I've never heard about, would require them to turn back on.
While we're at it, can we do something about the gigalumen blue light every device seems to have to indicate on/charging/charged? My house looks like a dystopia spaceship after dusk.
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.
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...
> It's the kind of flaw we don't notice until after we've bought the products and lived with them for a while.
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".
I did buy some rechargeable fans this year, and they had a very welcome "night mode" that shuts off the blue LEDs.
I'm not sure if they exactly advertised it as a feature. The Amazon product page was kind of a soup of mangled English. I guess it was probably mentioned in there somewhere.
Sure, we eventually react to ubiquitous issues like blue LEDs, but it's been 2 decades since blue LEDs were new/fancy and it's just barely popping up now. It's very reactive and very slow.
Just look at microwave interfaces. They haven't meaningfully changed in function in decades, and yet +30s buttons often don't start the microwave, power level can rarely be set after starting and all sorts of basic responsiveness details.
I've had to put a layer of electric tape, sometimes two of them, on some of those just to get the bedroom to a level where it's dark enough to sleep in comfortably.
They're so bright, you can see the damn blue circles on the ceiling. Blue moon rising, invited by no one.
I once bought one of those alarms that brighten along with the pattern of natural sunlight in the morning (and dim in the evening), as I don’t get much natural light in my bedroom. The time display on it was so unbelievably bright at its lowest setting that my sleep was worse until I piled stuff up in front of it. I don’t even bother with it anymore.
Renting, I'd want something I can temporarily attach to arbitrary pre-existing blinds. On reflection, there are several types one might encounter but I'm particularly thinking of the "twist stick to adjust horizontal slats" style. (As opposed to "loop of chain controls angle", or "fully unroll from top".)
I think there was a Show HN some months back where somebody 3D printed a mount so that the twist-stick could be slotted in at a slight angle.
Yes, seconding this one too. I've opted for ugly black electrical tape squares over the worst offenders in sleeping spaces, but why is that the only option?
Ha, I've done the same. I never thought I'd become like my old grandpa, who didn't like when TV stations started adding crawls to the bottom of the screen for certain news/information so put electric tape across the bottom of the screen.
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.
It used to be dim red LEDs but then in the early 2010s everyone switched to blue to look more fancy and modern. Sometimes really bright ones too, I used to have an ASUS router that had bright enough (blinking!) blue LEDs to light the entire room up. Without any option to disable them, of course.
With all public debate around the effects of blue light on sleep, it's weird more people haven't found that concerning.
> my old grandpa, who didn't like when TV stations started adding crawls to the bottom of the screen for certain news/information so put electric tape across the bottom of the screen.
I now have a small amount of electrical tape in my travel bag, and I use it at practically every place I stay. I just rewrapped some around a bit of plastic - no need for it to be very sticky anyway as I take it off when I leave.
I've always struggled to fall asleep with even a moderate amount of light in the room, and I used to go crazy trying to cover every small led to make things easier for me. It took me far longer than it should have for me to realize that it would be easier to cover my eyes instead, and I bought a nylon sleep mask on Amazon for a few dollars. It's literally been life changing how much my sleep improved after that. If anyone is bothered by this specifically when trying to sleep, I'd highly recommend trying out using a mask to block light when sleeping; it's really cheap to give it to a shot, so you don't lose much by trying, and you might end up winning the lottery like me.
My MacBook Pro's dual magsafe charging lights do this for me. It becomes an issue when I travel so that the MacBook is in the same room I sleep in. Sometimes turing it perpendicular to the bed is enough, at least it's not directly into my eyes even if it is lighting up the room. Other times I have to pile stuff on top
I have a monitor with a bright blue / dull orange LED. I found that stacking layers of kapton tape turns the blue into a dull green, while leaving the orange mostly unaffected.
The worst one of these I encountered was in a USB-PD power supply meant to replace a 12V outlet in a car. It was extremely distracting driving at night. The illuminated area covered most of the face of the device, so I covered it with RTV silicone.
yes plz && ty, I listen to audiobooks at bedtime and I can't put my earbuds back in the case without them turning on a super bright blue light that has actually woken up my partner in the past. Why? I can see a little pinhole status light to show me that the connection is made correctly but why outline the whole case in blue and then start flashing the percentage charge remaining in the case while also animating charging bars to show that the buds themselves are also charging? Why turn my bedroom into the landing scene from the movie ET?
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”.
I've disabled the entire notification stack on macOS and Windows 10 with some tweaks and couldn't be happier. It's not like I'm going to miss out on anything of value as Slack, Discord, Mail will just indicate new messages with a dock/taskbar icon change.
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.
One thing that drives me up the wall on macOS is when an application demands attention and its dock icon starts bouncing... and doesn't stop. It happens over fullscreen stuff too.
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.
Any app that pops up a notification when NOTHING EXTERNAL HAS HAPPENED has all its notifications turned off immediately and permanently. It's literally just deciding "hey, I'll bother the user about something pre-programmed right... now!" No.
This is a bigger problem, not just of software developers, but all businesses thinking you care about them as much as they do, not seeming to understand that I've made purchases from tens of thousands of businesses over the course of three decades as an adult, with more to come, and no matter how much I might care in theory or principle about any one of them, there is no universe in which I can read daily, weekly, or even monthly e-mails, SMS messages, or pop-up notifications from all of them, because if I actually did that, my entire life would consist of nothing but filling out surveys. The cheeky little smiley emoji asking if they can take just five minutes of my time misses the point. Sure, I've got five minutes, but you're one of 30 businesses asking for that every day, and it's no longer "just a moment" when it adds up to two and a half hours across all of them.
When arcade machines needed to cycle players to keep the the quarters flowing, it created a aesthetic in game design that took a decade or more to shake when we switched to an economic model that rewarded keeping players on the site; in that earlier era, even things that didn't benefit from kicking users off did so, because...well, that's just the way you did things.
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.
I recently went to buy a toilet for a new house. I saw one with a touch screen. Kohler "intelligent" toilets. God knows what horrors the touch screen would have revealed.
Go to a modern hospital emergency room, it's a cacophony of devices all vying for attention. I walked down the hallway and realized every room in the place had a different audible alarm—all active! I suspected the device manufacturers were all worried about liability for their device, making sure to notify that a patient had a problem. The end result for the medical staff was an endless chaos of noise. Complete systemic failure of UX from a practical standpoint.
Yes. I have a family member that has had many hospital stays over the last few years, and one of the most obnoxious things is that the staff just lets everything beep. The last time we were in the emergency room the blood pressure monitor did not work and the staff didn't notice for over an hour. Even when it does work, they're constantly in an alarm state because patient has chronic high blood pressure. They either can't or won't silence the alarms, so every room is beeping, the nurse's station is beeping, their phones are beeping, and it's all being ignored. It's the very definition of alert fatigue.
In the regional hospital near me, they've begun actively fighting for fewer alarms. In part because they annoy everyone: patients, visitors, and hospital staff alike. But mostly because the inevitable alarm fatigue that the cacophony results in actively endangers patient safety.
The policy of this hospital is that all alarms, beeping, etc. should be disabled except in limited circumstances. Particularly at night.
From time in hospitals I've gotten very good at disabling them. Most nurses are fine with it but every now and then one would come on shift and tut tut at me for having done it. They usually shut up when I point out that they don't respond to the alarms in any sort of prompt way - as I'm sure if I were to continue pointing that out up their chain of command they would then find some trouble.
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.
And in my experience (not surprisingly) they have all developed a good sense of what alarms can be ignored, so like a pump beeping because it's done delivering some medicine doesn't matter so they ignore it and let it beep, but it matters to the parents with new baby trying to get some sleep.
Also worth noting, as someone who worked with appliances in the past, I have heard nothing but praise for speed queen products. Sentiment is that they are extremely reliable, if expensive.
This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a very long time. A company that manufactured even halfway decent products that don't have endless amounts of dark patterns/planned obsolescence would quickly drive me bankrupt.
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.
I have a pessimistic view on this because I think most people are sadly very prone to going for whiz-bang style over substance. This is why people still buy Samsung appliances when Speed Queen are no frills but top tier in reliability.
I think an even more important factor is that, in the case of speed queen, it has a great reputation within specific communities...but you can't really buy them in the stores that the average person visits for appliance purchases.
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.
I don't think people actually trust Samsung as a brand that much. Marketing pipelines are just tailored to foist theirs and other garbage products because it generates revenue.
Yep, that's sort of what I'm getting at: people (generally) don't care enough to look past the marketing.
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.
They do exist. Cheapest stoves and fridges at home depot right now are the same old dumb appliance stuff they’ve been for 40 years. Cheapest microwave they sell is the same as its been for 30 years after innovating the dedicated Potato setting.
I didn't go look at the actual devices but I was pleasantly surprised when "America's Test Kitchen" (a youtube channel) had a review of Microwaves and said they rated device higher if (1) you could turn the sounds off (2) didn't have network features (3) had more direct controls
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.
I got a brand new microwave that controls time with a actual mechanical tomato clock mechanism, with a single distinct mechanical "bing" as it mechanically reaches 0 and hits a piece of brass.
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.
Touchscreens in the kitchen make no sense to me. Guaranteed to be working in an environment where things are hot, wet, sticky, etc. Why would I want to fight the sensor if my fingers are clean enough?
Hmm, while I imagine cleaning a continuous surface is easier, it doesn't need to be a capacitative one: Buttons beneath a flexing plastic membrane work took, like the classic microwave number-pad.
Pressing those is still tactile, although locating a distinct button by feel would require something else, like adding raised ridges.
I'm renting an apartment that came with a "nest" smoke detector. The thing ate through around 8 AA batteries every few months. We finally got sick of it and bought our own dumb 10€ smoke / CO detector.
If something like that is going to chew through batteries, it should be available as hardwired only, with batteries as the backup. But I know the manufacturers wouldn't want to miss out on the juicy market of people who don't want to deal with running the wires and who don't realize how often they're going to be replacing batteries until it's too late to return the device.
I agree. I think my anecdote illustrates the perversions of the renter's market, and the interaction with the Internet of Crap, more than it illustrates the IoC in general. A lot of people buy into this stuff and never realize it: they put it in their tenant's home and forget about it.
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.
One that I hate is GM cars that turn on the "reverse" lights in parking lots when the car isn't even turned on, or sometimes when there isn't even a person in the car. I'm sure someone wanted to turn those on as a convenience for people or maybe to indicate there is a person nearby? But those lights have a specific meaning which is no longer reliably conveyed by GM cars.
I was curious, so I just checked the FMVSS requirements for these[0]:
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.
I think this might be a disconnect between what those lights are "really" for, and how they're actually used (de jure vs de facto, in a sense).
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 specific use is to light the way when reversing. They are not intended for use as "reverse" indicators, even if that's what they're used for in practice. Trailers usually don't have reverse lights, for example.
Yeah, you could have a whole article-length rant about how courtesy lighting has devolved into turning parked cars into simulations of a rocket launch site lit with flood lights.
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.
They do this to help people see around the car at night. The reverse lights only turn on when the car is off. They also time out and turn off automatically after a short time.
When my wireless earphones reach 20 minutes of charge it starts warning me about this every minute. So this essentially cuts 20 minutes off it's battery life cause it's too annoying to use from then.
I know it's annoying to suggest that consumer preferences will fix stuff like this when clearly it comes from some corporate design culture that completely ignores consumer preference.
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?
1) A huge amount of wireless devices have these annoying low battery warnings which make the last 20 minutes a terrible user experience, you'd probably go through a whole lot of headphones/earbuds before you'd find one which doesn't. (And good wireless headphones and earbuds are typically significantly more expensive than $50)
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.
This is why I've never used wireless earphones (I just use the stock wired earphones that come with the phone). Sure, the wires are tangled every time I pull them out of my pocket. But they never need charging! That, plus a loathing of Bluetooth.
For me that's good because it annoys me into getting them plugged in before they go completely flat. If it only happened once, I'd tell myself I'll take care of it in a moment... and then completely forget to until the audio is gone.
Objects should notify when there is good reason. And ideally, these should be configurable.
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.)
> For example, my washing machine has an obnoxious alarm when it completes a cycle, that can fortunately be disabled via a (hidden!) menu
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.
I can't believe the people making or testing these products have kids or even sleep at night. They must be vampires. We recently replaced Vornado fans . The older model had a basic mechanical switch -- silent, tactile , works 100% of the time, works in the dark. The new model has a capacitive touch interface that only works 30% of the time when touched. Impossible to operate in the dark. The worst part is the deafening shriek whenever you adjust the fan .
They should have advertised on the box: wakes your kids and your wife at 2am!
Yeah I can't imagine a touch interface for fans. God. Atleast the ones which have a proper switch in your house, and then also let you control it with some random app are slightly better.
I'm spending about a grand to have a sensor in my golf door handle fixed because the car beeps for about 10 seconds every time it passes 10mph. Thinking of buying a car at least 15 years old so I can experience the lack of electronics again.
>My fridge: should I improperly close its door, it'll emit some faint noise for like 30 seconds. It's a totally valid important notification, as nobody wants to burn electricity to cold the room while the food goes bad.
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.
Ok but I think waste heat in this context is fairly trivial, we might as well claim that the room isn't perfectly insulated or something so it won't actually get heated
It might be hotter outside than inside. Someone might think "It's hot, therefore I'll open my fridge to cool it down in here." But that will lead to it getting even hotter, not cooler. If the A/C is on, it'll require the A/C to work extra hard to remove that extra heat.
Also, would you claim a space heater doesn't heat the house if the house is at an equilibrium where the space heater produces heat at the same rate that heat escapes outside? I would say the space heater is still heating the house, but the house is losing heat at the same rate.
I wonder if the LPG system is aftermarket, and as such doesn't know the amount of gas left in the tank.
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 problem seems exacerbated by increasing number of stakeholders involved with feature development. Especially ones that you can't easily say no to.
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.)
My favorite no-longer-works feature: I have a classic car and I used to be able to sit my phone upside down in the drink holder, so that the power port could be connected to the power cable, and the iPhone would rotate the screen around so I could still use navigation. Somewhere along the line, iOS/Google Maps/Apple Maps will no longer rotate the screen upside down. This just can't be done anymore.
Toshiba -- When the sounds turn off, long pressing on 8 for 3 seconds, it sounds a long beep and the sound turn off. All the buttons has no beep when they are pressed, including the ending cooking sounds is turn off too.
That's weird! A normal oven would continue cooking the food, dishwashers need the steam to escape to start drying, clothes get creased in tumble dryers...but a microwave ? Just why?
Every time I start my car I get a window pop up with a paragraph of text to make sure I follow the rules of the road and drive safe. Then I get a warning to connect to wifi and update my car. I miss the days when a simple light on the dashboard was all we had for warning and I wasnt getting bothered by nonsense.
I really, really, really want to get to the bottom of this one. There's speculation that it was done due to some auto industry regulation, or some idiotic court (redundant?) ruled that they were liable for something because they didn't warn the driver to "follow the laws". Possibly the worst possibility is that it's just a placeholder to hide the fact that the infotainment unit is loading 1GB of uncompressed bitmap data from eMMC or something.
If anyone inside the auto industry wants to spill the beans anonymously, please do!
I often stick some tape over the beeper in products. I was trying a ceiling fan and it made a loud beep every time you pressed a button on the remote. Not very good if say adjusting things in the middle of the night.
My peeve: electric cars that make noise to make sure that blind people around them can hear them like they hear gas-powered cars--except they make it 10x as loud as any gas-powered car.
Objects should also stop having always-on blue LEDs for power indication or whatever. When I turn off the lights at night, my living room basically stays the same luminescence, because of the wash of blue LED light from every stupid little gadget that is desperate for me to know at all times that it has power.
I've taken apart two theater systems and a blu-ray player to sort this. It wasn't even THAT the LEDs were blue (though that's annoying as all hell by itself) but these were even WORSE as they were bare straw-hat LEDs stuck out of holes in the cases facing directly outward. The little things would genuinely spot your eyes if you looked at them dead on.
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.
They survive by doing the much simpler thing of using a piece of tape to cover the hole up. Yes, I know it doesn't look super nice, but you don't need much to cover the light.
Before blue LEDs existed, green and amber LEDs were the thing and still are in some dated-appearing designs. In some ways, those are worse. But originally, red LEDs were the staple electronic equipment after transitioning from neon and incandescent lamps. Red LEDs were at least more subtle somewhat.
I think what people want is light pollution customization controls so they're not kept awake with LED Christmas trees.
Involuntary light pollution makes for a bad UX. Side cutters, foil tape, and/or electrical tape. I sometimes don't completely cover status LEDs but instead reduce them to a pinhole.
I much appreciate Ubiquiti APs being able to turn off the LED ring.
GE is a major offender. And it's meaningless noise... the little jingle that the oven plays when it's done preheating is the same as the one the dishwasher near it plays when the cycle is done. Zero useful information.
Oddly, that song is a lot like one they used in the 1970s in pantyhose commercials.
I miss writing like this. It feels like old internet. It was hyperbolic and silly but there was often a real point of view at the bottom of it and it felt crafted. Guys like Maddox and Jay Pinkerton and Tucker Max wrote like this, and they were wildly offensive and I disagreed with a lot of what they had to say (almost all of it, really) but I guess what I want to focus on is the format: it's nice to read something that isn't just a thought-terminating snowclone meme. It invited discussion by investing up-front in fleshing out the writer's thoughts. So much interaction on the internet now is just getting a shot in and disappearing back into the forest before the person you're responding to can reasonably react. It's generating the screenshot of their comment and your "drop the mic" response, designed to be consumed by people as a single serving after the comment rather than to engage in anything substantive.
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."
Unless it’s a smoke detector. In that case when it is running low on battery - despite also being hardwired - it should definitely warn you about the low battery… at 3am. Always. At. 3am.
More annoyingly, they'll beep intermittently with no other indicator.
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.
I have bad news for you -- those noise-cancelling headphones are "eliminating" the white noise by bombarding your ears with an equal and opposite white noise
There is nothing bad about that. The opposite phased sounds it plays genuinely do cancel out the vibrations from the original noise, decreasing the magnitude of the vibrations hitting your ear drum.
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.
The HVAC system occasionally stops at my work, in the rare occasion I'm working late in the office, and the silence is profound and divine.
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 will defend the dryer alarm case somewhat. For my dryer, it displays a time until the cycle is complete, but that time is wildly inaccurate (as in, the display will say 45 mins and sometimes the cycle takes twice that to complete). It is useful to get a notification when the dryer is actually done in my case. Granted, the dryer should accurately report how long it will take to run, but given that it doesn't a "cycle complete" alarm is the next best thing.
That bothered me for a while about a dryer I use. Eventually, it clicked for me that it based its estimates on a best guess at the material and quantity you’d be drying in that cycle; but it (correctly, in my view) actually timed the cycle based on feedback from humidity/temperature sensors in the air path.
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.
Our dryer just stop, and the lack of noise is often enough, but every 20 minutes, it tumble and blow dry air on clothes, whcih to be honest, seems a better option than sounding an alarm
There's no question that some sounds, in some circumstances for some people, are very useful. But it should always be possible to configure the machine to remain silent.
The dryer can't know. It lies to you because you prefer the lie to the truth, which is why you bought laundry machines with screens, while only one of mine even has LEDs.
Man I love ranty britishisms. Author's right though, at my last living place I had a drier that summons screeches from hell when clothes were dry. I mean that buzzer would make your heart stop, and if I didn't open the door, it would run again for a short period to keep the clothes warm then do the abhorrent sound again, all for a state (dry clothes ready for folding) that is absolutely non time-sensitive. Horrific user-centered design.
I always thought I was weird for not ever letting the microwave beep when it ends. I always open the door a second before it ends. Sometimes you'll see me running across the house just so I can turn it off before that annoying beep. But then I started working at a co-working space, and I see a sticker on the microwave that says "Be kind, open the door before it beeps".
Haha, just last night I noticed my daughter does that.
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.
I learnt at school that the thermostat in a kettle was a bimetallic strip, made from two metals with different thermal expansion coefficients. When the bimetallic strip reached 100 Celsius, the two sides of the strip would lengthen at different rates, causing it to bend. The strip was also part of the electric circuit, so the strip bending would open the circuit and switch the kettle off. This has been the standard design of kettles since 1955.
Why is anyone bothering to ruin such a great design?
Hell yes. My Skoda makes the exact same "DONG!" for "screen wash running low" as it does for "engine failure you're about to crash and die". I have a slow leak in my screen wash tank so this is really annoying.
Whenever I search my refrigerator or freezer for more than 20 seconds or so, an infernal beep begins. I have found myself singing Pink Guy's STFU either aloud or to myself when this happens. Needless to say, I appreciated this article.
My fridge’s door doesn’t fully close on its own if only gently pushed. But the beeping detector doesn’t detect the door as open if it’s almost but not fully closed.
Otherwise it’s great, I’ve only ever heard it once or twice, when I was /really/ taking my time.
The original title is "Objects should shut the fuck up". I don't like unnecessary cursing either, but it is emphasizing his frustration in this case and cursing objects, not people.
Renaming the title is just losing information for no reason.
Outta curiosity what kind of car is this? Or what brands offer the dual tank setup? Living in the US, I’m not aware of any cars that come from the factory with dual gas/lpg tanks. Here in the US it seems to largely be an aftermarket modification some folks make.
Smartphone notifications. Every now and again I turn off DND because I'm expecting a call, and every time I turn it on again soon after - the continuous barrage of pinging noises makes the phone unusable. I have notifications turned off for all apps by default!
I have a set of bike lights from Topeak that will flash the main headlight into the eyes of oncoming drivers when the battery is low, even though it has a battery indicator on the top. It gives me a heart attack every time.
I actually find that I really like East Asian appliances that sing little songs as indications. It’s much less annoying than loud beeping, and can be helpful once you learn what each song means.
Fucking agreed. Anything less than a fire alarm should shut the fuck up.
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.
Amen. I will research the next car I get and I will not consider any car that makes annoying noises. And if I can't find one I will buy an older model.
I had a Toyota RAV4 and it had a seatbelt alarm that was increasingly and incessantly obnoxious if you didn't buckle up. Meaning that you had to buckle up to move from one parking to another in a larger lot.
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 think it's an interesting correspondence—some general design principles about creating good auditory user interface somewhere in here. I would be interested if someone smarter than me can tell me what that principle is.
I suspect that there's some marketing component at play here. People who do not own but observe devices making seemingly unnecessary noises might perceive these devices as premium. Think about the various beeps that occur when locking a car and arming the alarm, the startup sound that infotainment systems in some EVs play, the twinkle twinkle little star of a fancy rice cooker.
We don't care about profanity on HN but we do have a problem with clickbait, which "Objects should shut the fuck up" arguably is, so I changed the title to "Objects shouldn't talk". I realize "talk" isn't quite accurate here but "should be quiet" or "shouldn't make noise" felt a bit too bland. Suggestions welcome as always!
Edit: never mind, an obviously better solution is to just de-"the fuck" the original.
IMO it's only clickbait if actual content doesn't live up to the title. I believe this article to be a justified rant and effective reflection about why objects should shut the fuck up. Title matches the tone, content is relevant, no deception.
> My dishwasher: no sound whatsoever, it simply opens up when it's done.
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.
Some Bosch dishwashers do this, to let the steam escape quickly. Also, the controls are hidden at the top of the door, so it projects a red dot onto the floor when it's running, because it's so quiet that you would have no idea otherwise.
I find it infuriating that navigation apps throw ads when I'm stopped at a red light. This is THE moment where I should glance away from the road and plan my routing
If you're in the unenviable position of being unable to edit your phone's hosts file, you can block most ads using a DNS-over-HTTPS provider. Mullvad has a free service.
Hopefully they do something about the annoying self-checkout machines too. The ones that yell back at you loudly for every cent you insert. Employees dislike them too.
Maybe this is generational, but I really don't care about the amount of minor jingles and tones I encounter on a daily basis, and I certainly don't see why it's necessary to publish this kind of a hostile rant about it. I guess the writer was trying to be over the top and funny, but really just comes off as unhinged and a bit obsessive, like the type of person you have to walk on eggshells around at work.
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.
It's an absurd feature. Cars have had gauges for things like fuel for decades and decades, as a driver you know how much you have left, the car does not have to signal this in any other way.
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.
You are saying that you don't care. There are people who care. He does and brings in good reasons why the defaults shouldn't be spurious alarms and noise.
I had a 2011 Toyota and there are so many beeps. It's annoying because they are just noise pollution at that point. I don't mind actual alarms, like my fridge door beeps when I leave it ajar.
My complaint about BMW, at least the one that I drove a few years ago, is that the warning sound for a passenger who hasn’t put on their seatbelt is the same warning sound as when the engine is about to catch fire and explode.
Do you have kids? I'm younger and don't, and could still empathize with the author having his children disturbed by annoying device sounds. I bet its awful.
In safety industries, particularly aviation, "alarm fatigue" is a really big deal. You recognize that pilots have limited situational bandwidth, and you REALLY don't want to be bugging them about things you can avoid. I worked in collision avoidance systems (TAS/TCASI/TCASII), and spent nearly a whole year just working on figuring out when and how we could avoid warning pilots in cases where "we're not sure exactly what is going on, so tell the pilot just in case" could potentially annoy pilots in cases like take off and landing (where they have important OTHER things to be doing!)
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!
But alarms drive engagement. Also, display a company logo and complete product name™
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.
Chemical companies could allow vendors to sponsor various alarms in their plants: "the Flowserve(tm) High-Level alarm on T102 is active!"..."the Flowserve(tm) High-Level alarm on T102 is active!". Then there could be a contractual minimum for the number of times that ad needs to be served to operators and engineers, otherwise the chemical plant would need to refund Flowserve for the unused ad campaign credits. Lowering the threshold of the high-level alarm would optimize ad revenue!
But like, do my washing machine or microwave needs an engagement? It is not displaying ads.
"do my washing machine or microwave needs an engagement? It is not displaying ads."
Not yet, though I suspect that time will come.
Uhm, my recent washing machine purchase involved actively looking for not needing an app. They did try hard though, for example by offering 3 more years of warranty when you install the app.
Either the cost or repair/replacement during those extra 3 years is really low or your data is really valuable. Adds flavor to the challenge in designing it to last just long enough to leave warranty.
Data is probably not the only advantage they get from the app. For example, you are more likely to purchase other appliances from the same vendor so that you can have them all in the same app.
My washing machine doesn't beep when it is done. My dryer does. So I some times don't time the emptying of the washing machine and have to wait a couple of minutes and the dryer annoyingly beeps when done.
How about an alarm with a mute button. Then everyone can be happy.
Everything is an advertisement for itself. Good or bad.
see, if you had copy/pasted the "alarm" text here we would have all been exposed to the brand and model washing machine or microwave!
> More devices should have a "squelch" switch!
Android phone, do not disturb enabled...
"learn what new things Android has to offer!". System notification from Android/Google (probably some new Gemini highlight).
That's why the first thing I do on my new phone is disable the Google app. It does absolutely nothing useful for me, but never sleeps, eats resources and shows you advertisements.
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.
and shows you advertisements
Is this a recent change? The last time I used an Android was many years ago and I did not experience anything like that.
Depends on what you consider ads.
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.
I think it's recent. Yeah it's goddamn Gemini.
Which one contributes more to alarm fatigue, spoken announcements like "bank angle" or beeps and buzzes like the autopilot disengage theme tune? Why is the latter so prominent?
If it's something that happens often (like on every trip or most days), a spoken announcement is more tiresome. If it happens rarely, the beep-encoded one is way more tiresome and can reduce situation awareness.
Curious if there's research - I'm sure there's tons, I just don't know that literature - but personally, in my experience as a professional aviator and as a spacecraft operator, the fatiguing alarms are the ones that are triggered in normal situations. If you start blinking red and squawking at me when I'm doing something nominal, you are training me to ignore you.
Autopilot disengage is heard every single flight and is completely benign... unless neither pilot was expecting it in which case it is very effective at getting our attention.
Reminds me of the issue of "bullshit NOTAMS" in aviation: https://ops.group/story/a-field-guide-to-notams/
Funnily enough, that PDF reader makes a very loud (and useless) noise whenever I turn the page.
What does a squelch switch do?
Squelch is a dial that changes a threshold below which analog radio signals are silenced so you can ignore noise. The dial allows you to dig into the noise when you want or be more conservative and only pass strong signals through.
Sets a minimum on the incoming signal to be amplified. For instance, only amplify stuff above x dB, silence stuff below x dB (noise).
A noise gate?
Not quite. More like signal-to-noise-ratio gate. In radio transmissions, there is white noise when no active signal is received. Radios mute themselves when there is white noise, as to not annoy the user. On 2 way radios this is very important otherwise the radio will be hissing at you most of the time.
The squelch setting determines the threshold of signal to noise allowed through. If the incoming transmission signal strength is really bad, the radio might not unmute itself. So you turn down the squelch, which might completely open the radio bringing in white noise, but you can then receive the transmission.
Isn't they exactly what a noise gate does? You set a level of loudness below which it mutes all sound. If sounds levels go above that then it plays whatever sounds goes above it.
Silence
My brand new car has a feature called forward attention warning which is driving me insane. It is essentially a small camera located at the steering wheel column which emit a series of high beeps and have an eye icon blink in the dashboard if the car doesn't think I am looking forward.
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.
There is truly a scourge in the EU of increasingly intrusive "safety features" which I truly believe are making cars less safe.
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.
I recently got back from Europe; rented a car. This "feature" is _insanely_ dangerous. Whatever idiot bureaucrat decided that having crappy machine vision software jerk the steering wheel around while you're driving should be sent to an island somewhere.
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.
Or you could look at some of the research, which suggest that this feature may in fact reduce fatalities significantly (I'm finding estimates in the 20 to 25% range). Well done idiot bureaucrat!
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/fewer-drivers-are-opting-ou...
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
What the first article actually says:
"Lane departure warning and prevention systems could address as many as 23% of fatal crashes involving passenger vehicles."
That appears to be something like a stat about how many fatal crashes involve unintentionally leaving a lane. It provides approximately zero evidence in favor of specifically mandating haptic feedback from the steering wheel.
The second article is marginally more on point - 24% fewer crashes for vehicles with lane keeping assist (so my guess at the meaning of the 23% stat may have been wrong). But the 95pct confidence interval is 2-42% and the study acknowledges that its efforts at controlling for confounding factors in the type of cars that have this feature are imperfect. It also took place in the US, so there's certainly no mandate for haptic feedback and I suspect very few cars had it. This is marginally more helpful evidence but not very good, I think--it seems very plausible that audible lane keeping features are helpful and moving your steering wheel (which sounds terrifying) is unhelpful.
As an anecdote, I crashed a car as a teenager thanks in part to panicking (unnecessarily) when a rough highway started moving the car's wheels (which I noticed of course via the steering wheel) without my intending it. Fortunately there were no injuries.
Surely they could've found a better way though than to make the car automatically swerve into oncoming traffic?
I'm 100% on board with the idea that the lane assist feature might, on average, improve safety in many conditions. Maybe enough to be a net win. But I'm absolutely certain that its terrible implementation (in legislation, not just in cars) leads to situations where it reduces safety. When I'm driving on small country-side roads without a center line, no amount of "but it reduces traffic fatalities on highways" will convince me that automatically swerving towards the oncoming semi trailer is safe.
> When I'm driving on small country-side roads without a center line
My guess is that people drive these types of roads a lot less often than they swerve on highways. Hence the statistics working out. Steering into oncoming traffic does indeed sound, uhm, suboptimal though. :-/
All the cars I’ve driven with this feature vibrate the wheel when they trigger but don’t try to steer.
My Honda Ridgeline (2021, USA spec) has two modes…
Default is “sticker shaker” mode - if it senses lane departure, it shakes the wheel and displays a warning on the dash. On by default, but can be disabled after start-up.
The other mode is “lane-centering” - has to be turned on after start-up, and actively steers car to the center of the lane. Really only makes sense on a highway/interstate - clear lanes, no sharp turns, etc. On dual carriage way, it gets a bit “stupid” when turn lanes appear with a gap or change in lane marking - it thinks the lane got extra wide and tries to center, pulling me half into the turn lane.
But, like I said, it’s 100% optional, so I use it on the highway/interstate, but nothing smaller.
Sounds like the EU mandates “lane centering” all the time that can’t be easily disabled, which is pretty silly (if it behaves anything like the Honda system, whcih is only really designed for true interstate use).
> Sounds like the EU mandates “lane centering” all the time that can’t be easily disabled
I'm in EU, on my 2023 Civic it's off by default and needs to be enabled after every car start if you wanna use it. Also works pretty well, other than when driving straight into the low sun or in heavy rain at night. The collision warning and road departure warning are on by default, the last one can be disabled until car is restarted.
In fairness, I haven't done much experimentation. It jerks the wheel and that terrifies me. I don't know if it's a jerk back and forth to make the wheel vibrate or if it's a jerk to steer the car to the left, either would probably give me a feeling that the wheel is moving by itself and would probably be scary enough for me to disable.
This entirely tracks to me but hints at a different problem. I suspect if this really does reduce traffic incidents and fatalities in general, it's because a large number of people are driving while tired and drift into adjacent lanes without realizing it and the lane-assist jerks them awake. Problem being this is a blunt force instrument that annoys or even endangers drivers who are not impaired and know what they're doing.
Thankfully, every car I've ever driven that has this feature allows it to be turned off and I have it turned off on my own car, which I drive for maybe ten miles a month in the middle of a Saturday when I'm wide awake.
This just goes to show how bad at driving a large number of people on the road are. Driving test standards are way, way too low.
Personally speaking I felt like I somehow accidentally cheated or something when I passed my test. It was too easy. Even now I sometimes question if I should really be trusted with piloting a 4k+ lbs steel box at highway speeds.
I thing most people are bad drivers some of the time. It only takes a moment of being distracted/tired/angry/whatever to cause an accident.
Your snarky comeback here is "suggest[s] that [it] may" and you couldn't find the links to support even that.
I agree that my comment was a bit snarky. Thing is, I'm getting tired of people dismissing 'bureaucrats' that easily. I know little about road safety legislation, but I know enough about the EU to state that they commonly have very smart subject matter experts work on legislation. Does that mean things always turn out perfect? Far from it. But 'idiot bureaucrat' is way too cynical for my taste.
EU has a huge revolving door problem, especially in automotive, which is a major industry in its (now declining) economic champions.
They might have people with credentials working for it, but the implementation described falls into the category of "some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe it." To an external observer, incompetence and malice are hardly distinguishable, especially when there is a huge economic incentive for both the automakers and legislators to be evil.
It's safety profiteering, squeezing millions in the name of saving lives.
The motivation of a bureaucrat isn’t the effectiveness of the policies they produce, but instead the political ramifications of those policies.
The safety minded “take no risks” at all approach has been if not popular, tolerated because it’s hard to argue against safety, even if the safety gains are dubious, and expensive. And so they keep their jobs.
Fast forward a few decades of this, and now nothing much new can be developed.
But of course the bureaucrats are “smart” so they’re never to blame.
Frankly they deserve the ire they get for being part of the problem. When is the last time they got rid of an ineffective rule in the EU?
The genius bureaucrat probably did as much research as you did and came to the same conclusion.
now you're thinking like a bureaucrat!
Never. Take. Away. Control. Authority.
The only way that system could be more dangerous is if the air bags were replaced by Claymore mines.
Based on the recall patterns, I think that's a free upgrade that self-installs to every older car eventually.
I was very annoyed about this feature when I first read about it. I don't have it in my car.
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
Same on my Skoda, it gently nudges me back into my lane if I'm not paying attention.
My Renault Megane is a bit inbetween I think. You definitely notice it trying to get you where it wants.
But if you're holding the steering wheel normally, ie not just with two fingers, you're easily able to keep it steady.
Another feature I think is suboptimal is the auto emergency breaking. It gets confused when there is strong shadows from an overpass or similar, or winding roads with wide vehicles like campers in opposite lanes, and stomps on the breaks. However when it works it can be a positive...
It's true, mine has that as well. While I can't turn off the default mode, it is thankfully only visuals and sound. It does however also have the assisted suicide mode, where it will either jerk the wheel or prevent the wheel from turning. Thankfully that can be turned off permanently.
I still find it crazy that these are supposed to be safety features.
> and JERKS THE STEERING WHEEL
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.
In Hyundais this can be disabled by long pressing on the lane keep assist button on the steering wheel. Its the one with a couple of white lines and a steering wheel between them.
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.
In the Nissan, you can customize all of these things and the car stores your configuration, you just have to press two buttons on the steering wheel every time you start the car to load it. And with those custom config loaded, I find the car really nice to drive. We (I and the family member) have gone through all the safety feature options and made a config which we like. Which mostly means just turning off a bunch of stuff, including the auto-crash and the obnoxious beeping which tells you you're going above (what the car thinks, sometimes incorrectly, is) the speed limit.
Doesn't help when you haven't driven the car in a while so you forget to push those buttons and the car reminds you by automatically turning the wheel towards oncoming traffic :(
Does the directive specify that haptic warning must mean a steering wheel jerk? Seems like carmakers have 2 alternatives:
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.
Realistically, car makers are going to find the cheapest way to comply. Adding motors for vibrating the driver's seat costs money. Ditto with adding vibration motors to the steering wheel. Using the motors you already have in the steering mechanism is just software.
So there's a clear incentive to involve the motors which control steering, which is inherently going to feel terrifying.
Lane assist works perfectly fine on my Skoda (or I have learned to live with it). Basically it doesn't do anything under 50km/h and then above that it will mostly lightly shake the steering wheel if you drive on the line, and it will steer only in extremes to keep me in my lane, eg. driving fast and crossing a double white line or something, which saved me a few time when I was distracted. Also, sometimes I use my blinker when I think it will engage, eg. road works and I need to cross the solid center line into the oncoming lane.
A family member of mine's car has that, I've had similar experiences where (living in a rural area) I've been driving down a 2 lane road with no one else about, seen a puddle or pothole, not wanted to hit it, tried to put the car a bit over the line for that reason and got shoved back by the bloody car thinking it knew better than me.
I've test-driven 2 cars in the last 2 years (because I'm environmentally interested in swapping my diesel for an EV), but each time has put me off that entire brand. First was Tesla, I can't stand the full iPad console with no physical controls. (And Elon... but that's a side thread).
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.
I'm driving an 11 year old diesel, the main annoyance I have is that its rear proximity sensors pick up on the trailer hitch (which is detachable, but I prefer to have it attached -- besides, it's probably rusted in place or something now after 11 years). So I always have to disable proximity sensors when backing up. An awkward design, but not really a big issue in practice. You get used to it.
I'm not looking forward to getting a fancy new car with government-mandated always-on systems which try to steer the car into oncoming traffic. The insanity is genuinely unfathomable to me. It is, without exaggeration, a fuck-up of such proportions that it's making me question the whole idea of the EU, as a Norwegian whose position on the EU has historically been that Norway should join it.
Although I suppose being outside of the EU isn't exactly saving Norway from its harebrained legislation.
You won’t get it. The tickytacky safety bs is lobbied by car companies who can now sell you more systems on margin. Hold onto your current car for dear life. They won’t ever make them like that again.
A relative's Tesla totalled itself because of that feature. It suddenly auto-steered to the side, right beside a concrete barrier. The barrier won.
No matter the supposed safety benefit, the driver should be in control of the car, and it’s notifications, permanently disabling them.
I love when you're trying to navigate through some zig zag construction bullshit and the lane assist keeps fighting you to eat some cones/barrels. It's also fantastic when the lines on the highway are wobbly and it starts trying to drive like a drunk person. All because of people who can't help but use their phones while driving...
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
I had a 2019 Subaru that was pretty smooth at lanekeeping. A lot of obnoxious beeping, though.
> a lane assist feature
More like Bike Overtake Prevention System. Unbelievable.
I rented a car in the UK a few years ago and by the end of the trip I was ready to set it on fire.
- 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".
I rented a car in the states last time I visited family and it was mostly ok - the touchscreen controlled all the heat/cool through convoluted menus but thankfully had dedicated buttons to kind of control climate?
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
Ren
A friend of mine spends the first minute of all trips in their car turning off all the auto-safety BS loaded in by regulation these days. All on by default the next time the car is switched on.
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.
I'm generally pro-EU but they sure know how to not fix things by annoying people as much as possible. C.f. the cookie laws, headphone volume warnings, etc.
I understand the spirit of the law, but any implementation by the EU feels like making a wish to a monkey paw these day. I would love for people to stop watching tiktoks on their phones while driving on the motorway, but the implementation means that I now get to be constantly distracted by my own car while driving.
I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a requirement for phone screens to not turn on over 10mph and gps located on a road
Passengers about to get bored out of their minds..... And car infotainment subscription plans love it!
passenger seats already have an occupancy sensor that you could probably hook into to make a passenger seat bypass somehow.
don't get me wrong, this would probably be horribly unpopular, but otoh deaths from cars are up ~50% in the last decade, bringing us back to ~1985 in car safety. Something fairly drastic is needed
Amount of driven kilometers are also up massively compared to 1985, meaning that per kilometer we did fine on the safety record.
Stop trying to make cars safer, and reduce the amount of driving you need to do. There is a way to have more liberties and have it improve safety instead of fewer. The liberty to commute, do groceries, and go to the gym by bike is huge life improvement, whilst taking nothing away in terms of car liberties.
Cookie dialogs easily avoided wherever companies care about their customers/users.
Is this the sort of naive reasoning that led to the law in the first place?
The EU didn't force the banners. They restricted opt-out data collection without consent, which is a good thing to do. The banners is malicious compliance.
And what lead to the banners is the knowledge that people like you would blame the law instead of the companies.
And they are getting better. I don't remember when was the last time a cookie dialogue forced me to uncheck 10+ switches, and making me angry that they give my browsing history to 1000+ random ad companies--I unironically miss that daily dosage of anger (against ad people and not the EU).
Most of them are one-click nowadays, just as intended. (Still bad on phones tho, especially javascript disabled.)
Yeah now they say "accept all or subscribe". Much better!
There has been a lawsuit over that, I've not heard of its result yet.
Example?
The Guardian does this now.
https://commission.europa.eu/index_en : cookie banner.
Can you find any big sites that don't have one? They're effectively a mandatory CYA, the Prop 65 warning of websites.
About the only thing they've gotten right recently was forcing Apple to switch to USB-C.
Even that only moved up Apple’s timetable for switching by a year or two.
My subaru will beep and flash a signal to let me know that it can’t see the lanes well enough to use the lane departure warning.
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.
My Tesla often beeps loudly at things I have my focus on completely to let me know that I don’t have focus on them, thereby forcing me to look around to see if I missed something and making me lose focus on the thing i needed to focus on.
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.
On my spouse's 2019 model, I could disable that alert in the menus. Even after I disabled every alert in the menus, the car still emits an urgent tone with an unknown meaning.
The thing is that I like the safety feature itself. It’s just asinine that it distracts me to tell me that for the next 1 second it’s not keeping me safe. Also the fact that there is absolutely nothing it changes in my driving behavior when it is off. I’m still the one driving.
I just drive with lane keeping enabled. The car will keep itself in the lane without audibly alerting me. If I really wanted to depart the lane, e.g. to avoid debris or to give a cyclist more space, the blinker or a slight nudge of the steering wheel will override it.
I’m talking about it alerting me that it has turned off for a moment because the lane isn’t marked well enough.
I really did like the actual lane-keeping function of my Mom's Subaru when I drove it on narrow two-lane roads, intentionally hugging the outside of the lane when appropriate. The sound it made wasn't annoying or startling, and quickly became another form of situational awareness to let me know that I was indeed near the edge of the road like I wanted to be.
Yes I like the feature itself. The annoying thing is that it beeps and flashes when it shuts itself off which is pretty frequent where I live.
I've found that disabling the lane assist in my 2020 Civic permanently disables that too. It's an EU model. For anyone looking for a solution, try if this solves it (if you wouldn't miss the lane assist, of course).
Unfortunately as I've later learned, it's a requirement in all cars in the EU from 2025, so there is no way to disable it permanently. Thank you for the suggestion though.
My understanding was that it is only required for lane assist/cruise control, unless i misunderstood. Hopefully if you deactivate those, your car will allow disabling this "feature".
No, it is mandatory for all new cars in the EU since 2025 and while you can turn them off, they will turn themselves on again once the car has been turned off. It doesn't matter if you use lane assist or cruise control.
Unfortunately.
I wonder if there's a market for a little device that taps into the CAN-bus(es) and auto-applies your desired settings on startup.
My dealer suggested that I cover the sensor with electrical tape, since that is what all his other customers were doing. It will then just give off a single warning when you start the car telling you, that the forward attention warning is disabled.
I have since learned that you can put some tinfoil between the sensor and the tape and seemingly disable it completely without any alarms going off.
With that in mind I wouldn't be surprised if there was a market for a gadget that remove all the hassle. I am definitely not alone with this issue.
I’ll keep my stupid, non-digital 2010 car running until the day I die. They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I’d rather register it as a vintage car and keep driving it.
Mine is over 50 years old. It's been upgraded with a few "modern" features like distance sensors, rear cameras, and a GPS, but those are actually useful and won't actively fight me.
In a lot of places in the world you can return new cars. I would return one that did that. Manufacturers won't get the hints until they start seeing returns wreck their bottom line.
Manufacturers can't do anything about it if it's required by law.
The law requires bad design/implementation?
Yes, pretty much.
They could try to cheat! That's actually what Volvo did in the Dieselgate. The EU regulation mandated the impossible duo of lower NOx emission and higher fuel efficiency. Diesel engines get higher efficiency by increasing compression ratio, which also increases NOx production.
So they should innovate then, spend those millions into some real R&D. Or does innovation only come in form of touch screen panels?
I’m pretty dure you mean Volkswagen, not Volvo…
They can lobby the politicians
They do. They know this will make cars more expensive and most people don't want any of it.
If a substantial portion of people refused to keep buying them, that's data supporting the repeal.
If people just keep buying them, then the lawmakers get to go "no see the people like it".
Why would they on such things?
In any case, it's law, there's no coming back from this.
Laws are immutable now?
possibilities: (1) they get lots of angry customers and bad press, and are tired of being made to look bad because of gov req's (2) it costs them more to manufacture all the fancy nanny tech, so their bottom line would be positively impacted by rolling back the requirement for it
> Why would they on such things?
Read the context of what you are replying to.
Wouldn't that wreck your credit score though? Pardon my ignorance.
I don't know the law in your country but most forms of credit have a 'cooling off' period where you can return the money or asset and reset the credit agreement within a certain time but I'm not sure if doing it a lot in a small period of time would flag to a future creditor though.
The assist to keep you in the lane that also auto turns on has been the only cause of 3 near crashes I've had, when renting cars. Never have I even had a slightly dangerous situation other than this bullshit turning the fucking wheel for me. Who the heck thinks that a machine knows best if it should turn the wheel than a human, with eyes, driving? I cannot understand how it ever helped anyone and it's much worse than just a beep, literally trying to steer against you.
This reminds me of how Boeing introduced an automatic nose-down feature in the 737 MAX, meant to compensate for its higher-mounted engines causing nose-up during takeoff. According to a video I saw, they didn't make pilots aware of this change from the older 737, nor train them in how to recognize it or turn it off, and its behavior in response to a bad angle of attack reading turned out to be deadly.
I think this is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KQ0g_-qJs
Keywords: 737 MAX MCAS trim
I actually knew about this one going in, since it's been a requirement for a bit longer. My Hyundai has two modes, one where it simply beeps if you cross the lines without the turn-signal and the dangerous one where it locks the steering wheel.
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.
Steering wheel lock? Is that seriously a thing, or is that a strong exaggeration?
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.
No, it will actively prevent you from turning the wheel if it means you will go outside your lane. It does have threshold if you struggle enough, in which case it will simply undo the lock and you get to jerk the wheel dangerously in that direction.
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.
> is required to enable itself once the car has been turned off/on
Get an older car. Screw panopticon tyranny.
Thanks, looks like I'll be repairing my 2010 Honda Fit (Jazz in EU markets) forever to avoid getting anything of the sort of antifeatures you describe.
That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.
Same with touchscreen controls in a vehicle.
Honda was still good in recent years. I drive a 2024 Honda CR-V. No tones that annoy me. No interior cameras. All of the important controls are still physical.
It sounds like some of these things need to be disabled by pulling a fuse, or else disabled via button every time the car is on, like a takeoff checklist for an airplane.
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.
On the Kia EV 9 I had to go in and disable lane assist (which you can still disable here in the US).
It was downright dangerous, jerking the steering wheel at seemingly random times when it gets confused.
Why not return the car for an actual sane one from 5 years ago?
I would, but once I fully understood the problem it was too late to return it. When I got the car I simply turned off the features, and because I don't drive a lot I didn't notice that the car would turn them on again until I was outside the return period.
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.
I live in EU and my car does not have any of that.
Obviously the reason will be revealed as you get into questions like what year was your car manufactured and at which stage of integration is your country.
It's required in new cars from 2025 and onwards.
Why'd you buy it?
You can't avoid cars with these anti-features if you want a new car. They're required by law in the EU.
Catalytic converters are required by law too, yet I know plenty who have done a "cat delete" on their vehicle. As a simpler example, pulling the seatbelt chime fuse was a common mod long ago when I grew up. You may want to check if the modding scene has any solutions for your make and model.
If you modify your car in such a way in the EU it won’t pass the mandatory yearly inspection which means it’s no longer road legal.
You obviously restore your mods before the inspections, and redo them afterwards. Even the "stupid Americans" know that much. ;-)
Yeah, that's why I don't buy new cars. Put up or shut up.
Because it's otherwise a great car. I did notice the problems during the test-drive, but I figured it wasn't a problem, since it could be turned off in the console. So I turned them off and forgot all about it. I would never have imagined that some obscure EU-regulation, that I've never heard about, would require them to turn back on.
While we're at it, can we do something about the gigalumen blue light every device seems to have to indicate on/charging/charged? My house looks like a dystopia spaceship after dusk.
It's pretty much never changing.
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...
> It's the kind of flaw we don't notice until after we've bought the products and lived with them for a while.
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".
That's certainly good news.
I did buy some rechargeable fans this year, and they had a very welcome "night mode" that shuts off the blue LEDs.
I'm not sure if they exactly advertised it as a feature. The Amazon product page was kind of a soup of mangled English. I guess it was probably mentioned in there somewhere.
Hopefully it's a growing trend.
Sure, we eventually react to ubiquitous issues like blue LEDs, but it's been 2 decades since blue LEDs were new/fancy and it's just barely popping up now. It's very reactive and very slow.
Just look at microwave interfaces. They haven't meaningfully changed in function in decades, and yet +30s buttons often don't start the microwave, power level can rarely be set after starting and all sorts of basic responsiveness details.
I've had to put a layer of electric tape, sometimes two of them, on some of those just to get the bedroom to a level where it's dark enough to sleep in comfortably.
They're so bright, you can see the damn blue circles on the ceiling. Blue moon rising, invited by no one.
I once bought one of those alarms that brighten along with the pattern of natural sunlight in the morning (and dim in the evening), as I don’t get much natural light in my bedroom. The time display on it was so unbelievably bright at its lowest setting that my sleep was worse until I piled stuff up in front of it. I don’t even bother with it anymore.
A related problem: I do get some natural light, but also a lot of night-time light from the apartment complex parking-lot lamps.
I've been thinking of a time-controlled motor on my window blinds.
Literally same here. Could've written your comment word for word.
That was going to be my DIY project, time to finally do it, I guess.
Renting, I'd want something I can temporarily attach to arbitrary pre-existing blinds. On reflection, there are several types one might encounter but I'm particularly thinking of the "twist stick to adjust horizontal slats" style. (As opposed to "loop of chain controls angle", or "fully unroll from top".)
I think there was a Show HN some months back where somebody 3D printed a mount so that the twist-stick could be slotted in at a slight angle.
Gaffers tape works great. Rips easy and one small piece is plenty to douse the brightest unwanted nightlight.
My record was 6 layers of duct tape! Didn't have any electrical tape around
A single small piece of aluminum foil under the tape will block all light.
That's exactly what I did on the next one but I think my aluminium foil was cheap because I'm sure one layer didn't do it LOL
It sounds like you might have a diode pumped laser for a status LED too hah
Yes, seconding this one too. I've opted for ugly black electrical tape squares over the worst offenders in sleeping spaces, but why is that the only option?
Ha, I've done the same. I never thought I'd become like my old grandpa, who didn't like when TV stations started adding crawls to the bottom of the screen for certain news/information so put electric tape across the bottom of the screen.
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.
It used to be dim red LEDs but then in the early 2010s everyone switched to blue to look more fancy and modern. Sometimes really bright ones too, I used to have an ASUS router that had bright enough (blinking!) blue LEDs to light the entire room up. Without any option to disable them, of course.
With all public debate around the effects of blue light on sleep, it's weird more people haven't found that concerning.
> my old grandpa, who didn't like when TV stations started adding crawls to the bottom of the screen for certain news/information so put electric tape across the bottom of the screen.
Your grandpa implemented an IRL Adblock.
He was really ahead of his time.
This is something Eero routers do well: you can turn off the light (which is a more subtle white to begin with) in settings.
Many Linksys routers let you turn off all of the lighting as well
Same is true of my Ubiquiti UniFi. You can set the brightness 1–10 and even set times of day when lights and display should be on or off.
I now have a small amount of electrical tape in my travel bag, and I use it at practically every place I stay. I just rewrapped some around a bit of plastic - no need for it to be very sticky anyway as I take it off when I leave.
I do the same only using some of the 2 dozen spare pillows they put on the beds
You don't want the interior of your home to look like it belongs in a scene from a star wars visual novel? I think that'd be pretty cool actually.
I can recommend a soundtrack for this one: https://youtu.be/DydIK14AvXI
I've always struggled to fall asleep with even a moderate amount of light in the room, and I used to go crazy trying to cover every small led to make things easier for me. It took me far longer than it should have for me to realize that it would be easier to cover my eyes instead, and I bought a nylon sleep mask on Amazon for a few dollars. It's literally been life changing how much my sleep improved after that. If anyone is bothered by this specifically when trying to sleep, I'd highly recommend trying out using a mask to block light when sleeping; it's really cheap to give it to a shot, so you don't lose much by trying, and you might end up winning the lottery like me.
My MacBook Pro's dual magsafe charging lights do this for me. It becomes an issue when I travel so that the MacBook is in the same room I sleep in. Sometimes turing it perpendicular to the bed is enough, at least it's not directly into my eyes even if it is lighting up the room. Other times I have to pile stuff on top
Fun fact, this is why nail polish was invented.
I have a monitor with a bright blue / dull orange LED. I found that stacking layers of kapton tape turns the blue into a dull green, while leaving the orange mostly unaffected.
https://www.lightdims.com/
The worst one of these I encountered was in a USB-PD power supply meant to replace a 12V outlet in a car. It was extremely distracting driving at night. The illuminated area covered most of the face of the device, so I covered it with RTV silicone.
Stick some opaque tape on it. It will still see through but won't project light everywhere.
When my wife moves in her sleep, her watch lights up the entire room for a moment.
yes plz && ty, I listen to audiobooks at bedtime and I can't put my earbuds back in the case without them turning on a super bright blue light that has actually woken up my partner in the past. Why? I can see a little pinhole status light to show me that the connection is made correctly but why outline the whole case in blue and then start flashing the percentage charge remaining in the case while also animating charging bars to show that the buds themselves are also charging? Why turn my bedroom into the landing scene from the movie ET?
All the external noises are a big problem.
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”.
I've disabled the entire notification stack on macOS and Windows 10 with some tweaks and couldn't be happier. It's not like I'm going to miss out on anything of value as Slack, Discord, Mail will just indicate new messages with a dock/taskbar icon change.
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.
One thing that drives me up the wall on macOS is when an application demands attention and its dock icon starts bouncing... and doesn't stop. It happens over fullscreen stuff too.
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 worst is when the dock icon does one jump and stops. You have to wait around for it to happen again if it even does.
Any app that pops up a notification when NOTHING EXTERNAL HAS HAPPENED has all its notifications turned off immediately and permanently. It's literally just deciding "hey, I'll bother the user about something pre-programmed right... now!" No.
It is easier to just completely disable all notifications for everything and manually enable as needed.
The only notifications I have on are direct messages on whatsapp (no group messages) and slack during work hours +-30min only.
This is a bigger problem, not just of software developers, but all businesses thinking you care about them as much as they do, not seeming to understand that I've made purchases from tens of thousands of businesses over the course of three decades as an adult, with more to come, and no matter how much I might care in theory or principle about any one of them, there is no universe in which I can read daily, weekly, or even monthly e-mails, SMS messages, or pop-up notifications from all of them, because if I actually did that, my entire life would consist of nothing but filling out surveys. The cheeky little smiley emoji asking if they can take just five minutes of my time misses the point. Sure, I've got five minutes, but you're one of 30 businesses asking for that every day, and it's no longer "just a moment" when it adds up to two and a half hours across all of them.
> developers and product managers mistakenly believing that I care as much about their product as they do
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.
But do you want these cookies?
When arcade machines needed to cycle players to keep the the quarters flowing, it created a aesthetic in game design that took a decade or more to shake when we switched to an economic model that rewarded keeping players on the site; in that earlier era, even things that didn't benefit from kicking users off did so, because...well, that's just the way you did things.
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.
> or a toilet that has pop-up notifications.
Toilets occasionally do that, but dismissing it requires a plunger and mop.
I recently went to buy a toilet for a new house. I saw one with a touch screen. Kohler "intelligent" toilets. God knows what horrors the touch screen would have revealed.
Needless to say I didn't buy it.
Go to a modern hospital emergency room, it's a cacophony of devices all vying for attention. I walked down the hallway and realized every room in the place had a different audible alarm—all active! I suspected the device manufacturers were all worried about liability for their device, making sure to notify that a patient had a problem. The end result for the medical staff was an endless chaos of noise. Complete systemic failure of UX from a practical standpoint.
Yes. I have a family member that has had many hospital stays over the last few years, and one of the most obnoxious things is that the staff just lets everything beep. The last time we were in the emergency room the blood pressure monitor did not work and the staff didn't notice for over an hour. Even when it does work, they're constantly in an alarm state because patient has chronic high blood pressure. They either can't or won't silence the alarms, so every room is beeping, the nurse's station is beeping, their phones are beeping, and it's all being ignored. It's the very definition of alert fatigue.
In the regional hospital near me, they've begun actively fighting for fewer alarms. In part because they annoy everyone: patients, visitors, and hospital staff alike. But mostly because the inevitable alarm fatigue that the cacophony results in actively endangers patient safety.
The policy of this hospital is that all alarms, beeping, etc. should be disabled except in limited circumstances. Particularly at night.
From time in hospitals I've gotten very good at disabling them. Most nurses are fine with it but every now and then one would come on shift and tut tut at me for having done it. They usually shut up when I point out that they don't respond to the alarms in any sort of prompt way - as I'm sure if I were to continue pointing that out up their chain of command they would then find some trouble.
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.
And in my experience (not surprisingly) they have all developed a good sense of what alarms can be ignored, so like a pump beeping because it's done delivering some medicine doesn't matter so they ignore it and let it beep, but it matters to the parents with new baby trying to get some sleep.
When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent
Free startup idea: An appliance brand that makes every home appliance with the following features:
* 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.
This basically exists in "Speed Queen". They've expanded offerings to try to capture the market that wants aesthetics and screens, but you can still get their old reliable: https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tr3003wn/
Also worth noting, as someone who worked with appliances in the past, I have heard nothing but praise for speed queen products. Sentiment is that they are extremely reliable, if expensive.
This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a very long time. A company that manufactured even halfway decent products that don't have endless amounts of dark patterns/planned obsolescence would quickly drive me bankrupt.
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.
I don't understand why this doesn't exist.
It seems to me the market for "no bullshit" appliances is HUGE, and waiting for a company to grab it and make billions.
I have a pessimistic view on this because I think most people are sadly very prone to going for whiz-bang style over substance. This is why people still buy Samsung appliances when Speed Queen are no frills but top tier in reliability.
I think an even more important factor is that, in the case of speed queen, it has a great reputation within specific communities...but you can't really buy them in the stores that the average person visits for appliance purchases.
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.
I don't think people actually trust Samsung as a brand that much. Marketing pipelines are just tailored to foist theirs and other garbage products because it generates revenue.
Yep, that's sort of what I'm getting at: people (generally) don't care enough to look past the marketing.
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.
They do exist. Cheapest stoves and fridges at home depot right now are the same old dumb appliance stuff they’ve been for 40 years. Cheapest microwave they sell is the same as its been for 30 years after innovating the dedicated Potato setting.
Solid and reliable is more expensive.
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.
More likely the following products will pop up:
And it will be an arms race, and the users will love their shiny iBlocks and iPlugs...They will both still have a blue LED on them though, so you know that they're on
I think iPlugs might be a rather unfortunate name…
I didn't go look at the actual devices but I was pleasantly surprised when "America's Test Kitchen" (a youtube channel) had a review of Microwaves and said they rated device higher if (1) you could turn the sounds off (2) didn't have network features (3) had more direct controls
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.
I got a brand new microwave that controls time with a actual mechanical tomato clock mechanism, with a single distinct mechanical "bing" as it mechanically reaches 0 and hits a piece of brass.
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.
Touchscreens in the kitchen make no sense to me. Guaranteed to be working in an environment where things are hot, wet, sticky, etc. Why would I want to fight the sensor if my fingers are clean enough?
Hmm, while I imagine cleaning a continuous surface is easier, it doesn't need to be a capacitative one: Buttons beneath a flexing plastic membrane work took, like the classic microwave number-pad.
Pressing those is still tactile, although locating a distinct button by feel would require something else, like adding raised ridges.
I'm renting an apartment that came with a "nest" smoke detector. The thing ate through around 8 AA batteries every few months. We finally got sick of it and bought our own dumb 10€ smoke / CO detector.
If something like that is going to chew through batteries, it should be available as hardwired only, with batteries as the backup. But I know the manufacturers wouldn't want to miss out on the juicy market of people who don't want to deal with running the wires and who don't realize how often they're going to be replacing batteries until it's too late to return the device.
I agree. I think my anecdote illustrates the perversions of the renter's market, and the interaction with the Internet of Crap, more than it illustrates the IoC in general. A lot of people buy into this stuff and never realize it: they put it in their tenant's home and forget about it.
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.
You were no doubt using the wrong batteries. Lithium AA batteries come with the alarm and last about 5 years.
One that I hate is GM cars that turn on the "reverse" lights in parking lots when the car isn't even turned on, or sometimes when there isn't even a person in the car. I'm sure someone wanted to turn those on as a convenience for people or maybe to indicate there is a person nearby? But those lights have a specific meaning which is no longer reliably conveyed by GM cars.
I was curious, so I just checked the FMVSS requirements for these[0]:
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...
I think this might be a disconnect between what those lights are "really" for, and how they're actually used (de jure vs de facto, in a sense).
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?
They are definitely intended to have a specific meaning (like turning indicators, but for backwards).
The specific use is to light the way when reversing. They are not intended for use as "reverse" indicators, even if that's what they're used for in practice. Trailers usually don't have reverse lights, for example.
Yeah, you could have a whole article-length rant about how courtesy lighting has devolved into turning parked cars into simulations of a rocket launch site lit with flood lights.
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.
Not really, there seems to be a specific rule that you can’t turn on the back-facing headlights when you’re going forward.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44789587
I don't think that rule matters here, because the car in question (in phkahler's comment) is stationary.
They do this to help people see around the car at night. The reverse lights only turn on when the car is off. They also time out and turn off automatically after a short time.
When my wireless earphones reach 20 minutes of charge it starts warning me about this every minute. So this essentially cuts 20 minutes off it's battery life cause it's too annoying to use from then.
Also, for some reason, every announcement headphones make must be on full volume.
This is probably a good thing. Continuing to use them when the battery is that low reduces the battery's lifetime.
I know it's annoying to suggest that consumer preferences will fix stuff like this when clearly it comes from some corporate design culture that completely ignores consumer preference.
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?
1) A huge amount of wireless devices have these annoying low battery warnings which make the last 20 minutes a terrible user experience, you'd probably go through a whole lot of headphones/earbuds before you'd find one which doesn't. (And good wireless headphones and earbuds are typically significantly more expensive than $50)
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.
Do you mean returning the wireless earphones, and then getting different?
No I mean just consider the money spent on the annoying ones lost and buy another pair.
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.
In that case, "consumer preferences [wont] fix stuff like this" because no signal is sent back to "corporate design".
Most decent noise cancelling headphones cost hundreds of dollars, so not exactly low ticket items.
This is why I've never used wireless earphones (I just use the stock wired earphones that come with the phone). Sure, the wires are tangled every time I pull them out of my pocket. But they never need charging! That, plus a loathing of Bluetooth.
"I just use the stock wired earphones that come with the phone"
If only that were still a thing.
Seriously?! I wouldn't know, my Pixel 3 and its stock earphones are still going strong. I'll have to save the earphones for my next phone. :P
Oh yeah. My headphones scream "battery low" every few minutes when they go to 20 mins of charge too. It's fucking annoying.
For me that's good because it annoys me into getting them plugged in before they go completely flat. If it only happened once, I'd tell myself I'll take care of it in a moment... and then completely forget to until the audio is gone.
My previous Roomba had a bug where it would complain loudly at 3am about being unable to dock, 14 hours after its run cycle.
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.
Objects should notify when there is good reason. And ideally, these should be configurable.
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.)
> For example, my washing machine has an obnoxious alarm when it completes a cycle, that can fortunately be disabled via a (hidden!) menu
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.
I can't believe the people making or testing these products have kids or even sleep at night. They must be vampires. We recently replaced Vornado fans . The older model had a basic mechanical switch -- silent, tactile , works 100% of the time, works in the dark. The new model has a capacitive touch interface that only works 30% of the time when touched. Impossible to operate in the dark. The worst part is the deafening shriek whenever you adjust the fan .
They should have advertised on the box: wakes your kids and your wife at 2am!
Yeah I can't imagine a touch interface for fans. God. Atleast the ones which have a proper switch in your house, and then also let you control it with some random app are slightly better.
I'm spending about a grand to have a sensor in my golf door handle fixed because the car beeps for about 10 seconds every time it passes 10mph. Thinking of buying a car at least 15 years old so I can experience the lack of electronics again.
>My fridge: should I improperly close its door, it'll emit some faint noise for like 30 seconds. It's a totally valid important notification, as nobody wants to burn electricity to cold the room while the food goes bad.
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.
It won't heat or cool the room, it's a heat pump so it will be neutral, pumping heat from inside back to inside
The heat pump uses electricity to move the heat around, and this electricity will eventually turn into additional heat which will end up in the room.
It will heat the room because the compressor is also inside the room, doing the work of moving the heat and thus generating heat itself.
Ok but I think waste heat in this context is fairly trivial, we might as well claim that the room isn't perfectly insulated or something so it won't actually get heated
It might be hotter outside than inside. Someone might think "It's hot, therefore I'll open my fridge to cool it down in here." But that will lead to it getting even hotter, not cooler. If the A/C is on, it'll require the A/C to work extra hard to remove that extra heat.
Also, would you claim a space heater doesn't heat the house if the house is at an equilibrium where the space heater produces heat at the same rate that heat escapes outside? I would say the space heater is still heating the house, but the house is losing heat at the same rate.
throwback to https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/054/961/748...
Yes but UI engineer performance is measured by user engagement and user engagement is measured by how much crap is clicked on.
Whats measured is whats managed, and so we have a bunch of unnecessary crap to click on because that pushes the engagement metric up.
I wonder if the LPG system is aftermarket, and as such doesn't know the amount of gas left in the tank.
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 problem seems exacerbated by increasing number of stakeholders involved with feature development. Especially ones that you can't easily say no to.
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.)
My favorite no-longer-works feature: I have a classic car and I used to be able to sit my phone upside down in the drink holder, so that the power port could be connected to the power cable, and the iPhone would rotate the screen around so I could still use navigation. Somewhere along the line, iOS/Google Maps/Apple Maps will no longer rotate the screen upside down. This just can't be done anymore.
Probably so apps don’t have to deal with the notch on the bottom.
> I can quickly count about 5 badges on my page of numbers that I don't think I'll ever actually care about.
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".
My microwave beeps when it’s done. And then keeps beeping every 30 seconds until you open the door. Very important safety feature, I guess
Toshiba -- When the sounds turn off, long pressing on 8 for 3 seconds, it sounds a long beep and the sound turn off. All the buttons has no beep when they are pressed, including the ending cooking sounds is turn off too.
That's weird! A normal oven would continue cooking the food, dishwashers need the steam to escape to start drying, clothes get creased in tumble dryers...but a microwave ? Just why?
That's every microwave that I have ever seen. I don't know the reason either.
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...
Mine does too, so I disabled the sounds by holding the "2" button for a few seconds. Might differ by manufacturer but hopefully yours has that option.
I constantly forget my food in the microwave for hours at a time.
Let it beep 3 times maximum(!), if you keep forgetting, you probably weren't very hungry.
And yet you are still miraculously alive, despite not being alarmed of the terrifying situation
I learned recently that most of them have a way to turn off the sound. It's usually hidden and requires the manual or a web search to figure out.
Every time I start my car I get a window pop up with a paragraph of text to make sure I follow the rules of the road and drive safe. Then I get a warning to connect to wifi and update my car. I miss the days when a simple light on the dashboard was all we had for warning and I wasnt getting bothered by nonsense.
I really, really, really want to get to the bottom of this one. There's speculation that it was done due to some auto industry regulation, or some idiotic court (redundant?) ruled that they were liable for something because they didn't warn the driver to "follow the laws". Possibly the worst possibility is that it's just a placeholder to hide the fact that the infotainment unit is loading 1GB of uncompressed bitmap data from eMMC or something.
If anyone inside the auto industry wants to spill the beans anonymously, please do!
I often stick some tape over the beeper in products. I was trying a ceiling fan and it made a loud beep every time you pressed a button on the remote. Not very good if say adjusting things in the middle of the night.
My peeve: electric cars that make noise to make sure that blind people around them can hear them like they hear gas-powered cars--except they make it 10x as loud as any gas-powered car.
Objects should also stop having always-on blue LEDs for power indication or whatever. When I turn off the lights at night, my living room basically stays the same luminescence, because of the wash of blue LED light from every stupid little gadget that is desperate for me to know at all times that it has power.
I've taken apart two theater systems and a blu-ray player to sort this. It wasn't even THAT the LEDs were blue (though that's annoying as all hell by itself) but these were even WORSE as they were bare straw-hat LEDs stuck out of holes in the cases facing directly outward. The little things would genuinely spot your eyes if you looked at them dead on.
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.
They survive by doing the much simpler thing of using a piece of tape to cover the hole up. Yes, I know it doesn't look super nice, but you don't need much to cover the light.
Before blue LEDs existed, green and amber LEDs were the thing and still are in some dated-appearing designs. In some ways, those are worse. But originally, red LEDs were the staple electronic equipment after transitioning from neon and incandescent lamps. Red LEDs were at least more subtle somewhat.
I think what people want is light pollution customization controls so they're not kept awake with LED Christmas trees.
Involuntary light pollution makes for a bad UX. Side cutters, foil tape, and/or electrical tape. I sometimes don't completely cover status LEDs but instead reduce them to a pinhole.
I much appreciate Ubiquiti APs being able to turn off the LED ring.
Hahahahahah young parent rage is the best rage!
> 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.
GE is a major offender. And it's meaningless noise... the little jingle that the oven plays when it's done preheating is the same as the one the dishwasher near it plays when the cycle is done. Zero useful information.
Oddly, that song is a lot like one they used in the 1970s in pantyhose commercials.
Have you had a Samsung washing machine and dryer lately?
https://youtu.be/IAoVDOkNq3k
Luckily, my Samsung washing machine can be completely muted.
I miss writing like this. It feels like old internet. It was hyperbolic and silly but there was often a real point of view at the bottom of it and it felt crafted. Guys like Maddox and Jay Pinkerton and Tucker Max wrote like this, and they were wildly offensive and I disagreed with a lot of what they had to say (almost all of it, really) but I guess what I want to focus on is the format: it's nice to read something that isn't just a thought-terminating snowclone meme. It invited discussion by investing up-front in fleshing out the writer's thoughts. So much interaction on the internet now is just getting a shot in and disappearing back into the forest before the person you're responding to can reasonably react. It's generating the screenshot of their comment and your "drop the mic" response, designed to be consumed by people as a single serving after the comment rather than to engage in anything substantive.
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."
Unless it’s a smoke detector. In that case when it is running low on battery - despite also being hardwired - it should definitely warn you about the low battery… at 3am. Always. At. 3am.
More annoyingly, they'll beep intermittently with no other indicator.
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.
Battery voltage drops with temperature.
This is also why taking the batteries out of the remote and back in works. Hands warming them up.
I learned the other day my office building has hidden speakers dispersed throughout each floor which blast synthetic white noise.
It's quite loud, I had assumed it was an improperly installed HVAC system...
My building has this too. I wear noise cancelling headphones with no music to eliminate the white noise.
I have bad news for you -- those noise-cancelling headphones are "eliminating" the white noise by bombarding your ears with an equal and opposite white noise
There is nothing bad about that. The opposite phased sounds it plays genuinely do cancel out the vibrations from the original noise, decreasing the magnitude of the vibrations hitting your ear drum.
This is extremely common and is a feature.
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's a cost saving measure warranted by open spaces. We used to have walls and closed offices instead.
Open plan vs private office is a totally different conversation.
Adding the white noise isn't cost-saving, it costs money to install.
The HVAC system occasionally stops at my work, in the rare occasion I'm working late in the office, and the silence is profound and divine.
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 will defend the dryer alarm case somewhat. For my dryer, it displays a time until the cycle is complete, but that time is wildly inaccurate (as in, the display will say 45 mins and sometimes the cycle takes twice that to complete). It is useful to get a notification when the dryer is actually done in my case. Granted, the dryer should accurately report how long it will take to run, but given that it doesn't a "cycle complete" alarm is the next best thing.
That bothered me for a while about a dryer I use. Eventually, it clicked for me that it based its estimates on a best guess at the material and quantity you’d be drying in that cycle; but it (correctly, in my view) actually timed the cycle based on feedback from humidity/temperature sensors in the air path.
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.
Our dryer just stop, and the lack of noise is often enough, but every 20 minutes, it tumble and blow dry air on clothes, whcih to be honest, seems a better option than sounding an alarm
There's no question that some sounds, in some circumstances for some people, are very useful. But it should always be possible to configure the machine to remain silent.
The dryer can't know. It lies to you because you prefer the lie to the truth, which is why you bought laundry machines with screens, while only one of mine even has LEDs.
Man I love ranty britishisms. Author's right though, at my last living place I had a drier that summons screeches from hell when clothes were dry. I mean that buzzer would make your heart stop, and if I didn't open the door, it would run again for a short period to keep the clothes warm then do the abhorrent sound again, all for a state (dry clothes ready for folding) that is absolutely non time-sensitive. Horrific user-centered design.
I always thought I was weird for not ever letting the microwave beep when it ends. I always open the door a second before it ends. Sometimes you'll see me running across the house just so I can turn it off before that annoying beep. But then I started working at a co-working space, and I see a sticker on the microwave that says "Be kind, open the door before it beeps".
Haha, just last night I noticed my daughter does that.
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.
Reminds me of my water kettle. You can’t disable the beep, when water reaches boiling state. Why the fuck not?
I learnt at school that the thermostat in a kettle was a bimetallic strip, made from two metals with different thermal expansion coefficients. When the bimetallic strip reached 100 Celsius, the two sides of the strip would lengthen at different rates, causing it to bend. The strip was also part of the electric circuit, so the strip bending would open the circuit and switch the kettle off. This has been the standard design of kettles since 1955.
Why is anyone bothering to ruin such a great design?
Maybe some people like different water temperatures: black tea, coffee, green tea, etc...
Hell yes. My Skoda makes the exact same "DONG!" for "screen wash running low" as it does for "engine failure you're about to crash and die". I have a slow leak in my screen wash tank so this is really annoying.
Whenever I search my refrigerator or freezer for more than 20 seconds or so, an infernal beep begins. I have found myself singing Pink Guy's STFU either aloud or to myself when this happens. Needless to say, I appreciated this article.
My fridge’s door doesn’t fully close on its own if only gently pushed. But the beeping detector doesn’t detect the door as open if it’s almost but not fully closed.
Otherwise it’s great, I’ve only ever heard it once or twice, when I was /really/ taking my time.
I removed the beeper module on mine. Couldn't load the groceries in peace.
I read this article to the sound of Cake's 1996 album 'Fashion Nugget' song - 'Nugget'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3sQDwOTFJU
Lol. It might be too soon to ask machines to STFU because LLMs don't have clearly expressed feelings or persistent negative prompt feedback.
PS: Coincidentally, I have the rare 33 box set and common 45's set too. Good tunes.
The original title is "Objects should shut the fuck up". I don't like unnecessary cursing either, but it is emphasizing his frustration in this case and cursing objects, not people.
Renaming the title is just losing information for no reason.
Outta curiosity what kind of car is this? Or what brands offer the dual tank setup? Living in the US, I’m not aware of any cars that come from the factory with dual gas/lpg tanks. Here in the US it seems to largely be an aftermarket modification some folks make.
Gasoline prices are, from what I’ve gathered, significantly higher in the UK than the US, which provides a greater economic justification.
Smartphone notifications. Every now and again I turn off DND because I'm expecting a call, and every time I turn it on again soon after - the continuous barrage of pinging noises makes the phone unusable. I have notifications turned off for all apps by default!
I have a set of bike lights from Topeak that will flash the main headlight into the eyes of oncoming drivers when the battery is low, even though it has a battery indicator on the top. It gives me a heart attack every time.
I actually find that I really like East Asian appliances that sing little songs as indications. It’s much less annoying than loud beeping, and can be helpful once you learn what each song means.
Bill Shatner played a character in the 80's that expressed this sentiment: https://youtu.be/Ebo0aLLPYwA?t=20
I can't get behind blinking and flashing lights!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWP9Oxdn9Q
Fucking agreed. Anything less than a fire alarm should shut the fuck up.
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.
100% agree. I leave negative reviews on any app with sound that doesn't give me the ability to mute it.
Crappy technology calls attention to itself.
Good technology doesn't.
Amen. I will research the next car I get and I will not consider any car that makes annoying noises. And if I can't find one I will buy an older model.
I had a Toyota RAV4 and it had a seatbelt alarm that was increasingly and incessantly obnoxious if you didn't buckle up. Meaning that you had to buckle up to move from one parking to another in a larger lot.
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.
Appliances that only have touch controls and make beeping sounds for every button pre^Wtouch. UX design has truly peaked. >:(
Yes. Also, instantiated objects from some random library shouldn't write to stdout and stderr, which I thought it would be about.
I think it's an interesting correspondence—some general design principles about creating good auditory user interface somewhere in here. I would be interested if someone smarter than me can tell me what that principle is.
I suspect that there's some marketing component at play here. People who do not own but observe devices making seemingly unnecessary noises might perceive these devices as premium. Think about the various beeps that occur when locking a car and arming the alarm, the startup sound that infotainment systems in some EVs play, the twinkle twinkle little star of a fancy rice cooker.
i loved the writing style (and the reference comes from from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dinner_Game)
Important exception: If the noise my whiteware makes is a fun jingle, I'm all for it.
I have a tendency to locate annoying beepers and disconnect them...
Amen. I am praying for the day when cars honking on lock is banned.
Anyone have any good literature on alert fatigue as a general concept in design?
We don't care about profanity on HN but we do have a problem with clickbait, which "Objects should shut the fuck up" arguably is, so I changed the title to "Objects shouldn't talk". I realize "talk" isn't quite accurate here but "should be quiet" or "shouldn't make noise" felt a bit too bland. Suggestions welcome as always!
Edit: never mind, an obviously better solution is to just de-"the fuck" the original.
IMO it's only clickbait if actual content doesn't live up to the title. I believe this article to be a justified rant and effective reflection about why objects should shut the fuck up. Title matches the tone, content is relevant, no deception.
That font looks hideous. why
I hate that it's not configurable
Everything is configurable if you're determined enough. ;-)
> My dishwasher: no sound whatsoever, it simply opens up when it's done.
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.
Some Bosch dishwashers do this, to let the steam escape quickly. Also, the controls are hidden at the top of the door, so it projects a red dot onto the floor when it's running, because it's so quiet that you would have no idea otherwise.
I find it infuriating that navigation apps throw ads when I'm stopped at a red light. This is THE moment where I should glance away from the road and plan my routing
If you're in the unenviable position of being unable to edit your phone's hosts file, you can block most ads using a DNS-over-HTTPS provider. Mullvad has a free service.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
Hopefully they do something about the annoying self-checkout machines too. The ones that yell back at you loudly for every cent you insert. Employees dislike them too.
Unexpected comment in comment area
Maybe this is generational, but I really don't care about the amount of minor jingles and tones I encounter on a daily basis, and I certainly don't see why it's necessary to publish this kind of a hostile rant about it. I guess the writer was trying to be over the top and funny, but really just comes off as unhinged and a bit obsessive, like the type of person you have to walk on eggshells around at work.
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.
Sound sensitivity varies by person. It's not generational.
It's an absurd feature. Cars have had gauges for things like fuel for decades and decades, as a driver you know how much you have left, the car does not have to signal this in any other way.
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.
You are saying that you don't care. There are people who care. He does and brings in good reasons why the defaults shouldn't be spurious alarms and noise.
I had a 2011 Toyota and there are so many beeps. It's annoying because they are just noise pollution at that point. I don't mind actual alarms, like my fridge door beeps when I leave it ajar.
My complaint about BMW, at least the one that I drove a few years ago, is that the warning sound for a passenger who hasn’t put on their seatbelt is the same warning sound as when the engine is about to catch fire and explode.
You sound like the programmers who just shrug off with "It's just a warning!" a plethora of production bugs to come.
My rice cooker does the same, but my microwave beeps a harsh tone until I open the door, which is very annoying.
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.
Do you have kids? I'm younger and don't, and could still empathize with the author having his children disturbed by annoying device sounds. I bet its awful.
"I don't have X problem. People who say they have X problem are the type of people you have to walk on eggshells around."
Imagine how your comments would sound if X were something like racism or unwanted sexual advances instead of noise.