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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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
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."
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
They're so bright, you can see the damn blue circles on the ceiling. Blue moon rising, invited by no one.
It's the kind of flaw we don't notice until after we've bought the products and lived with them for a while. Therefore, it doesn't hurt sales and therefore, there is no pressure for manufacturers to change.
It sucks.
As a workaround, these work great. Note that these particular ones are partial blackout stickers. They are 50-80% opaque. You can still see the light, but it won't be bright enough to annoy. If you want to darken even further you can just layer two of the stickers.
https://www.amazon.com/FLANCCI-Blocking-Stickers-Dimming-Bla...
If you need total blackout, there are similar ones available that are 100% opaque, although at that point I'm not sure why a person would buy a specialty product instead of just using regular tape...
If they're going to do LEDs, at least do red ones, which don't obliterate night vision. Making them togglable is the ideal unless they're literally a life-or-death piece of equipment.
With all public debate around the effects of blue light on sleep, it's weird more people haven't found that concerning.
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.
- 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".
That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.
Same with touchscreen controls in a vehicle.
In any case, it's law, there's no coming back from this.
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.
Unfortunately.
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.
But the things that irritate me even more are the infernal modals and alerts on my computing devices. It is hard enough maintaining focus without having to spend an entire work session playing whack-a-mole at random intervals for a hundred different things that aren’t relevant. I never want to know that my scanner software has an update available.
I realized that at its core, this problem is caused by developers and product managers mistakenly believing that I care as much about their product as they do.
It would be nice if the gatekeepers had mechanisms that punished this behavior. Search engines should lower the rankings of every site with random modals. App stores could display a normalized metric of alert click through — “this app has an above average number of alerts that are ignored”.
But it's sure as hell annoying to have unsolicited popups randomly appearing ("Java update available! Apple Music now 50% off! GeForce Experience driver update! Windows Defender scan results! USB drive not ejected properly!..."). They're also often embarrassing when screen sharing.
Now that the dominant economic model is driven by attention and engagement, even systems that don't benefit from it in the slightest are nonetheless infected by that aesthetic. I keep expecting to see a toaster that asks me to "like and subscribe" or a toilet that has pop-up notifications.
Must be activated when the ignition switch is energized and reverse gear is engaged. Must not be energized when the vehicle is in forward motion.
Seems that should be amended to not allow use when the vehicle is in park, just as they are prohibited while in drive. I'm tempted to write to the NHTSA and propose this change.
[0]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p...
They aren't meant to have a specific meaning, they're just headlights, but when going in reverse. So if the car has a feature to "turn on the headights" it makes sense to activate the ones on the back too.
Though that's just pedantry that kicks the can down the road to the question, why are the headlights turning on with nobody in the car?
* Absolutely never any beep or sound
* Direct controls, no "programs" (i.e. microwave has two knobs: power and time, etc.)
* No network connectivity of any kind (obviously)
With a strong brand identity and good marketing these would sell like sliced bread.
It seems to me the market for "no bullshit" appliances is HUGE, and waiting for a company to grab it and make billions.
More generally, it's sort of like how on auto enthusiast forums people are like "why don't car companies make cars for us anymore, manual, V8, rear wheel drive" and the answer is that, while there are enthusiasts, their numbers aren't enough to make the economics work compared to churning out a boring crossover that will sell significantly better.
I don't think we will ever see it though, at least not en masse. No startup would be able to afford the sheer number of lawsuits filed by the companies we have slowly allowed to become fat by selling products rife with consumer-hostile "features". Not to mention traditional advertising platforms would refuse to promote their products. Too much money already flowing in from the usual bad actors.
Whats measured is whats managed, and so we have a bunch of unnecessary crap to click on because that pushes the engagement metric up.
The policy of this hospital is that all alarms, beeping, etc. should be disabled except in limited circumstances. Particularly at night.
I always tell people though that being in the hospital doesn't make you healthier, mainly because you can't sleep. The hospital should be the absolute last resort, and your first priority on finding yourself in one should be to figure out how to get out of it, even if it involves nursing care at home.
But in this case (a $50 device rather than a washing machine or something) why wouldn't you just get a different pair made by a different company?
No one wants to do that but for a relatively low ticket item which one uses for hours every day it seems masochistic not to do so.
This led me to discover that there is no setting to disable sounds, you must take it apart and rip out the speaker, which I happily did.
I've switched to another brand of robot vacuum since then and that poor experience makes it pretty unlikely I'll use a Roomba again.
This is often communicated as too many project managers involved with a program. Hilariously visible in something like GMail. I can quickly count about 5 badges on my page of numbers that I don't think I'll ever actually care about.
Gets more difficult with things like disaster alerts. These are, generally, life saving. But, as we have gotten better at detecting things, it can feel silly if we have them too often. (My favorite is the alarm people have when they start to learn that coyotes are always passing through the yard.)
Edit: never mind, an obviously better solution is to just de-"the fuck" the original.
This is why I really appreciate my GE washer which has adopted the Japanese aesthetic of a happy little jingle when it's finished instead of the ear splitting BUZZZZZZZZ of traditional American washers.
I honestly think that some thought needs to be put into these alarms, and maybe take a note from Japan when it comes to the _tone_ of notifications.
It 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.
Oddly, that song is a lot like one they used in the 1970s in pantyhose commercials.
They should have advertised on the box: wakes your kids and your wife at 2am!
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.
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."
If anyone inside the auto industry wants to spill the beans anonymously, please do!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3sQDwOTFJU
It's quite loud, I had assumed it was an improperly installed HVAC system...
Without it, suddenly you can hear every conversation happening all the way on the other side of your open plan office. It becomes extremely distracting.
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.
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.)
That includes apps (games) that spend a minute screeching their godawful "mood music" during a loading screen. Or worse, won't allow you to shut the "music" off during a forced minutes long tutorial.
Why Android doesn't have a permission system for sound, I don't know. I'd love to be able to just forbid every app from making any kind of noise.
I need the model of this thing! Mine fires 5 deafening beeps when it's done and theres no option to turn it off. It has woken me up in a panic many times off the sofa.
I mean, my rice cooker is from Japan and plays "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" when it starts. Was that a requirement of mine when I bought it? No. Does it bother me? Also no. It's kind of cute, actually.
Imagine how your comments would sound if X were something like racism or unwanted sexual advances instead of noise.
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.
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.