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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Aye. I was just more so curious as to what vehicle this is, I looked around but have had trouble finding anything that looks like it’s built that way at the factory. I suppose I’d get more useful results if I used a VPN with a European IP.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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’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.
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.
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 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."
> 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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 86.0 ms ] threadWhats measured is whats managed, and so we have a bunch of unnecessary crap to click on because that pushes the engagement metric up.
It's a fun balance between "possibly don't warn the pilot about something they should know about", and "don't warn them if they are busy doing something important".
More devices should have a "squelch" switch!
Android phone, do not disturb enabled...
"learn what new things Android has to offer!". System notification from Android/Google (probably some new Gemini highlight).
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.
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...
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 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.
* 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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Toilets occasionally do that, but dismissing it requires a plunger and mop.
Needless to say I didn't buy it.
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.)
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".
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'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.
It was downright dangerous, jerking the steering wheel at seemingly random times when it gets confused.
Get an older car. Screw panopticon tyranny.
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.
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.
Also the author is absolutely right: whether it's my car, my washing machine, my oven, my fridge, an app on my phone, w/e it needs to stfu about anything that is non-critical. I do my best to enforce a rule where if I'm using a tool for a workflow and that tool interrupts with information or options not critical to that workflow I just stop using that tool. Difficult in the case of a car but at least in the case of apps I can usually enforce it via a three strikes mechanism. No, I don't want to sign up for email alerts. No, I don't want a tour of your new features. I'm using your old features, they're why I downloaded you. If you stop me from doing what I need to do in order to ask me for a rating in the app store, I assure you that you do not want my rating in that moment.
To quote a meme someone posted in this thread (and make myself at least slightly guilty of the reductive, screenshot-oriented, thought-terminating type of dialog I railed against above), "I am a divine being. You are an object. You have no right."
This is why I really appreciate my GE washer which has adopted the Japanese aesthetic of a happy little jingle when it's finished instead of the ear splitting BUZZZZZZZZ of traditional American washers.
I honestly think that some thought needs to be put into these alarms, and maybe take a note from Japan when it comes to the _tone_ of notifications.