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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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!
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.
Android phone, do not disturb enabled...
"learn what new things Android has to offer!". System notification from Android/Google (probably some new Gemini highlight).
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.
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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.
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.
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
I still find it crazy that these are supposed to be safety features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
More like Bike Overtake Prevention System. Unbelievable.
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- 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".
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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
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.
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.
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.
I think this is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KQ0g_-qJs
Keywords: 737 MAX MCAS trim
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.
Get an older car. Screw panopticon tyranny.
That, or the manufacturers and regulators wisening up, but I ain't holding my breath for that.
Same with touchscreen controls in a vehicle.
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.
It was downright dangerous, jerking the steering wheel at seemingly random times when it gets confused.
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.
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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...
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".
They're so bright, you can see the damn blue circles on the ceiling. Blue moon rising, invited by no one.
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.
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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.
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 only notifications I have on are direct messages on whatsapp (no group messages) and slack during work hours +-30min only.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
It seems to me the market for "no bullshit" appliances is HUGE, and waiting for a company to grab it and make billions.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44789587