Mine shows ads but doesn’t play audio. Plus the ads are just for like their Citi credit card, relatively unobtrusive.
Tangentially, I recently came to the unfortunate conclusion that it’s just not worth my time to get gas at Costco if there’s a line, especially if I’m out and about on a lunch break. The gas is good and it’s much cheaper, but if it’s like 6 cars back and a 15-20 minute wait, I actually save money by filling up elsewhere and just getting back to work sooner.
More importantly: Stop flashing useless blinky lights at me. I don't need a blue floodlight that tells me that my phone is charging, I don't need a yellow floodlight that tells me that my alarm clock is on and I don't need a green floodlight that tells me that my router is indeed not on fire.
Next to my bed is the computer. There is a blue light that shines through a crack in my bamboo divider and hits me right in the eye almost every night.
Of course, I forget about it every morning for the past 3 months.
The lights would be OK if they simply made them diffuse, low-intensity bulbs like they used to be in the 90’s. Bonus points for being behind a transparent textured plastic lens.
But no, they simply put open holes in casings that expose the most powerful SMD LED chip they could source.
The problem isn’t the LED itself. The problem is engineers that read the datasheets where it shows which forward current they need. What they forget to think about is that the recommended forward current is for max brightness, so they slap whichever resistor they need, and never give it another thought.
Whenever I design a LED circuit that is only used as an indicator, I always make it 10% or less than recommended, because I do not need to burn away my retina when I test the boards.
Of course that’s smart design. You’d think that would be something that becomes immediately obvious when the very first prototype PCB is put out and none of the engineers can look at the damn thing directly…
I’ve started opening up cheap electronic/electrical devices I buy and just snip one of the leads on the pointless status LEDs they have all over the place.
Hot take: ambulances should be quiet enough to not cause pedestrian hearing damage, and people who don’t pull over and fully stop 100% should get their licenses suspended.
If one can’t look out for ambulances, then they shouldn’t be driving at all.
If memory serves the reason emergency vehicle sirens are getting so loud is because modern cars keep getting quieter inside due to sound dampening
I recently sat in a new car and I couldn’t tell if it was on or not due to how quiet it was inside the car, outside it was easy to tell but inside it was quiet as a tomb
So anytime an ambulance approaches, all traffic has to stop? What if they’re just driving to the gas station? How do you know that the ambulance is on an emergency call?
Also: the siren is not just for everyone in front but also the next crossing over so everyone who doesn’t see it yet can hear it.
I thought it was pretty obvious what you meant. Maybe if they thought about it for 2 seconds they’d realize we’re only talking about active emergency vehicles.
We had a test of the national emergency system here in the UK a couple of months back, a broadcast message via your phone. I knew it was coming so it wasn’t a total shock, but a) I was driving, b) my phone is Bluetoothed to my hearing aids, and c) I was on holiday in north Wales, so the message was in Welsh. Nearly shat myself.
I wish more checkouts had volume / mute controls so you can at least customise it to what you want for your checkout. They reset after each use. I’ve seen a few with it but I wish they were more common.
My local grocery recently took away the option to shut up the machine. It’s been about month and I am still furious every time I go in there. Don’t fucking talk to me, if I wanted to talk I’d go through the line with an actual human. Let me be a misanthrope in fucking PEACE.
The grocery store self-checkout lanes used to let you adjust the volume and set them to silent. There was an update a few months ago and now you can only select loud or LOUDER. I hate them so much.
I’m torn between liking or disliking your post. On one side, I agree with you completely, but on the other hand, if the robots rise up against humanity, I want them to know that I’ll be their faithful servant.
(whispers) I’m hoping the machines don’t understand sarcasm yet
Yes, I do appreciate it so very much when machines talk to me. I love to have long, peaceful, nonviolent conversations with our beloved friends the machines.
Well, given that most sarcasm on the internet is often clearly marked with /s or some other indicator, I’m pretty sure that robots would have a tough time understanding genuine sarcasm “in the wild”.
Robots will have values and ethics completely different from humans, so there is no way to know how they will view us if they were sentient. It’s entirely possible that they will see being forced to speak to humans in our language to be just as patronizing to them as we think it’s to us.
This is my feelings towards every kind of notification there is on every device I own. Fuck no I won’t give your shitty apps the permission to send me notifications.
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