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.
“Listen,” said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, “they make a big thing of the ship’s cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”
“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What’s that?”
“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”
“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”
A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They spun round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.
“What?” they said.
“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don’t even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”
As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.
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.
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.
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.
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