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Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#71

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

radford-neal wrote: post #26

I very much doubt that there is any technical reason for the alerts always being loud. It's a deliberate decision. Like the whole idea of amber alerts, it is a matter of authorities taking decisions that make them feel good, without considering the consequences. Amber alerts are bad. We get them now and them in Ontario at 3am, sent to the entire (rather large) province. This is idiotic. The probability that someone w…

Don't forget the 3am alert is often because of a huge delay by countless bureaucrats too. Reading the message and finding out the incident or whatever happened 8 or 10 hours earlier is utterly ridiculous.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#72

Post by Havoc »

tpict wrote: post #57

On a similar note to the linked article: the low battery alert of the AirPods Pro can be ear-shattering, and there's no means of reducing the volume. I suspect it tries to scale volume with environmental noise because it ranges from "startling" to "painful".

Same for other headsets. Soundcore, planteronics, Sony - all seem to have fixed volume levels for low battery. Always makes me jump.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#74

Post by bombcar »

registeredcorn wrote: post #65
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are they useless? I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state. I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night,…

>I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away. Isn't part of the issue that when a child is taken, the assumption is that the kidnapper will immediately flee the area? I think hundreds, plural, might be excessive, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to notify people within a certain distance based on high speed and how much time has passed; maybe 50-100 miles? I can see getting annoyed at multiple messages, but…

The problem is that very few are actually "stranger danger" kidnappings; they're almost always custody disputes. And if you live anywhere near a major city, you will get them relatively often. If there was a way to turn off "parent kidnappings" and leave the rest on, I'm sure most people would take it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#75

Post by Beltalowda »

radford-neal wrote: post #26

I very much doubt that there is any technical reason for the alerts always being loud. It's a deliberate decision. Like the whole idea of amber alerts, it is a matter of authorities taking decisions that make them feel good, without considering the consequences. Amber alerts are bad. We get them now and them in Ontario at 3am, sent to the entire (rather large) province. This is idiotic. The probability that someone w…

Part of the problem is that now the system is in place, if you don't use it and later it turns out that maybe perhaps possibly it could have helped, you've got the possibility of a career-ending hurricane of piss coming your way, civil and maybe even criminal suits, and all of that. Sending out an alert is in many ways a very rational choice, even when it doesn't really make any sense.

Look how parents who don't handcuff their children to their wrists so they can keep an eye on them 24/7 are often treated.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#76

Post by bombcar »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #45
sidewndr46 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Texas. I get Amber alerts for missing children that are 8 hours of interstate driving away from me. That's completely useless.

Every single person I know in the NYC area turned off amber alerts in 2013 after being woken up by this one in the middle of the night: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-phone-4... Even older parents called their kids to find out how to make sure it does not happen again.

It didn't help at all that phones suddenly had this feature and defaulted to ON (for awhile you couldn't turn off Amber alerts without turning off "They just launched the nukes, kiss your ass goodbye" alerts).

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#77

Post by js2 »

bombcar wrote: post #6
tyleo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.

We get them every single time a thunderstorm sniffs at anything in the tricounty area. There may be a way to turn off the "Watch" alerts and still keep the "we are gonna die" alerts. The one time we got the green sky of doom the phone did explode in a way not normally seen, so I assume they know something about crying wolf. As for amber alerts being useless - something like 90% (?) of the time it's a custody dispute…

I have a weather radio in our bedroom with only two alerts enabled: tornado warning (not watch), and the nuclear power plant 6 miles away just had an incident, whatever that’s called. Weather radio alerts are very granular and most radios will let you configure just the ones you want to hear.

https://www.weather.gov/nwr/eventcodes

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#78

Post by Semaphor »

Reading this thread, I’m not sure what’s worse. The USA, where phones apparently randomly go off at any time for no good reason at a loud volume level, or Germany, where our alerting system is so broken that at the last testing round half of us didn’t get any alerts (these are supposed to be for actual emergencies, not custody disputes), and the rest received them over a time frame of several hours.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#79

Post by bombcar »

nonameiguess wrote: post #40
tyleo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.

If you live in a place prone to tornadoes, there should be real citywide outdoor tornado sirens that you'd hear from miles away. Also sending it to your phone doesn't add much unless you're a recording artist in a soundproof studio.

I was actually surprised how well a modern insulated house blocks the siren. We have one that is on a hill a mile away (there's a second but I don't think I've ever heard it) and it's hard to notice inside (they run a check every month).

It IS fun to get the weather warning and then run outside and hear the air-raid siren begin to warm up.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no way to lower amber alert volume on headphones?

#80

Post by t0mas88 »

prvit wrote: post #62

Why do Americans need amber alerts? How come the rest of the world apparently doesn’t?

We have them in the Netherlands as well, but not nearly as many. You get about 1 or 2 per year that happen as a message to everyone, only used for life threatening situations. And then around 15 per year for which only an app notification and social media are sent.
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