Everything with a battery should have an off switch • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#381

Post by moonbug » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #250

titzer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ikr? They have these things now, they call them "AAA" batteries...holy heck, you can take them out, and they even make rechargeable ones. Like, if your thing doesn't work, you can just swap the batteries instead of waiting N hours for it to charge itself....what a concept.

Rechargeable AAAs are crap though. Power density sucks. Voltage level sucks (and voltage regulators will suck the battery dry before your micro does). And the form factor sucks. I'd sooner have a 18650-family (e.g. 14240 or 14500) become standard than a bunch of AAAs.

Battery hipsterism. Oh HN, you keep giving.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#382

Post by davchana » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #79

pveierland wrote: post #67

Related to the topic, besides the energy argument and the ability to cycle system state, I'd argue the huge importance of being able to power things off for personal freedom, especially for things with connectivity. We still have the power to shut off devices and largely the ability to block their connectivity (e.g. routing TV ads through a network filter). With 5G and future connectivity, it feels as there will be p…

> With 5G and future connectivity, it feels as there will be push towards not being able to block the network access of individual devices, such that a TV or fridge will just speak to its server directly via some XG/IoT network which the user does control, without any user ability to block this communication How does one ensure that a product is built this way, to avoid it? I understood that a number of current 5G ca…

True. My car came with ATT sim installed. It uses that to remote start via App, and to tell me the location, miles, other data in app. Also, to show me directions on its display screen. There is no way for a user to switch off that data connection (not that I want it, its free of cost, and it helped me few times).

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#383

Post by kyaghmour » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #371

kyaghmour wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have copied-and-pasted the strangest of kernel errors, compiler errors, god-knows-what-obscure-tool errors, etc. over the past 20+ years into search engines and have almost always been delighted and amazed at how somehow someone somewhere at some point in time had not only encountered the same thing but actually wrote a description of possible root causes and potential solutions that often unstuck me right away. Th…

I call it "Somebody Else Has Had This Problem". It's a heuristic that became useful starting about twenty years ago, eh? Before the internet you had to have (and write) fairly complete manuals for software, now you put the error message into a search engine and, hopefully, amortize the suffering. However, I suspect this has also made it easier to write and (kinda sorta) maintain larger and more complex systems. Like…

That's an interesting take. Thanks for sharing. Sure, I can definitely see the "google this error" effect as having permitted a higher degree of complexity. Or, maybe to be more accurate, lowered the barrier to entry to create more complex systems. There are probably pros/cons to this. It takes less sophistication to build something very complex, thereby democratizing the ability of building sophisticated systems/services, but it also means there are many more complex systems out than there is a community of people who have a more-or-less "good" understanding of what they do and, possibly, whose overall behaviour is likely only partially understood by their own designers. Cue in all sorts of security implications, etc. Food for thought.

I don't mind the quoting, but, just in terms of mental hygiene, I generally dislike posting unequivocal opinions on the internet ... because it's often come back to bite me ;) I'm especially skeptical of my own writing when I use labels such as "ignorant" or "arrogant". So long as you understand that I don't take myself very seriously, I mostly stand by that quote you mention.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#384

Post by swader999 » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #238

swader999 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think bigger. Do the whole house. There's paint you can get for this.

Does that actually work for 5G? I believe that, in urban areas, you can even get cell reception from inside a microwave because a phone needs very little signal.

I can still get cell reception in my bedroom that has three coats of the paint with proper copper grounding running through it all. But it barely registers on my meter now whereas before it was 100x. I'm sensitive to emf and do sleep noticeably better now. I still turn my phone and wifi off at night. I'm about 400 metres from a cell tower. Rural so no 5g yet I think. Yeah I have the window film and metal window screens and metal fabric curtains too. Wasn't a trivial project.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#385

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

zanellato19 wrote: post #257

Kalium wrote: post #243

> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off. I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers . They don't have to use th…

Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this, tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like this one

Yes, every profession does that to some degree. But most professionals are impressed by things that make the results of their work better, even if at completely unreasonable costs.

Designers nowadays are in a fashion to get impressed by things that make the results of their work worse. That leads to completely different problems.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#386

Post by Joeri » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

yawz wrote: post #282

zanellato19 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this, tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like this one

I experienced this in programming when I got into Scala 13-14 years ago. For an outsider, it looked like the community was more interested in impressing each other than solving real problems.

I have to say that scala was the most fun in programming I’ve had. You can make beautifully elegant code, that is oh so clever. It is easy to get seduced into thinking about elegant code instead of good solutions.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#387

Post by hnbad » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

JasonFruit wrote: post #346

hnbad wrote: post #6

Obligatory addendum every time foone is posted here: foone goes by they/them pronouns and foone hates HN and all it stands for so please don't bother them with twitter replies just because you saw this thread on here. If you think about following them on twitter because of a cool tech thread, please be aware that they're not a tech novelty account and don't complain when they tweet about politics.

Why should we care whether Foone's mad at HN? Posting to a medium you don't own and expecting to be able to control who responds and how never really works out. If you want control over who sees your content and how they can respond, you have to use a medium you control, and I don't see why Foone is special in that regard.

The reason I said what foone wants and doesn't want is precisely that they can not control what others do. Yes, you can disregard all that, follow them on twitter and angrily chastise them for not sticking to cool tech projects and tell them to use a proper blogging platform, but I was providing this information based on the expectation that most people reading it would not want to be intentionally rude.

If the only thing stopping you from being rude would be the police literally dragging you away from your computer, yes, by all means, try to prove a point by being intentionally rude just because they can't stop you.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#388

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, May 09, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

vsareto wrote: post #198

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #134

>> (Our design team will never listen. This is because they, one, don't listen to anyone ever; and two, never use the products they design. Oh, sure, there might be a user study or two. But they never actually have to live with or work with the damn things.) This is so obvious from everyday life that someone really ought to write a paper about it and have it published in Nature. Because it will certainly be published…

I get that you're pissed, but there's plenty of technology that you seemingly forget about (being pissed off makes you a bit irrational) that works most of the time. Saying nothing ever fucking works is just a dumb take

Hum... Nothing that was redesigned on the last few decades works.

From cars and elevators to software. Anything that interaction designers touched is broken.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#389

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

c22 wrote: post #334

alistairSH wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the example you gave, as a user, what would you do with "Error: 0xFHJAD1234"? The best you could do is report it to Apple (or whoever). But, the error alone doesn't achieve anything. You would have been better off with "Something broke, click here to send log to Apple." (which is roughly what the book recommends - replace the error with something actionable).

And then what? Is Apple going to receive the error log and dispatch a technician to your house to fix it? In my experience sending crash data to software companies has never resulted in my satisfaction, nor has using some 'wizard' to diagnose an error. As alluded to above these systems are just not smart enough to actually know what's wrong. If the original programmers could create a fully automated flow to repair al…

Interestingly, sending crash data to open source projects often results in timely fixes.

Sending them to large software companies does not have the same outcome. But then, that's certainly not a flaw with the format.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#390

Post by dang » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

cristifalcas wrote: post #23

Quoted post unavailable.

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html