Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera

Post by happymellon » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

kybernetyk wrote: post #657

skhr0680 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy. It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".

Those alarms are pretty much mandated by law. So it's politicians/law makers who "design" those alarms. This smells like inexperienced engineers designing something and then being surprised by side effects. Sadly there's a severe (temporal) disconnect between making the law and seeing its results in person.

Post by torginus » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #59

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #6

All new cars. At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't tu…

Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figure it out. Eventually I discovered that it was beeping at me because my eyes weren’t on the road enough. Of course, figuring that out required me to take my eyes off the road to figure out which blinking signal was associated with this particular alarm. Also, b…

Post by torginus » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC

kybernetyk wrote: post #657

skhr0680 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy. It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".

Those alarms are pretty much mandated by law. So it's politicians/law makers who "design" those alarms. This smells like inexperienced engineers designing something and then being surprised by side effects. Sadly there's a severe (temporal) disconnect between making the law and seeing its results in person.

Post by lazide » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #577

skhr0680 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy. It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. Perhaps the people who design these things need an alarm to warn them of "alarm fatigue".

> It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer. It's the same culture in which product teams default install a background task that runs at every logon and checks for updates multiple times a day (for a program I used twice in the last year) or teams that default enable every possible notification (and in every update re-enable the ones users have explicitly turned off). Then they wonder why people don't try new…

Post by Integrape » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

einpoklum wrote: post #353

FunHearing3443 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of this acceptance of the "well if it saves one [usually child's] life..." - it's extremely powerful but is deceptive as it devalues the value of freedom (or some similar trait).

Another variant of this is: "What, you don't want to catch the pedophiles?"