> something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.
Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).
Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.
> and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).
This affected me about 5 minutes ago so this drew my attention - I find this more directly now. Fans had increased, but I've plenty of cores so nothing else was slow. I then checked and found some linting process that I'd killed was still running in the background using up a couple of cores.
I do kind of miss things like dialup tones and knowing how things had gone wrong by sound. I wonder if there's other fun ideas around that. I'm picturing either a ferrofluid or textured display that becomes more grumbly as my computer works harder. I can't hear disks thrashing now we're on solid state but big steady waves of water vs turbulent waves feels like a good analogy.
As much as I dislike skeuomorphism, I sometimes dream of recreating those noises.
More than that - on the list of projects to in spare time (read: retirement, if I'll live that long), which surprisingly I haven't seen anyone do already, is a system performance monitor that exposes metrics as sounds instead of graphs. A cross (or a blend) between fan noises, HDD murmur, and the bridge of Enterprise-D[0] - an ambiance of non-distracting sounds, but every single one correlated with an actual system metric - so that you'll learn to "feel" the machine by the sound this monitor makes (much like many drivers learn to "feel" their car by how it sounds).
If you (or anyone else) knows of "prior art" / some implementation of this idea, please let me know. Indicators in the tray, or semi-transparent graphs in the corner of a screen, generally don't work for me - my visual system just filters them out without parsing (except when they overlap something I care about, or find their way onto a screenshot, at which point I become annoyed). However, I believe sound would work for me, as it's a nice, additive channel, not very busy while I'm working, and such ambiance could actually substitute for pink noise (or the video from [0], which I sometimes use in lieu of noise).
Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).
Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.