It is in fact not difficult to blame them.

In reality users will keep everything on default.

I think it's regulated in places, as it was certainly an HMI concern ever since Three Mile Island. Our customer is really grilling vendors for generating excessive alarms. Generally for a system to pass commissioning it has to be all green, and if it starts event bombing after you're going to be chewed.

I have never seen a piece of new equipment that ever gets to an All Green state, before, during or after commissioning. I frequently recommend that we do not allow the commissioning team to leave until they can get it to that state but it has yet to happen.

I guess it's the matter of setting the expectations, both on SCADA and equipment side. Spent this weekend getting rid of that last sporadic alert…

Earbuds often have features like mic beam forming and noise cancellation which require a substantial degree of processing power. It's hardly unjustified compared to your Teams instance making fans spin or Home Assistant bringing down an RPi to its knees.

These sorts of things feel like they would be quite inefficient on a general-purpose CPU so you would want to do them on some sort of dedicated DSP hardware instead. So I would expect an earbud to use some sort of specialized microcontroller with a slow-ish CPU core but extra peripherals to do all the signal processing and bluetooth-related stuff.

No doubt, maybe should I have emphasised the "general" part of "general purpose" more. Not a hardware person myself, I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like this.

MCUs are so cheap that you’d never get to a cheaper solution by building out a team to iterate on custom hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You’d basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.

> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply

Where are you imagining costy savings coming from? Custom anything is almost always vastly more expensive than using a standardised product.

It's a way to avoid direct confrontation via passive aggression.

Yeah except being passive aggressive actually tends to escalate the situation. Because sometimes people will just respond to a polite question, but now you've just been the same asshole to them, so there is a higher chance that they're just going to get offended.

The whole PA phenomenology originates from the military, where hierarchy prevents direct confrontation. So subordinates lash out in ways that are harder to counter. I feel like it's a similar dynamic here.

Absolutely, but the key word in the GP's use of "avoid direct confrontation" is direct. Being passive-aggressive is indirect, and even if it's more likely to cause an escalation, to many people it feels safer, even if it really isn't.

> It feels like they're just trying to rip you off, but I suspect they see it more as a "nudge" to make people check in online, because that streamlines their airport process.

I believe the airline pays the airport for every check in and luggage handling transaction. They are just cutting costs.

It's the 21st century. Blowhards of the world united with the miracle of technology are moaning at any attempt of common sense regulation. This will become culture wars material right away.

They would argue that the market would solve the issue.

I think you suppose wrong. A statement like "the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides" doesn't seam out of reach of an algorithmic procedure like a classical NLP.

Sure, we can write a procedure that recognizes some formal grammar, which intersects with the natural language. Defining the formal grammar that fully captures the current natural language understanding of the mathematical community is a bit harder.

This problem was even worse: it's matched by the formal grammar, but the naïve formalisation has a trivial answer, so it is clearly not what was intended.

That clearly may be doing some heavy lifting. It is assumed that trivial answer wasn’t what was intended for the problem, but unless someone asked Erdos, I don’t think we know.

Considering that he did some work towards the problem, tackling non-trivial cases, I think we do know. There's no way he wouldn't have perceived trivial solutions at some point.

This is not a production system yet. Also, as someone who suffered VW/Cariad developed UI since 2021, it's going to suck balls.

I suffered similarly but I think the latest software (>5.0) solved most of the issues and I don’t notice the software anymore at all (which I take as a positive - I.e., it just gets out of the way)

I'm not sure we're even on same versions. They appear to push different branches on different platform revisions.

Mine still cold boots/watchdogs every time you start the car in what I suspect a Patriot-style fix of numerous issues. It still has confirmation dialogs over confirmation dialogs (e.g. when selecting CarPlay you get to confirm your choice three times). Voice input is still unusable: the only thing it reliably recognizes is when I tell it to fuck off (and it scolds me for that). Door locks/keyless became more unreliable, which I frankly doubted was even possible. Everything is lagging, especially after cold boot: getting to entering nav destination after you sit in the car takes an eternity.