10 ms·

Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts

157 points by geox 9mo ago

sklargh 9mo ago
When everything is important nothing can be important. I was particularly struck by the reduction of crew rest to service alarms. I'd sort of thought this was a problem for watch standers only but it makes sense that some alarms require a specialist or the crews are too thin. Heck, I bet the captain, engineer and first mate all have monitors in their staterooms.
- Hizonner 9mo ago
  Ah, but you see, the alarms from the device I am building are most important, because somebody might sue me if I can't shift responsibility onto the user.
abanana 9mo ago
Same sort of problem we have in modern cars? Speed, lane assistance, blind spot, etc, sometimes apparently beeping for the hell of it. For some it's distracting and frustrating, even increasing aggression and thereby increasing the risk. For others it breeds complacency, a "boy who cried wolf" scenario such that the alarms become meaningless. Either way, it doesn't work as intended. Interesting to know ships have followed the same pattern, apparently to a worse extent. I wonder how many more walks of life, and industries, are suffering in the same way.
- nsavage 9mo ago
  My Volkswagen has assistance features which routinely fail on snowy days and can’t seem to be disabled. The best you can do is disable them for a minute (!) at which point they start blaring again. Its ironic because the time you need the most focus is the time the car lets you focus the least.
  - DoingIsLearning 9mo ago
    It can absolutely be disabled they just wouldn't get the same brownies points in EuroNCAP by allowing _you_ to disable it. If I spent more than 50k on a car like that, I would absolutely return it and file a complaint. Car companies care a great deal about after sales stats. This trend will continue because we as users on average tolerate it.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    Get yourself a VCDS cable & software and disable that shit for good.
  - t0mas88 9mo ago
    BMW has the same issue but luckily still buttons to disable them. Snow will quickly result in "Forward collision warning failure" and "Blind spot detection failure" and if more snow "Lane assist failure" because the sensors get covered in snow. Oh and before you even start driving let us "bing!" you with a message that the temperature is below 4C. As if you didn't know that already.
- B1FIDO 9mo ago
  I rented a car last July, and I specifically picked out a small one because I wouldn't need to carry any cargo or passengers around. As soon as I drove off the lot, 3 warning indicator lamps lit up, including "Tire Pressure" so I stopped at a service station, thought for a moment, then drove back to the rental lot. The other indicator had something to do with crash protection, and I think we worked out how to disable the system. After putting air into my tires, I was good to go. So I'm thankful that those lamps indicated some actual conditions. I always kind of make a point of taking out the Owner's Manual and leafing through it, however briefly, just to see that it covers everything. They're still fairly comprehensive. I really appreciate that.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    Any alarm that causes to take the correct action is good. However if it causes you to take the wrong action it is bad. If the engine lost all oil but you choose to fill the tires because that is the alarm you choose to pay attention to that is bad. Normally engines don't lose oil and so going to fill the low tire is the right call. (If the tire is very low stop now is the right answer)
- Litost 9mo ago
  I had the misfortunate of needing to hire a car in the UK last year. Ended up with an entry level 2025 Kia (Ceed Estate). Compared with the 2012 Audi A4 I'm used to driving it was a nightmare. Similar experience, lots of flashing and beeping which is just distracting whilst also being wrong often enough to be really annoying (this is a known problem with speed limits). Exceeding the speed limit, needing to change gear and by far the worst, active lane assist which pushes you back into your lane if you cross the white line without indicating (I only found this out afterwards as the hire place didn't mention it or leave a manual) and something which can happen frequently if you're driving down narrow country roads where indicating wouldn't have seemed appropriate and may just confuse others. I spoke to one of the mechanics at my local garage who said you can't permanently turn these features off as they turn back on when you start the car. I wonder if anyone has who's had an accident caused by being distracted by all these alarms has successfully sued?
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    > you can't permanently turn these features off You most likely can if you have the factory diagnostics tool or a good aftermarket reimplementation. These features are often mandated on a per-region basis, so the configuration bits are definitely there.
- maccard 9mo ago
  My car will beep every 15 minutes when the washer fluid is low. “Low” being some arbitrary value, and not even remotely close to empty. Last time it happened. I had just started on a long motorway drive on a clear day and it just pinged and pinged and pinged. The beep is actually louder and harsher than the emergency anti collision break alert. I’ve also never used as much windscreen wash in any other car as I have in this one
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Wait until you see an actual failure; you will get individual alerts for every dependent system as if the dependent system failed directly. A single communication glitch with the ABS for example will trigger 5+ alerts for ESP, lane keeping assist, and so on... and even things like the check engine light, despite the engine being totally fine and maybe just operating in a degraded mode.
michaelt 9mo ago
Excessive alarms aren't just a problem at sea. There have also been fatal aviation accidents where there's a problem with a common system (a dip in the power supply or hydraulic pressure, or a problem with a critical sensor) and dozens of systems sound alarms at the same time [1]. And for a technology example, a database server disappearing might raise a single alarm, but the applications that rely on that database might raise countless alarms as attempts to connect fail over and over again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight_447&oldid=1333184324#The_24_ACARS_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight...
- ApolloFortyNine 9mo ago
  This is the flight where one pilot tried to pull up to recover from the stall, and the warning for dual input (which Airbus just averages together) was snoozed by the system yelling about the other errors and was reduced to a light they didn't notice. The captain commented towards the end"no don't climb". The stall alarm was the one the system chose to display over all others and was mishandled (by the pilot who didn't know how to recover from a stall). Boeing there's physical feed back, when one control moves so does the other. This was not the first time pilots were having conflicting input without noticing. >https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf
  - kortilla 9mo ago
    IMO that’s the wrong take about that crash. The stall warning stopped once the attitude was above a certain amount, which was an insane decision on airbus’s part. You can see in the CVR that the stall indicator stopped many times despite them being in a stall the entire time. The pilot (like every other pilot) knew how to recover from a stall on paper. But he had the plane telling him his airspeed was good (frozen tube) and that bringing the pitch down was causing a stall.
    - ApolloFortyNine 9mo ago
      The stall voice alarm sounded 75 times, during this time the stick Shaker also was triggering (if both pilots had let go, or just the one who was ignoring the stall warning, the plane rights itself). It's in the last column in the transcript I linked. Imo the whole average input issue would have been it's own Boeing MCAS level issue if it happened a decade later, that's more of the root here imo, since one pilot making a mistake is hardly unheard of.
1e1a 9mo ago
Direct link to the report PDF: https://maritime.lr.org/AM-report-2026 https://maritime.lr.org/AM-report-2026
paulnpace 9mo ago
I didn't look at the PDF, but the sample size reported in the article is 11 ships(!), which makes me wonder how this might look across a larger population of ships. I wonder how much labor expense has to be saved to make up for a future catastrophic event?
- seb1204 9mo ago
  Internalize gains, externalizing cost of events or accidents.
- ryukoposting 9mo ago
  11 might be a larger share of ships worldwide than you'd expect. The complete list of US-flagged privately-owned merchant ships is less than 200: https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2025-06/DS_USFlag-Fleet_2025_JAN.pdf https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2025-...
  - yorwba 9mo ago
    US-flagged privately-owned merchant ships might be a smaller share of ships worldwide than you'd expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merchant_navy_capacity_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merchant_navy_capacity... Liberia rules the waves.
chriskanan 9mo ago
This has been a major problem in hospitals where there are many false alarms and often concurrent alarms for hospital beds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/
- throwaway173738 9mo ago
  We talked about alarms and alarm fatigue often when considering whether to show an alarm and at what priority when I was involved in a medical device.
bob1029 9mo ago
I learned about the consequences of overloading the human operator when working on the primary UI for a manufacturing business. A natural inclination is to put things like confirmation dialogs around dangerous activities. I had managers telling me that one confirmation wasn't enough and that we had to add additional because people were still missing. Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all. I strongly believe in ideas like "safety 3rd". It's not that I want the humans to be maimed by the machines. Quite the opposite. The difficulty is in understanding higher order consequences of "safety" and avoiding the immediate knee-jerk satisfaction that first order resolutions may provide.
- user_7832 9mo ago
  > Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all. I think there's evidence and studies on this. IIRC removing traffic lights forces people to be much more alert, reducing accidents. Fun fact: Bhutan is perhaps the only country in the world without traffic lights!
  - onetokeoverthe 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - funkyfiddler69 9mo ago
    > IIRC removing traffic lights forces people to be much more alert, reducing accidents. No way this would work long-term in Germany. Maybe there wouldn't be that many more accidents but traffic would stutter, all the time, everywhere. Some safety-first drivers still don't get how roundabouts work ...
    - 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
dinkblam 9mo ago
on around 300 days per year i see a "severe weather alarm" on the iPhone Weather app, although nothing at all is happening, completely ridiculous.
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  We've gone so over the top on weather fearcasting. Just look out the window if you want to know what the weather is. Save the "the world is ending" messages for truly life-threatening, property-damaging weather (and no, temperature alone doesn't qualify---it's easy to know it's cold or hot by just stepping outside).
  - phil21 9mo ago
    Timely. I’m about to turn off severe weather alerts from my local city because they insist on spamming - multiple times per day - cold weather alerts. And they start at pretty ridiculous temperatures in the double digits. The only way those would be dangerous to you is if you were homeless and lacked any form of winter clothing, at which point you either already know or are too far mentally gone for a text alert to help you.
The_President 9mo ago
Excessive alarms from machinery could result in the alarm being bypassed. This is an insidious issue as both the alarm condition and the jumper clips could go unnnoticed and result in an event.
general1465 9mo ago
That was one of the reasons why Three Mile Island melted down - Alarm overloading operators who were then distracted by mundane issues and did not noticed that nuclear core is melting down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
havaloc 9mo ago
If you want a real life simulation of this, just go into the lobby of a local McDonald's near the kitchen. It's a cacophony and the employees have tuned it out.
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  And those are all just timers.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  As an employee years ago - we learned to tune the alarms from a different station out - but someone handled each one in a few seconds. Because non were ingored they were all good - despite the vast quantity.
funkyfiddler69 9mo ago
> Improvements were delivered through traditional marine engineering interventions, including correcting valve installations, replacing faulty sensors and tuning existing systems. This sounds like engineers wanted to go traditional routes in the first place but the chain of command wanted to reduce production/constuction time and save money.
nik282000 9mo ago
I work at a plant with a site wide SCADA/HMI (Siemens WinCC) system, every alarm is displayed on every HMI regardless of its proximity to the machine or even its ability to address the issue. And any given minute a hundred or more alarms can be generated, the majority being nuisance messages like "air pressure almost low" or my favorite " " (no message set) but scattered among those is the occasional "no cooling water - explosion risk". This plant is operated and deigned to the spec of an international corp with more than 20 factories, it's not a mom-and-pop operation. No one seems to think the excessive, useless, alarms are an issue and that any damage caused by missed warnings is the fault of the operator. When approaching management and engineering about this the responses range from "it's not in the budget" to " you're maintenance, fix all the problems and the alarms will go away". The only way for this kind of issue to be resolved is with regulation and safety standards. An operator can't safely operate equipment when alarms are not filtered or sorted in some way. It's like forcing your IT guy to watch web server access logs live to spot vulnerabilities being exploited.
- varjag 9mo ago
  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.
  - nik282000 9mo ago
    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.
    - varjag 9mo ago
      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…
acheron 9mo ago
Follow the incentives. If I’m in charge of setting alarms, and something bad happens without an alarm going off, it’s my fault. If the alarm goes off and the operator ignores it, it’s their fault.
barrkel 9mo ago
The main purpose of alarms is to relieve automation of liability.
fallingfrog 9mo ago
Any equipment eventually fails. Designing it to fail safe- in a way that does not threaten the human operator- costs money. But a little warning message costs nothing and ensures that the human can be blamed when something goes wrong. The company can point to the message and say, "see, you should have known." The message was never intended to help the human operator. It was intended to allow the company to avoid responsibility for cutting corners. If the goal of the message was to communicate something important to the human operator, extraneous messages would be a serious problem. But if the goal is simply to cover the ass of the company, then extra error messages are not a problem at all. Thats why they never get fixed or pruned.
dlcarrier 9mo ago
It's a problem in every field. In aviation, notices about life-threatening conditions can be buried in pages about taxiways closing during certain hours and other nonsense.
__turbobrew__ 9mo ago
When I have over 10 alarms firing on systems I run I find that overwhelming, I cant imagine thousands. There is no way you can operate a system with that many alarms.
pwjtnlskshc 9mo ago
No need to solve the underlying problem, let's just send all the alerts to AI to deduplicate and prioritize them! /s
uejfiweun 9mo ago
This was my issue with platforms like Sentry. Turns out, in a decently used prod web app with a lot of dependencies, there's a lot of noise. After spending hours trying to debug some of these only to conclude that they were not debuggable, I ended up kind of letting the Sentry reports fade into the background, and eventually I turned it off entirely to reduce payload sizes.
AngryData 9mo ago
This is how oil pipeline owners get away with leaking millions of petroleum products all over our natural landscape. They legislated to be able to keep using their 60 year old pipeline leak detection methods, which are a false alarm hell, despite better methods existing and being cheaper to maintain. Hire a guy whos job is to stand around and press a button if things go wrong, give them 99 false signals out of 100, then fire anybody who presses the button too often. And pretty soon, nobody ever sounds the alarm when bad shit happens, because ignoring the problem and letting people die is more profitable.
tsoukase 9mo ago
The solution is called 'log levels' and you should be able to filter out anything you think appropriate.
lxgr 9mo ago
For the aviation equivalent, see also the excellent https://fixingnotams.org/ https://fixingnotams.org/

157 points by geox 9mo ago

When everything is important nothing can be important. I was particularly struck by the reduction of crew rest to service alarms. I'd sort of thought this was a problem for watch standers only but it makes sense that some alarms require a specialist or the crews are too thin. Heck, I bet the captain, engineer and first mate all have monitors in their staterooms.

Hizonner 9mo ago
Ah, but you see, the alarms from the device I am building are most important, because somebody might sue me if I can't shift responsibility onto the user.

abanana 9mo ago

Same sort of problem we have in modern cars? Speed, lane assistance, blind spot, etc, sometimes apparently beeping for the hell of it. For some it's distracting and frustrating, even increasing aggression and thereby increasing the risk. For others it breeds complacency, a "boy who cried wolf" scenario such that the alarms become meaningless. Either way, it doesn't work as intended. Interesting to know ships have followed the same pattern, apparently to a worse extent. I wonder how many more walks of life, and industries, are suffering in the same way.

nsavage 9mo ago
My Volkswagen has assistance features which routinely fail on snowy days and can’t seem to be disabled. The best you can do is disable them for a minute (!) at which point they start blaring again. Its ironic because the time you need the most focus is the time the car lets you focus the least.
- DoingIsLearning 9mo ago
  It can absolutely be disabled they just wouldn't get the same brownies points in EuroNCAP by allowing _you_ to disable it. If I spent more than 50k on a car like that, I would absolutely return it and file a complaint. Car companies care a great deal about after sales stats. This trend will continue because we as users on average tolerate it.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Get yourself a VCDS cable & software and disable that shit for good.
- t0mas88 9mo ago
  BMW has the same issue but luckily still buttons to disable them. Snow will quickly result in "Forward collision warning failure" and "Blind spot detection failure" and if more snow "Lane assist failure" because the sensors get covered in snow. Oh and before you even start driving let us "bing!" you with a message that the temperature is below 4C. As if you didn't know that already.
B1FIDO 9mo ago
I rented a car last July, and I specifically picked out a small one because I wouldn't need to carry any cargo or passengers around. As soon as I drove off the lot, 3 warning indicator lamps lit up, including "Tire Pressure" so I stopped at a service station, thought for a moment, then drove back to the rental lot. The other indicator had something to do with crash protection, and I think we worked out how to disable the system. After putting air into my tires, I was good to go. So I'm thankful that those lamps indicated some actual conditions. I always kind of make a point of taking out the Owner's Manual and leafing through it, however briefly, just to see that it covers everything. They're still fairly comprehensive. I really appreciate that.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  Any alarm that causes to take the correct action is good. However if it causes you to take the wrong action it is bad. If the engine lost all oil but you choose to fill the tires because that is the alarm you choose to pay attention to that is bad. Normally engines don't lose oil and so going to fill the low tire is the right call. (If the tire is very low stop now is the right answer)
Litost 9mo ago
I had the misfortunate of needing to hire a car in the UK last year. Ended up with an entry level 2025 Kia (Ceed Estate). Compared with the 2012 Audi A4 I'm used to driving it was a nightmare. Similar experience, lots of flashing and beeping which is just distracting whilst also being wrong often enough to be really annoying (this is a known problem with speed limits). Exceeding the speed limit, needing to change gear and by far the worst, active lane assist which pushes you back into your lane if you cross the white line without indicating (I only found this out afterwards as the hire place didn't mention it or leave a manual) and something which can happen frequently if you're driving down narrow country roads where indicating wouldn't have seemed appropriate and may just confuse others. I spoke to one of the mechanics at my local garage who said you can't permanently turn these features off as they turn back on when you start the car. I wonder if anyone has who's had an accident caused by being distracted by all these alarms has successfully sued?
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  > you can't permanently turn these features off You most likely can if you have the factory diagnostics tool or a good aftermarket reimplementation. These features are often mandated on a per-region basis, so the configuration bits are definitely there.
maccard 9mo ago
My car will beep every 15 minutes when the washer fluid is low. “Low” being some arbitrary value, and not even remotely close to empty. Last time it happened. I had just started on a long motorway drive on a clear day and it just pinged and pinged and pinged. The beep is actually louder and harsher than the emergency anti collision break alert. I’ve also never used as much windscreen wash in any other car as I have in this one
Nextgrid 9mo ago
Wait until you see an actual failure; you will get individual alerts for every dependent system as if the dependent system failed directly. A single communication glitch with the ABS for example will trigger 5+ alerts for ESP, lane keeping assist, and so on... and even things like the check engine light, despite the engine being totally fine and maybe just operating in a degraded mode.

michaelt 9mo ago

Excessive alarms aren't just a problem at sea. There have also been fatal aviation accidents where there's a problem with a common system (a dip in the power supply or hydraulic pressure, or a problem with a critical sensor) and dozens of systems sound alarms at the same time [1]. And for a technology example, a database server disappearing might raise a single alarm, but the applications that rely on that database might raise countless alarms as attempts to connect fail over and over again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight_447&oldid=1333184324#The_24_ACARS_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight...

ApolloFortyNine 9mo ago
This is the flight where one pilot tried to pull up to recover from the stall, and the warning for dual input (which Airbus just averages together) was snoozed by the system yelling about the other errors and was reduced to a light they didn't notice. The captain commented towards the end"no don't climb". The stall alarm was the one the system chose to display over all others and was mishandled (by the pilot who didn't know how to recover from a stall). Boeing there's physical feed back, when one control moves so does the other. This was not the first time pilots were having conflicting input without noticing. >https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf
- kortilla 9mo ago
  IMO that’s the wrong take about that crash. The stall warning stopped once the attitude was above a certain amount, which was an insane decision on airbus’s part. You can see in the CVR that the stall indicator stopped many times despite them being in a stall the entire time. The pilot (like every other pilot) knew how to recover from a stall on paper. But he had the plane telling him his airspeed was good (frozen tube) and that bringing the pitch down was causing a stall.
  - ApolloFortyNine 9mo ago
    The stall voice alarm sounded 75 times, during this time the stick Shaker also was triggering (if both pilots had let go, or just the one who was ignoring the stall warning, the plane rights itself). It's in the last column in the transcript I linked. Imo the whole average input issue would have been it's own Boeing MCAS level issue if it happened a decade later, that's more of the root here imo, since one pilot making a mistake is hardly unheard of.

1e1a 9mo ago

Direct link to the report PDF: https://maritime.lr.org/AM-report-2026 https://maritime.lr.org/AM-report-2026

paulnpace 9mo ago

I didn't look at the PDF, but the sample size reported in the article is 11 ships(!), which makes me wonder how this might look across a larger population of ships. I wonder how much labor expense has to be saved to make up for a future catastrophic event?

seb1204 9mo ago
Internalize gains, externalizing cost of events or accidents.
ryukoposting 9mo ago
11 might be a larger share of ships worldwide than you'd expect. The complete list of US-flagged privately-owned merchant ships is less than 200: https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2025-06/DS_USFlag-Fleet_2025_JAN.pdf https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2025-...
- yorwba 9mo ago
  US-flagged privately-owned merchant ships might be a smaller share of ships worldwide than you'd expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merchant_navy_capacity_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merchant_navy_capacity... Liberia rules the waves.

chriskanan 9mo ago

This has been a major problem in hospitals where there are many false alarms and often concurrent alarms for hospital beds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/

throwaway173738 9mo ago
We talked about alarms and alarm fatigue often when considering whether to show an alarm and at what priority when I was involved in a medical device.

bob1029 9mo ago

I learned about the consequences of overloading the human operator when working on the primary UI for a manufacturing business. A natural inclination is to put things like confirmation dialogs around dangerous activities. I had managers telling me that one confirmation wasn't enough and that we had to add additional because people were still missing. Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all. I strongly believe in ideas like "safety 3rd". It's not that I want the humans to be maimed by the machines. Quite the opposite. The difficulty is in understanding higher order consequences of "safety" and avoiding the immediate knee-jerk satisfaction that first order resolutions may provide.

user_7832 9mo ago
> Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all. I think there's evidence and studies on this. IIRC removing traffic lights forces people to be much more alert, reducing accidents. Fun fact: Bhutan is perhaps the only country in the world without traffic lights!
- onetokeoverthe 9mo ago
  [dead]
- funkyfiddler69 9mo ago
  > IIRC removing traffic lights forces people to be much more alert, reducing accidents. No way this would work long-term in Germany. Maybe there wouldn't be that many more accidents but traffic would stutter, all the time, everywhere. Some safety-first drivers still don't get how roundabouts work ...
  - 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

dinkblam 9mo ago

on around 300 days per year i see a "severe weather alarm" on the iPhone Weather app, although nothing at all is happening, completely ridiculous.

SoftTalker 9mo ago
We've gone so over the top on weather fearcasting. Just look out the window if you want to know what the weather is. Save the "the world is ending" messages for truly life-threatening, property-damaging weather (and no, temperature alone doesn't qualify---it's easy to know it's cold or hot by just stepping outside).
- phil21 9mo ago
  Timely. I’m about to turn off severe weather alerts from my local city because they insist on spamming - multiple times per day - cold weather alerts. And they start at pretty ridiculous temperatures in the double digits. The only way those would be dangerous to you is if you were homeless and lacked any form of winter clothing, at which point you either already know or are too far mentally gone for a text alert to help you.

The_President 9mo ago

Excessive alarms from machinery could result in the alarm being bypassed. This is an insidious issue as both the alarm condition and the jumper clips could go unnnoticed and result in an event.

general1465 9mo ago

That was one of the reasons why Three Mile Island melted down - Alarm overloading operators who were then distracted by mundane issues and did not noticed that nuclear core is melting down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

havaloc 9mo ago

If you want a real life simulation of this, just go into the lobby of a local McDonald's near the kitchen. It's a cacophony and the employees have tuned it out.

SoftTalker 9mo ago
And those are all just timers.
bluGill 9mo ago
As an employee years ago - we learned to tune the alarms from a different station out - but someone handled each one in a few seconds. Because non were ingored they were all good - despite the vast quantity.

funkyfiddler69 9mo ago

> Improvements were delivered through traditional marine engineering interventions, including correcting valve installations, replacing faulty sensors and tuning existing systems. This sounds like engineers wanted to go traditional routes in the first place but the chain of command wanted to reduce production/constuction time and save money.

nik282000 9mo ago

I work at a plant with a site wide SCADA/HMI (Siemens WinCC) system, every alarm is displayed on every HMI regardless of its proximity to the machine or even its ability to address the issue. And any given minute a hundred or more alarms can be generated, the majority being nuisance messages like "air pressure almost low" or my favorite " " (no message set) but scattered among those is the occasional "no cooling water - explosion risk". This plant is operated and deigned to the spec of an international corp with more than 20 factories, it's not a mom-and-pop operation. No one seems to think the excessive, useless, alarms are an issue and that any damage caused by missed warnings is the fault of the operator. When approaching management and engineering about this the responses range from "it's not in the budget" to " you're maintenance, fix all the problems and the alarms will go away". The only way for this kind of issue to be resolved is with regulation and safety standards. An operator can't safely operate equipment when alarms are not filtered or sorted in some way. It's like forcing your IT guy to watch web server access logs live to spot vulnerabilities being exploited.

varjag 9mo ago
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.
- nik282000 9mo ago
  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.
  - varjag 9mo ago
    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…

acheron 9mo ago

Follow the incentives. If I’m in charge of setting alarms, and something bad happens without an alarm going off, it’s my fault. If the alarm goes off and the operator ignores it, it’s their fault.

barrkel 9mo ago

The main purpose of alarms is to relieve automation of liability.

fallingfrog 9mo ago

Any equipment eventually fails. Designing it to fail safe- in a way that does not threaten the human operator- costs money. But a little warning message costs nothing and ensures that the human can be blamed when something goes wrong. The company can point to the message and say, "see, you should have known." The message was never intended to help the human operator. It was intended to allow the company to avoid responsibility for cutting corners. If the goal of the message was to communicate something important to the human operator, extraneous messages would be a serious problem. But if the goal is simply to cover the ass of the company, then extra error messages are not a problem at all. Thats why they never get fixed or pruned.

dlcarrier 9mo ago

It's a problem in every field. In aviation, notices about life-threatening conditions can be buried in pages about taxiways closing during certain hours and other nonsense.

__turbobrew__ 9mo ago

When I have over 10 alarms firing on systems I run I find that overwhelming, I cant imagine thousands. There is no way you can operate a system with that many alarms.

pwjtnlskshc 9mo ago

No need to solve the underlying problem, let's just send all the alerts to AI to deduplicate and prioritize them! /s

uejfiweun 9mo ago

This was my issue with platforms like Sentry. Turns out, in a decently used prod web app with a lot of dependencies, there's a lot of noise. After spending hours trying to debug some of these only to conclude that they were not debuggable, I ended up kind of letting the Sentry reports fade into the background, and eventually I turned it off entirely to reduce payload sizes.

AngryData 9mo ago

This is how oil pipeline owners get away with leaking millions of petroleum products all over our natural landscape. They legislated to be able to keep using their 60 year old pipeline leak detection methods, which are a false alarm hell, despite better methods existing and being cheaper to maintain. Hire a guy whos job is to stand around and press a button if things go wrong, give them 99 false signals out of 100, then fire anybody who presses the button too often. And pretty soon, nobody ever sounds the alarm when bad shit happens, because ignoring the problem and letting people die is more profitable.

tsoukase 9mo ago

The solution is called 'log levels' and you should be able to filter out anything you think appropriate.

lxgr 9mo ago

For the aviation equivalent, see also the excellent https://fixingnotams.org/ https://fixingnotams.org/