Thankfully, it’s just the mobile providers and central directories of big companies (like railway operators, hospitals) here, very few others get the number of bot-serviceable phone calls to justify that. And they only recently started to ditch keypad-navigable systems and require you to speak, probably due to the state of Czech TTS (our language is phonetic so it’s technically easier than English but with just 10M speakers, only recently did Big Tech really invest in Czech TTS, driving up the reliability/price ratio).

But American businesses at least take care that their website is up-to-date and not a 502: Bad Gateway page, right? So you barely need to make calls, right?

And get you arrested, screaming “I wasn’t trying to steal cash from the self-checkout machine, just rip its speaker wires!”

I don’t want them in my case,
I don’t want them on my mouse.

(Reference to Ted Cruz’s awful poetry)

The new “AI” of one of Czech providers is super annoying.

“Thank you for calling. To make sure it’s you, use your keypad to enter your numerical password.”

[6 DTMF beeps]

“You entered 123456 [they say it way too quickly but OK, I have a feature phone so no butter finger errors]. Is that correct?”

(At this point, you cannot proceed until you say “Yes”. Typing the number again (or anything else) will not help, you’d just hear “We couldn’t hear that. Can you try again? To make sure it’s you, use your keypad to enter your numerical password.”)

“Yes”

“Thank you for verification. Please tell us what your problem is-”

“Human”

“We couldn’t hear that. Can you try again?”

“Human”

“Are you sure you want to talk with our operator? The average wait time is 5 minutes.”

“Yes”

(2 minutes of awful music and nagging to press 1 to reconnect to the bot)

“I have a question about your ToS since your website is down. Also, I don’t ever want to speak to the bot again, can you bring the USSD text service or voice keypad menu back?”

It’s not regulaar at all. It features a lot of different things and AI. Also, the fugly scaling dialog remains but the scaling is no longer nearest-neighbor.

The Czech radar company?

https://aerospace.czechoslovakgroup.com/en/news/eldis-pardubice-has-signed-a-contract-for-the-delivery-of-radars-to-albania

The ends of fluorescent tubes with traditional EM ballasts flicker at 50/60 Hz because the filaments take turns being the cathode and anode based on the current polarity of AC, which is perceptible in peripheral vision. And some long tubes have waves on their arcs, causing travelling ripples of bright spots. But without a more advanced ballast, there’s just the phosphor smoothing the 100/120 Hz ripple, which is not very effective (and usually, yellow phosphor lasts longer than blue, resulting in color banding in video) but that’s not normally perceptible.

I never thought alcohol would make the brain work faster though, thanks for sharing!

Glare? That’s not a physical property of LED light but an effect of overly bright headlights enabled by LED and laser technology.

Except my eyes do a kind of color aberration where I see different wavelengths in slightly different spots when squinting, and the peak of blue that most white LEDs’ spectra have makes for a clearly visible fringe. I wouldn’t really call that “glare” though.

I oscillate between chaotic good and chaotic evil. Like the shower. You just witnessed a chaotic evil idea.

Poorly made LEDs actually flicker at 120Hz on 60Hz mains, see my other comment. And it’s more like a pet peeve, only below 60 Hz is actually headache-inducing. Unless it’s specific circumstances (I couldn’t stand a cheap 120Hz PWM RGB strip close to a gaming monitor because I’d see annoying “rainbows” as my eyes dash across the screen). More details in my other comments.

Yup. Except they flicker at double the mains frequency because they use both the positive and negative half-cycle thanks to a FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER.

And see my other comment: it’s not unhealthy, just annoying. To be honest, I use trash-picked LED bulbs and repair them, and I don’t normally care to replace a poor smoothing capacitor. In rooms I spend much of my time, I make sure most bulbs in the fixture are low-flicker (it’s arbitrary but generally don’t get below 75%) for comfort. I’m not peculiar about light quality like CRI and matching color temperature unless it’s very obviously bad, although I do notice the circadian effects of cold white light. I do mark badly flickering bulbs though so I know not to put too many of them together unless it’s somewhere non-consequential like a cellar. I also hold my phone camera to any neutral-white E27s I salvage to find and mark true flicker-free ones because I use them while filming.

I would get headaches from watching PAL (50Hz) CRT TVs for a long time. 60Hz monitors were noticeably better, and 75 or more was good to endure all day. Modern screens don’t go blank between refreshes (except PWM-based AMOLED) so the refresh rate is mostly irrelevant unless you want to shave off a few milliseconds of latency for serious gaming (then it’s best to match the refresh, render FPS and video signal).

But as I’m walking down the street and move my eyes, I notice cheap lighting whose drivers don’t smooth the 100Hz ripple of rectified AC. Especially if they reach 0% brightness during the ripple. This applies to:

• sodium and mercury vapor lights in street lamps
• single-board (aka mains-voltage) LED modules in cheap, powerful reflectors
• any LED bulb or fixture with a constant-current driver whose mains smoothing capacitor is too small or has failed due to heat (however, some such as EMOS and Solight spherical 18W ones refuse to turn on if the capacitor gets too bad, making for an easy repair)
• any dimmable light powered from DC (like 12V and 24V non-addressable LED strips with those cheap flat remotes, or multi-mode flashlights) whose manufacturer was too cheap for a constant-current driver (fair enough) but could have very easily set a higher PWM frequency YET DIDN’T and therefore deserve a PWM shower.
  • This is especially annoying with RGB ones because the hue changes during the cycle, creating off-color fringes or even “rainbows” when moving my eyes. I can’t believe some people use things like that in/on/around their battlestation: this would totally distract me as my eyes dashed around the monitor while gaming.
• multiplexed displays, especially with low duty cycles (look up charlieplexing, chances are your powerbank or similar gadget uses that to minimize the pin count of its chip) - these are usually over 100 Hz though

So yeah, it’s not unhealthy, especially above 60 Hz. But it’s annoying for me to look around badly smoothed Christmas lights. And if they are of different phases (this is uncommon for Christmas lights (and even impossible in most American homes because they have 180° aka split-phase 240 V, not 120° 400 V) but always the case with multiplexed displays), I say a long rolling R to vibrate my face and see them wiggle.

A temperature knob could be added to control the pulse width. Get this shower to everyone who designed LED lighting with PWM frequency below 100 Hz.

Probably varies wildly by body part

This but with an acid and a base

There’s a lot of cultural differences between Karkonosze and the Baltic… North Pole or South Pole?

I originally thought it was a kind of Sphinx riddle

Yup. There’s only so much a pacemaker can do.

*still sells
plus, it’s a plushie so it’s lovely and huggable – my guess is that such warm contact can feel gender-affirming (I’m not trans but I do have a Blåhaj)

Could use some improvement. For example, you generally have to do the steps in reverse order. Except mechanical locks, for which it’s 4-3-1-2.