A friend of mine works AV at shows that have rotating DJs and one of the things she has on her mixer board is "The Suck Button."
It causes a mic at the other end of the room to get cut into the DJ's live feed monitor with a semitone shift down and some reverb. This causes all sorts of inner-ear chaos and usually clears a DJ off the stage when they're over time within a few minutes at most -- usually under 30 seconds. One time they were trying to figure out why it wasn't working and discovered that the DJ had muted their monitor feed, which explained why they were not only peaking the meters but over time: They hadn't heard the FOUR warnings from the back of house that it was time to wrap up.
There was a coffee shop ages ago in SF that would every few hours play a cacophony (e.g. multiple songs at once). I assume it was to drive away people camping on their laptops to rotate tables. Understand but super annoying to people like me who had a timer to but food or drink no less than hourly to be a good citizen
When this was first presented, I was watching this in a large dark hall with this on the projector and the sound level set to extremely loud. Like a fool, I sat through this to the end wondering whether it was going to ever end rather than recognising it as a glorious troll.
That's extremely annoying. I have a Bluetooth speaker that I was intending to repurpose into a device to combat inconsiderate smart phone usage. I connected it to my laptop and started playing multiple streams of Punjabi MC - Beware of the Boys. It was torturous.
My other idea was to get the line from dumb and dumber "Do you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world..." And just loop the sound continuously.
I might just try this project though and see how it goes.
We had a friend who would play Metal when the ice cream store he worked at was closed but the customers were lingering too long. It generally worked, as he was immune.
I introduced my local restaurant owner to Mongolian Techno and the late night bar flies and some of the kitchen staff have never forgiven me. He won't admit if he plays it for himself, or because of them :)
It's 3am and we're arguing some insipid minutae over technically illegal tequila shots while one drunk girl is breaking it down on the tiny dance floor :)
In Japan it's pretty much an institution that shops play an instrumental version of Hotaru no Hikari (which is basically Auld Lang Syne with different lyrics) when they're closing.
We did this where I bartended as well. Generally 15-20 minutes after serving the last drink of the night.
The goal wasn’t to offend or clear out 100% of the customers - just make a large enough portion decide that outside might be more comfortable/conducive than inside. The 20 or so customers who were fine with the cacophony were easy enough to wrangle manually, and also generally either people we knew well .
I was at a coffee shop once that was playing metal while my writing group was meeting there and I just thought they had excellent taste (it was not near closing time)
That reminds me of the "speech jammer", which won an Ignobel Prize last decade. It's an acoustic gun that combines a directional microphone and speaker array with a delay, tripping up the speaker.
Better Plex than plex for music built by people who know what they're doing that uses a common API among different servers and clients, including ones that glue to Sonos, etc.
I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.
Hang around old Microsofties and you'll encounter a phrase: "The Deal." The Deal is this informal agreement: Microsoft doesn't pay amazingly but you're given the time to have work-life balance, you can be relatively assured that upper leadership gives a shit about the ICs, there's space for "... So I was thinking..." to become real "... and that's our next product" discussions and that it's okay to fall so long as you can get back up and keep walking afterwards.
The Deal is dead.
People fired for performance after a bad review their manager didn't give them. The constant slimming of orgs and the relentless gnawing at budgets. I watched as a team went from reasonable to gutted because it got the short straw in "unregretted attrition quotas"
AI is driving this, and I want to see the chat logs between executives and copilot. What sycophantic shit is it producing that is driving them to make horrible decisions?
The Deal died when Microsoft got on the layoff bandwagon in Q1 2023 for no good reason and became very aggressive with perf after that. If Microsoft is just as toxic and unstable as Meta, why not just work at Meta for double the money?
Funnily, Apple also has an unspoken "deal" (pay a bit low but treat really well) and they stuck to it even through the layoff era.
AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.
From the outside this is clearly visible how Project Reunion crashed, C++/WinRT went into maintenance, VC++ losing steam to ISO compliance after bosting about C++20 and C11/17, .NET focus on Aspire/Blazor all AI in detriment of the rest,....
Thankfully I am technology mercenary, polyglot, and use whatever the clients need, regardless of my point of view, but it is sad to see the human part behind those decisions being affected.
I've seen four startups make bank on precicely that.