Blank screen if kids yell too much

http://superuser.com/questions/545329/my-kids-yell-too-much

by ivoflipse • 13 years ago

225 176 13 years ago

Tichy4• 13 years ago

Great answer: "You have done this so many times manually that you feel you need to automate it... Doesn't that suggest to you that this method isn't working? "

Evbn6• 13 years ago

Yeah, I feed my kids every day and they still want more. Feeding must be wrong.

ck2• 13 years ago

How about a feedback headset where the local loop from the microphone has such high volume that a whisper is rather loud.

Of course that won't work if the game doesn't need a headset but you could disable external speakers and make it only work via the headset.

skreech• 13 years ago

It seems wrong to teach your children that the machine is a person.

Why not tell them "I put a script in the machine that will shut down the screen if you yell too loud"?

Same result, more truthful method.

chakalakasp• 13 years ago

Son, I hate to tell you this, but I invented the Internet to keep you preoccupied as a child. It took me a good half year of coding in my off time, but I finally got it right and, well, your posts and this response are the only human-input things you've read on this screen since you were 7.

Love, Pa

neya• 13 years ago

Brilliant reply, sir!

damian2000• 13 years ago

I don't think its wrong, its just stretching the truth. Kids know its a machine, but believe that its sensitive to noise.

rytis• 13 years ago

I agree. Furthermore, if you think about it, why are we sensitive to noise? In simple terms, because we have sensors, processing "circuit" and some sort of analogy of "code" that has this primitive logic - "high sound pressure -> pain".

Now looking back at a machine - it has microphone, and sound card. So the input mechanism is in place, the only missing bit is the logic that determines machine's reaction to stimuli.

Without the scrip, the machine cannot be "upset by the noise", but with the script it actually can be, IMHO. So there is some grain of truth in what the guy is saying to his kids...

ajuc2• 13 years ago

> It seems wrong to teach your children that the machine is a person.

In 2100 your comment will be evidence of wild anti-AI sentiments popular in our backward times.

onlyup• 13 years ago

No it won't.

reinhardt3• 13 years ago

Check your meatspace privilege, human.

angersock3• 13 years ago

ahahahahhahaha yeah okay

when duke nukem forever is ported to common lisp running on the hurd

suuuuure

Edit: More seriously, trends in AI seems to be running towards statistical analysis and away from anything that might resemble actual "sentience"--even were we to define such a thing. I doubt that an overgrown Bayes engine would take offense at anything I do.

cnvogel• 13 years ago

The idea of changing behaviour, conditioning living creatures, to obey rules enforced my machines feels very disturbing to me. Even though I understand that in this case it is for sure a pretty harmless feedback mechanism (stopping the computer game), I don't like the idea at all.

Furthermore, on the technical side, it's not too easy to calculate some number corresponding to the perceived loudness level, especially not as some answers suggested to parse the RMS-signal number output by the command-line tools "aplay"/"arecord". You'd need at least to take the (non-linear in amplitude, dependent on frequency) weighting curves shown on the wikipedia-page for "Loudness" into account:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness

Then, you'd have to take into account how annoying a sound is, which is obviously highly dependant on the circumstances: A colleague might drive you mad with only very quiet squeeking of his chair, but a lound regularly humming machine you might be able to completely mask out mentally so that you don't even remember if it was turned on or off at some day.

Putting these technical things back to the (morally questionable) problem at hand: If you don't "punish", "educate" or "feedback" your children according to a quantity that they can actually perceive and whose magnitude they can judge, they will experience this apparatus to be highly unfair.

And, additionally, if I would put such a machinery to use, my children would with absolute certainty become masters in creating the most appallingly unpleasant and annoying sounds one can imagine that just don't reach the threshold of the machine. And they would be completely right doing so ;-).

Edit: Typos, "tools aplay/arecord".

dsr_• 13 years ago

   The idea of changing behaviour, conditioning living creatures, to obey rules enforced my machines feels very disturbing to me.

Do automated traffic lights bother you?

ctbeiser• 13 years ago

"The idea of changing behaviour, conditioning living creatures, to obey rules enforced my machines feels very disturbing to me."

I've made use of this technique on myself; I've got a concentration app that, when turned on, will make an abhorrent piercing noise if I go on Facebook/Twitter/Hackernews/ read RSS feeds / etc. It's helped me train myself to focus when I'm working.

I will grant that using this on someone else without their knowledge is more questionable, but I wanted to say that it's sometimes legitimate.

skriticos2• 13 years ago

Children are told that a fat man climbs down the chimney on Christmas to deposit presents under a tree and other stories that are total lies. It's probably better that they get a chance this way to figure out not to believe everything without question.

Jach• 13 years ago

I second the idea that it's good for kids to be able to learn things on their own and not have all the answers immediately given to them. However if I had a kid I'd try my hardest not to intentionally lie--if they pick up the Santa lie or other lies from other kids, I'll neither confirm nor deny them and let them figure it out. (I might give hints toward avenues of testing a belief, though... but especially the importance of making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences...)

kawera• 13 years ago

An interesting book by Donald Norman on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Signals-Facial-Expressions-Automo...

CodeMage6• 13 years ago

Because the "truthful" method doesn't get the desired results.

I'm a father (and I also remember something about being a kid) and I can tell you that 4 year old kids are unbelievably egocentric. A lot of the rules adults try to impose that are perfectly reasonable to anyone with enough empathy seem completely arbitrary to a 4 year old. So, "don't yell because that distracts/bothers me" is an "arbitrary" rule coming from a "cranky" dad. "I put a script in the machine that will shut down the screen if you yell too loud" gets translated into "I don't want you to yell", which is, again, an "arbitrary" rule kids don't care about.

On the other hand, "computer doesn't like loud sounds" is a perfectly "reasonable" rule, because the computer is "in charge" of letting you play the game. You disturb the computer, the computer reacts. And you can't argue with it or try to manipulate it. Crying at it or throwing a temper tantrum won't do any good. It has no mouth, so you can't have a conversation with it. In short, you have to follow its rules.

If you want to avoid having the kids jump to the "logical" conclusion that the machine is a person, you can formulate it differently: instead of saying "the computer doesn't like loud sounds", you can say "the computer is a machine that doesn't work well when there's a lot of yelling".

Then again, someone else already pointed out that kids believe that an old, fat man can come down their chimney and leave gifts in a matter of minutes -- and do so for every kid in the freaking world -- without suffering any psychological scars from an "untruthful" method of influencing their behavior (because Santa brings gifts only to kids who are "good"), so I don't see what the big deal is with going through a short period of believing the machine is a person.

maeon35• 13 years ago

When I discover anyone has deceived me successfully, my shields are up around them, forever, because a deceiver is always a deceiver, I always have to spend more cpu cycles to wonder: "Are they deceiving me now"? This could be an elaborate lesson for the kid to teach them about deception. But it looks to me like this is a dysfunctional family in the making. When you break the bond of trust, it takes YEARS to get it back, and for me, it's like 5 years. Father is playing with fire here, and I'd kick that guy in the shins and post an image to reddit for all to laugh, why? Because it's FUNNY!

andrewflnr• 13 years ago

Actually, if you just say "it doesn't work well when there's a lot of yelling", that's basically a true statement, even if the only reason is the script you added. ;) But it doesn't work to just say "I put this script there because I, not the computer, am in charge of letting you play the game"?

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Fast forward to 2030...

  ...
  for (int month = 1, month <=12, month++)
  {  
    printf ("You never call. I'm your Dad you know. :-( ");
  }

kmfrk4• 13 years ago

I'm afraid I can't let you eat that icecream, Dave.

blazingfrog23• 13 years ago

This is appalling. Without knowing the OP's life circumstances or much about the dynamic of human relationships for that matter, jumping to this kind of conclusions only make for a witty post, at best.

Raising kids who will want to "call their Dad" once grown up is hardly about letting them make as much noise as they wish at age 4.

I sometime envy how some people view life as a simple If-Then-This-That... Much easier to sleep at night that way.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Well, that's how I feel about automating the parenting of 4 and 5 year olds. I'm not saying he should let them make as much noise as they wish - although he probably should, some of the time, I'm a quiet-loving person myself. I am saying that he's better off telling them in person. If he's tired of doing so and automates that task away they're learning something from the experience, but not necessarily what he intends.

simplexion2• 13 years ago

Wow... why did this guy think it was a good idea to have children if he didn't want children? "Hi, I need a script to kill fun. I hate when children are having fun."

dasil0032• 13 years ago

To be fair, no one has the first clue what they're getting into when they have kids.

corin_• 13 years ago

And to be more fair, it's a bit of a stretch to imply that "wanting his kids to yell at the computer less" means "doesn't want those kids".

alan_cx5• 13 years ago

And its only once you do have them that you realise how much you didn't want them...

neumann_alfred17• 13 years ago

On what planet do kids not make a lot of noise?

Confusion• 13 years ago

You don't know whether they are having fun: they may as well be fighting a lot. But let's assume they are having fun: people can have fun without making a lot of noise.

In fact, the question is why people make a lot of noise in the first place. It doesn't seem like a very good evolutionary strategy, which suggests it is in fact learned behavior with a cultural source. In which case it may not be a bad idea to try and unlearn your children this behavior.

Evbn6• 13 years ago

It is advantageous for kids to make their location known to adults who protect them from danger. Why adults make noise,I don't know. Usually juvenile, drunk adults are noisier.

kyro2• 13 years ago

I feel the same way about parents who want their kids to stop smearing spaghetti sauce on the walls. It totally ruins the creative process. Might as well kill your kid at that point.

muoncf• 13 years ago

I'm calling Poe's law on this one.

reinhardt3• 13 years ago

Spoken as a childless preacher.

blazingfrog23• 13 years ago

Spot on. Once you have kids, your self ceases to exist and 100% of your brain power (and patience for that matter) are redirected to the task of rearing those children.

After all, it's not like parents have a life to live, a work/personal life balance to strike or any shot at personal happiness anyway.

Words of wisdom, dear sir. I can totally tell you have no idea what you're talking about.

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Now if only this worked with other peoples' kids on Xbox Live...

pi18n2• 13 years ago

I have a solution for that. The more a person says "faggot" the more images of men kissing they see in the game. A homophobic 13-year-old would be totally horrified by this whereas a reasonable adult that (somehow) didn't use the word as an insult wouldn't care.

abcd_f• 13 years ago

> A homophobic 13-year-old

Do you seriously think 13-year-olds are homophobic? They just repeat what their peers say like parrots. It doesn't really matter to them what it means as long as it sounds offensive and they can pronounce it.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

Can anyone explain how the OP's solution works, in particular the chvt 3/7? I looked up chvt and it seems like it would switch a different terminal into the foreground, but this raises more questions than it answers.

Like how does he know what 3 and 7 have on them? And would this work on a windowing system? And why does it appear as if the screen has turned off?

rosser• 13 years ago

X typically runs on vt 7. Switching away to any other vt would probably show a login prompt, unless he had something else running on vt 3 that presented only a blank screen.

younata• 13 years ago

On linux, it defaults to virtual terminals 1-6 (for the keys 1-6) behave like command lines, and X11 will occupy virtual terminal 7.

Basically, he's switching between a near-blank screen, and the graphical environment.

chli• 13 years ago

terminal 7 is were X resides...

So basically it's :

switch to text terminal wait 15 seconds switch to X Window

mappu• 13 years ago

Are you running linux currently? You have a number of virtual terminals, commonly Ctrl+Alt+F1 through Ctrl+Alt+F7, with 1-6 running text consoles and 7 with your X11 session on it.

If you boot into the GUI and spend all your time there, then although 1 will probably contain remnants of the boot process, 2-6 will be unused, a blank screen with some text in the corner.

dzb• 13 years ago

I would be careful with the solution of turning off the screen. My young cousins would go straight for the reboot in such a situation.

Fargren• 13 years ago

Even if the game continued to make sounds? That should give him at least a moment's pause.

alan_cx5• 13 years ago

Um......

Get a stick. Stand over child. If child makes noise, hit child with stick. Repeat until child quiet, becomes adult, or gets stick. If child gets stick, leave home.

And that is the "British" way. :)

alexjeffrey• 13 years ago

was the British way

alan_cx5• 13 years ago

Ah, the good olde days!!

bnegreve2• 13 years ago

I saw this yesterday and run this script all night:

and got this: http://i.imgur.com/oD6ZKIg.png?1

Interesting things: When my neighbor walks in his apartment above mine, it creates a amp peak with low frequency.

I have no idea what are those approx. one hour long periodic variations in the frequency, maybe my computer's fan or me snoring.

Anyway, pretty useless...

elteto2• 13 years ago

I look at that command line and feel amazed at what you can do with a command prompt. These are the two things that strike me as incredible:

* You didn't write a single line of code (well technically you did write one), nor researched about sound APIs or any kind of sound analysis algorithms or theory.

* You used several tools that just seamlessly shared their inputs and outputs and each one worked as supposed.

Granted, you need to know some bash and figure out how every utility works and the right command line switches to use, but still, pretty impressive.

dllthomas4• 13 years ago

This is the advantage of living at the command prompt. If you're mostly working through GUI (or CUI) interfaces that hide those details it can be somewhat convenient in the short run but you trap yourself: the effort needed when you want to do something complex that requires that knowledge is now suddenly much greater, because first you need to learn how to talk to each of the components of that pipeline before fitting them all together. I'll still need to check a man-page or two for less familiar functionality or a less familiar utility, but that's much better than checking five (the number of commands in the above pipeline that are passed at least one switch) and that's assuming you know which commands you'll want to be using in the first place.

DenisM• 13 years ago

That looks rathe cool! Do you know by chance what it takes to get something like this running on a Mac?

dllthomas4• 13 years ago

sox and arecord, or equivalents, it looks like...

phaemon• 13 years ago

Nice line, but you don't actually need all those separate greps and cats. You can do:

while true; do sox -t .wav "|arecord -d 1" -n stat 2> /tmp/tmp; echo -n $( date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S ); grep -e "Maximum amplitude" -e "Midline amplitude" -e "Rough *frequency" /tmp/tmp | cut -d ":" -f 2 | tr -d "\n"; echo; done

Shortening a line like this reminds me of a discussion on a forum about picking a random movie to play. It started off with loops and scripts of all kinds, and eventually ended with "shuf" :)

DanBC• 13 years ago

The children are four and five.

Who is monitoring them while they are playing video games?

It's reasonably easy to calm children down when you need to, you just need to learn some techniques. These techniques would probably require someone to be in the room for them to work, but once you've succeeded in calming down the over-boisterous behaviour they'd be okay.

And, of course, children enjoy being boisterous, so I hope they get opportunities to let off steam in a more appropriate setting. Soft play rooms[1] are good, as are parks and gardens and some games in the home.

The adult could investigate various parenting courses. "Webster Stratton" is an example of a respected course.

[1] In the UK you might have a Sure Start centre near you with a soft play room for hire. These are lovely because you will be in the room with your child alone, and you can really enjoy the experience. There are also commercial providers such as Play Barn which will be full of screaming, crying, poorly supervised children and stressed harried parents. This is, for some people, a hellish experience.

glass-• 13 years ago

Children make too much noise. Children don't get to use the computer for a week.

Eventually children will learn and stop making too much noise. This is a parenting problem, not a technical one.

maeon35• 13 years ago

When you use this manipulation to get your way to your kids, the kid watches you, and you find yourself the lab rat of a psychological manipulator far more capable then yourself. And the kid uses tricks you never heard of to shape your behaviour. Which causes a feedback loop of who can trick the other into doing what they want better.

Then you end up with a dysfunctional family. Funny joke, but there are serious child education problems in this joke. It's like laughing at a baby seal getting kicked around by teenagers. It's hilarious to people who are emotionally present-oriented. yolo, if it feels good, then it's good.

pretoriusB5• 13 years ago

>When you use this manipulation to get your way to your kids, the kid watches you, and you find yourself the lab rat of a psychological manipulator far more capable then yourself. And the kid uses tricks you never heard of to shape your behaviour. Which causes a feedback loop of who can trick the other into doing what they want better.

It's not a manipulation or a trick.

It's a "reward system". You get X only if you do Y. Period.

It has worked wonders for ages. Still does in most parts of the world. The US has a messed up system that ends with annoying, over-self-indulged, entitled children and adults.

gregpilling• 13 years ago

I have noisy kids. Three of them. They make lots of noise when playing games, when watching TV, and right now are making lots and lots of noise (at 7.33am on a Saturday morning) by playing in a cardboard box that holds a bathtub (we are remodeling a bathroom, it goes in Monday).

Kids are noisy. I have dealt with it by installing a solid door at the end of the hallway. No scripting required. Occasionally I tell them to quiet down if they get out of hand. Kids are noisy, that is just part of the experience.

shortlived2• 13 years ago

Greg speaks the truth. Let kids be kids. Stop acting like an old lady.

gruseom• 13 years ago

Many "old ladies" are experts in letting kids be kids. They're the ones with the most experience, after all.

CodeMage6• 13 years ago

I have dealt with it by installing a solid door at the end of the hallway.

Read the comments on SuperUser. He's a single dad. Being unable to hear what your 4 year old kids are up to is a bad idea when there's no one else to monitor them.

angersock3• 13 years ago

My parents suggested that it was when we had gone quiet that they started to worry. My recollections of childhood seem to confirm this heuristic.

kmfrk4• 13 years ago

A lot of people clearly haven't played a 4-player game on their Nintendo 64. :)

pretoriusB5• 13 years ago

Beat them when they yell?

gyardley2• 13 years ago

Good lord, just discipline your children.

Set clear rules, make sure they understand those rules, and follow through with enforcing those rules.

CodeMage6• 13 years ago

You left out the most important step: make sure kids understand the reason for those rules (other than "because I say so"). Speaking from my experience with my parents, yours is a great recipe for having your kids think you're an asshole when they're older.

gyardley2• 13 years ago

I don't think my parents are assholes. Sure, I did when I was a teenager, but that's because I was egocentric and had poor impulse control - in short, a teenager. Thank god my parents were doing their job instead of trying to be my buddy.

kmfrk4• 13 years ago

Another important lesson: obey the same rules.

Nothing is more infuriating than parents setting rules that only apply to their children for arbitrary reasons.

mosselman• 13 years ago

Have fun automating something that will prevent them from smoking or something, since you haven't taught them to listen to you, but to the computer by then.

Tichy4• 13 years ago

Hooking up a smoke detector to the XBox should do the trick :-)

SoftwareMaven3• 13 years ago

I'm don't have enough information to know whether I like the attempt to silence his kids. It would be easy to see kids that age getting out to control to the point that damage to the computer occurs and noise is almost always the first step towards that.

But holy crap! Half of this place seems like they want to be raising robots, not individuals who all have their own needs and will need to be taught and treated differently. Worse, I have a strong feeling most of them haven't talked to a kid in years, much less ever raised one.

And these people are not just giving advice, but being highly judgmental. Saying the father is wrong. I raise four kids with my wife. Two kids as a single dad would be twice as hard at least.

Go walk a mile and see how your "build a robot" methodology works for your kid.

(Sorry about the rant. I take fatherhood and other people judging it very seriously. I came from an abusive household, and that is the only kind of environment I would openly judge a father for. This is not abusive, even if it offends somebody's sense of logic.)

SoftwareMaven3• 13 years ago

I forgot to mention, all parenting aspects aside, this is a really cool hack. I love seeing what can be accomplished with just scripts, pipes, and the occasional file.

Cushman10• 13 years ago

Hear, hear. The way people second-guess everyday parenting decisions is annoying, but the way people here are reacting to this one is mind boggling. This is a clear and obvious win all around: Dad's happy, the kids are happy, and all because Linux saved the day. Let's ship it and go home, folks.

hackoder• 13 years ago

Thank you for that voice of reason.

You make two very good points here and in your other post.

1) Kids are different. There is a whole spectrum of right and wrong decisions depending on what your kid is like. Would anyone suggest that the same methods would work with a kid who is stubborn and one who is easy going?

2) These decisions depend on a kid's age. A 2-5 year old is not logical or rational, and can do outrageous things just to see how you would react. Don't deceive them, let them be kids, yadda yadda are almost funny to read. Like you said, walk a mile in the parents' shoes.

Anyway, getting back to the original post, I do see an issue with this approach (to parenting, not the technical solutions): I'd rather solve the bigger problem of the kids not listening to what the parent is saying rather than fixing this single instance. On the other hand, it is easy for kids to get rowdy without realizing it and this method seems to fix that particular issue well.

neumann_alfred17• 13 years ago

Don't deceive them, let them be kids, yadda yadda are almost funny to read. Like you said, walk a mile in the parents' shoes.

Or, have had the luxury of having great parents who never bothered playing such mind games with you. Of course, since such gifted parents are rare, it's easy to simply dismiss such a high standard. But once you go non-bullshit, it's just hard to go back.

kmfrk4• 13 years ago

That's just the weird cargo-cult "hacker mentality" intersecting with parenting.

People would submit articles entitled "How I hacked my children", if it weren't because there was a nagging feeling in the back of their skull that something wasn't right about this attitude.

Doesn't stop people from applying it to everything else, though.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

This. Got into a moderately long discussion with a co-worker about filtering out access to MySpace (it was a while ago :-) and chat access for my kids when they were younger. They were of the opinion that I was really damaging my kids by creating this barrier between them and the 'real world' and it wasn't like they weren't going to get there eventually. The conversation meandered into manners, swearing, all sorts of things. It was only then that I realized they didn't actually have kids, and said as much "So, you don't actually have kids do you?" and they sputtered a bit and admitted that no, they didn't. But they had a couple of nieces and nephews they knew pretty well and kids were kids. I just thanked them and ended the conversation.

If you are not a parent, evaluating parenting strategies is not possible, just like evaluating sexual positions if you're a virgin just doesn't work out. You need to be 'experienced' as Jimmy Hendrix famously said, to flip the bit in your brain associated with that experience before you can effectively evaluate different choices. Sad but true.

001sky• 13 years ago

If you are not a parent, evaluating parenting strategies is not possible

As devil's advocate, i would argue this is not true. There are externalities to any strategy. And one can judge the impact of strategy X on people outside the immediate family. This is perhaps a caveat outside the scope of the context, but when evaluating things generally is worth pointing out.

neumann_alfred17• 13 years ago

"No, but I was one."

And frankly, most of the criticism has nothing to do with parenting but with intellectual honesty and how much you yourself understand about the world. If you teach your kid 2+2=5, I will be sure that is wrong, and "but you don't have kids" is a hilarious rebuttal.

reinhardt3• 13 years ago

I'm just going to leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vRhr502wIc

incision3• 13 years ago

>...individuals who all have their own needs and will need to be taught and treated differently.

So, so true.

I find it's a common source of frustration and tool of rationalization to blindly apply what appears to have "worked" for one kid to all of the rest, expecting if not demanding the same result. Kids aren't uniform data ready for predictable processing.

>Worse, I have a strong feeling most of them haven't talked to a kid in years, much less ever raised one.

Child-rearing is such a magnet for expert advice given from a position of zero practical experience. There are all sorts of things in life that would be more applicable to speak authoritatively on with only theory to work from, but I rarely see the same kind of absolute assuredness anywhere else.

I'm thinking folks tend to take their own childhood as years of "factual" evidence and experience in the matter.

markokocic• 13 years ago

What's up with those submission title editing lately? There was nothing wrong with the original one, and the new one is so "inspring" that I wouldn't even click there unless for checking is this yet another title edit.

bjhoops1• 13 years ago

This makes me so happy. I've got my first on the way in about a month. I'll have to bookmark this for future use...

kakuri• 13 years ago

SNR is way too low in this discussion thanks to non-parents posting. Peace out.

protomyth• 13 years ago

4 and 5 year olds make lots of noise. When they are not making noise and being extremely quiet, they are doing something they shouldn't. Why would you want to screw up this parenting warning mechanism?

Blank screen if kids yell too much

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