I’m an automotive CE… we’re getting there.
Cars used to be DONE at lots… now, there are weeks to finish code before the customer lays hands on, and that time is factored in now.
Worse with OTA updates. Now, so long as it’s fixed if enough customers complain that’s good enough.
Cars used to be great. Then some morons connected them to the internet for no good reasons.
It was three letter agencies embarrassing the mfgs into “taking security more seriously” but conveniently also giving gov access, backdoors, and data on vehicles.
Play the game or they’ll make sure the next article is about you.
People would look at the vehicle industry a lot differently if they knew what was going on behind the scenes.
I discovered the vulnerability that lead to all that. I wish I could say more, but no one took it seriously.
Elon Musk and Franz von Holzhausen, to be precise.
Far closer to Obama and his circle. Around Carpocalypse 2008, a bunch of three letter agencies started pushes for internet connected vehicles knowing the tech wasn’t there; but would be.
I watched it happen. There was some shady shit, and the reality was 2008 wasn’t just about GM and Chrysler but and entire JustInTime mistake that could have stopped almost all car production around the world. Different topic, but the effect was government would be involved in cars a lot more than previously.
Fast forward, and here we are. Your car ABSOLUTELY is spying on you, and the upside is you also get shipped unfinished vehicles.
Be a culture war sally about Musk all you like, I know, the bad men say the mean things. But this isn’t on him. Tesla had to and in some ways is still learning that cars aren’t computers on wheels, but this specific “feature” came from Big Government first.
You really lose all credibility when you downplay the richest man on earth openly bribing voters and the President claiming the man helped rig voting machines, and that same man makes Nazi salutes and goes to Europe and supports the Nazi party in the place where they invented Nazi parties. And then he basically moves into the White House and magically his companies start getting government contracts, while saying empathy is a bad thing and begins eviscerating the government with no oversight.
That isn't "bad men saying bad things." But, of course, this very bad man did say some very bad things, too.
Imagine being trigger by a department of government finding fraud, waste, and misspending of YOUR’s and my tax dollars! If Bernie Sanders suggested it you’d be touting it as the best idea ever.
Saying “I give you my heart” and then making a gesture of giving the crowd your heart is not a “nazi salute”. If that is a nazi salute then Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have both given “nazi salutes”.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/starlink-benefit...
And it 100% was a Nazi salute. Plain as day. Quit telling people to ignore what their own eyes can see. Him saying a little phrase after doing that gesture doesn't change the gesture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy#/...
> Imagine being trigger by a department of government finding fraud, waste
They're doing nothing of the sort. They'll probably only end up wasting more money than anything they're "saving", which is really "saving" in the same way as not paying your rent is "saving".
Sure you lowered the spend of the agency, but you probably, by removing all the people who actively investigate/police waste, fraud and abuse, promoted more people to defraud the agency and not get caught.
Congratulations, you played yourself.
jesus expand your fucking media diet you absolute loon: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/20/150-year-olds-a...
Those were all just made up stories to you?
under age: https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10085.pdf
"over age" (i can only assume you mean 150 year olds or whatever, dead people are getting checks): https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...
"future birthdays": assuming you mean that there are records in the database, according to elon and 'BIG BALLS' that are assigned to someone who has yet to be born. However I can find no stories to support this. I expect it's typical elon musk puffery.
4g now. 3g was turned off causing these cars to drain the battery searching for signal.
Bad engineering at this point. To be fair, we could have had good car OS, good smartphone OS. But we didn't because everyone wanted to have their own pie castle.
Imagine a smartphone that was actually useful. Or a car OS that supports you with repairs. Possible, but not wanted by manufacturers.
Sony boots a RTOS Linux system on their cameras in 3 seconds flat, and the firmware is arguably mission critical for that camera. It can be done for an infotainment system.
However, you don't notice that three seconds. Because when you flick the switch and raise the camera, and it's already ready to shoot.
There's powersave after a minute (configurable), which can be considered as S3 sleep, and returning from that is faster.
Moreover if you have a stabilized lens, they work in tandem to improve things even further.
Many shots you think which would gonna be blurry comes out perfect. e.g.: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/49047642802/in/photo...
I don't really use Flickr and a new personal website remains as yet on my list for this year, but here's something from back in 2020, one of the few really good shots I got that year: https://web.archive.org/web/20230513030226/https://aaron-m.c...
Not the soul of technical perfection, I freely grant, and I'm obviously adding a fair bit of light. But this was the second or third time I'd strayed even as far as my own backyard, after a covid dose earlier in the year had me knocked back for a few months. I suppose it could be sharper, but I had a hard time catching my breath that day, and I'm not actually sorry that a little human frailty should show through in a work where impending death and the onset of life are quite literally belly to belly.
In any case, it was really switch-to-shutter lag I was curious about. Three seconds there would be an eternity, so I appreciate knowing that's not the case.
Is stuff like this documented anywhere? This is one software topic I find endlessly fascinating but can't find any resources on.
We now have sloppy software simply because we can update bugs later.
This is a purely social problem that won't get solved with technology.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
Lots of software works very well. Including Facebook's, where "move fast and break things" was coined, I believe, which is some of the most scalable and reliable on the planet.
Facebook had a shit ton of teething problems. If social security/Medicaid has teething problems, people die. If Social Security has teething problems, people can't eat/pay rent/property tax, they get kicked out, their credit is ruined, and they can't qualify for new housing. Miss medication. Die. A little different than a blank page on Facebook. Facebook is also 'optional', and people can use other things to replace it. Society has committed to people over their entire lifetimes on Social Security/Medicaid. America should honor it's commitments, even when it's a little bit harder/inconvenient/more expensive. Especially when at the same time it's making 4 trillion dollar optional tax cuts instead of honoring it's promises to it's people.
Should blood bank typing software move fast and break things? Should your bank move fast and break things? Should your car's anti-lock braking system software move fast and break things? But the funds people depend on to live (Medicaid pays for the majority of nursing homes for the elderly, Social Security is many people's entire retirement income) should?
I disagree that that is how the United States should treat it's 'use cases' and 'constraints' in serving it's citizens/honoring it commitments.
And unlike Facebook, the current systems have actually worked for decades. How many times has Social Security needed a major uplift?
Now compare that to how often Facebook has had to overhaul its tech stack.
Lastly, for your comparison to work, you are claiming you are willing to fund government tech on the same level that Facebook funds their tech (otherwise the comparison makes no sense). Are you REALLY saying you are willing to fund government software development at the same expense level as Facebook? That's $60 billion and $65 billion in 2025 alone.
10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department. ...
13. You would press the 'start' button to shut off the engine.
(Though to be fair, the button tends to be labeled both start and stop)
> If cars were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
Next to the software side of things, I also often wonder about planes. But, until now, they have proved fairly resilient to falling out of the sky, except for the well known "recent" events. Which is fairly surprising, knowing the levels of mismanagement at play. We've been lucky..
move fast and break things is going to be studied in the future as a hilariously clusterfuk misuse of an idea.
Well, cars did break down by the side of the road daily! That's why it used to be good advice even in the 90s to always have a basic set of tools in your trunk, why AAA offered roadside assistance already in 1915, and why part of the European CDL is enough basic mechanic knowledge to self-help when the truck breaks down.
It's only in the last 20-ish years that "smarts" became cheap and ubiquitous enough in cars that the car can warn preemptively. And additionally, regulatory requirements on quality, parts availability and public expectations went up, exerting competitive pressure.
Though maybe I am of the philosophy of prototyping as I like to code for problems that I am facing right now in real life and wish like damn... wish someone could build something cool & though I use AI quite hard. Its actually because I am currently in school and I just don't have the time to code but I face some issues which I genuinely feel need to be solved right now. (Maybe even as just a proof of concept) so that I can later write good readable code later on when I go into university.
The critical software parts of cars (non user-facing entertainment systems gripes aside). Think engine control modules, ABS, etc.
This stuff is mission critical and almost always works. I think about that a lot.
In this day and age, like... is anything secure at this point? You say hastily... but even the biggest "walls" get breached, constantly. Just claiming hastily to feel better about your own glass walls is just as bad.
This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even works. If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.