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Comment by alsodumb | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so they're saying CarPlay and Android Auto are buggy on their cars, most likely because of their errors in getting the mirroring part right, so instead of fixing the issues, they think switching to their in-house system that they will design from scratch, that'll probably have hundreds of bugs, that's most likely gonna suck, is a better option?

They could've just said we're out of excuses we just want to make money on infotainment system lol.

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What makes you think they design it in-house? Automotive companies outsource most of this software to third parties at bottom-feeder rates on a hard delivery deadline. They don’t know how to produce good software like this. Every aspect of the process is the antithesis of what is required to have quality software come out the other side.

I have my issues with CarPlay but the OEM software is hot garbage by comparison.

It's hilarious just how bad OEM car software is. One of those many moments in my day to day that I realize how bad 90% of software we interact with is absolute trash.

ATM machines, credit card readers, parking meters, TVs, microwaves, ovens (really any appliances), phone trees, any kiosks, etc.

If the device registers my touch within 500ms that's usually enough to impress me at this point.

> One of those many moments in my day to day that I realize how bad 90% of software we interact with is absolute trash.

Yes. My favorite crap area is point-of-sale systems. There's a cafe where, if I present the card too soon, the reader beeps and flashes, but card doesn't complete transaction, and I have to try again. Same at a bookstore. This seems to be a standard Veriphone feature. There are supermarket card terminals which explicitly tell you to present the card before the system is ready for card info. The point of sale system and the credit card terminal are not properly synchronized, and they lie to the user about it. It's a dark pattern.

The one restaurant that had a really good system, one that had no excess screens and read the credit card correctly every time, replaced it with an inferior system that misreads the card about half the time.

This way they can wrap the errors in try..catch blocks and suppress their output.

Boom - error free code!

“Try..catch”—what the hell is that? When I craft my performant error-free code, I only use the finest bug-squasher:

On Error Resume Next.

No need to wrap anything. You declare it once and cruise to your solution.

Fun-fact: if you compile VB.NET code that uses On Error Resume Next it results in output IL that wraps every statement in its own try/catch+swallow block.

Wow. I didn’t know the .NET version still supported that. I remember it from VBA code in Excel and VB6 stuff way back when.

I guess if I’m forced to support an “ignore all errors” feature, doing implicit try/catches in the IL is as elegant as it’s gonna get without having to maintain custom IL to support VB of all things.

I do kinda miss VB6 though. I wish RAD was still a thing in desktop applications.

Welp that's horrible, I'll have nightmares about this.

I have zero doubt there's some kind of VB6 monstrosity living in some car's infotainment system. Complete with a copy of Windows CE to boot.

AFAIK GM's new software is going to be based on Automotive Android.

https://source.android.com/docs/automotive/start/what_automo...

but think of all the promotions and headcount for the internal teams...

Followed swiftly by the biannual layoffs. It's fine just reapply at the beginning of the fiscal year after they've shown investors how responsible they are.

Maybe they can go find rastermon and revive Tizen lol.

My Samsung fridge is running Tizen! It's awful!

It's still baffling to me why Samsung fridges aren't just an API server exposing info to Samsung apps to present it on any other (potentially Samsung) device.

Leaving a space on the door to attach a Samsung tablet could even work, and the user gets to update the tablet whenever they want.

Actually my Samsung Bespoke fridge is just that. The REST API docs are even in the printed manual!

To be fair it doesn't actually do much. (We got the one without the in-door tablet so we could use the glass front as a whiteboard!)

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