Hacker News Reader

> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.

It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:

> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.

Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.

Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.

It's somewhat fascinating to me that we are so far out in the weeds of stupidity in the modern era that the only things that were predicted accurately have to come from satire about "Nobody would ever be so stupid as to build or create this"

It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.

The touchscreen is the only thing that's kept me from leasing a Tesla the past 8 years.

And now it's one of two things keeping me from ever doing so in the future

Not the hitler salute?

Correct

"Nazis are fine, but touchscreens aren't" seems like a weird place to draw the line, but I guess it's good that you have one at all.

Sus username

You're old enough to get the reference, but then maybe you had an i/PowerMac at the time and wouldn't.

> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.

Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.

It used to be worse: at one point Tesla made the controls for the AC intensity a slider. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried moving your finger in a perfect straight line in a moving vehicle without looking, but I’m pretty sure it’s impossible.

can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)