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Comment by odysseus | Hacker News Reader

Kia just did this with their EV9 update - it broke CarPlay with a blank screen a few minutes into driving, which then reverted itself a minute later. Another OTA mostly resolved it. Neither of these updates explained what happened or what the fix was.

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Let me be a devil's advocate here: you have essentially two options.

1. You write release notes thet contain technical details. Less than 1% of your customers understand them. More than 90% probably won't even care, let alone understand the document. And then there are the folks who get confused or scared and reach out to customer support with weird questions. This generates extra workload.

2. You explain nothing. The release simply is. The technically minded people are mildly annoyed. A few customers affected by open issues wonder if it's fixed now. The rest of them doesn't even care that there is an uodate and carries on with their lives. Customer service continues to complain about the usual bunch of random and weird customer issues.

It's quite natural to start doing (2) in a consumer facing business, isn't it?

It would be very simple to write out details but make them harder to access. Motivated users will find them.

To what end? Pleasing a few nerds? Nerds that are just as likely to have ripped out the OTA modem or not be using a car like that.

Why would they read the updates then?

It is genuinely lost on me why tech nerds specifically have a hard time grasping the idea that they are not the only people that matter. That sometimes, someone will know that something will upset computer nerds, and will still do the thing, because they see it as worth it overall.

Like spoilt children. I genuinely don’t know if it’s the decades of SV pandering or what.

MOST OF THE TIME, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU. And they’re probably right not to.

This is a pretty dumb response, not only because the idea that knowledgeable people matter ≠ knowledgeable people are the "only people that matter," but also because the alternative that you're crowing about is that nobody matters (other than you, the person selling the thing.) You're accusing people of being narcissistic for wanting any information, and bragging about only being guided by your own desires. It's really a moral toilet.

The "tech nerds" is a bullshit term for "people with the background to understand the explanation." If you're not explaining it to them, you're not explaining it to anyone. You're just subjecting everyone to your whims, and really should be regulated into the unemployment line.

You seem to be missing the underlying reason(s) why tech nerds are, well, tech nerds. 0dd to be angry about tech nerds being tech nerdy about things.

In a forum for tech nerds, of all places.

Instead of picturing spoiled children, who are mad about something that doesn't matter, like spilled ice cream, instead consider civil rights movements, for the modern era. The point is to make people care about something that will affect them, sooner or later. Like the right to repair. Nerdy at, until farmers got involved, and there are specific monetary issues involved. Most of the time, people don't care, but people are going to care if farmers don't do their job and there's no food.

What you really mean is that there is very low value to the company in appeasing this minor vocal audience. What you forget is that you are posting on a message board to an overlapping audience.

Post them by the coffee machine in the dealership waiting room.

We used to just do things because it was the right thing to do, or out of pride for what we were making, or sometimes just to be better than the other guy.

That everything has to be about profit is a lot of what's wrong these days. And yes, bitching about this on a YC-owned forum is just as silly as bitching about nerds here, I'm aware.

You mean a few customers? Yes, I think that’s perfectly reasonable to expect that changes made to a very expensive product are well-documented for those customers to whom that matters.

To the end that they exist at all.

One of the biggest organizational anti-patterns of the modern SaaS world is the move away from release notes.

It's a question of whether a company has a competent enough change control process to be able to generate a list of changes for a given release.

If a tech product company can't meet the low bar of documenting its changes, then it probably shouldn't be trusted?

Release notes aren't for end users in the same way that the wiring diagram taped to the back of your appliances isn't for end users.

They're for experts to either directly use... or to communicate in simpler language to end users.

> To what end? Pleasing a few nerds?

It's the nerds that the non-nerds/normies go to for advice on tech-y things. If you can generally make the nerds happy, and earn a good reputation among them, you'll have a customer base from which to expand from.

Or as Tim O'Reilly recommended back in the day, "Watching the Alpha Geeks":

* https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/081119-stanfo...

* https://web.archive.org/web/20130000000000*/http://origin.co...

* https://www.oreilly.com/tim/archives/apple_wwdc2002.pdf

Driving up costs to the company.

The costs will be recouped by sacking more developers...

i remember when the TV station would shut down in the middle of the night.

Or businesses would close to do inventory.

We made do.

Those are reasonable. A business must take account of its stock - a useful thing is happening. A TV station shuts down in the evening as paying for electricity to broadcast and humans to schedule programming that goes unwatched is unproductive. It is not reasonable that a piece of working software in a product I paid a substantial sum of money for, which has no good reason to not work, should not work randomly.

That is an external service needing to do maintenance.

Not my own device on my own machine.

I don't remember a time my CD player on my car would stop working due to an update.

> It's quite natural to start doing (2) in a consumer facing business, isn't it?

Absolutely.

But also don't break my stuff.

I know people who aren't nerds and actually like to know what's in the update. Just ask a LLM to write a high level human-friendly description of the changes. That's it. Just be good to your customers or in general to others. Ignorance, whataboutism & Idontcareism spreads like plague. Don't make it worse.

Looks like some regulation is in order to prevent companies releasing dubious software updates with no release notes.

The thing is, Kia does tell you what’s going on in some of their release notes, for example: https://owners.kia.com/us/en/ota-software-update-release-not...

However the very update that says it fixes the blank screen caused the blank screen to happen in the first place. (Never happened before that update.)

Then another silent update not listed on their site undoes that problem, but you have to wait a month or so to get it.

> Neither of these updates explained what happened or what the fix was.

"Bug fixes and performance improvements "

Even worse than the "reformat" commit message that your bisect landed on.

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