bhauer

> Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model.

How is a subscription model any less volatile to the long-term support of an application from the end-user's perspective? To my mind, a subscription service is equally likely to close up shop if the subscriber count dips low enough, which is something that can happen as easily as a "new version" failing to sell well in a purchase model.

The downside is compounded, however, in a subscription model because when a subscription service fails, every user is impacted, both those who would have upgraded had it been a purchase and those who would have kept plugging away with an outdated version. At least with the purchase model, abandonware continues to function for some time.

Funny you should mention owning music because I also prefer to do exactly that rather than pay for a subscription service. And this preference is for two reasons: (a) I like being able to use the music where-ever and whenever I want, and (b) I like that more money goes to the artist via Bandcamp than say, Spotify.

Which is consistent with what they had said at the time when they removed the low-resolution radar they had been using. Specifically, they had said that radar would be useful if it were sufficiently high resolution. The radar in the works and rumored to be added soon is anticipated to be high resolution.

I wish HN would be better than that, but your summary is perfect.

They had been doing that, and called it "shadow mode" [1]. I suspect it's no longer being done, perhaps they reached the limit of what they can learn from that sort of training.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13341194/tesla-autopilot...

It truly is fascinating to what degree news coverage is politically biased. Partisanship rules everything.

As you point out, the stark flip-flop of roles between left and right-leaning coverage of Tesla is almost hilarious when observed from any "neutral" point of view. Even in this HN comment thread, the emotional injection of political points throughout is both funny and disheartening.

Tesla never used lidar. They did use a low-resolution radar and dropped it because they felt it was holding back their vision-based development. At the time, Musk commented that radar was not useful unless it were higher resolution.

There have been credible rumors of an upcoming addition of high-resolution radar to the Tesla sensor suite, consistent with Musk's earlier remarks.

It's really as bad as Reddit in here. I would expect better from a technical audience.

Same here. All the time with the iOS keyboard. It's infuriatingly slow with suggestions. They always refresh well after my finger has already started moving to select one.

Same thing happens all the time to me on the iOS virtual keyboard. The root problem, in my opinion, is that word suggestions lag far too much. They are refreshed at least a few hundred milliseconds after your last keystroke.

I know Windows Phone is long dead, but its virtual keyboard was consistently superior at providing suggestions that were well-aligned with user intent and not awkwardly delayed such that options shifted while the user's finger was in-flight.

The iOS keyboard's suggestions are the worst offender here. They always lag more than other virtual keyboards I've used, and I routinely end up selecting a different suggested word than I intended because they change from beneath my finger. I can't tell you how infuriating the iOS keyboard is.

TLDR: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...

The phrase "Tesla killers" needs to be killed. Every EV maker sells every EV they make. EVs are supply constrained.

When a legacy manufacturer or EV startup adds to the EV supply, it takes from ICE vehicle market share, not Tesla market share. So any new EV is an ICE killer, not a Tesla killer. The majority of people buying EVs from legacy brands are doing so because they are fans of those brands; they weren't going to be buying a Tesla anyway. And even those who considered Tesla and chose another brand do not result in a lost sale to Tesla since someone else will buy that unit. Demand exceeds supply.

Another faux pas the article makes is assuming that the number of models has any meaningful relationship to the number of units delivered to customers. Tesla continues to dominate the world EV market with just four models: a mid-size sedan, a CUV, a full-size sedan, and a mid-size SUV. It doesn't matter if you have 11, 14, or 30 models in the pipeline if you simply cannot manufacture as many units because of battery constraints or whatever excuse applies at the moment.

It's also bizarre to see Tesla's very high R&D capital efficiency as a liability:

> Tesla, by contrast, has spent less in total vehicle R&D since 2008 than Toyota and Mercedes-Benz each spent in 2020 alone.

Toyota has essentially nothing of note in the BEV space to show for their big R&D expenditures in 2020, aside from the underwhelming BZ4X.

The article claims traditional OEMs are poised to out-produce Tesla with no explanation of how they expect to achieve Tesla's current production rate, let alone Tesla's future production rate with two big factories spinning up in Austin and Berlin.

Don't get me wrong. I really like the looks of several EVs from the likes of Polestar and Nio. But it's clickbait to call these "Tesla killers."

Just be honest: they are ICE killers.

For me:

    - Email
    - Web (external and internal) and blog
    - Matrix for chat (federated with friends)
    - Media server
    - File server
    - Backups
    - Password management
    - Property surveillance

Still too much telemetry in my opinion. Is it possible to opt out, perhaps for a price?

That sounds similar to the Windows 10 Mobile docking experience. Interesting, and a novelty, but not quite the execution we seek.

For a decade now, or perhaps longer, I've been wanting a first-class general purpose computer in the form factor of a cell phone. Microsoft has danced ever-so-close to providing us this, through several iterations of rumored "Surface Phones," and in showcasing the promise (if not necessarily the execution) of a viable dockable phone in the Windows 10 Mobile era. A few Linux flavors of the same concept have circulated through history as well, but none particularly viable.

Failing that, I'd like a computing model that I call PAO, Personal Application Omnipresence, where all of my devices are terminals to my own application server [1].

[1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

This should not be a surprise to anyone who has been reading the New York Times' technology journalism for the past several years.

In fact, I'd argue that even before any such "directive" was made, the bias in high-profile papers was already predominantly anti-tech, except in rare circumstances where praising a technology sector or tech company served the overarching political narrative of the moment (e.g., then-nascent social media was a good thing when Obama leveraged it to success; and a toxin when later less palatable politicians did the same).

This is not limited to the New York Times. Even tech-oriented journalistic venues such as The Verge have a decidedly snarky and grim view of many technologies. And they are effective at steering discourse, even among notionally technology-savvy people. Consider, for example, how antagonistic coverage of autonomous transportation by major media outlets has yielded widespread pessimism and doubt. Presently, you have non-trivial numbers of otherwise intelligent technology-forward journalism consumers convinced that autonomy is an unsolvable problem.

Musk-hatred as a pop ideology is certainly one of the weirder ones. It's a baffling hybrid of conspiracy theorist, self-serving gatekeeping of engineering licensure, not-invented here extremism, technology "realism," billionaire rage/envy, angry politics, and a need to feel superior to the engineers who work at the Musk companies. Altogether, not a look becoming someone who is on a web site devoted to technology and innovation.

Look, it's fine if you don't like the guy or his companies. But some of the ridiculous talking points listed elsewhere in this thread are unhinged.

It's awesome to see an article from Dr. Ray Toal on HN this morning! In my biased opinion, the excellent tenured professors at LMU's CS program make it a stand out for its size.

But here it was brought up to provide context for why Tesla had to go it alone in creating a charging network and connector. And to provide some useful context when digesting what amounts to a GM press release from The Verge. If you're not aware of GM's past with electric cars, you might afford them too much trust in the present. Not to say they deserve exclusively disdain, but they need to continue to (re)earn trust by actually executing rather than talking.

Using a third-party cloud only ensures that all work scenarios enjoy the same lowest-common denominator.

My preference is to select one of the work contexts (e.g., the office) as primary and to put a workstation there, then remote to that workstation from secondary contexts (e.g., at home). This configuration gives me first-class computing where I need it most, in the primary context, and a decent second-class option when I need to work in other contexts.

I happily worked with this configuration for more than a decade and found it served all of my local and remote needs.

Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting.

Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1].

STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to count: just sum the scores.

Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a good balance of utility and simplicity.

If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather than superior alternatives.

[1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...

My Acura had some slightly misaligned panels and they never contributed any perceptible issue to the road worthiness of that car during my ~15 years of ownership. There were some interior rattles over time, but I've never had a car that didn't eventually develop some rattles.

I have not observed any panel misalignment on my Model 3.

There is some validity to that argument.

Ironically, Tesla receives a significant amount of criticism/hate for the small size of their product line up (four models, where each pair of two is very similar: X & S, and Y & 3). Many analysts and critics fail to appreciate how much market opportunity exists for a single very well-executed vehicle per major category, such as "small SUV."

I have roughly the same experience with my Model 3. Fit and finish is acceptable, matching the entry-level luxury vehicles I have owned in the past (vehicles from Acura, BMW, Infiniti, etc.)

The quality of materials is debatable since, for example, Tesla exclusively uses synthetic material and no leather. But as you point out, the durability of these materials seems very good. Even with routine leather care, my previous vehicle with a leather interior showed more significant signs of wear at the same point in its life.

This is utterly unsurprising.

By the same token, consider the vehicle market which has seen prices balloon in 2022 due to high demand. Consumers are less tolerant of dealer markups (which enrich a low value-add dealership) versus OEM markups (which ostensibly flow to the manufacturer and its employees).

> A handful of grumpy old gits know that if you pick the right languages, and the right tools, you can build something to replace this 2nd level system in the same types of tools as the first level system, and that you don’t need all the fancy scaling infrastructure because one modern box can support a million concurrent users no problem, and a few such boxes can support tens of hundreds of millions of them, all in something in the corner of one room, with an uptime of decades and no need for any cloud.

I suppose I am a grumpy old git, then, although I did not think of myself that way until recently. In the past decade or two, I've seen computer science lose its collective appreciation of the staggering potential of hardware. This has steadily resulted in software being built with tremendously over-engineered, hyper-complicated, cloud-first architectures that barely match the throughput of a single box running a high-performance platform (and for the record, "high performance" can still be relatively ergonomic via Java, C#, Rust, and so on).

The scale of hardware, clock cycles, bits per second of bandwidth, etc., being squandered on modern cloud-first highly complicated architectures boggles the mind.

I fear there is no strength behind any pendulum swing back to architectural simplicity, appreciation of the available capacity of hardware and how to use it, and local-first.

If you are right, T-Mobile's effort to get Apple onboard with making the necessary changes to separate iMessage payload from regular cell data on these special low-bandwidth space-cells could be a challenge.

> At most, we can say that Netflix chooses to buy a lot of middlebrow drama shows, and middlebrow drama shows today share a similar aesthetic

Exactly. The article did concede that there are other examples of the phenomenon, such as Hallmark. I would argue that Amazon has their own style as well.

As the article points out, video compression causes several aspects of the resulting appearance such as exaggerated edges, but that is shared across all streaming services.

It's not a Netflix-exclusive phenomenon.

> The Music app is barely functional for listening to your own music files...

The fact that you can't click a band name to navigate to that band's list of albums when playing local media is perhaps the thing I hate most about iOS. The band name renders in the color of a link, but is non-interactive.