Maybe it’s a “but when it happens you’re screwed” situation. I’m thinking of the story of BMW’s battery safety fuse (the one that trips in an accident to protect first responders and the people in the car) actually tripping when you hot the curb or a pothole harder. It requires a very expensive trip to the dealer. Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.
I have no idea if Chinese EVs are consistently better, Volvo can be seen as one and I don’t think they excel at reliability lately.
P.S. Software issues are reliability issues. The software is a core part of the car and its value proposition, you can’t discount them as “just software issues, not reliability”.
Volvo has had absolutely terrible software since Geely acquired them. I own a Volvo and like the brand, I still think the cars are beautiful and the engineering outside of the software is pretty good, but the software is an embarrassment. It's just so bad. Shockingly bad. The worst of all the automakers by far. I'm worried it will sink the brand, and am not looking forward to owning a car made by a defunct automaker. I hope Volvo cleans house in the software department.
> Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.
They're pretty lucky from what I hear! A friend of mine just sold his Model S because he'd been waiting over 7 months for the shop to source a replacement part. Apparently he'd even resorted to begging Musk to look into it over X because Tesla wont even give him an ETA.
Day 1 reviews, the ones that drives sales of any product, are flawed by definition. They take a narrow and superficial view of the product, a snapshot when what you need is a timelapse.
The winter tires that score great on day 1 but put a bit of wear on them and they turn to crap. The motherboard that scores the highest in the benchmarks at launch but later on burns your CPU, or gets a BIOS update that caps the performance, or gets no updates whatsoever. The car that shines at acceleration and feature list but breaks down often and is slow and expensive to fix.
Day 1 reviews certainly have some value but it’s higher for the reviewer than for the potential buyer. By the time the reviewer follows up after battle testing in time, if they even want to risk looking like they got it wrong the first time, the damage was done. And people aren’t that interested in reading about old stuff, those reviews don’t get the views.
The most obvious difference being that unlike China or India, Europe (or the EU) is not a single country. This doesn't make things impossible but certainly complicates them.
Exactly, now that the internet is ubiquitous, none of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical. They are regulatory, they are political, they are social.
> one of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical
VISA and Mastercard never resolved major technical problems. It's nothing a bank wouldn't already be able to achieve internally from a technological complexity point of view. They didn't invent any of the technologies, they just navigated the political and regulatory hurdles, then leveraged their position for more.
Your comment makes it look like the problems are "just" political or regulatory. These are more often then not the bigger ones.
> But they boast the most sold video game in the history of videogames (Tetris a close-ish second), and most downloaded free mobile game, respectively.
Just out of curiosity, I guessed Minecraft which tracks, and Subway Surfers respectively, rather than Candy Crush Saga. Is CCS actually the most downloaded free mobile game ever?
The difference between “PKI” and “just signing with a private key” is the trusted authority infrastructure. Without that you still get the benefit of signatures and some degree of verification, you can still validate what you install.
But in reality this trustworthiness check is handed over by the manufacturer to an infrastructure made up of these trusted parties in the owner’s name, and there’s nothing the owner can do about it. The owner may be able to validate software is signed with the expected key but still not be able to use it because the device wants PKI validation, not owner validation.
I’ve been self-signing stuff in my home and homelab for decades. Everything works just the same technically but step outside and my trustworthiness is 0 for everyone else who relies on PKI.
If you want to play around now and with little preparation, there's no beating proto-boards. No toying around with designing the PCB, no waiting for the order. They're also great to practice your soldering skills.
Sometimes you just want a sandwich, not to bake bread
"The victim did it to themselves" is a famously bulletproof defense. I don't know why people don't try it more often.
This is the typical tall tale that used to travel in every neighborhood as a warning, especially to scare kids from doing some things. Kids eat up these stories. Probably doesn't work that much in the age of phones and "pics (shorts?) or it never happened".
Unfortunately, we’ve reached the era where pics and shorts are very much no longer proof. In a few minutes you could generate video of that exact scenario.
> When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.
Sounds like you’re focusing on Eastern society examples and some are a stretch. If you believe “institutionalized fairness” is unequivocally wrong, what do you think of the more Western “DEI”? It’s a standout example of “equity”.
Is your opinion that DEI results in the same kind of bad outcome? Do you think that Western societies can pull off “institutionalized fairness” better than Eastern ones? Are you drawing a biased picture by highlighting the failures without putting them in the larger context along with any possible successes?
DEI is fine. The problem isn’t the goal of treating people well; it’s the structural error of trying to institutionalize "fairness" as a top-down directive.
Whether it’s an AI or a government, centralized systems are remarkably bad at optimizing for vague moral proxies because they lack the local feedback loops required to avoid catastrophe.
Western history is littered with these feedback failures. The British government’s commitment to an ideological "fairness" in market non-interference during the Irish Potato Famine led to 1 million deaths. Their wartime resource distribution in the 1943 Bengal Famine killed 3 million more. Even the American eugenics movement was framed as a "fair" optimization of the population; it sterilized 64,000 citizens and provided the foundational model for the Nazi T4 program.
In the context of IP, claiming it’s "fair" to deny a creator compensation for their labor is just a way to subsidize an abstraction at the expense of individual incentive. When you replace objective market signals with a bureaucrat’s (or an algorithm’s) definition of equity, you don't get a more just system- you just get a system that has stopped solving for reality.
The stated goal is always to treat people well. The unstated goal, if there is one, is hard to determine.
So you cherry picked some bad outcomes which just happen to be from the same part of the world, didn’t provide context for your reader to understand if that outcome is the rule or the exception, when asked about other things that fit under your wide brush “argument” your comeback was a weak “except that, it doesn’t count” (half of Americans voted for the guy who stomped on DEI so your “treating well” argument isn’t shared by a democratic majority for better or worse). This on a fresh account screams hidden agenda.
And n the wider topic of fairness, it’s hard to formally define what fair or unfair are. But you know it when you see it. The way copyright law works today is a prime example of unfair to “everyone else”.
The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.
Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.
A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.
I have no idea if Chinese EVs are consistently better, Volvo can be seen as one and I don’t think they excel at reliability lately.
P.S. Software issues are reliability issues. The software is a core part of the car and its value proposition, you can’t discount them as “just software issues, not reliability”.