How is this my fault as customer? This a predatory practice in tech.
I work in automotive, the hoops you have to jump through in order to push a SW update are enormous. One of the first rules is: if the owner of the vehicle does not consent to an OTA update, you're out of luck.
The industry is obviously unable to self-regulate, so it is time for an external regulator, e.g. the EU, to jump in and mandate that SW updates cannot be applied without explicit consent and an explicit explanation of what is being changed. Of course, security updates must be maintained separately from feature updates like this.
As a consumer, I always want the latter, rarely do I want the former. My device, my choice.
> There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
Yes there is. Either nobody is engineering towards that aspect or it is a conscious decision, deliberating between two different buckets: bill-of-material cost per unit and estimated impact on your warranty & goodwill budget. Whatever is deemed to be cheaper will win.
Source: I work at an automotive OEM and one of my first projects almost two decades ago was how to anchor after-sales requirements into the engineering process. For example, we did things like introducing special geometry into the CAD models representing the space that needs to be left free so a mechanic can fit his hands with a tool inside. These would then be considered in the packaging process. If you consider these are two completely different organizations, it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage
Refusing access to training isn't a BoM issue by any means. Neither is a repair process that's so error prone that it can do even more damage to the car. We are surrounded by evidence that manufacturers in every field are taking decisions that are hostile towards their customers in the chase for profits. With the rise of EVs with far fewer moving parts needing constant maintenance, the manufacturers had to shift to different revenue streams, like killing repairability and locking everything behind manufacturer approval.
This is a professional shop voicing the complaints, not a random guy trying to do a fix on the side of the road.
Imagine someone told you they work for Apple and the reason everything is soldered, glued, stacked in a way it will never survive disassembly, and every bit of software and hardware in the device needs the manufacturer's blessing to be replaced or just keep running is because it was cheaper and safer this way.
> it becomes a very tricky problem to solve.
It was a solved problem for everything mechanical where locking it down or preventing people from learning wasn't really an option. How did it become tricky again just now when we deal with far more flexible software and possibility to lockdown?
I likely did not communicate clearly enough: it is tricky because of organizational reasons, not technical. There are many trade-offs that have to be made and it involves different business units with their own targets and incentives.
To take a few examples from the article with likely causes (note I don't work for BMW, so this is pure speculation based on my own experience):
> BMW has over-engineered the diagnostic procedure to such a level that even their own technicians often do not know the correct replacement process.
The ECU, diagnostic procedures and service methods are being developed by a different org-units. One is engineering, which works towards their own development use cases. They might develop the on-board diagnostic interfaces. The service unit develops their own tester and have to develop their own procedures.
Engineering is usually late with providing real hardware & software samples, let alone a fully integrated car. The service unit might only get a working test car very late in the process and discover that the procedure is super complicated. By that point the car development is already too far along for major changes. Remember that most components have been specified and awarded to suppliers years ago by this point.
> And it gets worse: the original iBMUCP module, which integrates the pyrofuse, contactors, BMS and internal copper-bonded circuitry, is fully welded shut. There are no screws, no service openings, and it is not designed to be opened, even though the pyrofuse and contactors are technically replaceable components.
Engineering is not concerned with these issues, it's usually the service unit which needs to bring in maintenance requirements. A judgement call is being made whether an assembly that you source as a single part needs to be split up further. For example, if you split it up further, you now have more parts to manage. You need to provide logistics and must allocate space in your spare parts warehouses for these new parts.
That usually makes sense for expensive components. Here's another fact: the manufacturer allocates a warranty & goodwill budget for each car line, because the manufacturer has to pay dealers for these repairs if it falls into the warranty period or is judged to fall under good will. It's usually not in the interest of the manufacturer to have expensive repairs because of that.
It might also be that the repair is being deemed to dangerous, because it is a high-voltage component. Opening it up and tinkering with it might increase the risk of an electrical fire in the battery. It might be that this risk was judged to be higher than the repair cost.
> Additionally, the procedure requires flashing the entire vehicle both before and after the replacement, which adds several hours to the process and increases risk of bricked components which can increase the recovery cost by factor 10x.
No service unit wants these long flashing times, because it blocks a repair bay in the workshop. But it's usually because the EE integration has been developed in this way. It might need coding, calibration or just bringing up everything to the latest release.
Vehicle SW is super regulated, you need to fulfill a staggering amount of regulations. Look up UNECE-R156 SUMS as an example. It might be that the new parts comes with a newer SW version, which has only been verified and approved in combination with newer SW in the other components. This would require flashing ancillary ECUs as well even if they have not been changed to ensure release compliance.
> Even after we managed to open the unit and access everything inside, we discovered that the Infineon TC375 MCU is fully locked.
Look up UNECE-R155. Things like these are mandated, if not directly in the regulation then indirectly by making the manufacturer liable for any modification that somebody did to their car. It is practically required to lock it down.
Just a few points off the top of my head, the comment got too long anyway.
Thanks for your comment. It looks to me that most of the people who work in engineering area express some form of understanding or give the benefit of the doubt to the situation while people from outside the field borderline call for malice in the side of BMW.
I think both are right. Engineering a modern car is really complex as you pointed out but the customer also has the right to say, "well that is what you are paid for". In the end the customer can just go to the next car brand.
I own a relatively recent BMW but it is only a mild hybrid diesel (4 year old M340D) and before I even received the car, they changed the whole engine and did not release the car until that was executed. That was done by the dealer, and i never knew what was the reason.
On the flip side of modern car engineering I once had a check engine light called the dealer and with authorization prompts on my side they were able to tell me some gas exhaust sensor was malfunctioning and I would be able to go there at my leisure, as it was not urgent. That was nice. When i bought the car I had 5 years of maintenance included and this is one of the nicest things about owning a car in modern times. They even call me when it is about time to do the maintenance asking for when I am available. I never owned top brand cars before but this is for me worth the premium so far as it is one less thing to organize.
Apart from the normal maintenance and the above I never had any issue with the car, and it is a very big difference between a 2001 Passat TDI(my youth car) or a Ford Torneo Connect(the car i am aiming to exchange for due to family reasons).
But that’s a very long way to say that yes, BMW is to blame for making something that’s hard to repair and doesn’t do anything about it because it makes them money. Other companies got it far better so your explanation is superficial.
When a system “malfunctions” only to the benefit of one side it’s not “an issue” as much as design.
Why don’t you run the same careful reasoning against any hostile action from any big tech company and see how it sounds? All the actions of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon are just the result of unfortunate misalignment between teams.
If a flipped coin always lands how the person flipping wants it to land, it’s loaded, not misalignment between hand and coin.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made in corporations with more money and higher stakes than BMW. Once you get off the ground and see more of the bigger picture, you can’t unsee the hostile decisions that are compartmentalized from the people who just see the tiny bit in front of them and it’s easier to sell them that they aren’t doing anything wrong and it’s not a problem.
> I just haven't found Emacs to be particularly productive over SSH. IMO it works best on a local machine, there's just too much in the GUI which isn't as workable over terminal. Font rendering, images, clickable text links all take a hit. None are really deal breakers, but Emacs TUI just kind of feels like an afterthought. X11 over SSH doesn't feel responsive to me.
But that's what tramp is for, it works nicely and is surprisingly well integrated into the rest of Emacs. The only obvious downside is initial performance, but that can be worked around by tweaking SSH settings to keep connections open.
Another hack I use is to initiate a connection from remote to my local Emacs instance. The use case is ssh'ing into a remote shell, typing "remote-emacs <file-xyz>" and having that open the file on my local machine.
I did that by creating a script that gets my local IP from $SSH_CONNECTION, uses that to ssh into my local machine and executes "emacsclient -n /ssh:$HOSTNAME:$FILEPATH" which then in turn opens the remote file using tramp. Pretty useful.
How does it handle things like project heirarchy? Does folder browsing work? Can I use an org-roam database? I've used TRAMP to open single files over SSH, but it seems less functional than mounting with FUSE. But I haven't looked into it extensively.
I am definitely going to build out that bash script for the second use case, that sounds excellent. Thanks, I had no idea you could do that
Yes, it works basically everywhere you'd interact with a local file or directory.
For example, you open a remote dired buffer with C-x C-f /ssh:host:/dir/. Afterwards, opening a file or navigating to a directory will open it remotely as well. You can also use project functions or magit seamlessly. I have plenty of bookmarks remotely etc.
Fundamentally, you just prepend "/ssh:[user@]host:" to any path or file operation and things will magically Just Work (tm).
If the system values proportional representation higher than qualification, than I will either abandon my own strive towards excellence or I will actively support changing that system.
I feel the latter option is more likely than abandoning something that is often shaping one's own identity
The system should value qualification higher than other factors. But the system is made up of people with inherent biases that has led to imbalanced representation of the majority over actual qualifications.
You can strive for excellence and equality at the same time. It’s not zero sum.
In my country, in high school, you get grades and at the end you have a standardized test.
Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college.
College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive.
How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times.
I very much applaud the effort in trying to push the boundaries, especially on the front of responsiveness and performance. We are typing on machines with mind-boggling resources and yet editors don't feel snappier(tm) at all, so I appreciate optimizing on that dimension.
However, I can't see myself moving away from Emacs. I've been using it for almost a quarter of a century and have seen many editors come and go in that timeframe: BBEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, Atom and so on. The current hotness is VS Code, but I personally believe that will be abandoned at some point as well.
It would be great if some of the learnings of Zed can be backported to Emacs, however unlikely that is due to the amount of old cruft there.
> It reminds me of the aesthetic of Kubrick's 2001 from the same era.
AFAIR IBM was involved in the making of 2001... But when they learned that it was about a computer "killing people", they wanted all the IBM logos removed.
TL;DR — I agree wholeheartedly and thanks for the chance to blather about a fictional universe I really enjoy, also a huge wall of text about Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’ showing an interesting division within the 40K fandom.
I agree so hard that I would upvote your comment a thousand times if I could. This fan originated ‘prequel’ to the 40k universe is absolutely perfect in both aesthetic and tone.
But I think, despite the wide support this concept has, it displays a really interesting view into some large tonal changes in the fandom and published materials and attitudes. Within the 40k fandom I think there are a group of fans (mostly older now and less involved in the hobby) that disagree with Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’. It is an interesting dichotomy between what 40k has been since the late 90’s and what it was at its start and during its early editions.
Early fans, in the discourse I have seen online and in older GW periodicals, really focused on the political satire and the somewhat eclectic humorous undertones (and often overtones). The tongue-in-cheek demonization of the human faction, via making them so crazily over-the-top authoritarian, WWII-type theocratic fascists, is clearly pitched as a caricature of the then super powerful right wing party, under Thatcher and her ilk. The other factions had less direct satirical targets, but, as an example, the Orcs power of ‘be stupid but believe and results will follow’ can be seen as a critique of the apparent lack of intellectual curiosity and focus on conformity present in the UK, or as a statement on the semi-‘Cargo Cult’ mentality around the rising hyper-consumerism that was beginning to be pushed on the public by plutocrats. There are plenty of other broad and specific satirical or openly political commentary throughout the 80’s material, especially in White Dwarf supplemental writing.
However, then there are the fans that came into the hobby in the late-middle and late 90’s and up til present day. 40k has been a cornerstone, forerunner, and standard bearer for Grimdark(tm) for nearly the last 30 years. This block of fans (by far those most active in the hobby, particularly the lore/fluff/art creation and discussion) absolutely sees Event Horizon as being a perfect fit for 40K. The days of satire are long past, now the factions and characters in the setting are nearly played straight as examples of their respective stereotypes and associated tropes in genre fiction. Granted, 40k established a good portion of the grimdark tropes, but it has remained steadfast in utilizing and somewhat revising those trappings of the genre without apology.
Where 80’s 40K would have by now been lampshading everything in the setting and potentially altering fluff to better satirize the current global political and societal milieu, the current fandom and GW itself are committing to playing the universe out.
I love 40K and think both perspectives have merit, but at the end of the day 40K is still my vibe no matter which side of this divide I may find myself.
To me the silliness of Event Horizon fits the tone of 40K well. People who decided it's supposed to be taken seriously seem the same as those who don't realise Batman isn't a serious way to attack crime or that Judge Dredd isn't an endorsement of militarised police.
This is why I'll pay Relic but not Talisman, the Talisman game is very silly, but Relic sets it in the 40K universe where it makes sense. Or rather, it makes no less sense than everything else.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
I thought Don't Look Up was pretty solid satire. It's not quite so obvious at first, but by the time of the post-credits scenes they really hammer the point home and I found it very funny.
Don’t look up is in position 3 on my ‘to-be-watched’. I’m holding out hope that it is good. I know it is supposed to be a comedy, but I haven’t seen someone fully commit to it being hard satire.
