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Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

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Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#41

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Retric wrote: post #22
Jtsummers wrote: post #10

Re QA: To quote Dodge (via Deming), "You can not inspect quality into a product." This poster seems to think well of the QA team they had. However, It doesn't matter how great your QA team is, if the quality isn't in the system the QA team can't put it there. All they can do is tell you that you're making poor quality products, and attempt to inform management (as QA rarely has real authority) who should then act on…

QA done well is more than testing. It's managing risk and ensuring the process matches your risk tolerance. Car entertainment systems and Car breaking systems can be handled differently because the results of failure are different.

This is OK if you can guarantee 100% separation of concerns, but the news reports where hackers were able to take over control systems in the car through bugs in the entertainment system should be a huge note of caution.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#42

Post by FLUX-YOU »

mandeepj wrote: post #29
ddevault wrote: post #11

I used to work at SpaceX on the team that did a piece of software called "WarpDrive". It was a massive monolithic ASP.NET application, with large swaths done with ASP.NET WebForms and a slow frontier of ASP.NET MVC gradually growing when I was working there. This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. Elon is a big Windows f…

> This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. They could have bought something off the shelf. Not sure what was the value in building everything from scratch

Maybe all of the contractual obligations for existing products were not a good idea

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#43

Post by maym86 »

compostable wrote: post #37
GW150914 wrote: post #4

Well, that was a butter clenching read. It’s not hard to understand why their chip designers bailed as soon as possible, and they seemed to perpetually bleed technical talent. Is this a matter of incompetence or the usual anything-to-win “move fast and break things” approach? The latter fits better with their marketing vs. reality gap on “autopilot” and subsequent crashes.

>> butter clenching Excuse me, I am a native English speaker and I do not understand this reference

butt clenching

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/buttock-clenching

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#44

Post by DCoder »

compostable wrote: post #37
GW150914 wrote: post #4

Well, that was a butter clenching read. It’s not hard to understand why their chip designers bailed as soon as possible, and they seemed to perpetually bleed technical talent. Is this a matter of incompetence or the usual anything-to-win “move fast and break things” approach? The latter fits better with their marketing vs. reality gap on “autopilot” and subsequent crashes.

>> butter clenching Excuse me, I am a native English speaker and I do not understand this reference

When autocorrect meets "buttock-clenching", I'd guess.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#47

Post by ryeguy_24 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #15
ryeguy_24 wrote: post #13

Based on some of the details within these tweets, I would assume this person provided enough information to identify himself/herself at this point. Do software engineers typically have confidentiality agreements that prohibit releasing proprietary information?

Yes, but he's already marked as "former", so recovery is limited. See the Waymo lawsuit.

So, after separating from company, you can release all proprietary information and you'd have limited liability? I thought there would be larger recourse. Not familiar with law though.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#49

Post by bradleybuda »

At DEF CON 23 there were two car-hacking talks that made an impression on me: one about hacking a Tesla [1] and one about hacking a Jeep [2]. FWIW, I came away thinking that the software architecture of the Tesla was light-years ahead of what Jeep (and presumably many other legacy manufacturers) was shipping:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OobLb1McxnI

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#50

Post by jasonmaydie »

sz4kerto wrote: post #8

Why is this interesting or surprising? Of course almost all challengers have hacky tech under the hood because they don't have the resources. Winning from that position is possible not because of generally better tech but by delivering something that the incumbents don't. Remember the demo of the first iPhone (vs the huge expertise of Nokia). Or how Microsoft won the desktop starting from a single user, cooperative m…

well it's interesting because it gives an insight for those of us who aren't there how things actually work.

Musk fan or not, you can't deny this has no interest

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