This is the opposite of what I want, guess I should buy a low mileage used Tacoma and hope it lasts for the rest of my life
Software is eating the car
211–220 of 549 posts
Re: Software is eating the car
#212Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code…
"Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container." - Nathan Myhrvold
Re: Software is eating the car
#213What if cars were like TVs? Some would be smart with integrated software, and some would be dumb and require a "stick" to make it smart. I'd certainly be tempted to buy the dumb version and have the flexibility to try different software experiences.
It's getting hard to find dumb TVs anymore.
FYI anyone who is looking: Sceptre makes dumb 4K TVs up to 75" (sold at Walmart).
Re: Software is eating the car
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope just because we have two more industries that have gone the same transitions, aeronautical and aerospace. Back in the day airplanes where just knobs and levers, and we didn't have the reliability that safety that we have today. With aerospace, I mean, software engineering as a discipline started with aerospace! If we write "starup code" (i.e. CRUD web…
I'm sure you didn't mean it quite so bluntly, but characterizing the history of aviation safety as a triumph of computer control systems over analog ones misses the mark by a pretty wide margin--even if we're just talking about the advances that only computers have provided. Probably the only way a modern car is technologically less sophisticated than a passenger aircraft is its inability to substantially steer itsel…
> One of my perennial frustrations with current tech is the idea that putting a computer in the control loop necessarily makes things safer.
I completely agree with you! A simple electronic component is a lot more fragile that a mechanical counterpart that is unfazed by ESD, vibrations or whatever other things that can kill a electronic component, or a circuit board for that matter.
My point is more along the lines that a computer in a control loop makes things different, not necessarily safer. But with the flexibility that a computer brings to the mix, if used properly a computer can add some safety features that would be hard to implement with only analog/mechanical parts.
It seems to me that we have reaching a ceiling with what we can do with mechanical systems, although I do believe that we often get lazy and opt for software convenience instead of using mechanical reliability where it would be beneficial.
So all in all, computer control systems are not safer just in themselves, but they can be, if not in reliability, at least in monitoring health and providing warnings before things are critical (i.e. a temperature reading instead of waiting to see smoke coming of the hood of a car)
Re: Software is eating the car
#215Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code…
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Re: Software is eating the car
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controls you can feel for seems to be a lost art. (Looking at you, Touch Bar.)
Isn't touch bar is at the edge of vision, so theoretically isn't that distracting? Neither of my Macs have one of these. This is why I'm asking.
It's not that it's visually distracting that's the problem - it's that you can't feel where the buttons are without looking.
And if you aren't looking you'll accidentally do things you didn't mean to, like press escape, or turn your mac off when trying to hit back space.
Re: Software is eating the car
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope just because we have two more industries that have gone the same transitions, aeronautical and aerospace. Back in the day airplanes where just knobs and levers, and we didn't have the reliability that safety that we have today. With aerospace, I mean, software engineering as a discipline started with aerospace! If we write "starup code" (i.e. CRUD web…
I don’t want to imagine how Program Alarm 1202 looks like on a SpaceX Starship running Chromium instances on Intel Atom, the latter half of which is how they’re planning to do it.
The stuff running inside Chromium on Intel Atom processors is not mission critical.
Re: Software is eating the car
#218Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code…
I would prefer a car that is almost entirely mechanical because mechanics make way more sense to me than software. The old crusty mechanic I take my 20+ year old 4Runner to for service complains about this a lot. Cars don’t make nearly as much sense to him as they used to. Just to be clear, I appreciate improved safety that technology brings to cars, and I know I can’t have it both ways.
You can't have high tech safety features without high tech, but you can limit the complexity of electronics, software, and in-car networking to a bare minimum, which is arguably not even being attempted, at least in some markets.
Re: Software is eating the car
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know the dark pattern of presenting a license agreement over and over until it's accepted? I predict one day someone will make the argument in court that they always declined the EULA (perhaps the one in their car) hundreds of times, but one day accidentally brushed "accept" with their finger, and that doesn't constitute legal acceptance, especially since they've demonstrated an effort to decline the EULA, but be…
If I'm the dark pattern developer I'm not logging when the EULA is accepted or how many times they declined it.
>If I'm the dark pattern developer I'm not logging when the EULA is accepted or how many times they declined it
This cuts both ways. If the user can show one case of their rejecting the EULA without it being logged, they can then make the claim--correctly or not--that they repeatedly rejected it. If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted or rejected, proof of its movement would be sufficient to show repeated rejection.
More pointedly, willfully hiding information like this could backfire massively with the courts or law enforcement.
Re: Software is eating the car
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast, vast majority of all new cars sold today either don't have any kind of uplink to the cloud, or can have that capability easily removed (e.g. OnStar from GM). It's really only some of the EVs (the non-compliance ones like Tesla, really) that are software-heavy and blazing a new anti-privacy trail.
Don't they still record and just upload when you go to the dealer and they plug in the cable?
There is an extremely limited amount of diagnostic data recorded by most cars (Tesla aside) - absolute limits, performance counters, and freeze-frame diagnostic data. There simply isn't much storage, and again, Tesla aside, most manufacturers don't want to have to buy high-write capable flash of the sort that could cope with constant logging.
The most invasive is probably airbag blackbox data, which is stored upon deployment and not routinely uploaded besides as part of an investigation.
As far as I know based on extensive reverse engineering of many modern European vehicles, no location data is routinely stored or uploaded to a dealership tool by any of them.