691–700 of 709 posts
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Why not avoid a car all together, and invest the ~$50,000 then? Even though VW's solution may be cheaper for many, the way it's being portrayed feels more scammy.
Because where I live the weather is awful for half the year and a car is the only reasonable way to get around.
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I recently purchased an old 4Runner from the mid 2000's, I though I would hate it, but it's become my favorite car (that I've owned) of all time. The biggest reason is seeing articles like these, more and more cars are closed off, requiring you to "subscribe" to get all the features of the vehicle. My car doesn't play those games, it's a simple car, no infotainment system, no self driving or autopilot features, no su…
A bit off topic, and pardon my asking, I'm genuinely a bit fascinated to know how you came to buy what seems to be quite a specific vehicle, with the expectation that you would hate it? If it was just cost and utility (i.e. "yeah it sucks, but I can do x,y,z.. with it") I suppose that makes sense, and I'm glad it turns out you enjoy it. It just seems like 4Runners specifically have quite an enthusiastic following, I'…
I've always hated SUVs, but with some lifestyle changes it was clear that my current car then would not suffice and I would need an SUV. So going into this I had the expectation that the car would suit my needs but I wouldn't love the car like some of the previous sports cars I owned.
I wasn't much into offroading before I got this 4Runner and I mainly bought it because it was so popular. Much like if you walk into a new restaurant where half the folks in there order one thing off the menu, you get that because if others are raving about it, there must be something there.
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> I already pay almost $20 per day for public transportation. You may be an outlier. Usually people buy monthly passes for 150-200 dollars. It gets expensive when you have to commute from another town though, like taking the GO Train in Toronto. https://www.ttc.ca/Fares_and_passes/PRESTO/Monthly_Pass_FAQ.... https://www.gotransit.com/en/trip-planning/presto/fare-disco...
CHF 545/month (= ~$600/month = ~$20/day): 1st class national travel card in Switzerland. I chose this instead of owning a car. https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga/... (see monthly prices).
What is the difference between 1st class and 2nd class?
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How do you do those things without driving? Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation?
> How do you do those things without driving? I typically walk. I take buses or trains if I need to go further than walking distance, which is fairly rare. > Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation? That's usually what you'd build to get rid of cars, yes.
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Last I checked, airbags are not required by any government nor are they a standard option on motorcycles. If you wish to wear one, either spend the $400 upfront or pay for the subscription for the months you do ride. The monthly subscription sounds just right for someone who can't afford $400 but can afford $12 to wear an airbag vest on their daily commute on a motorcycle. It's much cheaper than ending up in the ICU.…
It's $400 upfront plus either another $400 or $12 per month subscription. I don't see this company lasting long after the first crash where someone thought they were protected but were not due to payment error/ddos/whatever.
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latency might be an issue though
The average reaction speed of a human to unanticipated situations can be ~3 seconds. Any connection within 1000KMs is generally going to be under 0.1s - an order of magnitude less than a human's.
Playing a game with input lag is terrible because you always need need to do all your inputs ahead of time in anticipation what a frame 100ms in the future will tell you. That might make precise control very difficult, not just in unanticipated situations such as e.g. emergency braking.
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> BMW will sell your on, not you. It does not matter who sells the car. What matters is whether: (the price of used car with heated seats that must be paid for) - (the money already made from renting out heated seats) > (price of a used car with heated seats that are free) The identity of the seller does not alter this equation at all, nor can it flip a loss to a gain.
The seats are in, as a leased car it never belonged to you, but rather BMW. Now, it is up to BMW how they price the seats for you. And how they price them when selling the car of after you returned upon leasing end.
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> special roadway markings I continue to expect something of this nature to be necessary before we get self-driving tech anywhere close to where we want it to be. Cameras simply don't work in all conditions, and even with LIDAR mistakes can be made. There needs to be an external reference point.
But currently eyes do. So theoretically cameras should right?
The physics of the eye are relatively complex, the data processing and recognition we do more so, and the ability to dynamically mentally model a set of controls onto a vehicle of arbitrary shape and dimension even more so.
Cameras are not eyes, the algorithms we use to detect are completely different, the algorithms we use are completely different.
I can't prove that it is impossible, but its different enough that it might be. A bit like saying a tomato and a brocoli are both vegetables with organic matter, but good luck making Tomato Juice with broccoli.
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> With services in particular you indeed don't need one. > No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc. > The person working with a rented service infrastructure can focus on what makes them money: the process. No, that's just not even remotely true. VMs, managed services all require updates that are pushed to the end user of the service. Do…
I think we're talking about very different things here. When I say "No need to ensure the software is up-to-date, no worries about hardware outages, no need to monitor the system, etc. etc." I don't mean these things don't need to happen at some point. The idea is that it's not you, as in the customer, who's responsible for this. If I book a Redis-DB of a given size, I don't have to care about its software version, p…
And what I'm getting at is that you do. While there might exist managed services that don't require this, many managed services nonetheless do. E.g., AWS RDS regularly has updated versions, and it is somewhat up to the customer to schedule them & apply them, and downtime happens during that. RDS is relatively pain-free, and is higher on my list of "would use again" for that reason. But take something like Azure AKS: it's a "managed" service, but upgrades are very much not pain free. I have to manually schedule them, and manually apply them, and deal with fallout (which is often, IME).
> It simply means it's not you, the customer, who has to troubleshoot and fix them.
Again, I disagree. When S3 had its outage, I had to debug why certain requests weren't happening, I had to capture sufficient request IDs to prove to AWS that S3 was in an outage for us, and only then did we get the proper support, and eventually, attention from engineering. My company had to pay an engineer to do that. Sure, I'm not literally debugging S3 actual, but that doesn't mean an engineer isn't needed on the consuming side. Same story with an example with ACR where we were receiving 500s: it took not only capturing 5xx requests & their time of occurrence, it took multiple back and forths to convince Azure that the 5xxs were on their side. (Both of these incidents also demonstrated a real fundamental lack of alerting on the side of the companies managing these services. Our monitors on their services very clearly indicated outage. S3's excuse was that it was "just" our bucket. But the point is that they have no insight into the actual service the end user is perceiving even after the customer raises the support ticket.)
Just recently I was SSHed onto an AKS VM to try to help Azure understand why packets weren't making it from their Virtual network into AKS. Data, from one Azure service to another! (And we didn't figure it out, either; we ended up changing what we were doing anyways, and so the investigation became moot.) And this demonstrates another issue I've hit, a bunch, is that interactions between managed services are also impossible to debug: you end up with two separate services both claiming it isn't them that is out of spec, but nonetheless the end result doesn't work, and nobody on either side has the competence to actually debug the problem.
If you want the downtime to end, it becomes you, the customer that has to debug & troubleshoot these things. And that is a cost that must be accounted for when weighing managed services vs. unmanaged ones.
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CHF 545/month (= ~$600/month = ~$20/day): 1st class national travel card in Switzerland. I chose this instead of owning a car. https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga/... (see monthly prices).
Switzerland! That explains the price! What is the difference between 1st class and 2nd class?