Thats quite an impressive amount of functionality for not much code. Tokei says 4.4k sloc in the ui dir which contains the editor implementation. I was over 25k sloc for a less ambitious editor in typescript recently.
> impressive amount of functionality for not much code. Tokei says 4.4k sloc
Curious about your process here. Do you evaluate repositories this way as a habit? Is there a Web interface for such tooling? Visualization? What are your heuristics to evaluate a project this way?
How does that work? Is that an open source solution like the ZCRX stuff with io uring or does it require proprietary hardware setups? I'm hopeful that the open source solutions today are competitive.
I was familiar with Solarflare and Mellanox zero copy setups in a previous fintech role, but at that time it all relied on black boxes (specifically out of tree kernel modules, delivered as blobs without DKMS or equivalent support, a real headache to live with) that didn't always work perfectly, it was pretty frustrating overall because the customer paying the bill (rightfully) had less than zero tolerance for performance fluctuations. And fluctuations were annoyingly common, despite my best efforts (dedicating a core to IRQ handling, bringing up the kernel masked to another core, then pinning the user space workloads to specific cores and stuff like that) It was quite an extreme setup, GPS disciplined oscillator with millimetre perfect antenna wiring for the NTP setup etc we built two identical setups one in Hong Kong and one in new york. Ah very good fun overall but frustrating because of stack immaturity at that time.
> but LLMs can only learn languages that programmers write a sufficient amount of code in
i wrote my own language, LLMs have been able to work with it at a good level for over a year. I don't do anything special to enable that - just front load some key examples of the syntax before giving the task. I don't need to explain concepts like iteration.
Also llm's can work with languages with unconventional paradigms - kdb comes up fairly often in my world (array language but also written right to left).
You're arguing that accounting is misleading, your argument is that we can ignore the balance and count only the assets column. A summation of assets ignoring liabilities is not a measure of wealth.
Money has lost about about 10% per year in value for the past 5 years. It used to take like a million dollars to retire, but now it's like double that. In addition, nobody really knows how long they might live or how bad inflation could get. Imagine retiring at 50 only to be wiped out, and maybe still on the hook to pay for your own expenses for another 50 years, plus whoever you have in your life who counts on you.
2 millions to retire? Without owning a house? You must be kidding, unless you plan to live only until 60 or move to the cheapest place in the country. Also keep in mind that most health problems start after 50.
To be fair, if you believe all the usual assumptions, then you can expect to earn 5% on that money. That would turn into $100k annually which is enough to live just about anywhere. Now, if you retire on time, I think this may also be tax free. So it's not that crazy, except for the unknowable inflation part of the puzzle. If inflation is also 5%, then your effective loss is 5% per year, so you'd be down nearly 100% after 20 years. Housing costs are crazy, but if you don't need to work then you can easily move to a cheaper place to save money.
€4000 euros plus tax to replace the module that contains the fuse. Insane.
The ford transit custom PHEV costs £4500 to replace the timing belt. Access issues mean dropping the hybrid battery and parts of the sub frame. Compare with the mk8 transit, i've done the wet belt myself on that and it requires no special tools (well, i bought a specific crank pulley puller for £20) and can be done in a day on the driveway. I believe in some markets the replacement schedule is down to 6 years for the new phev due to all the wet belt failures on older models.
So far my favourite brand to work on has been Mazda, the engineering is very thoughtfully done with consideration for repairs.
I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all, specifically various parts of the electrical system. I believe that was the most popular car in the world at that time.
Tesla is remarkably well done. Simplicity is under rated. So much so i bought one with the intention to keep for a looooong time.
Is it insane? I'm working in this field, and I know how quickly you can come up with such a number if you are BMW and you are deathly afraid that someone will get electrocuted while working on your car, driving it or rescuing someone in a crash. It's a safety and liability issue, where they go to great lengths to actually re-certify a battery after crash. The whole thing is setup so, that even the dummy electricians in an average BMW shop can safely certify that this battery is still safe. It's a lot easier to kill yourself (or someone else) when working on a EV Battery than wet belt. Also a lot harder to repair said battery than wet belt. And that goes for all EVs and manufacturers that actually care about people (Tesla, demonstrably does not).
Yes, it is insane. It's a fuse. They must have some stats on how often those things need replacing and it should have been accessible. The customer has - when they buy the car - absolutely no way of knowing what kind of surprises like this there are hidden in the vehicle and besides, it kills the second hand market so you can only trade your vehicle to a BMW dealership where they can absorb those costs for a fraction of what it will cost an end user. BMW is a crap brand in spite of their reputation, we've had one leased Mini in our company and it is the very last time we do business with BMW, that thing was more in the shop than out of it with electrical issues. A friend had pretty much every BMW ever made since he got wealthy enough to afford them (car enthusiast) and his experience is much the same, but he keeps buying them.
Well, he buys them for the same reason people buy Apple products: very performant, look good, and carry a lot of social status.
Otherwise, they make some very questionable engineering decisions for sure. On their motorbikes, you often have to disassemble half the bodywork just to change the battery; that's just beyond stupid. But like Apple, their products are kind of unique, so people deal with it.
BMW bikes have improved. It used to be with the last of the dry clutch flat twins that when the clutch failed (and it would fail), you had to remove the back half of the bike. Literally. As in not figuratively, to avoid doubt. The front half would be left standing, like some bisected cow artwork. Apparently it was a two day job.
I mean, they are generally excellent motorcycles. Their monocylinders are super smooth with great handling.
But often you have to deal with those weird engineering decisions that make repairs annoying. My local garage is a BMW car specialist, and it appears that it's basically the same deal.
Funnily enough, in my youth I visited the BMW factory in Munich, and I was amazed back then. But the maintenance fails to amaze as much, haha.
I think the people that replace fuses are aware of the potential issues around them. The article - which I'm sure you've read so don't take this as commentary on your comment - details that in other electric vehicles, for instance Tesla this is handled quite differently:
"While Tesla’s pyrofuse costs €11 and the BMS reset is around 50€, allowing the car to be safely restored, BMW’s approach borders on illogical engineering, with no benefit to safety, no benefit to anti-theft protection — the only outcome is the generation of billable labour hours and massive amounts of needless electronic/lithium waste."
It's not a choice between 'ridiculously inaccessible with the potential to create more damage than your car is worth' and 'push to reset'. There are many options in between, some of which would be a happy medium between the two that protect both safety, the environment and the customers' wallet. Which BMW's solution clearly isn't.
This fuse blows because a crash was detected and it is to protect the people inside the car and rescuers. The article argument is that it can blow even for small crashes where no damage to the battery occurs but rehabilitating the vehicle still incurs an outrageous cost. This is not a simple over current protection fuse.
$1000 for the module with the fuse seems ok to me. Another $3000 to link the module to the vehicle is the outrageous part.
They are not only linking it to the vehicle, they are doing a LOT of other checks on the battery - that it's not damaged in non-obvious ways. For that you need trained people (it's really high voltage and amperage stuff), tooling AND you really need to be sure you guarantee everything is OK.
Even the basic mechanical disconnect and lowering of the battery is far from simple (and requires A LOT more expensive tools than changing a wet belt - not because they are greedy, but because a lift that can lower such hevy battery costs a lot of money, mostly in materials), and that's not even opening it, making sure you don't get electrocuted when you work on it ect.
Yep, might be there was a known issue that was addressed, at which put in a new one. But just replacing a fuse (or, simultaneously worse and better, just resetting a breaker) without further investigation is just kicking a very spicy can down the road.
I had a doozy of a trip issue on one project, a motor would occasionally (not always, no real pattern, hot/cold/etc. didn’t matter) trip the breaker, requiring a sparky to come out and open up the panel to reset it. We tried a bunch of things, megger-ing the motor, testing peak startup current on each phase with a fancy meter, checking phase-to-neutral current (Larger than you’d think! But this was normal, apparently.)
Everything was normal. In the end all we could think something was weird about the contactor. They took it out (I was off site at the time) and took it down to the substation to test it out.
With three phases connected to the contactor (and nothing connected on the other side) they energised the coil, and with an almighty bang it tripped the main incomer and took the entire sub offline.
Turns out there was a manufacturing defect in the contactor and sometimes for a millisecond, if the phase of the moon was right, it dead shorted two phases.
So there, even when you know everything, you don’t know everything.
> Fuses are not items that should be replaced normally - they are self-destroying emergency protections for the electrical system.
Next time when the fuse switch in my home I'll buy new home. I shouldn't normally switch on auto-fuse again!
Fuse blows, so you know something went wrong, you check corresponding part, fix it, and enable/change fuse. Nothing special. In home perspective - it could be plugging too many energy needy receivers into one outlet.
In that situation, if you bypassed the fuse, or just kept replacing them without figuring out why it blew (too much load on a specific circuit), you very well might burn your house down by catching the wiring inside your walls on fire.
If it’s something that it is easy to connect loads too, then that is probably not super unusual and easy to fix, because people do that all the time, and you know what is happening and how to fix it. But you do need to fix it.
If it isn’t, then that is very concerning, because something caused that overload, and without that fuse your wires would have caught on fire instead of the fuse blowing. Inside your walls.
Either way, fuses are an emergency measure to stop the wires from destroying themselves from overload. They are destroyed in the process of saving your wires.
And if you are doing this all the time? You’ve got a very big problem brewing.
Fuses are necessary on any electrical system, and especially in a car, which is an electrical shitshow (floating ground, high-voltage and high-frequency interference), fuses blow all the time. Granted, usually on a well-maintained and new car it happens very rarely, but saying that it's a catastrophic and concerning event is dumb.
This is a pyrofuse, it does not blow with overcurrent as regular fuse, but blows in the same way airbags blow - when detecting a crash. We can debate if they blow too quick, but if you are designing this system - where and truly lives can be in danger, you would probably err on the side of caution too.
The problem is not that the pyrofuse blows. Safer to be paranoid when it's the the battery pack. The insanity is what it takes to replace it, including throwing away perfectly good parts because of the anti-theft protections.
Usually not by itself though, and if it does that makes it a hybrid fuse, one that has both a pyrotechnical disconnector and a thermal/overcurrent one.
I’ve never had a fuse blow on a car less than 20 years old, and then it was due to shorts due to damaged insulation and
bad grounds due to corrosion, which are legit problems that need to be corrected.
Also, unlike breakers, fuses are generally immune to issues with HF interference and the like - they work through basic thermoelectric effects which iron out all but the most extreme issues. If you’re moving multiple amps in a situation described as ‘RF’, or ‘high frequency’ in a DC system that’s not just noise!
That’s a real problem that needs fixing!
Not fixing the underlying problem behind a blown fuse (or constantly tripping breaker) is how your car (or house or whatever) burns to the ground.
Or you have a Lucas, in which case my condolences.
I'll grant you that, I had a lot of beaters. A typical thing was that a lock solenoid pulled too much current in cold weather and consistently blew the central locking fuse.
This is BMW we're talking about. Their guarantees are worth absolutely nothing if my experience is anything to go by and them accepting liability is not something you should have to pay 4K for if other brands can do the same thing under $100.
They'll refuse warranty on the XDrive if you don't use approved brand and model of tyres so... my bet is on them wanting to extort all the precious money they can from their poor customers
They'll refuse warranty if the difference between thread is too much between front and back as that causes wear of the clutches. Just like you should have the same tire on the same axle.
Or if the tires are not the right size, especially in staggered setups.
If you come from a car that is FWD with AWD capabilities, it doesn't matter as much.
But BMW (at least the ones with the engine mounted longitudinally) which have xDrive are permanent AWD.
I'm sure it depends on market, but I also know 100% that if they will certify the battery as safe, and then you get electrocuted when entering your car because the battery was not safe - they will be on the hook, in all developed markets. No one else, that cares about people safety, do the same thing for under $100. Even Tesla, that almost completely disregards any safety - be it "Full Self Driving" or "let's just change this, without checking if the battery is actually safe", does not do it under $100.
Depends on the brand and the model, there is a trend towards higher voltages because that implies lower currents and wiring is heavy and expensive.
It started out with (nominally, voltage can rise and fall based on charge levels) (30S) 144V packs, (96S) 352V is very common and there are (192S) packs that do 704V (but that are marketed as 400V and 800V respectively).
You don't want to get zapped by any of these, it's middle voltage DC which is quite dangerous, so the fuses definitely have a safety aspect in case of a crash, they are to protect emergency personnel from touching the frame and exposed wiring. But that's in case of a very serious crash, your average encounter with a rabbit might set off the crash detector (which can't really know ahead of time how bad a crash will be) but has extremely little chance of resulting in exposed wiring. In the case of BMW that rabbit could end up being pretty expensive.
> I'd personally prefer e.g. 48V even if that meant some more losses and/or thicker cables.
That's unfortunately not an option. The problem with the 600 to 1000 V domain is that it is able to creep where lower voltage would stay constrained and high enough that it can jump small gaps and start arcing spontaneously. The fact that it is DC makes it more dangerous still. But from an economy and practical engineering perspective it makes perfect sense. Keep in mind that these cars are often built using Lithium-Ion packs (though fortunately we are finally seeing a change here towards safer options, even if they are slightly less dense and more expensive), so the electrocution risks are small compared to the thermal runaway risks.
Running an EV off 48V would lead to a heavily, heavily compromised vehicle. There just aren’t components that can handle 5-10kA of current with a reasonable size.
Charging speed is directly related to the voltage of the pack. Even if your own vehicle had arm-thick cables to support high speed charging at 48v there is no quick charger in the world that could support it. You would be stuck in the bad old days of needing hours to recharge the battery on your EV.
No it's not, only in a practical sense. If you truly had 'arm thick cables', you could definitely charge a 48V battery just as fast. Practically speaking, though, you don't do this because every becomes so unmanageable that you can't build a charger, bus bars, etc, that would be able to match the charging speed.
The problem isn't the cables in your car, it is the cable between the DC fast charger's transformer and your car. They are already thermally limited, which is why you need higher voltages to support faster charging.
Like I said, this assumes you use ridiculous cabling and bus bars. You could design something that handles this, it would just be wildly impractically large and cost way too much money.
Also, the problem is definitely also the cables in your car. Moving to 48V would mean amperage would increase by 10-20x, which would mean cabling thickness would have to increase substantially.
It’d be a massive waste of electrical conductors to use 48V batteries due to ampacity. Higher voltage means lower ampacity and smaller conductors.
You’d need to use silver plated copper buss bar as conductors, 150kW @ 48VDC is 3125 Amps. I’m not familiar with DC ampacity tables, but you’d need (9) 3” conduits each containing (3) #500 MCM conductors for a three-phase 3125A alternating current circuit. One foot of #500MCM copper weighs 1.5 lbs, so each foot would have 27 times 1.5 lbs or 40.5 lbs per foot.
150kW @ 400V is 375A, a single set of #500MCM can carry the current, 4.5 lbs per foot.
The risk of being shocked by 400VDC while using the car is essentially 0, so they use higher voltage to save on conductor material.
There’s no way in hell I’d ever open up an EV battery myself and I know enough to do it safely. DC is incredibly scary, make sure to discharge your start/run caps if you replace them yourself!
What are you talking about? Yes I know how quickly I can get electrocuted when the battery pack is open. I just need to touch two exposed busbars ~30cm apart. Or my tool needs to touch them.
Exactly, you need to touch both plus and minus. You moved the goalpost from getting electrocuted driving your car due to shoddy quality remanufacturing of battery, to getting electrocuted while repairing the high voltage side of your vehicle. Remanufacturing quality does not come into play if you decide to touch plus and minus side of a HV battery.
Sorry I have no idea about this goalpost moving, maybe it's a language barrier. I'm just saying working on it is quite dangerous. But you can easily get electrocuted by shoddy remanufacturing (especially if someone drilled into the battery to replace a single cell - as EV Clinic shows in their videos), that's why there are additional safeties with regards to bad isolation. So I stand by both takes.
There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.
I'm sure BMW would love to not be liable in those cases if they could just decide not to be liable, but inspections and fuses presumably turn out to be cheaper than the settlements they'd otherwise be paying.
If that was the issue you wouldn't be allowed to change your wheels on the side of the road. They'd be locked down to the car and require a complex software procedure to guarantee they were swapped correctly and won't endanger lives.
This is a professional shop raising the issues. They are liable for how the repair is done. BMW is just liable to lose money if people can easily fix their car at some other, cheaper, professional garage.
> Yes, as changing a tire is completely the same tool-and-knowledge level than repairing a EV Battery.
I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous.
A short internet search tells me [1][2] that some sort of tire malfunction causes tens of thousands of accidents and kills hundreds of people every year in the US alone. That doesn't include wheel malfunctions (e.g. wheel coming off). Yet this isn't locked behind some manufacturer approval and proprietary tools.
How BMW chose to approach this is profit driven. The old money printing machine from ICE maintenance, repairs, and spare parts is slowing down so they come up with new ways of extracting money. Like making the lives harder and more expensive for any non-BMW shop to do repairs. They're not alone in this, other brands do the same.
> If you would see how EV Clinic "repairs" Tesla batteries, you would not say they have any concern for liability.
More moving of goalposts mixed with not understanding what liability is, and where it belongs. So you tell me what's Tesla's liability when EV Clinic "repairs" a battery.
> I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous.
Sorry that you feel that way, it was not my intention. But improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire is A LOT less dangerous than crashed EV Battery. And in EU you have a lot of effort going even into this, Police can inspect (and does) the tire from the outside (+ regular mostly yearly MOTs). All new cars have to have pressure sensors in the tire. So I would say EU (where EV Clinic is present) is making a lot of the same strides to make everything around tires safer. And believe it or not, if you go buy any new car in EU, drive it 5 minutes and swap the wheels yourself, it'll flag an error! As the wheels need to have appropriate pressure sensors - that also need to be programmed into the vehicle for a lot of makes.
You think it's profit driven, I don't. Agree to disagree.
> More moving of goalposts mixed with not understanding what liability is, and where it belongs. So you tell me what's Tesla's liability when EV Clinic "repairs" a battery.
I was aiming at EV Clinics liability, not Teslas. And I can guarantee you that both Tesla and BMW take into consideration the bad press if someone, even non official mechanic, repairs their cars and then they kill someone/catch fire. Of course Tesla a lot less than BMW, I even have a feeling that this contributed more to how BMW does things, than profit.
I posted some links with data. You still think that improperly installing the only thing that keeps a speeding car on the road is not dangerous? You disagree even when the data is provided so that sets the bar for what your disagreement means.
BMW has manufactured engines and cars for over a century and historically they were relatively easy to fix by anyone. Their image in the press never suffered because of bad unofficial repairs.
All of this is trying to find a retroactive explanation that fits the result when the real reason is staring you in the face: they make money by making the owner entirely dependent on BMW as much as possible.
Your explanations are flimsy and disproven by data or history.
Improperly installed wheels that have fallen off of vehicles in motion have killed not only the occupants of the vehicle but pedestrians and other motorists (especially motorcyclists) in the past. We also allow people to fill vehicles with highly combustible fluids with little to no oversight, which has caused fires and deaths.
There is a certain level of risk that is inevitable with moving multi-ton machines at lethal speeds, and deciding that this particular issue is where we are going to draw the line is dubious.
The point that "allowing this fuse to be replaced affordably is too much of a safety issue" is a cop out is valid.
If you and BMW are correct - if we take it for a fact that a simple fender-bender can make batteries develop life-threatening faults, which absolutely require a 4k euro inspection that involves complete disassembly and specialist equipment, then that means that EVs are unsuitable for public use.
So either all EVs need to be scrapped forever, or BMW needs to engineer a more tractable solution to the problem, or BMW is overreacting and overcharging customers.
We don't have the full picture. Like I mentioned too many times in this thread, I know EV Clinic head boss Vanja likes to overreact and twists stuff to fit into his narrative. Not saying this one was not a fender bender, but I take all his stuff with a grain of salt. Mostly because I worked with him AND work on the same stuff he does - and it usually doesen't match up to what I'm seeing to the degree he 'dramaticizes'.
In the article, it was mentioned that the issue can be caused by hitting the curb, there's a guy in the comments who says his VW grenaded itself this exact way just while charging (luckily his car was in warranty).
Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000.
Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired.
And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.
Depends on the parts situation. As someone who works on my own cars I've become increasingly distressed at the car parts industry. Even OEM parts, when they are still available, seem to have had a dramatic decrease in quality over the past couple of decades. This is even assuming the correct part is shipped in the first place, which is another problem that has become entirely too common, especially in an age where everything is computerized. So many times you get a box with the correct part number on the outside but the wrong part inside.
If you have the parts and the will it's possible to keep any car running close to forever. That said if you've gotten to the point where the frame is totally rusted out then maybe it's time to consider moving on.
Plastics. Those are the hard to source bits. Plastic doesn't stay plastic for ever and NOS can be dried out just as much as the bits that are in the car.
Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
NL, not a lot of snow but they do put salt on the roads here and it hasn't affected the body at all as far as I can see. My son drives a similar vintage E320 station and it too is still mostly rust free, the only part that seems to suffer on his car is the rear hatch.
Yeah - a car hits a similar valuation around ~15 years of age, meaning a failure of this component limits the financially viable lifespan of a car to this amount - mechanics do engine rebuilds for less money.
The article and comment aren't debating whether the fuse plays an essential role. There's no reason to make the process of fixing the issue after a minor incident expensive, extremely convoluted, and very prone to error.
Making it a very complicated and expensive fix isn't what's saving your rescuer or mechanic from getting electrocuted while working around your car.
> 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.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the battery pack status after a crash is essentially unknown. It should go through a thorough and competently conducted safety inspection or it may kill someone in the future. Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure, but the core idea of an inspection is just unavoidable.
> Of course, this doesn't excuse extra red tape tacked into the procedure
That's exactly it. I understand the importance of safety but reading the list of complaints I just cannot believe that safety is the key driver for the design decisions.
> ISTA’s official iBMUCP replacement procedure is so risky that if you miss one single step — poorly explained within ISTA — the system triggers ANTITHEFT LOCK.
> Meaning: even in an authorised service centre, system can accidentally delete the configuration and end up needing not only a new iBMUCP, but also all new battery modules.
> BMW refuses to provide training access for ISTA usage
Everything about this screams greed driven over-engineering. Since when are error prone processes and lack of access to information better for safety?
We live in a world where everyone justifies taking user hostile actions with some variation of "safety". Software and hardware are locked down, backdoored, need manufacturer approval to operate even when original parts are used, etc.
I won't go into details about 'training access for ISTA usage' - cause I don't know what exactly Vanja means by this - but generally speaking in EU BMW provides the easiest access from all OEMs for aftermarket repair. Everyone has to provide it by law, but BMW has the most straightforward way of registering/paying/using it. For sure not ideal, but far from really being problematic IMHO.
But other than that I mostly agree, I don't think that the over-engineering is greed driven - but the EU Manufacturers (but honestly, even other ones) have a really hard time with anything software based. Be it in car or outside of it. But BMW is far from the worst on that front.
P.S: VW ODIS original diagnostic is based on Eclipse :D
My experience with many German mechanical and electrical engineers is that they have a tendency to think of software like a magical cheap and malleable part on a BOM that can make their arbitrary design work. Especially the mechanical engineers like a nice little black box that they screw on and wire into their machine to make it go brrr once they turn it on.
That kind of thinking along with some calcification of organizational structures in/around R&D teams seems to be the cause for the rather dysfunctional software development at the German car companies. Software dev doesn't thrive in this environment.
Volkswagen probably had the right idea on paper when they created Cariad as a subsidiary software development company to isolate the devs, but then they ruined it by importing their own culture into it again.
I mean, I don't think my perception is warped by what I see. But by "am I willing to risk that my repair will kill someone, because they wanted cheaper repair"? Or even if not kill, maybe just burn down their car (+ house,...). "Am I willing to use cheap tools, not rated for 800V (or 400V) god knows how many Amps?". Because this is not software development - you can be killed REALLY quickly working on a HV EV battery pack. It's no joke. For sure it'll cost more than working on a regular car, where there is danger, but a lot less. And that's just the basic thinking, without going deeper into why its more expensive to repair stuff like this.
I also work in this field, and I feel manufacturers like to exaggerate the dangers as a liability umbrella, aside of disassembling the battery itself it’s very hard to even access the HV components in a dangerous way, every HV connector has an interlocking line that opens the battery internal contactor so other than hacking the HV line with a saw I don’t see how you could “touch” the live wires.
It's not excusable to do this to the product because of some hand wavey napkin math about liability.
Understand how people will interact with your product and then use that information to avoid doing things like routing power where firefighters want to cut and you'll accomplish the same thing without a stupid expensive hair trigger fuse.
I am a problem, but on the other spectrum - OEMs ain't getting the repair €€€ because people like me repair stuff (but a different approach than Vanja).
Then, almost no manufacturer that sells in the EU knows how to do this (Renault is almost the only one that doesen't have pyrofuses in the battery, almost everyone else has). The catch is, the routed power is not problematic, the problem is when something gets squished and redirects that routed power to somewhere else. Which tends to happen in a metal tincan.
As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics. I have a stoplight switch issue in my 86 (from being rear-ended) that I have neglected because it would require pulling out the trunk assembly to fix.
The engineering praise comes from the fact that if you are taking care of it, you will probably never have to work on it until it's well into 6-digit mileage. This remains consistent through pretty much their entire line with the one exceptional black mark really being the RAV4.
I occasionally like to see what the highest mileage Toyota Prius I can find for sale is. They are obviously used as taxis and it's common to find one for sale with half a million miles.
Usually at that point someone puts in a new hybrid battery and sells it to someone else starting out driving Ubers.
They reach a million miles because they're taxis, not in spite of it.
What kills the hybrids is that the kind of people who buy these sorts of "peak appliance" cars tend to be the same kind of people who'll obliviously let some critical fluid run too low. You get orders of magnitude less of that sort of behavior in taxi fleets.
I don't know if this is applicable to hybrids, but taxis attain high mileage with relatively few engine cold starts. Engine cold starts are what kills main and conrod bearings and piston walls. Taxis' bodies may be beat to garbage, the interior might be trash, but the engine and likely the transmission too will be representative of a vehicle with an order of magnitude less kilometers driven. Because they go an order of magnitude further between cold engine starts.
All this assumes proper maintenance, especially oil changes.
Oh yes, the Prius gets even better lifetime because the hardest strain on the engine components is completely negated by the electric motor. If I ever ditch the little mini sports car, I will most likely replace it with another Prius.
In fairness most cars get taken for scrap with an engine which starts and runs. Even when they are running a bit rough it's more often fueling and ignition components than a mechanical problem with the engine components.
That said, the synergy drive is by design a very robust mechanical system. It has no dog gears, clutch or torque converter. I'm sure this contributes a lot to their long life.
> As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics.
I had a Toyota Yaris a couple of decades ago. Very reliable, very few issues. But some routine things like replacing headlights were completely bonkers. You had to wiggle your hand between some sharp metal parts to unscrew the back end of the armature. Sheesh, would it have been that prohibitive to add a few cm of extra space there?
In the abstract, if you have access you can look at the technicians manual, and see how many labor hours are allotted to various common repairs, you can even look at common problems and see what the common outcomes were to repair the vehicle.
Unfortunately, most people don't have access to this highly valuable resource.
Most people need a recommendation for something more current, from people who work on these modern cars daily. The reputation of 25+ year old models can be misleading.
Another source of good recommendations could be insurance companies. Cars with low reliability or very expensive fixes probably need more expensive insurance. But I don't know if this data is public or if you can tell apart the reliability from the repair cost.
If you're in Europe, you can consider Dacia. A lot of their stuff is old Renault parts that they've bought a license to use/manufacture. Get a pre-2023 model with the 1.6 non-turbo non-hybrid petrol engine - it's actually a Nissan HR16DE, which has been in use since 2004. Very reliable and low complexity.
Is it using that Nissan/Renault CVT? That transmission is notorious junk.
I must say that I've been impressed with Dacia. Even the build quality is excellent - on par or beating VW. I've driven on Romanian roads so I can see why they would prioritize such high build quality.
You can get them with a manual transmission, or a dual-clutch automatic, or CVT. AFAIK, the manuals are all decent, although the 6 speed manual on the 4WD models has quite low ratios (no transfer case) so it doesn't have great fuel economy at highway speeds.
Not true unless you equate a normal road (one or two lanes per direction, rarely separated from the other direction) with a highway, which is something else (comtrolled access, separated lanes, safety lane). Top highway speed is 130 kph, express road speed is 110 kph and normal roads it's 90 kph.
At least the last time I was there, 2010, all the intercity highways look like they hadn't been maintained since Ceausescu fell. No matter what the legal limit was, there were very few places where one could drive 90 kph safely. Maybe this has changed - I certainly hope so
Well, it's quite different now after being in the EU for nearly two decades. What you recall is regular roads, that cannot be called highways, but those got fixed as well. The highway infra is still not countinous, but it exists. And Romanian drivers do >90 kph on normal roads as well. Romania and Bulgaria have the highest road fatalities per capita in the EU.
It's not an infrastructure issue, but a cultural one that took off because of lacking infra. Those roads were designed for doing a maximum of 90 kph on them. Drivers were out of options, needlessly wasing time on thd road, so they started driving recklessly.
Pretty much every major safety feature is an order of magnitude less meaningful than the last.
If you wear a seatbelt and eschew the most risky driving behaviors your chances of getting in a crash where the difference between 2005 and 2025 matters are very, very, very, small.
At the very least, modern cars are much heavier and ultimately mass wins. For example, a 2005 Honda CRV weights 3400 lbs while a 2025 is 3900 lbs.
Plus they have tons more auxiliary safety features like lane departure warning, forward collision warning, blind spot detection, better visibility, etc. And they are roomier, have more power, get better gas mileage, and have backup cameras and Apple CarPlay!
Nothing I own has ESC. It's not even close to an issue. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had something with a ton of power but I don't.
None of these technologies prevent you from coming into a turn or stop or other situation too hot which is far and away the biggest problem in snow and is easily doable independent of vehicle equipment.
Sure if you got good tires, good weather, drive very cautiously, have long wheelbase vehicle - it will never be used.
Drive a bit faster on gravel road and FAFO. Puddle on a highway - hope you can brake quick enough to trigger ABS and save your ass. Taking a bend with a bit more speed than you should and there's some dirt - RIP. There's some snow and you drive Smart - you'll be spinning even with the best of tires.
Sure it can be avoided. It saved my ass about 5 times. 4 of which I was simply going too fast, but once it wasn't my fault.
I'd suggest getting car with one and try to spin it out of control either on gravel or snow. Pretty sobering.
Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.
A 15 year old car currently is going for 5 figures - not a shitbox. Not unless it’s a shelll of rust held together by bondo. Then your crash standards or whatever year are meaningless as the chassis may have 25% or less of its design strength.
At least over here where we have mandatory inspections you can find statistics on percentage of cars which fail the inspections, broken down by brand and model. Toyota seems to consistently place in the top.
Those sorts of comparisons are highly misleading because the overwhelming majority of failures for any inspection program are simple stuff that doesn't affect the operation of the vehicle in the base case. Light out, bald tires, brakes below replacement threshold, windshield crack, minor exhaust leak, etc. So what you wind up measuring by proxy is the owner behavior, since that's the dominant factor in how proactively those sorts of things get addressed.
And it ought to surprise nobody that trophy wives in 4runners show up with their vehicle in a statistically different state of repair than single moms in Altimas.
The big failures that you really want to avoid almost never show up on safety inspection data because they typically render the car much less drivable so they either get fixed promptly or the car stops coming around for it's inspection.
That's very interesting. I could argue that you are reading the signal wrong here. You want to go for the car that has the most failures in some cases, since it has survived long enough to fail in minor ways that leave it still able to drive.
If you have car brand A that has a reputation for having catastrophically expensive failures in major components, and car brand B which just keep chugging along for decades, you will probably see an elevated failure rate for brand B since it is still driving, while brand A will not be failing since it has already failed so badly it has been scrapped.
> I hear a lot of praise for toyota but it's from people who haven't worked on a car themselves rather than mechanics and they must be talking about toyotas from a bygone era because i'm not impressed with a 2019 corolla engineering at all
Toyota hybrid powertrains are more reliable than any other company, but other than that they are no longer special.
I've got a '91 Toyota Carina and can attest that it's very easy to work on, my friend and I pulled the engine and gearbox in under two hours with hand tools, but I can't really speak for anything modern.
I am affacted by this as well: the rear knuckle uniball bearing was broken after 3 years (Achsschenkel). Many MY here in Europe have this issue, due to bad parts or too hard suspension.
But there are two other things that make it a bit unfair for Tesla in comparison to other brands:
Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real breaks. Simple solution is to force breaking from time to time (I.e. breaking in neutral). Another aspect is, that all the other brands have a mandatory inspection from the manufacturer before the cars will be tested by the independent check. This avoids that they will fail it, because the car will be repaired before it is checked by the independent inspection. This is not mandatory for Teslas.
> Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten br[e]ak[e]s - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking instead of the real br[e]ak[e]s.
That's something that they should have taken into consideration when designing the car.
Service intervals. Other OEMs will prompt a service interval at X thousand miles/km to go pop in and have it looked at by a dealer, probably swap out your cabin air filter, upsell you on some new wiper blades, etc.
ICE vehicles would normally catch these issues sooner because you'd be pulling in a lot more often for oil changes (and a quick mechanical inspection is typically a courtesy at that time).
>Often the cars fail official inspections because of rotten breaks - this happens when your drive carefully and the Tesla is using regenerative breaking
Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
The Teslas have far stronger regen than other brands. Have you ever wondered why Tesla's Long Range models have 500 horsepower? It's not for increased acceleration power, it's for increased braking power. Far less energy is wasted on the friction brakes in a Tesla.
German TUV thinks Teslas are horrible because apparently nobody is servicing their brakes on a regular enough interval so every time Teslas get pulled in for their 2 year inspections after 3 years of ownership they keep failing out on brakes and suspension, but VWs are the pinnacle of perfection because they slam 10K service intervals in your face.
(Of note: I drive a hybrid vehicle, and over 125,000+ miles of ownership I have replaced my front brakes once and my rear brakes three times now in five years.)
I'm at 125000 on my Long Range Model 3. I plugged a tire last month and photographed brake caliper - like new. I could not believe it. I can upload a photo if you'd like.
.... I also didn't add the rest of my environmental conditions like the fact I'm in an absolute rust belt in the winter.
NYS DOT does some good work with the salt and sand up here, heavy on the salt. Mother Earth has some high blood pressure up here as she turns rotors to rust.
My calipers (all around) are also in excellent condition after 150k and I've been told that it's an absolute surprise I didn't destroy them with how low the pads went on the last change...
> Huh? Every EV uses recuperative braking, how is this special to Tesla?
It‘s not. But there are some newer EVs (e.g. Mercedes and VW) that track brake usage and will periodically switch to using the disk brakes when there‘s danger of corrosion.
I am no Tesla fanboy. But let’s face the truth. Teslas leave factory with end of line check. Then they are driven more than average cars for 3 years without any maintenance. Then go for check. And surprise surprise, the first model Ys were not well made. I bet with 1000-1500€ maintenance cost over these 3 years the TUV result would be dramatically different.
Btw, my petrol car had ugly rusty rear brakes. No way to pass the check. The car had manual handbrake and I used in every highway exit to slow down and removed rust.
It's speculative price gouging. Calling it "surge pricing" doesn't stop erosion of consumer trust in the market. Watch now as more people more readily jump to price fixing conclusions. Not helped by the inevitable further increase in speculation through feedback loops and the resultant volatility.
First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing". A lottery is a better principle than "surge pricing". In the case that someone over purchased, they're free to dispose via secondary market if the value to them is lower than the out of stock price. I.e. decentralised pricing (and profits). Secondary market sales are just more efficient, they occur at negotiated prices that reflect true individual valuation, not the retailer's speculation.
I'd rather reward diligence and personal responsibility - if you monitor market trends, anticipate needs, and act quickly, such as buying RAM ahead of a known upcoming supply crunch, you're rewarded with access at the original price. Rather than passive reliance on wealth to solve problems. First come first served values effort and foresight. Scarcity is managed through time and effort rather than money.
> First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing".
This is called a price ceiling, and it's a bad idea with a track record of failure and significant harm.
I'd rather pay extra and get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance and otherwise be forced to go without or buy from scalpers for the same price I would have paid anyways. This is the purpose of prices. So the people who really need it can buy it, and those who are borderline about the purchase decide to opt out.
If you're concerned with wealth inequality or one large buyer cornering the market, there are better ways to address those problem than prices ceilings.
The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling. That's a different thing. That requires more than simply swapping surge pricing with first come first served. You've created a strawman.
> I'd rather pay extra and get what I need with 100% chance
False dichotomy. Neither approach increases supply. Of course according to economists who can hand wave away bullwhip effects with simple "this model assumes X" statements that go unquestioned in the conversations which cite the findings of the given model but i digress. According to economists, both approaches do increase supply, the theory goes that the price gouging retailer invests in more factory capacity. Or the factory owner buoyed by vibrant secondary market activity views increased production investment as a safe bet. Maybe there's some truth in the latter...
> If you're concerned with wealth inequality
I'm concerned with lazy financial engineering over hard work. Why should the scrappy but innovative startup be excluded from resources over the sclerotic incumbent with a deeper wallet?
> The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling. That's a different thing. That requires more than simply swapping surge pricing with first come first served. You've created a strawman.
What is it then? If you allow the price to increase, there is no need to enforce a different rationing mechanism. The only reason to think of implementing the alternate rationing mechanism is if the good isn't being rationed. If you insist on the previous, lower price, then that is a price ceiling in so many words, with the consequence of needing your rationing mechanism. If you allow a higher price, then your alternate mechanism is unnecessary.
The bullwhip effect is the whole reason why retailers may want to hold greater product stock in the first place; to absorb transient demand fluctuations and not have to pass them on in full to the supplier.
And a "scrappy but innovative" startup has an obvious interest in being able to source the DRAM or other goods they require, even at higher prices.
> The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling.
If you force companies to price products lower than what they want, then you have a price ceiling by definition.
> Neither approach increases supply.
I didn't mention or allude to supply at all, although it's true that price ceilings also decrease supply (less so if there is monopoly or collusion, but they still do).
I was talking about resource allocation. The person who needs a new system because their previous computer broke will be willing to pay the extra money, but the person who already has a DDR4 system with a 5950x that runs their games well enough will be content to hold off on their AM5 upgrade to DDR5 because the marginal improvement isn't worth the extra $400.
If you have a price ceiling like what you proposed, the person with the DDR4 system may buy the DDR5 that they don't really need 1 day earlier than the person who actually needs the DDR5, creating a misallocation of resources.
(that's an example of the more abstract principle at play).
Theoretical arguments aren't even needed here. The empirical history of price ceilings is there for you to google.
If you didn't know that what you were proposing is a price ceiling, and you thought that I was talking about supply instead of resource allocation, then I mean this with no offence intended but you should study elementary economics before forming confident opinions on the subject. Society is in a vulnerable point with cost of living pressure and we don't need more energy behind these harmful populist ideas.
Price ceiling definition: a government-imposed legal maximum price
My original comment: First come first served is a better <snipped for brevity>
This is not a legal maximum price, this is a legal maximum in the derivative of price.
> I didn't mention or allude to supply at all
>> get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance
How do you square these two statements? One claims 100% supply certainty when no such thing exists in this context. Without making certain assumptions (unstated, but ludicrous, assumptions are rife in economics discourse), you can't state much of value about which buyer will get the goods in the surge pricing model, you especially cannot say that the buyer with the larger wallet will always win. Think for a second what assumptions you've made to this point in the conversation - you're still down the rabbit hole of price ceilings in the comment chain thus far.
>> The empirical history of price ceilings is there
Not disputed but as per your call out of definition above, not relevant.
To make the point further - the name for a limit on rate of change of price is not a price ceiling, anymore than the 0-60 time of a car is its top speed limit.
>> you thought that I was talking about supply instead of resource allocation
My challenge to you is to name the assumptions you've identified in your reasoning around resource allocation. I'm confident i can point out the deficiencies in your model because that is the nature of models.
>> you should study elementary economics
That's a great idea, a really good follow on from that is to identify logical fallacies you discover i. that process, especially those so accepted that it's not a stretch to say they are underpinning the discipline. A good example of that would be the conjectural origin theory of money but i digress.
> My original comment: First come first served is a better
Retailers are first come first serve. The first customer to buy product gets the next unit of inventory.
If you’re trying to argue that retailers need to be forced to set a retail price for each unit of in-stock inventory and then be forced to sell each unit at that price later no matter what the market rate does in the mean time, that’s an awful idea.
I’m sure you don’t mind when retailers decide to give discounts or put things on sale, do you? If the market price drops, they reduce selling price. Same thing when market rate goes up.
Forcing retailers to price things how you want doesn’t change supply and demand. It would only force retailers to add extra margin into their prices to account for the added risk of the government forcing their hand in sale prices.
> It's speculative price gouging ... if you monitor market trends, anticipate needs, and act quickly, such as buying RAM ahead of a known upcoming supply crunch, you're rewarded with access at the original price
The word for "monitoring market trends, anticipating needs and acting quickly" is, well, speculation. Why should a retailer not be allowed to speculate and hold more product stock when they anticipate a future crunch? In fact, the whole reason prices have become so volatile right now is that this supply crunch was not properly anticipated.
The reason why retailers are not "price fixing" is that price fixing involves setting an artificial ceiling on total production; retailers are not in a position to do this, and there is no evidence at all that DRAM makers are doing this either.
> First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing"
First come first serve must means enterprising individuals would buy as much as they could afford and then immediately relist it on Facebook Marketplace for the actual market rate.
Thinking that retailers could keep RAM prices low and also keep it in stock for you is irrational.
If your goal isn’t to make cheap RAM available to you, then what even is your goal?
Are you just angry that retailers are making a little extra temporary profit on their in-stock inventory? Is the goal to punish them for behaving rationally and understanding basic economics?
This perspective is pretty silly. If you don't know the price you set it up for auction. The Ebay auction prices in German are in the $400 range for 2x16GB. The retailers aren't particularly expensive. Maybe $10 to $20 more.
>I'd rather reward diligence and personal responsibility - if you monitor market trends, anticipate needs, and act quickly, such as buying RAM ahead of a known upcoming supply crunch, you're rewarded with access at the original price. Rather than passive reliance on wealth to solve problems. First come first served values effort and foresight. Scarcity is managed through time and effort rather than money.
Are you really going to discount the effort made by the manufacturers to produce the product? You know, giving them money is the best way for them to produce more products. A lucrative DRAM market will also make it easier for new competitors to enter the market.
Also, if everyone does what you suggest, then all that will happen is that the price will rise extremely rapidly before the actual supply crunch even happened. That sounds like what is currently happening.
I think that original post was taken down after a short while but antirez was similarly nerd sniped by it and posted this which i keep a link to for posterity: https://antirez.com/news/150
"Well, the first problem I had, in order to do something like that, was to find an archive with Hacker News comments. Luckily there was one with apparently everything posted on HN from the start to 2023, for a huge 10GB of total data. You can find it here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news and, honestly, I’m not really sure how this was obtained, if using scarping or if HN makes this data public in some way."
This is funny to me in a number ways. I doubt anyone would be interested in post-2023 data dumps for fear it would be too contaminated with content produced from LLMs. It's also funny that the archive was hosted by huggingface which just removes any sliver of doubt they scarped (sic) the site.
What would be a good example of the kinds of things a 100 line function would be doing?
I don't see that in my world so i'm naively trying to inline functions in codebases i'm familiar with and not really valuing the result i can dream up.
For one, my tests would be quite annoying, large and with too much setup for my taste. But i don't think i'd like to have to scroll a function, especially if i had to make changes to the start and end of the function in one commit.
I'm curious of the kinds of "long script" flavoured procedures, what are they doing typically?
I ask because some of the other stuff you mentioned i really strongly agree with like "Focus on separating pure code from stateful code" - this is such an under valued concept, and it's an absolute game changer for building robust software. Can i extract a pure function for this and separately have function to coordinate side effects - but that's incompatible with too long functions, those side effectfull functions would be so hard to test.
> What would be a good example of the kinds of things a 100 line function would be doing?
If you have a shopping list with 100 items, that does not mean the complexity of that is high.
Longer functions are worse, everything else being equal, but sometimes they have very low complexity.
To answer your question: if you have, for example, a function that returns for a key a certain value (basically a dictionary) for example for some translations that can be a very long function. Of course you could take the data out of the code into a data file, etc. but there is nothing wrong on principle about a function like that. A function like that is closer to extract state into data than one where that gets refactored into many small functions.
> What would be a good example of the kinds of things a 100 line function would be doing?
For me i see it alto in older video game engines with a switch statement that has 100s of possible states that need to be taken into account.
That kind of code is less common these days but its nice to be able to see all the possible states in a single switch statements vs them all being abstracted away in multiple classes that handle a subset of each state transition.
This is one case where having a super long function makes readability far better than abstracting away the states into multiple classes that all need to be read to understand the state of the world.
I'm also a bit jealous of how clean the reframe usage model is, i really liked the dominoes explanation when i first learned about it. https://day8.github.io/re-frame-wip/dominoes-60k/
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