> People will buy nice electric cars that aren't riddled with quality issues.
Anecdata: my father bought a VW ID.4 1 year after I got my M3 (2019). The MY wasn't available yet. VW ID.4 has been at the garage 3-4 times/year for various (mostly software) issues. Same with my mother's Peugeot e-208. My M3 got the latest software update the next day after an imperfect firmware update made autopilot sometimes unavailable, all done with the technicians via the Tesla app.
You can choose between amazing efficiency and software, and perhaps a 1mm-off panel on 1 out 1000 vehicles, or perfect esthetics but horrible software.
Teslas are still not perfect, and a stronger QA would definitely make for a better image, I agree. Still, Tesla has made a lot of progress, you don't find as many people complaining about QC/panel issues anymore on reddit. But competitors still have a ton of catching up to do.
The eternal optimism of Tesla fans continues to astound me. The cybertruck has just been recalled because the soap they used to install accelerator pedals made them slip off, and you're telling me people are complaining less about panel issues?
Other manufacturers have recalls too, for equally dangerous conditions, but only Tesla ever makes the news (I'm not defending Tesla, just proving a point). CT has been out for ~4 months, 4k units delivered, platform engineered from scratch, new low voltage system, steer by wire, ...... inevitably something will slip.
Compare a brand-new everything to minor updates to existing cars:
While I agree that Musk's personality is damaging Tesla a lot lately, and it lost a huge chunk of the accumulated goodwill, I still don't get how people manage their daily lives then. Shall we stop buying Nestle products? Luxottica? Oil companies? Clothing products? The list goes on.
Besides that, the closing sentence and some comments regarding stalks and buttons demonstrate once again that many people have never driven a Tesla for more than a 2h rental:
> Of course, there is much more competition today, and Tesla’s designs are getting old, and looking a little stale. Their huge decade-long software advantage is now probably somewhere in the 2 -4 year range.
The design is minimal due to aerodynamic reasons, and competitors have essentially the same lines, with perhaps a slightly more rounded accent to it. Interiors are minimal because half the point of Tesla is save on costs on 200 buttons that you never use once. The software makes up for it 99% of the time.
Similar priced cars in the same segment are still nowhere near the efficiency or software quality of Tesla. Yes, FSD is still in beta, sure, but the infotainment experience is still unmatched, and it's not a 2-4 year headstart, it's more in the 5-10 year range.
Millions of people boycott Nestle products still, with no downside to their lives beyond missing out on Kitkats. Not driving around in an advert for a right wing nutjob isn't going to negatively impact anyone's life.
Yes, but you need to build a similar network of hydrogen pumps as we already have for gas, hydrogen requires more power and infrastructure to store, requires more energy to extract, cars need pressurized tanks, ............
Batteries are simply cheaper, and require far less infrastructure.
"We fucked up the air globally in <50y, lets fuck up the ocean faster to un-fuck the air issue temporarily".
But seriously, we lack the understanding to do local geo-engineering, much less at global scale. Hard pass.
Reducing CO2 emissions by going green and EVs (and not just EV cars), and removing CO2, is a longer but much more controllable and stable approach. I just wish we had better battery technology already, but we spent the last 100y deluding ourselves that a finite non-renewable energy source, that messed up our only biosphere, was the only course of action.
I run kubernetes as... a standalone node. I run it on a dedicated server with two disks on btrfs RAID1, with a subvolume for each pod that needs it (hostPath).
Not the minikube version, not the kubespray version: the kubeadm version, installed by hand and minimally tweaked (NodePorts 0-65535), with dual-stack networking support.
I have ~3 tenants, 5-15 pods each, and managing this configuration with docker was a steadily increasing pain for the last few years:
- I had docker-compose split-files for each service for each tenant to keep a consistent state, so I used a simple bash script to generate a really long docker-compose line to bring everything together, networking was a real pain
- Dual-stack support in docker does not exist/work in compose v3 to this day, but v2 has it
- Querying the configuration and state of a container was an exercise in debugging the output
- For certificates, I had to run letsencrypt/certbot externally (2 tenants with separate accounts for wildcard certs), but use traefik in docker-compose (the syntax pain was on top of the rest, of course)
Kubernetes simplified all the pain points above:
- I still have the service split-files, but I don't care about network addresses and links between pods anymore, just their names
- better isolation between all the architecture points, and clearer definition and integration
- IPv4&IPv6 native just working
- "describe" gets me all the information I need in a pretty format, "get type name -o yaml" if I need the configuration
- standard nginx ingress + cert-manager, and I can have multiple tenants without resorting to hacks
DBs are regular containers in the pod that requires them, just like any other container. Daily subvolume snapshots are small and effective to make sure the data is safe.
Kubernetes is a much better orchestrator than docker compose, availability is a plus if you really need it. You don't need to build an HA control plane plus 3 workers if you have no use for it.
I work in a small software shop (~10 people), and besides me there's only one other guy that could take up the task of running wires all over the office, the others are developers, not sysadmins. We don't have >3k$ "business" desks, we have Ikea desks. Our office is essentially an apartment converted to office. It does have ethernet wall sockets in each room, but it's only 2 per room.
We've been talking about wiring the office properly for years, but:
- we'd have to run wires on the ground from the wall sockets and protect them properly, otherwise creating potential safety hazards (people tripping, water, ...)
- we'd have to add a switch per room, to place somewhere, but the only available places are the cable-holding Ikea desks (not exactly reliable)
- we'd have to run and hold cable on each desk, for.... people that mostly use Macbooks, most of which only have USB-C ports; we'd have to buy expensive docks just to fix the ethernet cable in place, when all our screens have power-delivery over USB-C already and everyone has wireless keyboard/mouse
To us the investment is simply not worth the effort, not just in money, but also in time spent implementing it and maintaining it. It's simply not a priority, we have applications to deliver.
I did work in banks and big corps, and there I always had wired desktops with wifi being reserved for guests (with certs generated by the host ofc). I can totally see small/medium-sized companies growing organically over the years and not getting this addressed as a top priority, as you said wifi is fast enough nowadays.
- quality has been steadily and consistently improving
- they have the SC network that everyone is adapting to
- they managed to slash prices, reduce per-car costs, while still getting the average auto industry margin - there is no EV competitor that can do this without selling at a loss, at the moment (if they do, everything becomes an optional and you get back to 50k$)
- finally a Non-US-sized vehicle is going to be released in 2025 - definitely 2y too late due to the CyberFuckup (seriously, the only market capable of buying this is the US)
Everyone keeps comparing to BYD, but I just read today that the software quality and compat for charging are simply not there yet. The other manufacturers are even more behind.
What I see/think:
- Wall Street pseudo-science of EPS has been flawed since forever: the same analysts expect Tesla to keep growing >50% YoY, and call for doom if it misses 600mln out of 25bn, or 0.03$ out of 0.71$ (I see this all the time also with other stocks, esp. in the last ~4y)
- Tesla's valuation is heavily reflecting the expected future developments, and has been inflated for some time; this is not necessarily a bad thing, but a market correction was to be expected and long overdue
- Musk's cult and news outlets created this alternate reality where having a Tesla product expresses approval of the CEO: I don't buy it, and I don't care; I own a M3 and plan to get a Powerwall because they're the best products in the price range
- Musk's behavior is concerning, I'd rather see him out at some point, but I fear Tesla would lose its most powerful asset: the constant, enormous push to innovate and break boundaries; if Tesla were to become the regular car company, it would probably disappear in less than 5y
- I hear all the time on Reddit that Service Centers are a hit and miss (esp. in US), this will need to be addressed ASAP not to break user trust (along with repair costs); my experience has been flawless luckily
- their products are way superior to competition for the price range, other car companies cannot get even close to the efficiency and reliability of Tesla vehicles, not to mention the UX/software updates (not FSD)
- FSD 12.1 video released a couple days ago is impressive, I finally get the feeling we're getting close to something usable (I don't have it and will very likely never buy it)
- CyberFuckup should have been canceled before prototype phase, and deposits refunded; it was and still is a massive resource distraction on the way of bringing EVs to the masses
- a 25k$ vehicle should have come sooner, it's coming, and will sell like crazy when available, esp. outside the US
- I hope storage and solar won't be forgotten, all other solutions I've seen so far are not so well integrated with the house, or as easy to control via a phone app
Some anecdata from daily cold booting my MacBook Pro 16' 2019:
- Slack is very reactive, displays a spinner in <2s, takes a few seconds (<10s) to fully load and draw - perfectly acceptable
- Outlook (new experience mode) is a bit slower, takes a few seconds extra to draw, but is still reasonably fast and manageable considering the amount of data it handles - still reasonable, although a bit laggy at times
- New Teams ® (released somewhen Q3-Q4 2023) takes >15s to open or display anything, >15s to draw, >5s to switch across organizations, >1s switching chat tabs in the same org
I'm not spending 3k$ every 2-3 years because "my computer is the problem".
We need to force devs to use and test on non-workstation machines, that don't have 64GB of RAM and the latest CPU/NVMe drive, especially for Electron apps, which open an entire browser copy for each application.
The only reason you would need to spend 3K is because of Apple. You could spend half that and get a similar/better computer that would last as long.
Or spend as much and get something that would significantly outlast any Mac of the same price, at least from a performance point of view.
Apple has been absurdly milking its consumer for quite a while now, without much merit in the form of technological advantage.
It's not the fault of software companies if Apple hardware is overpriced, they don't have to care, their hardware are cheap enough...
Been driving a M3 since 2019: at this point I feel most of the people complaining about Tesla UX have never really driven one for more than a rental day.
Yes, everything is in the tablet, but it's super-responsive (even on the Atom CPUs from pre-2021 models), essential buttons are well placed, and the car does a good job of adjusting AC (air temp/flow/outlets) and lights automatically. Once you get to know the car, it really does a good job of staying out of your way most of the time.
Compared to my father's ID.4 or my mother's Peugeot e-208, Tesla's software already had a 10y advantage in 2019, and it still has at least that much after 5y. Their car is laggy, menus are too deep to navigate during drive, lots of useless options placed alongside common ones.
I do agree with jnsaff2 that I probably wouldn't like the Highland refresh with no stalks and no USS, I also feel these two things were better kept as they were.
...with which you still need to fight with MongoDB.
I'm still running with a Turris Omnia as router, which served me very well for >7y, added a small legacy SSD, managed to setup everything and worked for a while, but TO is armhf architecture, which mongodb quit packaging for with version 3.x. LXC containers for armhf (Debian/Ubuntu) stopped being released too by official channels. But the latest shiny Unifi app requires MongoDB >= 4.x (Unifi app >=7.5).
"Ok, I'll just buy one of those small embedded boxes": purchase Odroid H3+ (x86_64), install stuff, add docker, start up mongodb5 container annnnddd... illegal instruction! Turns out with MongoDB 5 they decided that with pre-built packages everybody has AVX instructions anyway, and packages are built with the expectation AVX instructions are present... which is not always true for low-power devices or even servers (the Intel Jasper Lake CPU of the Odroid H3+ was released in Q1'21).
Anecdata: my father bought a VW ID.4 1 year after I got my M3 (2019). The MY wasn't available yet. VW ID.4 has been at the garage 3-4 times/year for various (mostly software) issues. Same with my mother's Peugeot e-208. My M3 got the latest software update the next day after an imperfect firmware update made autopilot sometimes unavailable, all done with the technicians via the Tesla app.
You can choose between amazing efficiency and software, and perhaps a 1mm-off panel on 1 out 1000 vehicles, or perfect esthetics but horrible software.
Teslas are still not perfect, and a stronger QA would definitely make for a better image, I agree. Still, Tesla has made a lot of progress, you don't find as many people complaining about QC/panel issues anymore on reddit. But competitors still have a ton of catching up to do.