CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software. People who complain about loosing CarPlay are not using the new software but reacting in fear thinking the old car software will come back.
The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
> CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software.
I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.
(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)
> gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra, which is still fairly new and hardly any companies have implemented it. That’s not what’s being asked for.
> fear thinking the old car software will come back.
Why would this not be a concern? Condition forces higher quality. If these car companies are competing against Apple and Google, they need to stop phoning it in. If they block them out, they can ship more junk and drivers are just stuck with it.
If they believe it what they ship, they shouldn’t be afraid to also build in CarPlay/Android Auto support. Have the sales people go over the built in system so people give it a chance. Impress the customers with it. Advertise how good it is. Eliminating the competition and claiming it’s for the best, does not inspire confidence.
> This was covered in the article, that’s just CarPlay Ultra
And Apple doesn’t just take it over. It requires a per-model design package the OEM makes with Apple’s help. So they can keep all their logos and design elements they care about.
They still don’t do it, as you pointed out. But it’s not like using an AppleTV to avoid the terrible built in smart TV interface. The OEM is still there.
I drive a 2026 Toyota, how do I enable this new good native infotainment system of which you speak?
The one in my car sucks, and to use the most basic features (navigation, music) that cost nothing on CarPlay (beyond my phone bill) cost $15-25/month from Toyota.
Yeah. It's so demoralizing, seeing all these people make fortunes while honest people scrape by. It feels like getting in on the grift is the only way to make it.
only lawyers care what the laws say. I care about what's right and good and leads to prosperity for people I care about (which is to a greater or lesser extent everyone)
It's the lawyers job to make the laws align with some version of the above, and many of them, like most other people with power in society, are doing a willfully terrible job of it
This is not correct. It's a politician's job to make them selfrich by any means necessary. It's a lawyer's job to make you pay for as many hours as possible.
correct - "a" lawyer. a single lawyer is but a cog in the machine. Lawyers as a whole, as an institution, however are at least ostensibly supposed to exist for some benefit to society. They, like other institutions, must act to prevent principal agent problems. And like other institutions, they are failing dramatically
Would it matter if the bets were real and they picked the 0.00001% big winners to feature in the ad? Would that be less fraudulent in any meaningful sense, would it have a different impact on the world?
Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?
In the US, the FTC is very clear that faking or purchasing testimonials is illegal. Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud. On the other hand, selecting and advertising specific real testimonials is fine. A customer described their actual experience that way, and presumably the consumers understand that advertisers will select especially positive individual testimonials for their advertisements. I can't believe I'm actually trying to explain this, but fake testimonials are illegal because the consumer has no way to know that they are made up. Real testimonials are not "lying with statistics", they're not statistics at all, and are legal because consumers can understand that it's not the median customer experience.
If picking real winners and real winnings to feature in the ad was just as good, they could do that. If not, then yes, it makes an impact on the world to mislead people with that marketing.
Somehow there's a difference between things that happened and didn't happen, and that's a good place to draw a line in the sand of what you're allowed to advertise and not.
Believe it or not, the laws don't say verbatim "Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising...". I can't really believe that this is a real question and that I'm trying to explain this, either. The actual laws are more specific, and combined with how the courts interpret them, cover a lot of different situations and try to do so in a reasonable way.
If you actually want to understand why "an actor pretending to enjoy drinking Coca Cola" is okay while other kinds of endorsements are not, in the US at least, you could start with the FTC "Truth in Advertising" website, and "Advertising Endorsements" specifically, or other resources on that page.
Not GP, but here is how I know. Messi and Steve Carell did an ad for local chips brand, (market size < 10 million people). There is no way that brand could afford them. Searched online and found the same ad for Lay's. Turns out Pepsi owns a lot of local snack brands. They'll buy local brand and if it's popular they will keep the brand (instead of replacing it with global brand like Lay's). Ad is recorded for all brands at once, they just replace bag of Lay's with bag of whatever is the local chips they own.
I question your definitions. In what sense is it legally or morally useful to discriminate between lying with statistics and lying without them? It's an academically useful distinction, but why does it matter in practice? People are misled, the misleading is intentional, but if you hire a statistician to do it for you instead of an actor then you're A-Okay?
It's useful because honesty and dishonesty are strongly self-correlated. Someone who works hard to ensure their advertising is technically true will likely work hard towards technically satisfying other goals and rules we set for them; someone who's comfortable outright lying in their ads will likely also lie about other things.
I was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad.
There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging."
Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA.
So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.
I agree with your point in general, but doesn't that disclaimer apply to any kind of supplement? As far as I know that sort of thing has been allowed for quite some time. For whatever reason the FDA allows for an almost completely unregulated vitamin/supplement industry.
They used to be vague and not make specific claims because that wasn't allowed. They'd say "Vitamin K helps promote healthy eyes." They can't say "our chewable will cure your glaucoma. (claimhasnotbeenreviewedbytheFDA)"
But apparently they can do that now, or at least they are doing it.
It's not up to the FDA, their hands are tied thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah on behalf of the supplement lobby.
Unfortunately American culture is cursed, you can’t expect it to fix itself after trump leaves. Trump it’s ultimately a product of America’s culture over the past decades. He’s not the one who caused it, but he’s another symptom of it.
I don’t really want to explain why I think American culture has been cursed for ages, but this isn’t the place, my point here is that Trump is a criminal grifter and sexual assaulter and more, and that’s because American culture loves that sort of thing now and the road from high trust to low trust started 50 or more years ago, not just when trump became an issue. He’s horrible and needs dealt with but so does American culture in general to prevent more trumps.
That's pretty much the present today. Tbh I'm fine with the public internet just dying off at this point and people going back to their local smaller scale groups.
I'd prefer the 2011/2012 era before mass moderation was possible and before people began policing for "toxicity". We still had the culture and vestiges of freedom of the old web, alongside with the network effect of millions of "normal" people joining in the conversation through their iphones
That’s pre-SOPA, pre-Snowden, when the internet could still organize to fight (and win) political battles. There’s a reason the internet has become a battleground since then.
lobste.rs has a pretty decent system with a global invite tree, where users can provide access for other people. it comes with the benefit of creating an association graph of accounts that allows for swift moderation, and lets the userbase grow within a community of people likely to appreciate the culture.
no, its public federated social media running on at protocol. no big tech control, no crypto bullshit like nostr, no way for bad admins to delete your posts like mastodon (they can only ban you from their own server). you can build a web of trust or vetting system on top of that like what tangled is doing for code.
I looked into Zed because popular harness (OpenCode/KiloCode) just random downloads npm packages in the background and didn't tell you. But then I found out reports of Zed doing the same. Why we can't have nice things?
I heard that Zed came with a lot of integrated AI and team sharing features that phone home, so that's an issue for anyone working with stuff like NIS2 compliance. Not that VSCode isn't a compliance nightmare as well.
Zed is nice, but the project wide search (sidebar based) in VS Code and diff viewer in VS Code are still better IMO and unfortunately since I no longer code, those are my most used features of an editor. Still using it instead of VS Code but I sure wish it improved those views.
I don't think I've ever been unhappier than working on a Rails project. See a bug on the site - something is rendering incorrectly. grep to find the view. Great, there's a method that is being called to render the buggy section. Grep for the method name - 0 hits. Amazing, it's something that is synthesized somewhere and I have no idea where. Guess I'll stop what I'm doing and read docs for an hour. If you do nothing but use Rails all day, sure, but the whole convention over configuration thing is such a huge anti pattern to me.
I won't be as harsh because I have years of experience in Rails and didn't develop harsh feelings against it but moving from Rust/Go/Zig/TypeScript (which I used lately) to Ruby ain't smooth ride.
Discoverability is much worse, LSPs aren't super helpful. Using Dash (documentation app) helps a ton. Still some names are confusing after switch (took a minute to recall that 'filter' is actually 'select' in Ruby).
I won't say that dev experience is bad but it's definitely different.
Weird that searching for it didn't yield any results, though I stand corrected.
However it seems that select is the actual "root" of documentation. Filter sends to find_all, find_all sends to filter or select.
I’ve had similar experiences with Spring Boot Java applications. Methods in stack traces that don’t exist in source code but are magicked into existence by annotations.
Spring Boot is very similiar to Rails. That's what was surprising to me, when I was forced to use it at uni. The annotations magic brings all the PTSD of method missing from Ruby
The fact that you have to read a book and break out a debugger to do the equivalent of "find all" in any other languages should tell you something right?
My experience is exactly the same as Milch's. I've tried to fix stuff in Gitlab but given up when I couldn't even find where it things are defined.
That can happen in other languages, e.g. Rust or C where macros are used. But it's pretty much the exception there whereas in Rails it seems to be done by default.
Exactly. Sure, I can go read a book and learn about Rails. If I wanted to be a Rails specialist I probably would, but I don't want to be a Rails specialist. And like you said, other languages can do this too, but I haven't really found it to be too much of an issue. I remember one time where I had to break out whatever the rustc flag is that just produces the code with expanded macros, but that's it.
The worst part is communicating to the Ruby on Rails community that they have a problem with DX or that Rails is not really the top choice anymore for new startups. It's a cult of DHH. I am still mostly part of the Rails ghetto; it's paying my bills, but after gaining more experience during my computer science master's degree with statically typed languages, I clearly see the pitfalls of Ruby.
People often miss the difference between simple and easy. Yes, Ruby is easy, but it's not simple, and it will make you suffer a lot if you get to a complex app. The debugging sessions in Rails are a nightmare. Meanwhile Ruby community is acting like religion, it's almost impossible to convert people from Ruby to other languages, they don't see the language as tool, but as part of their identity
Maybe I'm just not tapped into the community but I've been a ruby developer going on 6 years now and I find debugging ruby apps no better or worse than any other languages I've worked with over the years. It's fairly easy to instrument ruby much like all the other dynamic languages (python3, js, etc) but with better ergonomics. My main qualm with ruby is their reliance on external type files for type annotations. What a terrible idea. Should have just done inline optional types like python3 or typescript.
I have been pretty happy with Java and .NET frameworks, regardless of the lack of appeal in SV influenced circles.
Happiness doesn't always translate into performance, e.g. famous Twitter logo until they moved into JVM and Scala.
While Ruby on Rails took the fame, we already had similar experiences with AOLServer and Vignette, using Tcl.
We had our own variant at a Portuguese startup, and eventually the founders created OutSystems, one of the first graphical RAD tools for Websites and distributed systems development in low code/no code, targeting JVM or CLR infrastructure.
Now having said all of this, it is great to finally see CRuby getting a JIT in the box.
It’s short term happiness at best, and at the expense of every other possible architectural characteristic (maintainability, performance, reliability, scalability, you name it).
Updating Rails is one of the most painful processes ever. There is no real way to be sure it works. You just have to have 50,000 unit tests, cypress tests, and then hope and pray.
On any sufficiently large and old app, something will always break in a way that isn't caught by your tests or manual testing, and only shows up after it goes out live.
I have taken applications from 2-to-3, 3-to-4, and so on, through 8.X.
If anything it has gotten better/easier over time. The most challenging upgrades were 2.X to 3.X (for reasons I can't recall), and then 6.X to 7.X (for an application that had issues adopting zeitwerk). In both of those situations, there was a lot of rote legwork, but once tests were passing, the application was working reliably. The other upgrades (3-to-4, 4-to-5, 5-to-6, 7-to-8) weren't happy-fun-rainbows-and-unicorns, but they weren't catastrophically complicated? Not even in fairly large codebases.
For each of these, a strong test suite was the best tool, which it sounds like you already know?
In my experience, the other impactful factors were:
(1) Reading the CHANGELOGs and knowing enough about Rails to know what they meant for the application.
(2) Using test fixtures (or fixtures with only some factories) for a quicker feedback loop for engineers.
(3) Having a true QA function in the company that isn't just engineers testing their own code.
Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.
Yes, typing would obviate the need for the sorts of extensive unit testing I'm talking about here. I feel that. Luckily, the frontier LLMs (especially Claude) have gotten _really_ good at writing Rspec...
Why do many people mention the need of tests for types in dynamically typed languages?
In Rails my tests are mostly to ensure that a request to a controller returns the expected response and the expected changes in the database. Unit tests are often on validations and the errors they return for invalid data. Then there are functional tests that drive a headless browser.
For me it surely is Python with Pytorch, if we talk about frameworks in general.
For web, I can't really offer any useful positive input, I was never satisfied with any framework for Python or Node. I see people praise RoR and Phoenix quite a lot tho!
Most of the datacenters in my city are concentrated near the warehouse zoned area by the expressway, railroad and interstate leading to the airport. Basically nobody lives there, and those that do are probably much better off now that the diesel trains no longer running.
It does seem most of the pro-AI people aren't actually affected by any of the negative aspects of it. It's a lot easier to be in favor of something that doesn't actually affect you or anyone you care about.
It appears to be not so much about the datacenters themselves as it is limiting the growth capabilities for the LLMs. From their understanding fewer datacenters means more congestion which means less possibility LLMs can be shoved into more places where the public thinks they are intrusive. Which seems to be everywhere.
We don't build the chips or even the machines that build the machines that build the chips. We don't own all the rare earths and our ability to generate electricity isn't anything special.
The data centers are getting built. Up to us if it's in Utah or overseas.
Everyone pays for the negative externalities of these outsized water- and electricity-sucking, noise- and heat-generating monuments to greed and charlatanism.
Very well thought out argument, I'm sure spamming it some more will really convince people. You're telling me people aren't affected by AI in any way whatsoever? That's a very bold and obviously untrue claim. No wonder people don't trust AI sycophants, you can't even keep your story straight.
The water usage is floating point error compared to ethanol and the electricity prices near the centers are some of the cheapest you can get. In terms of the physical world this is maybe the lowest impact industry in history.
Some people have empathy for those who are, even if they are not.
I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it.
And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.
What negative impact is that? For context there are only five houses within half a mile of xAI's data center, the building for which has been there for decades, and any homes in the area have been living by the existing giant natural gas power plant next door to the data center for 20+ years. It's really not introducing anything that hasn't been there forever
I often see empathy being mentioned in places where I can totally see the self-preservation link: if other people are negatively affected, it will sooner or later also affect me personally negatively. I am totally fine with seeing empathy and compassion as tools for self-preservation, without assigning any morality to it. Unless I kill you and all of your tribe and anyone else who cares about you, not caring about your needs will backfire on me. It simply makes rational sense to see what you need and make you happy so I can stay happy too.
I live near a datacenter, well, technically, there's a farm on one side and an abandoned factory on the other side. Tell me, is living in one or the other optimal to be able to participate in this discussion without being dismissed?
How would you know? I mean, I'm surrounded by lots of buildings, but I'm not usually aware of what's going on in ones I don't go inside of. There are lots of warehouse-sized buildings all over, and whether those buildings contain racks full of servers or something else entirely isn't something I'd immediately discern.
The stated reasons are "populist brainrot". They aren't scientific or based on reality at all. What has happened is the AI folks have made themselves very very disliked. Saying you are going to take everyone's jobs will do that. So whatever they try to do, people will oppose it. It doesn't matter if the reasons are based in reality or not.
The average person's inattention to nuance could be labeled as "populist brainrot" in this case, and the cases of poor zoning could be used as examples of the issues with datacenters that the average person does not evaluate with the proper attention to nuance.
Sure, the water use is often a simplified argument against these data centers, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons but they are in fact more nuances and context dependent based on the specific location.
Hank Green has had the best take I've heard which is AI is definitely something but everyones still figuring out what it is. It will likely end up being nothing like it is today.
The author acts like manufacturers get CarPlay for free when it has a high cost, high constraints, and gives over most or all of the dash over to another company.
reply