I am afraid that without a major crash or revolution of some sort, user won't matter next to a sufficiently big biz. But time will tell.
For companies that have a solid competitive moat they have at best gotten lazy about user centricity and at worst actively hostile.
It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:
- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails
- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code
For example:
- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code
- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was
- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction
I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
This looks like an example of biobackend: defective IT compensated by humans
Your point is very sane, of course, shitty code was not invented now. But was it ever sold as a revolution ? Probably, too !
Most maintainability conflicts come from packaging and design for assembly.
Efficiency more often comes into conflict with durability, and sometimes safety.
Do you optimize an engine for how easy it is to replace a filter once or twice a year (most likely done by someone the average car-owner is already paying to change their oil for them), or do you optimize it for getting better gas mileage over every single mile the car is driven?
We're talking about a hypothetical car and neither of us (I assume) design engines like this, I'm just trying to illustrate a point about tradeoffs existing. To your own point of efficiency being a trade with durability, that's not in a vacuum. If a part is in a different location with a different loading environment, it can be more/less durable (material changes leading to efficiency differences), more/less likely to break (maybe you service the hard-to-service part half as often when it's in a harder to service spot), etc.
If the car is going to need to be in shop for days needing you to have a replacement rental because the model is difficult to service and the cost of service itself is not cheap , that can easily outweigh any marginal mpg gain .
Similarly because it is expensive and time consuming you may likely skip service schedules , the engine will then have a reduced life, or seizes up on the road and you need an expensive tow and rebuild etc .
You are implicitly assuming none of these will change if the maintenance is more difficult , that is not the case though
This is what OP is implying when he says a part with regular maintenance schedule to be easily accessible.
[1] of which fuel is only one part , substantial yes but not the only one
There’s definitely a programming equivalent as well…
Not for normal car
Fun Fact: Along with the "Bees are disappearing" scare, which was just measurement error, there has been an "insects are disappearing" scare, due to the fact people's windshields are not covered with bugs like they used to be. However that is because cars have gotten more aerodynamic so fewer insects are hitting the windshield.
Um I’m pretty sure that’s not the only evidence for insect population declines.
Or, we consider that 2mpg across 100,000 cars can save 3,500,000 gallons of gas being burned for the average American driving ~12k miles per year. And maybe things aren't so black and white. You're argument, in this hypothetical, is that negligent car owner who destroys their car because they're choosing to not change the oil is worth burning an extra 3.5millon gallons of gasoline.
We're already in the land of the fucking ridiculous. Let's have fun with it.
There is just no universe in which placing an oil filter in one location or another is going to make such a difference. You'd have to mount it completely outside the engine, say sitting as a cylinder on top of the hood, and even there you are not going to get a 2mpg improvement.
So, similar with software design, as in other fields, often a problem goes away when you ask a different question.
The obvious one is the battery, and you can argue that modern EVs have batteries so expensive that when they are dead the car becomes scrap, and - sure, whatever.
But EVs still have: cabin air filters, coolant, brake fluid, lubricants in various places (although granted, these lubricants will mostly last the service life).
At the end of the day, as long as you have a car which moves, and not a statue, it will have things which wear out and which should be easy to replace.
Engine oil and oil filters are just an example.
They actually will need oil changes starting anywhere from the 50k to 100k mile mark.
Here's the maintenance guide with pictures walking through changing the oil and filter for the Rear Drive Unit (RDU) in a Tesla Model S:
https://service.tesla.com/docs/ModelS/ServiceManual/Palladiu...
Every moving part - especially gears -- needs to be oiled, and whenever you are oiling metal on metal contact such as in gears, you are going to want an oil filter to catch worn metal debris, to remove it from the oil.
The difference between EVs and ICE vehicles is not that only one of them uses oil to reduce friction, but that the oil service intervals on EVs are so long that regular oil maintenance is not needed, you do it every 60,000 miles or whatever the manufacturer recommends, so it's out of mind. But that doesn't mean it doesn't require service.
Once EVs have been around for a while and there is an established market for used EVs, the people who buy them are going to want to change the oil to add more life to the EV. So it's something that is dealt with in the long-life maintenance, not the monthly maintenance. But when you do the oil service, you will curse Tesla for needing to drop the battery in order to do it, and all of a sudden you will care where things are placed and how accessible they are.
Here is a nice video -- I follow Sam Crac as one of my favorite automotive youtubers - and he picked up an old Tesla and did an oil service for it. It's a nice watch:
biz > user
"We arrived at a little model that expresses the relative importance of various factors in software development..."
choeger•1h ago
Obviously, our regulations aren't perfect or even good enough yet. See DRM. See spyware TVs. See "who actually gets to control your device?". But still...
codemog•41m ago
jjk166•41m ago
If that's what the regulators are optimizing for.