Those are small parts, though. The interesting part is the E-axle. BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs. That, plus an electronics box and battery, is the power train. This simplifies vehicles considerably.
There are E-axle teardown videos. There's no big secret about how to do this. Copying this is hard for Detroit, because they have a huge investment in "engine plants".
With this design, BYD doesn't need standalone engine plants.
Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost. They want to put two or four motors in a car. BYD does make supercars, to show off, but their volume products are reasonably good cars with E-axles and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which work fine. (It's not clear that Tesla is even into car design at all any more, but that's another issue.)
Detroit ought to be doing this, but they insist on making electric cars that are modified gasoline cars. Ford has an electric Mustang, an electric F-150, and an electric Transit. Chrysler doesn't even make cars any more, just one minivan. GM has a good Bolt now, which they are killing to appease Trump.
you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.
and to your point : a dead axle is an effort to reduce unsprung weight compared to a live axle; it also lets you actually use alignment as a remediation for asymmetry issues rather than just pre-delivery straightening.
On the contrary, this much integration makes repairs nearly impossible, meaning you might have to swap the whole unit(for a lot of $$$) when something small inside it inevitably breaks.
Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.
Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.
On the other hand: If the assembly is reliable-enough, then repair isn't normally something that needs to be pursued in the first place.
Like Honda engines on their myriad pedestrian cars. I'm sure there's exceptions, but the engines tend to be ridiculously reliable. The rest of the car often fails (due to age and/or rot and/or deferred maintenance and/or crash) and leaves a very good engine behind.
Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.
Thus, there's very few people rebuilding them. They certainly can be rebuilt, but it usually just doesn't make financial sense to strip it all down and freshen everything up.
So when an engine does fail on an otherwise-working Honda daily-driver that is actually worth repairing, then the usual move is to swap in a used motor.
---
So if it's reliable enough, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.
I don't have so much knowledge about EV repairs, but I got burnt by this on ICE cars already - had a car fail a regular fitness test on suspension bushes, they weren't replaceable without replacing the whole arm(s). What should've been a $40 part was being quoted as more than the cars value.
(I'm not sure if there was a way around this, there may well have been but I had other things going on and sold for scrap)
FWIW, this has been my experience since 2003 when I had to get suspension work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BMW or Honda, dealership or indie repair shop, the story I have heard consistently is that the bushing is part of the arm for structural integrity, stability, <reason I can’t remember, truth or crock>. Bushings typically fail faster than the arm does, and this repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics).
The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.
Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.
EU added "cybersecurity" requirements in response to Comma.ai that means that a lot of ECUs going forward use signed messages AND often crypto key pairing against an onboard security auth box. The pairing process often require something like a scuffed up manufacturer rental Panasonic Toughbook with weird half baked apps and passwords. The car would refuse to drive or whatever if the owner wouldn't play along with that game.
>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.
Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck.
>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and manufacturing quality are piss poor in the race to the bottom for cost cutting and shareholder returns. Timing chains were also supposed to last a lifetime but plenty have been recalled due to know timing chain issues from manufacturing quality.
VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. Again, with rare exception, manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. Are you old enough to remember when TVs broke so often that TV Repairman was a job? One day we will look back on car mechanics the same way.
I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro on the track, but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun, and kids will look at me the way I looked at old men who take care of antique steam engines and traction engines and take them to fairs. That sure is a lot of noise and smoke and doohickeys for very little speed and power!
> manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport.
From what I see online, Teslas, especially MS/MX, are actually quite like an EV-swapped Toyota than anything futuristic. A lot about their cars(exception being CT and Semi) are ICE-mass-market-car coded. They're car equivalents of ARM PCs in ATX form factor like NVIDIA's DGX Station, opposite to the likes of trashcan Mac Pro.
I own a Model 3 and I like driving it, but I scratch my head at everyone who claims there are no mechanical problems. I'm glad you didn't have any, but there are some repairs that are almost obscenely common.
In the past year, the heater failed (PTC Heater had to be replaced), and the lateral link ball joint ball joint had to be replaced. That is about CAD5000$ worth of work. There is also an issue with a wire in the rear center seatbelt that broke (but after a check, it doesn't really have any safety concerns wrt airbags so it is OK to leave as is), and the top roof glass cracked. (I also had to replace the front windshield, but that's normal in Calgary and I don't hold it against the car)
I'm not "rough handling", I have a Toyota Sienna without any of these problems. On the bright side, the battery has no problems and no imbalances so fixing it will keep the car running for years (hopefully).
I bring this up because I find it very annoying that people were painting hagiographies of these cars when they have real issues. None of the issues above should be happening. Moreover, there are no 3rd parties providing parts (supposedly because of patents).
In the end, I'll never buy another gas car again but my cute tiny car has a bigger turn radius than my Sienna. It's lost more value than my Sienna. I agree with the poster who said that it isn't even clear if Tesla is interested in cars anymore.
If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.
>Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids.
No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit.
>but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”.
I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved.
>Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
Good for you, but do you know there's a whole lotta other EV brands out there? And many are not as well and reliably designed as your Tesla.
>I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro [...] If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun
Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?
There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.
People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.
> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.
This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.
The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.
I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.
A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.
>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.
I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.
But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.
My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.
My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.
Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.
>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.
It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.
Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.
The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.
I’m very confused as to why this is downvoted but I tossed you an upvote since I do my best to work against the constant brigading I always see on this forum.
I have an original HP11C within reach. Still works. Had to replace the batteries this year, after 20 years.
If you replace the batteries, get the good Panasonic silver cells from Newark, not "compatible" alkaline cells. The silver cells were intact after two decades.
AWS Bedrock is other companies’ models running on separate dedicated AWS hardware, metered through AWS billing. AWS owns and operates all of the infrastructure and the client interface; the model provider basically hands over the model and weights to AWS and AWS Bedrock take it from there.
So, as an example, if you use Codex through Bedrock, that’s a totally separate instance of Codex from anything you would be interfacing with if you directly used OpenAI’s API; if you use Codex via Bedrock, OpenAI never sees your data or prompts because they stay sandboxed in an ephemeral Bedrock instance. For many large enterprise deployments this hard boundary is a big big deal.
Over the past year, Claude being available via Bedrock and ChatGPT/Codex not being available via Bedrock has been a huge competitive advantage for Anthropic in the enterprise space.
That's some kind of encryption box. It has a "zeroize" button, to clear the keys in an emergency. It might have something that forces uniform latency to make traffic analysis more difficult. Some cryptosystems are totally synchronous, and send random bits at a constant rate when there's no data.
You can't sign up for a Facebook account without giving a live selfie.
Any image of your family you post will be scraped by Clearview AI, bypassing the restrictions that make it hard for you to create accounts, to create a worldwide facial recognition system.
Indeed, well before Clearview, Facebook demonstrated they can identify faces and asked people to tag people in it, creating one of the earlier massive facial ID databases.
FB's policy on this is patchy. I've known people who have had accounts for years, who were suddenly asked to provide a selfie - often after posting political content. Their accounts were then either locked down permanently, or unlocked.
I also know people who created accounts from scratch without needing a selfie while connecting exclusively through a VPN. (Only some VPNs, work apparently.)
Supposedly FB uses device ID tracking, so if you're picked for selfie ID on a device and try to create an alt, you'll be selfie-ID'd again.
Using a different browser on desktop solves the problem for desktop but not for mobile.
And so on. Basically it's doable, sometimes. And sometimes it isn't.
You find it to be a negative that banks require identity verification to drain an account? Personally, I would refuse to keep my money with a bank that doesn’t do this.
Asinine requirement by whatever risk management firm they use. A selfie provides nothing in terms of lasting security while simultaneously adding permanent risk.
Have you ever considered that it’s a front? You may think that store that never has customers is just run incompetent business people, but in reality the real objective is not the one you believe it to be, and it’s actually great if you were to refuse understanding that.
I've found that framing topics like this as primarily a pretext for different motives is a sure-fire way to be ignored by people you may want to convince.
As always, the goal in convincing others is to take someone from their current understanding and bring them closer to yours. You can't get there if you don't start the topic at their current understanding of it.
> they accept money and direct deposit still with no KYC. But to get the money out? Oh no! We need a picture of your face!
Unauthorized deposits aren't nearly as much of a concern as unauthorized withdrawals, right? I'd imagine that there are far fewer malicious actors that try to deposit money into random bank accounts than there are ones that try to withdraw money from random bank accounts.
> And there’s no option for going in person.
Won't an in-person bank also take pictures of you via security cameras? I don't really understand your objection here, could you elaborate?
A bank's security camera feed isn't likely to be sold to dozens of companies.
It is all but guaranteed for Internet-based facial recognition services.
Hacked facial recognition data already is reportedly being used by scammers to not only bypass bank security but also to impersonate people to target their loved ones.
There is no lasting security gain by providing a selfie. There is a lasting security and privacy loss, however.
Additionally - furtherance of facial recognition technology would impact travelling to foreign jurisdictions.
One of the most common ways foreign travellers get flagged when travelling internationally is for social media posts made under their own name that their destination country's government may not like. Traditionally if you've kept yourself pseudo-anonymous, you've largely been safe. But if we get to a point where pseudo-anonymous accounts are associated with pictures of people's faces, it will become significantly less pleasant to travel internationally for a lot more people.
It used to be that you could expect to not have your likeness captured and transmitted to third parties for their AI model training and who knows what other nefarious purposes.
It seems like all expectation of privacy and anonymity evaporated in the last 5 years.
I'd consider it a negative that they trust a shitty webcam / selfie camera to cut the expenses of having an actual office with trained personnel.
Who aren't flawless of course, but selfies have been easily circumvented with photos or video game cameras.
Hell, at one point we had to implement age verification for a Japanese tobacco product website via a 3rd party vendor, I just used the wiki page's picture of a Japanese ID to test it, worked fine.
most banks using faceid won't accept you go to a branch. because they contract with a provider who makes more money from building and selling a database than to fulfilling the contract with the banks.
It’s the end of large scale “global village” social media - good riddance if you ask me; I’ve left it years ago for more private spaces.
I wonder though how it will affect places like 4chan. I don’t really know if it’s still as anonymous as it used to be but that’s like a cornerstone of their existence.
Are you referring to financial accounts or social media accounts? (If social media accounts, I'm guessing you're referring to the US specifically, and during advance visa processing rather than at the border.)
this is reason enough to close the vast majority of them. if you're engaged in discussion, that's one type. the doomscrolling types, more addictive but very much more disposable.
You don’t “have to”. They’re requested when travelling to the US - but from my experience it’s not enforced (at least not consistently, I’ve never been asked why it was blank on my forms)
I thought so too, and said so at a meeting at work when some colleagues were unwilling to travel to the US.
It turns out close contacts of some of my colleagues have been asked to show their Facebook accounts at the US border. There was a recent rule change about it.
And your data on all those platforms - Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are ALL building comprehensive profiles on you, selling your data, and probably tossing it straight to the government in one way or another.
That’s to post something on a garbage social media like Facebook. Facebook owns their site, so I believe they can require whatever they want, and your option is to not use them. Other services requiring Facebook (or an Apple or Google phone) and everyone using Facebook are separate problems, that should be handled specifically; I think it’s easier to leave Facebook than coerce Facebook into decency.
Fortunately on Hacker News, you still only need a username and password. And if spam is an issue, on lobste.rs you only need an invite.
Fun fact: America invented the social credit score, long before China, and they still have it. The only difference, is the lack of the word "social" in the system's name, but it's the same system.
I’ve configured my browser to disable certain tech like webgl, I get infinite captchad by google. Using vanilla chrome works fine. It might not be full blown attestation but it’s not great.
Fuck you google for ever thinking infinite captchas are acceptable.
"might as well abuse this tosser to train the AI a bit. Free compute and classification, hey!" - or so, I guess. They immediately know they'll never get you through :)
Good luck, I don’t know whether the slight line in the adjacent square is part of the traffic light and sometimes I just say fuck it and click random squares.
It's amusing to read people in the past writing about the prospect of superhuman intelligence. The real problems have turned out to be different. Sycophancy and hallucinations, which are part of being confidently wrong, remains a big problem. Needing square miles of data centers was an issue in 1950s science fiction, and disappeared by the 1980s. Yet now they're being built, with private funding and the prospect of profit. The need for way too much training data indicates something is still wrong with the current approach.
> The pressing ethical questions in machine learning are not about machines becoming self-aware and taking over the world, but about how people can exploit other people, or through carelessness introduce immoral behavior into automated systems.
I think the main point still stands. (And there have been some pretty prescient depictions, e.g. Marvin the paranoid android was a pretty spot-on prediction of Bing. Or perhaps the fact that Marvin was in the training set was what led to Bing?)
Some sci-fi content differentiates between Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Intelligence, where AI is a true "human-like" general intelligence that (often) has a sense of self and is capable of deriving+learning new things by itself.
VI is close to what we have now, software that has some fixed intelligence, it can only really imitate what it has been taught and is not very adaptable. Useful for kiosks, drones, essentially just a tool rather than something we would see as a separate being.
I predicted on this site in 2016 the massive social and economic impacts AGI would have and specifically when RL data loops are not available to anyone but major players:
> Reinforcement Learning tasks rely on ridiculous amounts of data. Whereas with traditional software architecture, where you accomplish tasks through explicit task instruction, RL trains for tasks based on millions of tests through a reward system. Most importantly once you have trained it to some minimum level, if you deploy it correctly, then it should continue improving — so long as you bake feedback into the UX. Imagine that instead of telling excel what to do, you and every other user will have a conversation with excel, improving the system incrementally.
Agreed, and this is exactly what we see happening. Your posts back then were prescient ... there's literally now 'Copilot for Excel' and 'Claude for Excel' etc. But what do you propose the people/commons can still do at this stage to redistribute the inherent power found in RL data loops to a more stable equilibria of sharing participants?
Great question and there’s two steps in my opinion:
First is to become as free as possible from lock in and own your own data. The best way to do this is the self host your own technology.
This is really not possible for the majority of people though.
So practically I always suggest that you have multiple providers for services, don’t pool your data any one place (other than your own place) and own your backups. This is basic stuff that we’ve been teaching since the 90s and still very applicable today.
The harder and more impactful thing is to then create community owned technology that is outside of the commerce model.
So for example imagine that instead of FAANG running the world, the largest tech and data orgs would look more like wikimedia foundation, Annas archive, scihub, Graphene, Linux etc…. and more generally that technology and governance are open and not bound to commerce/taxation/coercion based organizations.
Ultimately we need to create a democratic-technology movement such that capitalists don’t monopolize technology, which is currently the trend. This is not some kind of simple thing by the way, this is revolutionary economics is what I’m talking about.
My suggestion is to read Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
I've never been able to figure out what's so great about Atherton. The houses are big, but other than that, it's nothing special. Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias. Los Altos Hills used to be; there was a time when the Los Altos Hunt ran the town. Palo Alto is next to Stanford. Portola Valley used to have more patent holders per capita than anywhere else in the US. Atherton is just a bedroom town on flatland with big houses.
sometimes that's it... you're thinking they are not great and if others feel the same, then it's no wonder they feel insecure and are fighting footing for recognition.
It's the only option for large flat lots in the middle of Silicon Valley. Aside from the famously responsive police department, city services are basically non-existent, but the residents have their own private libraries and recreation centers.
> I've never been able to figure out what's so great about Atherton
It's 90s/2000s tech and finance leadership money - excluded from Woodside and Portola Valley so Atherton was the next best thing back then.
Not being around Asians played a huge role as well - in the 1990s and 2000s, Saratoga, Cupertino, the Fremont Hills, and the parts of Palo that fell under Gunn High became "Asian" and we were viewed negatively by Silicon Valley types back then. I remember the white flight first hand [0]
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." (2005)
Their kinds still populate HN.
> Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias
Older money (1950s-1990s)
> Palo Alto is next to Stanford
Palo Alto was much more "middle class" (think like Fremont or Dublin is today) back then
Is there a deal between Google and Cloudflare to make non-Chrome browsers harder to use? The pressure to use Chrome keeps increasing, and the amount of ad filtering you can do in Chrome keeps decreasing.
As someone who runs Firefox on both Linux and Android, with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled, and tries to use web over native mobile apps wherever possible ... I really don't feel this at all?
I assume it's business people finding it to be a better "bang for their buck" implementation time-wise or lazy developers who don't use Firefox for their testing phase. I've seen it so many times. At a previous company, I was the only person using Firefox daily and I would catch bugs a few times a year during PRs for things that worked fine in Chrome, but not in Firefox. Oftentimes the suggestion was just to leave it because "who uses Firefox?"
Whenever companies make statements like this and then people act surprised when they backtrack, I can't help but think of a bit of my favorite dialogue from Star Trek Enterprise.
HARRIS: We had an arrangement!
KRELL: You did what I wanted. I don't need you anymore.
HARRIS: You agreed that both our governments would benefit if the two of us worked together.
Not only that, but Spybook aka Facebook, also connected offline information, e. g. I think if I recall it was dental care or something like that. I don't remember the year (edit: a google search led me to this article from 2018, but I could swear this was several years before that - see https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607), but it was scary that they go and sniff for ALL data they can find about people. This brings mega-corporation to a new level of Evil. And I haven't even gotten to talk about Google here, yet ...
I'd bet good money this is mostly related to Europe's GDPR / DMA actions against Facebook. Ironically, I think Facebook would be in the clear to just charge everyone in Europe and dump ads altogether. :shrug:
I didn't see it mentioned that this hid ads. I would be surprised if it did, since facebook makes way more than $4/month off many of it's users, they would be leaving a ton of money on the table if they only charged that to remove ads.
Probably paying would toggle on/off personalization of the ads, but then also they'd charge extra for the ads they show to "paying high-quality users" or something, so they can double-dip both sides.
Those are small parts, though. The interesting part is the E-axle. BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs. That, plus an electronics box and battery, is the power train. This simplifies vehicles considerably.
There are E-axle teardown videos. There's no big secret about how to do this. Copying this is hard for Detroit, because they have a huge investment in "engine plants". With this design, BYD doesn't need standalone engine plants.
Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost. They want to put two or four motors in a car. BYD does make supercars, to show off, but their volume products are reasonably good cars with E-axles and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which work fine. (It's not clear that Tesla is even into car design at all any more, but that's another issue.)
Detroit ought to be doing this, but they insist on making electric cars that are modified gasoline cars. Ford has an electric Mustang, an electric F-150, and an electric Transit. Chrysler doesn't even make cars any more, just one minivan. GM has a good Bolt now, which they are killing to appease Trump.
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