After the initial 2001 model, Commodore used a mix of materials, with some models made of all metal and some of a metal/plastic hybrid (metal base, plastic top), according to this website: https://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cbm/PETx/petfaq.html (look for "WHAT MODELS OF THE PET ARE THERE?")
The chassis (the bottom black part) was always made out of metal. But all the white part above, on the very first PETs (the ones with the rectangular keyboard) it was made out of metal, and on all subsequent ones (with normal keyboard and green-on-black screens) it was made of this plastic material. Source: Personal experience (I'm old).
Am I courting disaster by reviving won't-charge pouch cells by just manually running a bit of current through them until they're nonzero volts and then a normal charger will do the rest? So far, in the maybe half dozen times I've tried it (rectangular battery blocks for old digital cameras, the pouch cell inside a long-disused Kobo Reader) it's worked. They charge right up, they don't swell, and they still have decent capacity.
I'm running at the hairy edge and only high quality safety engineering is protecting me here? Or these cells can take a lot more abuse than they're given credit for?
About 15 years ago I was writing software for an embedded device made by another company, and they sent us a unit for testing. It had a small rectangular rechargeable lithium battery that was charged via a DC jack.
At one point I hadn’t kept it charged, the battery went completely flat, and after that it would no longer charge at all. When I called the company, they said the battery was now too deeply discharged and required an “intelligent” charger to revive it. They sent a charger with a slot for the bare battery; some LEDs blinked in various patterns for a while, and eventually normal charging resumed.
I’ve always wondered what that charger actually did, that the built-in charger was not capable of. Was it performing some kind of analysis to decide whether the battery was safe to recover (e.g. after deep discharge), or was it simply applying some initial charge ignoring the battery’s protection circuitry (and at what risk)?
Over-discharged Li-ion cells can grow metallic lithium dendrites that result in internal short circuits. Charging them again following over-discharge does create a risk of fire/explosion.
I've thought before that it'd be nice to have some kind of device that would do this in a safe(r) fashion wherein you'd connect the 2 charging leads to the dead battery plus a temp sensor pad and it'd slowly bring the charge up to the minimum required for charging by a regular charger.
Cool. I have a modern (not smart) body weight scale and it regularly ruins this way at least one of the 3 GP NiMh rechargable AAA batteries I put in it, so I wanted to hear some ideas what could be done with them given they have been through only bunch of charge cycles.
My only experience with Linux secure boot so far.... I wasn't even aware that it was secure booted. And I needed to run something (I think it was the Displaylink driver) that needs to jam itself into the kernel. And the convoluted process to do it failed (it's packaged for Ubuntu but I was installing it on a slightly outdated Fedora system).
What, this part is only needed for secure boot? I'm not sec... oh. So go back to the UEFI settings, turn secure boot off, problem solved. I usually also turn off SELinux right after install.
So I'm an old greybeard who likes to have full control. Less secure. But at least I get the choice. Hopefully I continue to do so. The notion of not being able to access online banking services or other things that require account login, without running on a "fully attested" system does worry me.
Secure Boot only extends the chain of trust from your firmware down the first UEFI binary it loads.
Currently SB is effectively useless because it will at best authenticate your kernel but the initrd and subsequent userspace (including programs that run as root) are unverified and can be replaced by malicious alternatives.
Secure Boot as it stands right now in the Linux world is effectively an annoyance that’s only there as a shortcut to get distros to boot on systems that trust Microsoft’s keys but otherwise offer no actual security.
It however doesn’t have to be this way, and I welcome efforts to make Linux just as secure as proprietary OSes who actually have full code signature verification all the way down to userspace.
here is some actual security: encrypted /boot, encrypted everything other than the boot loader (grub in this case)
sign grub with your own keys (some motherboards let you to do so). don't let random things signed by microsoft to boot (it defeats the whole point)
so you have grub in an efi partition, it passes secure boot, loads, and attempts to unlock a luks partition with the user provided passphrase. if it passed secure boot it should increase confidence that you are typing you password into the legit thing
so anyway, after unlocking luks, it locates the kernel and initrd inside it, and boots
the reason I don't do it is.. my laptop is buggy. often when I enable secure boot, something periodically gets corrupted (often when the laptop powers off due to low power) and when it gets up, it doesn't verify anything. slightly insane tech
however, this is still better than, at failure, letting anything run
sophisticated attackers will defeat this, but they can also add a variety of attacks at hardware level
I’d much rather have tamper detection. Encryption is great should the device is stolen but it feels like the wrong tool for defending against evil maids. All I’d want is that any time you open the case or touch the cold external ports (ie unbolted) you have to re-authenticate with a master password. I’m happy to use cabled peripherals to achieve this.
Chaining trust from POST to login feels like trying to make a theoretically perfect diamond and titanium bicycle that never wears down or falls apart when all I need is an automated system to tell me when to replace a part that’s about to fail.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough. We’re talking about three things here:
(1) Encryption: fast and fantastic, and a must-have for at-rest data protection.
It is vulnerable to password theft though. An attacker might insert evil code between power-on and disk-password-entry. With a locked down BIOS / UEFI, the only way to insert the code is to take the boot drive out of the device, modify it, put it back, and hope no one notices. “Noticing” in this case is done by either:
(2) Trust chaining: verify the signatures of the entire boot process to detect evil code.
(3) Tamper detection: verify the physical integrity of the device.
My point is that (1) is a given, and out of (2) or (3), I’d rather have the latter than deal with the shoddiness of the former
> the reason I don't do it is.. my laptop is buggy. often when I enable secure boot, something periodically gets corrupted (often when the laptop powers off due to low power) and when it gets up, it doesn't verify anything. slightly insane tech
Reminds me of my old Chromebook Pixel I wiped chromeos from. Every time it booted I had to press Ctrl-L (iirc) to continue the boot, any other keypress would reenable secure boot and the only way I knew to recover from that was to reinstall chromeos, which would wipe my linux partition and my files with it. Needless to say, that computer taught me good backup discipline...
Doing secure boot properly is kind of difficult. There are a bunch of TPM measurement registers for various bits and bobs (kernel, initramfs, cmdline, lots more). Using UKIs simplifies it a lot, but it’s not trivial to do right at the moment.
Same with remote attestation. Not all implementations are actually secure. But hopefully over time those security bugs can be ironed out and the cost to extract a key be made infeasable.
Hopefully not. What you have just said is a synonym for "But hopefully over time manufacturers will be able to completely prevent users from running unapproved software."
In the case of video game consoles that could be the case. It turned out that being able to run unapproved software results mainly in people playing pirated games. These security measures are reactive to the actions other people have taken. We already experimented with computing being the wild west where there was little to no security. It turned out that bad actors will abuse anything they can find. Even if it's not economical some attackers will still cause abuse.
There's always going to be a market for computers that can run unapproved software. I don't see that going away.
There is the integrity measurement architecture but it isn't very mature in my opinion. Even secureboot and module signing is a manual setup by users, it isn't supported by default, or by installers. You have to more or less manage your own certs and CA, although I did notice some laptops have debian signing keys in UEFI by default? If only the debian installer setup module signing.
But you miss a critical part - Secure Boot, as the name implies is for boot, not OS runtime. Linux I suppose considers the part after initrd load, post-boot perhaps?
I think pid-1 hash verification from the kernel is not a huge ask, as part of secure boot, and leave it to the init system to implement or not implement user-space executable/script signature enforcement. I'm sure Mr. Poettering wouldn't mind.
It is not useless. I'm using UKI, so initrd is built into the kernel binary and signed. I'm not using bootloader, so UEFI checks my kernel signature. My userspace is encrypted and key is stored in TPM, so the whole boot chain is verified.
Yes, you can. I really don't want to be in the business of building OSes. If these guys make it so that getting reasonable boot security is a simple toggle, I'd be grateful.
On arch it isn't particularly difficult to create UKIs other than changing like 2 lines in `mkinitcpio`'s config.
Then there is also `ukify` by systemd which also can create UKIs, which then can be installed with `kernel-install`, but that is a bit more work to set up than for `mkinitcpio`.
The main part is the signing, which I usually have `sbctl` handle.
Isn’t the idea that the kernel will verify anything beneath it. Secure boot verifies the kernel and then it’s in the hands of the kernel to keep verifying or not.
Yes that's the case - my argument is that Linux currently doesn't have anything standardized to do that.
Your best bet for now is to use a read-only dm-verity-protected volume as the root partition, encode its hash in the initrd, combine kernel + initrd into a UKI and sign that.
Standardizing that approach is one thing that the systemd project has been working on. They've built various components to help with that, including writing specifications (via the UAPI group) on how that should all fit together.
ParticleOS[0] gives a look at how this can all fit together, in case you want to see some of it in action.
> A basic setup to make use of secure boot is SB+TPM+LUKS. Unfortunately I don't know of any distro that offers this in a particularly robust way.
Have a look at Ubuntu Core 24 and later. Though it's not exactly a desktop system, but rathe oriented towards embedded/appliances. Recent Ubuntu desktop (from 25.04 IIRC) started getting the same mechanism gradually integrated in each release. Upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 is expected to support TPM backed FDE. Worth a try if you can set up a VM with a software TPM.
Keep in mind though, there's been plenty of issues with various EFI firmwares, especially on the appliances side. EFI specs are apparently treated as guidelines rather than actual specification by whoever ends up implementing the firmware.
Isn't it possible to force TPM measurements for stuff like the kernel command line or initramfs hash to match in order to decrypt the rootfs? Or make things simpler with UKIs?
Most of the firmwares I've used lately seem to allow adding custom secureboot keys.
There is some level of misinformation in your post. Both Windows and Linux check driver signatures. Once you boot Linux in UEFI Secure Boot, you cannot use unsigned drivers because the kernel can detect and activate the lockdown mode. You have to sign all of the drivers within the same PKI of your UEFI key.
> you cannot use unsigned drivers because the kernel can detect and activate the lockdown mode
You don't need to load a driver; you can just replace a binary that's going to be executed as root as part of system boot. This is something a hypothetical code signature verification would detect and prevent.
Failing kernel-level code signature enforcement, the next best step is to have a dm-verity volume as your root partition, with the dm-verity hashes in the initrd within the UKI, and that UKI being signed with secure boot.
This would theoretically allow you to recover from even root-level compromise by just rebooting the machine (assuming the secure boot signing keys weren't on said machine itself).
I honestly didn't know that! And even better, being old (>54 years) don't even need to take a (Canadian) citizenship test. This may finally get me motivated.
So LLMs can't do that? Every LLM-written historical or pseoudo-historical (i.e. made up) thing that comes up in my Facebook feed does start with a "hook" like that. Doesn't make them great articles but obviously you can prompt them to do it.
That's insane. If the CPU has enough fuses (which according to the wiki it does) why the h*ck can't they just make it impossible to reflash the >= minimum previously installed version of the OS after preventing the downgrade? Why the hard brick?
The "glass fiber modem" is an inherent part of the GPON network. These are complicated. The "P" stands for "passive". Yours and and up to 127 other houses are all on the same "light domain" i.e. the downstream is passively split, and the upstream is passively combined, in optical boxes that don't even have electrical parts.
This needs crazy accurate timing for the upstream. The head end needs to know the exact delay to your particular box to give it a "grant" to transmit at exactly the right time so transmit bandwidth is not wasted by idle time or multiple boxes transmitting at the same time and corrupting each other.
You don't want brand X modems with dodgy configurations in this. Of course as a consumer you'd want "as little modem as possible" i.e. just give me an ethernet port running DHCP or PPPOE and let me do the rest.
They are complicated, but standardised and commoditised. Ubiquiti, for example, sells an ONT (fibre modem) in a SFP form factor for US$39 [1], or a little standalone unit with an Ethernet port for US$49 [2].
For comparison: you can bring your own DOCSIS modem to a cable network, even though all the houses on the street are connected to the same cable and you could jam it, or send a voltage spike to break everyone's modem.
Not very familiar with DOCSIS and cable; the story I'm getting from my nearest friendly LLM is that while you could bring your cable modem, it'd have to be a pre-approved model, and that the firmware and configuration would be under ISP control, unlike with DSL modems. Is that wrong?
By law the demarcation is a passive one; the provider is not allowed to mandate you operate ANY of their active hardware. If they want to sell you internet only via e.g. RJ45 Ethernet they better consider asking your landlord to rent them space and power and Cat.5(+) wiring access to put a switch/router, because by law they can't dump that on you the residential apartment renting customer.
You may either rent/buy a device from your ISP, or you may bring your own, at your discretion. ISPs are required to accept all devices, of course if your device kills the network segment, they will kill your connectivity. But they can't refuse to let you connect.
You get taken to court and sentenced to pay the damages? Same thing that happens with the TV cable that runs through the whole street. Or the cars parked openly along the road. If you damage it, you pay for it.
Controlling your hardware without consent that they legally can't ask for would be illegal hacking.
They do however have the right to mandate certain configuration parameters just how they are allowed to mandate you connect something that isn't a noise generator to e.g. a cable TV outlet. Well, being able to limit you to connect devices that conform to some spec.
Wait a minute. My recent-ish car has LKAS. It recognizes white lines (or possibly curbs too) and if both boundaries of the lane are recongized, will steer for you - for 10 seconds maybe, before it nags you provide some steering input. But in those 10 seconds it's perfectly capable of smoothly steering around bends in the road on its own. And it is a useful safety feature even if only nudging the steering wheel while you're holding it.
So you don't get even that in a Tesla without (now) ponying up $$? Something that's a standard feature in my non cloud connected (or connectable!) "so last century" fossil fuel vehicle?
Was watching OPLive last week. Every week they have a segment called "Triple Play" where they have law enforcement send them videos of crazy chases and other interesting experiences.
This last week they had a guy who had completely passed out in his car and was fast asleep at the wheel. A state trooper pulled up alongside it and could see the guy slumped over his wheel. Apparently the car was essentially weaving back and forth between the lane lines because the car had LKAS enabled, effectively keeping the car from driving off the road.
The state trooper followed the car for several miles trying to decide what he should do. He tried several times by running his lights and sirens, honking, etc to no avail. He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop. During the pit, the man suddenly woke up - for obvious reasons.
They later found out he had been working 22 hours straight and then was driving to his GF's house several hours away for the weekend and was just exhausted and fell asleep at the wheel.
I've never actually tested what happens if you ignore the "steering input required" nags from LKAS. Does it truly keep driving at cruise control speed? I assumed it would eventually slow to a stop.
As for the safety feature. I inherited (literally) a second car that's 10 years older than the primary one. You get used to LKAS. I was driving a long distance in the older one while somewhat overtired and had several rumble strip excursions that would not have happened in the LKAS-equipped car. And for the asleep guy in the parent post, it may have made the difference between still being alive and dead in head-on collision or rollover.
A few cars will go as far as to apply the brakes and pull over. I think a lot just end up disengaging the steering and cruise control while beeping loudly at you a lot.
If the weight of your foot was somehow enough to push the pedal though, you could certainly keep going.
Some lane keeping systems purposefully ping-pong between the lines to prevent you from relying on it by making it somewhat annoying.
If you’re using it the way you’re supposed to and giving real steering input then it helps you stay within the lines. So it’s less effort for you and it helps mitigate large wind gusts and such.
But basically lane keeping is absolutely not meant to steer for you.
> He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop.
No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.
I agree with the recommendation that you yourself replied to: move in front of the vehicle, and gradually slow to a stop, with lights and sirens optional but recommended
I am thrown by the question of "What else should have been done" though, after grandparent made an explicit recommendation
There was a news story here in town a few years back where a private citizen - not cop - brought a ghost car (driver passed out) to a stop by driving up in front of it, making bumper contact and then braking both to a stop. Not recommended! But can be done even without adaptive cruise control.
It's important to make sure we have all the context before making a judgement like this. My rule of thumb is that if I think something is obviously stupid, I'm probably missing something.
Older systems including the older versions of Blue Cruise may not go around you, but you also don’t know if they even have radar cruise control enabled.
If it’s a simple enough system maybe it would just keep going the same speed no matter what until it hit you.
No, it's literally that. It's super dangerous and the practice of performing it in any but very unusual situations is, to put it mildly, hard to justify on any actual public safety grounds. To the extent the maneuver is a "safe" version of making a car crash, it's (relatively) safe for the cop causing the crash.
A certain segment of the public, plus cops themselves (having significant overlap with that segment), love it though, because they enjoy seeing non-compliance met with life-endangering levels of force and can't understand why any of us wouldn't enjoy it unless we want more crime or something.
So a bunch of suspects who weren't, car chase aside, any imminent danger to anyone, and their possibly-unwilling passengers, end up dead or life-alteringly injured... and so do plenty of people who had nothing to do with any of it. Often over what was originally just e.g. property crime.
I would rather a cop risk a runner's life every time than let him continue to flee at speed recklessly for miles on end, usually culminating in crashing into an innocent person or their property. That's not even a question for me. Or would you rather just let criminals run away if they manage to enter a vehicle?
It takes two to tango, and the cop can stop the life-threatening chase at any time, without causing a wreck.
Causing the speeding car to go out of control is also not a great thing for public safety, and does kill and cripple people who are in no way involved in these chases. We have jurisdictions with no-chase rules and it doesn’t seem to cause some hypothesized explosion in crime. It is in-fact ok to not do them, as satisfying as they might feel.
Well, I'd rather they just get pitted. If someone is at the point of fleeing from police in a high speed chase, I want them removed from society, because nobody well adjusted and beneficial does that. Whether that's by arrest or by accidental death, I really don't mind either way. The alternative also emboldens criminals to flee as a first resort and to plan around that possibility.
Fortunately in USA we have many state jurisdictions to choose from so we can each live under the sort of laws that suit us best!
This would be precisely the divide I mentioned above. One is focused on whole-picture outcomes, the other is focused on making sure “bad guys” have a bad time (regardless of how that fits into the larger picture). Folks on either side of this divide tend to think the other is actually, factually nuts.
You are ignoring the big picture outcome of the resultant culture that develops in a society in which criminals can easily flee and not be chased. Culture shifts for the worse in an environment that is less likely to catch, arrest, or prosecute criminals. Trust and norms erode.
The factual outcomes almost don't matter; what matters is perception among the masses. For example, if people largely believe that shoplifting is not prosecuted in a city, and they see shoplifting occur, it is extremely depressing, even if they see the person arrested. It's demoralizing. It also probably leads to more attempts at shoplifting overall. I use this example because it's common enough in a few cities.
High speed chases are rare, so it's not as immediately obvious. But if people see on the news two stories, "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, high speed chase, crashes into innocent bystander killing self and them" versus "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, police arent allowed to chase him so he is currently at large, but they are trying to track him by other means", the latter is far more demoralizing, makes one lose faith in society and the rule of law, makes one less proud of their culture, etc etc. This is a serious effect over time.
At some level, society needs to believe that bad behaviors are punished and that good guys are trying their best to stop bad guys. This is very important to a functioning society. When people stop believing that, culture declines rapidly. Even if the utilitarian outcome is slightly better when not stopping bad guys sometimes (e.g. not prosecuting the previous president even if you could), it's usually not worth the resultant demoralization.
I broadly agree that both are important, but I think the difference lies in the level to which the person feels about the two scenarios you post. Some people are far more upset about the former than the latter (and also consider what happens if you modulate it by the crime committed).
(And of course it's not a strict either/or as well: you can have a rules of engagement for such things. e.g. in the UK the police are not blanket banned from pursuing a fleeing vehicle, but they need to have had appropriate training and do so only in particular circumstances)
I have a 2014 car that's connectable but no driver assistance; I had a 2017 (delivered mid 2016) with lane keeping and emergency braking which seemed pretty new and exciting, and it's connectable, all I would need to do is pay a big annual fee and also setup a 3g CDMA network. Couldn't do much with either if it's connected; I pulled the 3g modem from the 2014 when it was convenient cause I was worried it was using power while off.
Not that lane keeping needs a connection, just that I'm surprised they put it on a car without a modem.
To my knowledge it is completely offline. The fanciest version of it (Honda Civic) has wifi and will connect to your house wifi when in range (and also do wireless Android Auto) but mine doesn't have it. This one has no cloud features and if there's a SIM card lurking deeply in there somehwere, it certainly isn't going to facilitate reaching down to monitor me in the car (the hardware isn't there, aside from the microphone for bluetooth) or change features on me.
I won't claim to know for certain but want to point out that if there's a SIM card in the head unit then it can upload anything it can see on the CAN bus which is literally every sensor in the vehicle. I guess the only thing likely to be missing is a cockpit video feed.
Even if it doesn't offer the user an option to connect AFAIK approximately all vehicles from the past 15 years or so are part of the internet of shit. They send telemetry back to the manufacturer.
My 2016 Corolla has zero advertised connectivity features. It could secretly be sending data somehow, but far as I've been able to tell there's no modem.
I have a Subaru with driver's assistance. Basically you input speed and distance from the vehicle ahead, and the car turns, accelerates, and brakes. It disengages quite often, in particular when the lanes are not clearly marked.
I used it a couple of times, but then I stopped; for me, as a driver/passenger, it has very little value. Yes, maybe I can lower my attention from 100% to 95%, but it does not make much difference: I need to keep my hands on the wheel, it disengages at random (for me) times.
Yeah I don't get Tesla's move here. Lane Keep Assist has been a standard feature in most new cars, EV or not, starting around ~2019ish. IIRC, the EU now has regulations mandating lane keep assist in all new vehicles sold.
Heck, a cheap base model Maza 3 I rented had lane keep assist.
Tesla only stands to lose by gatekeeping what's now a basic feature behind a paywall.
It checks out with all the other awful software changes they're making like whatever "curvature assist" is that randomly brakes where it doesn't need to, or when it gets confused about what road I'm on while on the freeway and suddenly drops my 75mph cruise control to 55mph and slams the brakes.
IMO; you should try the product. The car basically drives me everywhere with no interventions, including on errands around SF. Just plug in where via the Google Maps view.
I’ve been paying the monthly for a while. Very worth it to me.
“basically” is doing some heavy lifting here as they aren’t good enough to let you ignore the road without taking serious risks. So you’re stuck in the drivers seat paying attention to traffic, but you get to mostly avoid turning the steering wheel, yay what an awesome improvement definitely worth 8k or 100$/month
IMO adaptive crude control that works down to 0MPH is still the sweet spot.
Also standard equipment now (in my mid-level Honda Civic). However once gone to zero, it won't roll again until you nudge the throttle pedal. Also, just like lane keeping it "needs supervision". Once someone braked hard up ahead to do an almost-missed left turnoff, and I let the adaptive cruise control do what it does. And it missed it and I had to brake manually, fairly hard too!
But for driving in slow traffic with no passing lane for the next half hour (Highway 7 between Perth and Marmora, for Ontarians) it's a godsend. Just let it handle it and chill.
First, you're talking about a different product, FSD vs Autopilot.
Second, I have a 2025 Model 3, and even with the latest v14.2.2 FSD I had an intervention rate of roughly every ten miles in Washington DC/VA suburbs. I shudder to think what it would do if I didn't pay attention, so I don't think it's an improvement over me driving myself.
How does lane-keeping assist drive you everywhere, or plug in to Google Maps? That doesn't make any sense to me. Are you talking about a separate feature or something?
- Has legal liability shifted as a result of the system being the driver?
Because I feel like the answer needs to be "yes" for this claim to be accurate. If the answer isn't "yes," then you're still meant to be fully engaged with driving and are liable for any accidents that occur.
It could be a better product, but that doesn't mean it's a better purchase if you care about the morals of the companies and leaders you do business with
I rented one of these in the form of a Hyundai Sonata, and their lane follow is amazing. Included in the cost of the car, does radar cruise and all the rest. Free for the life of the car.
You don't have to pay for what was previously called autopilot. This title is blatantly false. You only play for FSD which drives from parked to parked.
I'm not sure I agree with all of that - that single-purpose tech is making a real comeback. But I do have one example in my daily life that supports this: A Garmin watch.
Unlike "full" smartwatches (arbitrarily defined as: You can browse the web on them in some fashion) Garmin devices are intentionally limited but in return, what they do works very well and seems fully debugged. I spent several years recording outdoor activities with the Strava app on my phone, and always there was about a 1% failure rate where for one reason or another, the GPS trace was interrupted or corrupted. With the Garmin watch this simply doesn't happen. If it's recording, the recording is good, period.
It is that, that has somehow been lost. That devices that just do one thing and do it well have been replaced by apps on a device that, in the modern software fashion, are "mostly" debugged, get constant updates that may or may not remove bugs (or features!) and usually don't add anything useful. One app got an update which, on my lower-end phone, changed it from crisply responsive to incredibly slow (5+ second response time to a tap). It worked fine before.
In this, isn't it more that Garmin has been making sports watches for a long long time? And were given the grace by their customer base to just keep making that particular function better.
You could probably find the same with bike computers. Established brands that have a fairly predictable customer base tend to continue to focus on the thing that they do well. If you are having to chase a market that doesn't really exist, you find half baked features that speak to an idea, but often don't actually deliver on it.
For an amazing example of that last, look at how Amazon is destroying their echo market. If they just focused on "voice activated radio and timers," the device would be very different from the "we are trying desperately to make a new market for our smart assistant."
This is my problem with software now. It doesn't work well enough, and a product's incarnation doesn't have a long enough lifecycle, for it to be worth incorporating into my life.
Heck, my big complaint on here for a while was Google managed to break the timer voice functionality on my Pixel, my second most used function after playing music. They broke it long enough and I had enough meals ruined/issues that I moved to something else. My phone is less used for useful things than it was 10 years ago purely because companies have made it not worth using.
And here I am each morning having to manually enforce sync multiple times to have my fucking Garmin watch sleep data show up in my iPhone Garmin app. I love this watch (Instinct 2) but it’s far from bug free even in its most fundamental functions like data sync
I had a phone I liked that was stuck on Android 7 and had increasing sync issues until I got a phone that can run current Android. iPhone should be better with support, but also, Apple is hostile to third-party apps that use Bluetooth, so I'm hesitant to say this is Garmin's fault and not Apple's.
I still have my old pebble (the metal one they made between the original and Pebble Time). The battery has finally died, otherwise I'd still definitely still wear it from time to time
I've started to realize of late that a vast majority of tech is "making things and services that maximize the amount of money taken out of customer wallets" and not "making cool technology that works". They have just as much pride and put just as much care and craft into squeezing money out of consumers as developers and engineers put into their projects.
This creates a market where quality and craftsmanship and customer service reduce competitiveness and eat into profits. We've empowered and optimized a market for the enshittifiers, and they're damn good at what they do.
Tech hiring has shifted dramatically. It used to be people genuinely interested in, and passionate about technology. Top companies used to filter for this as well.
Now it's just anyone that wants a big paycheck. And the culture shift is reflected in the products.
It's shifted because you can outsource and race to the bottom, and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages, and you fatten up the ranks of middle managers to make people leave every 3-4 years, stagnating wage growth, ensuring you get a constant stream of fresh, energized, underpaid workers, some of which can't complain or advocate for higher wages, and all participate in a culture of competitiveness and bean counting. Nobody builds relationships or sticks around long enough for policies and perks that are used to sell the package in the first place. There are all sorts of dark patterns that are taught to MBAs as "best practice". Throw in McKinsey et al, third party CYA vendors, and you have a rancid stew of bare minimum, low effort, "technically legal" policy and practices designed to screw everyone out of as much money as possible in order to make number go up. Companies that compete in the number go up game end up beating every other company that think they're in the something-as-a-service game, or the best quality product game.
We don't have to live like this. We can make them stop with reasonable regulations. That'd require term limits and nuking the dark money PACs and all the other corrupt bullshit, though, so who knows. Maybe we're all screwed, and "getting yours" is the best and only move left.
> and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages
Heh. Most HNers that seem to have little moral restraints when it comes to making money in their posts seem to be in the US.
Do you even notice how many "solo saas founder" and "faang employee" types defend the right of those large companies that you're complaining about to increase their profits ad infinitum?
Or how many consider "free to play" IAP fests as regular honest video games?
The root problem isn't really multi-purpose tech. It's the perennial coercive tendencies of monopolies being multiplied by their modern capability to update software in the blink of an eye.
If a company develops a monopoly in virtually any part of your life these days, and if a $1 network connected SoC can be added to their product, they can start abusing their position within a matter of months. The standard playbook is some combination of advertisements, notifications, and subscription charges (sometimes for stuff that used to be free!). None of those things are met with enthusiasm from consumers. But if the consumer has no other choice, it's almost a guarantee that the business will add them eventually.
Lock in and abuse. This isn't a new business model, we've just watched it spread from being a Microsoft PC thing in 1990s IT departments to pretty much everywhere now. (Speaking broadly about MSFT's business strategy back then, but they were also literally the first ones to try and shove unwanted Internet ads down your throat by streaming Active Desktop Channels on top of your wallpaper in 1997...!)
A Fenix 5S+. A lucky garage sale find. I can't btw vouch for "fully debugged" on some of its fancier features. I mean map display? On such a tiny device? I'll just use my phone. But the basic sports stuff is rock solid.
Map display is incredibly useful for us outdoor people - having a map of a hiking track at hand is much nicer than having to pull out a phone constantly.
This holds true also for other sports - e.g. ski layer is nice to orient yourself on ski slopes.
(Also Garmin maps actually have sports tracks with better detail than software made for cars like GMaps.)
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