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by foxtr0t 2000 days ago
I keep coming back to this in my head, thinking about how superficial this counterpoint is. Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements. In reality, table stakes are LED DRLs, high beams and lowbeams. Matrix LEDs or laser lights that can mask out other vehicles using onboard IR sensors are becoming more common. Additionally there are styling requirements, such as computationally driven welcome and farewell patterns for lock/unlock, and trends to follow like light bars, super thin OLED strips etc.

A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.

1 comments

> Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements.

Yes they are. You don't get to point to random fancy things and call them "requirements".

> A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.

You're taking "phones have lights" too seriously. It was a deliberately vague and useless rebuttal to a deliberately vague and useless point. The real answer is what I already said. Replicating the functionality of a bulb/socket/housing is not hard to such an extent that the only reason to bring up lights is for jokes. So the joke got a joke back.