[latchkey]

I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing...

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/

[tw04]

That’s always been the case with Tesla. I still have no idea how the yoke with no progressive steering and a tiny button for a horn ever passed any sanity check. Not to mention the NHTSA.

[latchkey]

Oh, I wish they would install tiny horn buttons on all the vehicles in Vietnam! In that country, the horn is a method of communication, much to the ire of literally everyone trying to exist.

[gerdesj]

Excessive horning (made up word) is not just a Vietnamese thing. Italy is probably Europe's worst offender, with Greece a close contender.

I'm not so familiar with Asia, but I get the impression that the entirety of Indian and most of Chinese drivers feel the need to lean on the horn with gay abandon (fnarr).

In Britain the horn is generally reserved for "fuck that was close: I think you are a bit of a tosser" or "you are driving a German car and seem to have have no indicators".

[bluGill]

In india if you hit someone after sounding your horn you are not at fault as you gave warning and they didn't move. (It is far more complex than that but as always the real truth is too complex for a comment box - if you are trying to drive safe it is close enough, but this isn't a license to murder), As a result all drives will honk their own if there is any possibility someone might cross in front of them.

India is getting a lot stricter about driving rules, and I hven't been there for a few years. I would expect the above to change as people realize that the horn doesn't really work for that purpose anyway. But change is always slow.

[jabl]

Was something like 20 years since I was in India, but IIRC at least back then they didn't have a "priority to the right" traffic rule, but rather some kind of "the one who first honks has priority". Traveling in a taxi felt suicidal, drivers just honked when approaching an intersection and continued blithely.

Based on a quick googling, this seems to no more be the case, and there is a 'priority to the right" rule.

[whstl]

I saw something similar when visiting Latin America a few years ago, in a neighbourhood friends lived in. Some people would just go full speed in residential streets and hold the horn while crossing intersections because I guess that's what's gonna keep their car intact?

[jameshart]

By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?

Neither system describes how Indian traffic works, which is much more of an iterated cooperative fluid dynamics simulation, with the main rule being ‘don’t drive into people who are in front of you’.

And they drive on the left, so priority to the right makes no sense.

[aloisdg]

I ride a bike for a few months in India. The honk system worked quite well. As a small vehicle, you learn your place on the road. Largest first, even if you honk. Honking at every turn in small town works ok, but it is loud. so loud.

[amatecha]

Ah wow, this explains so much about the idiot who didn't know how to use a 4-way stop and nearly drove into me the other day. I thought he's giving me a hard time, blaming me, when I had the right of way. Maybe he was just doing the "warning because he might hit" thing?

[stef25]

In Asia it's mainly used to signal your presence, like when you're overtaking someone. Just a little tap of the horn. Just the fact that you hear it say in the right corner behind you will make you not swerve in that direction. It's almost subconscious and really does improve safety imho. You can't possibly visually scan for all vehicles around you.

The result of course is that there's a non stop cacophony, in places like Hanoi it REALLY gets to you after a while.

Here in EU if someone honks at you it's considered rude and will make me really react with wtf is your problem. Out in Asia it's completely normal.

[PetitPrince]

It's been a while since I've been to Vietnam but most of the traffic is composed of motorcycle and not cars, so honking is indeed a signal of presence that's needed compared to just having the noise of a single car that's behind you.

(crossing the street is also kind of surreal as it's more like going through a school of fish; the trick is to walk at a steady pace to maximize your position predictability)

[darkwater]

When I got my driving license too many years ago in Italy, they taught me that a brief honk when taking over in interurban roads is actually mandatory (but nobody did it). I don't know if that rule stayed the same as they harmonized more and more the road rules to the European ones.

[seanmcdirmid]

Horns were disabled in Chongqing at least a couple of decades ago. I’m not sure what it’s like now though, but the government in China can and will deal with excessive horning using means we wouldn’t consider in the west.

[rangestransform]

They straight up banned horning in Shanghai when I was there in 2017 using some kind of camera system IIRC, it was quite jarring when I continued onto Nanjing and the usual cacophony resumed.

They also banned lane changing over solid lines with the same camera system IIRC

[seanmcdirmid]

Ya, China has no problem using camera/recognition tech to its fullest. I wonder if other societies will eventually be outcompeted (cheaper law & order costs means Chinese cities will be more efficient) or if there is some huge cost (privacy violations that lead to economic consequences) to this that will make it less competitive.

[gerdesj]

Although things are a bit shit in many places, I do love our planet and the weird and wonderful ways it works.

Were car horns disabled (broken deliberately) in Chongqing?

[seanmcdirmid]

20 years ago each city/province was basically its own closed market. So if you were driving a car in CQ, it was probably bought and even made in CQ. They simply required that the horns be disabled.

China internally is much more of a free market now, so I’m not sure how they could just disable horns anymore, although you still can’t get away with driving an outside register vehicle inside a city for very long without getting a crackdown by the police (meaning, they can enforce inspection requirements fairly easily).

I’m not sure if it was really Chongqing or some other obscure city like Dalian, I’m going by hearsay 20+ years ago. More recently, Shanghai banned honking in most circumstances in 2007 (inside its outer ring), but it’s enforced with just fines.

[Thorrez]

Huh, I drove in Italy for a week and a half and didn't notice excessive honking. I did notice tons and tons of tailgating.

[lostlogin]

When I was there (ages ago), the driver of the bus I was on overtook on a blind corner on a road cantilevered off a cliff. They did cross themselves before doing it.

[HelloNurse]

Honking is a harmless replacement for solving disputes with handguns. You probably drove in low-stress environments.

[KSteffensen]

There is a low-stress driving environment in Italy? Where's that?

Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.

[brabel]

Italy is really 2 countries, north and south are quite distinct.

[PopePompus]

Where ever you are in Italy, you will be told by locals that you can't trust anyone from a town south of that place.

[whstl]

What's the difference between them in terms of driving?

[Hikikomori]

Try driving in Naples.

[IncreasePosts]

Naples is the first place I got honked at for not cutting the person off. I was at a stop sign, making a left turn onto a main road that had a steady stream of traffic. Apparently, I was supposed to wait a few seconds and then just creep out, cutting cars off on the way, which is what I believe the driver on the main road meant when he beeped at me and gesticulated wildly while I was sitting still at the stop sign.

[j-a-a-p]

Italy pales in comparison to Vietnam.

[stevoski]

Lebanon. Especially Beirut. The honking. Every taxi driver that passed me if I was walking down the street. Honking. Honking. So much noise. All the time.

Six months I was there. Six months of honking honking honking.

[jq-r]

Unfortunately like every city in Egypt. They have a hand permanently on a horn button.

[noisy_boy]

I have experience of both Vietnam and India amongst other countries. The latter takes any country, including Vietnam, you can throw at it and wipes the floor with them when it comes to mindless honking.

[ErrorNoBrain]

and here you can get a 100 euro fine, for using your horn.

You can only use it, if its to prevent an accident from happening. that's it.

[qmr]

https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...

[loeg]

> The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails.

I worked for a $ ~billions revenue software storage vendor who had the exact same issue (excessive logging wearing out under-spec'd flash drives).

[namaria]

The bane of every cargo cult cloud op. I worked with a company that had maybe 20 devs total, > 30 "microservices" in kubernetes and one of the most complex bits of the deployment was handling Greylog and Elasticsearch. Still they couldn't manage high availability, despite logging all the things. Go figure.

[whstl]

I once worked for a unicorn that got near-zero traffic during the pandemic, but nobody could understand why some services were struggling to stay up.

Datadog was costing several thousand euros per month despite near-absent customer traffic. But the name made finally sense because all the data in there was absolute dog shit from reboots.

So yeah too much logging can be bad.

[namaria]

Oh most definitely. Maybe my sarcasm was a bit too subtle.

I definitely think that teams should think about what to log. Otherwise go with a live image kind of system like Smalltalk of LISP. The whole event sourcing paradigm and trying to just log everything and look at it later strike me as a poor reconstruction of that concept.

There is a tragic aspect to the "Worse is Better" essay that I see play out everywhere: there is a way to do something correctly but just throwing something together wins the race to market. Winner takes all and we're stuck with ossified bad decisions from the past. The idea that we can fix it later is just a lie. You can't do the foundation later, you'll be stuck with a structurally unsound edifice and forever holding it together under a completely unnecessary cognitive load.

[whstl]

Oh I got the sarcasm, I was just agreeing.

And I also agree about worse is better. To me the most tragic part is that "worse" has become almost as costly as doing "The Right Thing", mostly due to the extreme flexibility and rush to the market from vendors and libraries. Our foundations weren't as sketchy when the concept was invented.

[namaria]

It has definitely gotten much worse. The only thing keeping me sane is hacking solo projects in languages with great tooling. I don't think I can even stomach interviews anymore, let alone the whole application process farce.

[DanielHB]

We had the exact same issue as well haha

These kind of problems only happen years after the software roll out so no one cares when you are under time pressure.

[loeg]

We sold physical hardware with bundled software, so we could actually create the problem via in-market software update that didn't exist at time of sale! Fun times.

[RedShift1]

HPE also had this issue with their ILO 4. New firmware fixed that issue but if your flash chip was already worn out you're out of luck and the only solution is to replace the entire motherboard.

[immibis]

Issue, or revenue driver?

[loeg]

Issue. We warrantied the longevity of those flash drives, and they were cheap anyway. The problem was mostly the customer pain.

[iknowstuff]

You’re using a software fault which wore out the flash as evidence of poorly designed electronics?

[amatecha]

How is writing excessive logs to a destined-to-fail flash chip in a car's electronics system not a poor design choice? Pretend the person wrote "poorly-designed electronics implementations/sytems" or similar, because that's obviously the intended meaning.

[mavamaarten]

If the flash was better, the product wouldn't fail so quickly. It's really a combination of poorly designed electronics, and a software bug wasn't there, the fault wouldn't have popped up so early.

[iknowstuff]

All solid state chips have a write limit

[HelloNurse]

it isn't a software fault, it's a whole defective system that was designed poorly end-to-end: the software does something inappropriate, which the hardware cannot bear, probably because of a high level mandate to write too many logs and to be too cheap.