In a perfect world where developers are omnipresent and all knowing sure? This isn't a perfect world. Heck, how do you account for the developer who coded it leaving the company, and now that code has been untouched for half a decade if not more, because nothing is seemingly wrong with the code, what then? Who realizes it needs to be changed? Nobody. The number of obscure bugs I find in legacy code that stump even the most experienced maintainers never ends.
There have been dozens of government investigations and lawsuits around Tesla crashes over the past decade (more likely hundreds or thousands, I'm just thinking of the ones that received significant national press and that I happened to notice.) In each of these cases, Tesla's data retention was questioned, sometimes by regulators and sometimes as a major legal question in the case. There is no way in 2025 that the retention process around crash data is some niche area of Tesla's code that the business leaders haven't thought about extremely carefully.
This is like saying "maybe nobody has recently looked at the ad-selection mechanism at Google." That's just not plausible.
I really should know better than to think that I can criticize a small part of an article without a bunch of people thinking that I'm defending everything the article discusses.
The process of collecting and uploading the data probably confuses a lot of non-technical readers even if it worked as per standard industry practices.
The real issue is that Tesla claimed the company doesn't have the data after every copy was deleted. There's no technical reason to dispose of data related to a crash when you hold so much data on all of the cars in general.
Crash data in particular should be considered sacred, especially given the severity in this case. Ideally it should be kept both on the local black box and on the servers. But anything that leads to it being treated as instantly disposable everywhere, or even just claiming it was deleted, can only be malice.
> The real issue is that Tesla claimed the company doesn't have the data after every copy was deleted.
Exactly. The issue is deleting the data on the servers, not a completely mundane upload-then-delete procedure for phoning home. This should have been one sentence, but instead they make it read like a heist.
> The real issue is that Tesla claimed the company doesn't have the data after every copy was deleted. There's no technical reason to dispose of data related to a crash when you hold so much data on all of the cars in general.
My money is on nobody built a tool to look up the data, so they have it, they just can't easily find it.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
I think that freedom includes, for example, the right not to be shot dead. When someone is using speech to cause people to be shot dead then we have to weigh which freedom is more important and I happen to think that not being shot is more important. If there not also your opinion, fine, you can go to America where speech is considered more important.
You don't want to live in America because it's dystopic and collapsing? Strange. Strange that there's a correlation between countries that hold your opinions and dystopia and collapse. One might even be lead to think that principles held by dystopic countries that collapse might be bad principles to build a country on. But those who promoter those principles told me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
We have to stop rejecting the evidence of our eyes and ears. Propaganda is everywhere. That is a fact. Some of it is destroying the country. That is a fact. We either deal with it or accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact. Your choice is to accept the destruction of the country. That is a fact.
Blocking RT is a very light reach. If you believe the lightest of reaches is already a severe overreach then you are making it binary and polarized, not me.
The fact that some kids will still find ways to get them would be at least partially addressed by the "education" part of GP's comment. Even then, of course, some kids will still start smoking. Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
> Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
What about when devices come with such a "feature" baked in? Android has Magic Cue, Windows has Recall. How long until they're opt-out, or "accidentally" enabled with an update, or just on at all times? And "sensitive" can be wherever details I want to share with that friend. It can be as benign as giving them an address or phone number, or maybe a medical diagnosis, or a crypto wallet number.
Is your position that anyone who's not tech savvy enough to constantly fight the onslaught of shady business practices and dark patterns that most tech companies throw at them is not worthy of their friends' trust?
For most people asking them to guarantee their own devices won't spy on them is a tall order.
> Is your position that anyone who's not tech savvy enough to constantly fight the onslaught of shady business practices and dark patterns that most tech companies throw at them is not worthy of their friends' trust?
Trust is a function of character and competence. Not understanding how your technology may be compromising you is, within the scope of keeping secrets, a fracture of competence.
I can’t repair a car. My friends would be correct in not trusting me to go under their cars’ hoods unsupervised. Similarly, a friend or colleague who cannot be trusted to understand the device they’re using cannot be trusted with matters of confidence in that context.
> I can’t repair a car. My friends would be correct in not trusting me to go under their cars’ hoods unsupervised
What a let down of an answer. Who said anything about "going under the hood"? This is about simply using a device. Unfortunately the control of your phone is shared with a manufacturer or OS developer with shady practices and interests that don't align with yours. You are tasked with operating a device that is more than occasionally actively hostile and subversive towards you, the owner and user.
You probably don't fully understand almost any of the things you will ever interact with in your entire life. When some of those things will betray you I bet you won't find it a matter of your incompetence. Come to think about it, one day you'll realize you lived long enough to screw something up in almost every area you touched.
> who cannot be trusted to understand the device they’re using
In my previous comment I made it crystal clear that this is about using a device and gave concrete examples of dark patterns that would challenge even an expert. And you still misunderstood, and still wrongly assume that it's a matter of "competence". That's a fracture of competence if I've ever seen one.
Like a victim of a robbery in a bad neighborhood showed a fracture of competence by not understanding bad-neighborhood-dynamics.
I'm sure that by having fewer parts in the logistics chain they can build a car cheaper. They then define models via software almost for free. And that would be great if the saving was passed to the consumer. Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".
But the situation is objectively worse than today because it doesn't just involve a "software defined car" but a "subscription defined car". Today you buy your specs and own them, you're not at the manufacturer's mercy on the monthly price.
I'm afraid it's just a matter of time until everyone does it. It only takes one company to go first and take the heat to make it mainstream, the rest will follow.
Its a funny situation: they a put larger battery in the car, which makes the car heavier. Then they derate the battery to give you less mileage with the added “benefit” that you carry with you a deadweight that you can’t get rid of and contributes further to reduced mileage.
And someone at VW looked at this and said: amazing idea.
My single take from this is that batteries have become so cheap that you can put more in a car and still make a good profit.
It would have been nice if the savings would be passed on to the consumer.
> It sounds to me like they're just limiting the kW output of the pack.
That's what he means by derating. Using the battery as if it were specced lower than it is. The deadweight is that you're hauling around a battery that is heavier than it needs to be if it were actually that spec.
OK, let’s try this another way: they could have sold a car with a say 70kW battery. Instead they are selling it with say 100kW battery.
Am smaller battery would weigh less than a bigger battery.
Because they de-rate the battery via software, you are carrying a bigger battery which weighs more than a smaller battery, while you only get the mileage of a smaller battery.
And then all we'll need is a federal government that's friendly to free trade and all of the domestic auto manufacturers will go out of business because they can't compete.
It might not happen this year, it might not happen this decade, but it will eventually happen.
Organizing your business in such an anti-consumer way is a huge liability, but executives who will have extracted all the wealth anyways will probably be long gone by then.
If it’s just extra revenue that implies that, if the manufacturer actually made 2 physically different models, they could just sell the cheaper model at the expensive model price and then charge extra for the upgrade on top of that. In other words there is zero customer price sensitivity. That seems unlikely.
> Instead every saving is definitely captured by the manufacturer and the consumer gets to buy a car that definitely does everything but "computer says no".
Or enabling full power puts more load on the vehicle's components and costs the manufacture more in warrant and reduced resale values.
Suspect it is a bit of both, but without access to the books.
Treaties in general aren't the best way to deal with anything. At best they're virtue signaling, at worst they're just misleading.
The countries which benefit the most from ignoring the paper will ignore it in the shadows, then in the light, to the point they just unilaterally denounce it and do their own thing. You can't "stimulate" a country's representatives to care about something unless you give them an equally important incentive, carrot or stick. The stick doesn't work with powerful countries, and the carrot is usually too expensive.
So the methods employed to negotiate and agree on a treaty's text are even less meaningful.
I just don’t understand the “this approach is imperfect therefore we should do nothing” mindset. Yet it’s so common these days. Is it just nihilism? Learned helplessness?
By all means go solve plastics some other way and educate us all. But there really isn’t any value in just declaring entire methodologies useless because they don’t always produce unmitigated good outcomes.
For grounding, here are treaties that made a material difference:
- The Montreal protocol made a huge difference in reducing CFCs and other ozone destroying chemicals. If you’re old enough to remember “the ozone hole”, this is why you don’t hear it now. Google for reductions in skin cancer attributed to the treaty.
- Conventional on Tabacco Control is only 20 years old but has made huge reductions in tobacco addiction and cancer reduction
- High Seas treaty is even newer but already reducing overfishing in almost half of the ocean
Do you really want to give up and throw those kinds of things out just because some jerks put on a sham treaty show in this instance?
> You can't "stimulate" a country's representatives to care about something unless you give them an equally important incentive, carrot or stick.
I agree with this statement, and the reasons why they don't work, but also see it as lacking a systems perspective. Incentives are the result of system dynamics and, regardless of how they are wielded, do little to affect the protocols and structures that formed them in the first place.
My suggestion is that, by redefining the structures within which such discussions take place, new incentives will appear. This is anything but trivial and requires a solid understanding of both social psychology and international relations, but it is also not impossible.
If we consider consensus to be counterproductive, we must seek alternatives. Of the top of my head, one route could be to leverage the tendency for friend-shoring. This could involve grouping countries such that immediate impacts to profits are no longer shouldered by single interests. Those countries who possess both wealth and a greater sense of urgency could make side-agreements that allow for a kind of liquid-democracy within the final vote, similar to the way that coalitions form in countries that use proportional representation.
Another options might be to structure trade agreement such that externalities are re-internalised, forcing countries engaged in extractive processes to confront the impact that their activies make. Carbon credits have worked to do the opposite, acting as a lubricant that allow emission to be easily localised elsewhere and enabling an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality.
> Treaties in general aren't the best way to deal with anything. At best they're virtue signaling, at worst they're just misleading.
Treaties are just the end result of negotiations. The piece of paper itself is meaningless. The agreement it represents is meaningful. The treaty is just a symbol of the important work.
Part of the processing is to add something harmful or remove something useful either as the target of the process, or as a byproduct.
I give you a tomato, that's unprocessed. I squash it a bit and maybe add some salt? That's processed. I boil the hell out of it and mix it with 30 other ingredients (like salt, sugar, flavoring, preservatives, other additives, etc.), especially in large quantities? That's heavily processed or above. As you can see, the processing is what made a tomato worse for the health.
Not "necessarily", but "realistically". I think we need to start by clarifying what "processed" means from a practical (legal/commercial) perspective rather than common sense. What you call "processing" as a normal person, like boiling, frying, smoking, canning, fermenting, baking aren't necessarily even considered "processed" in the commercial sense. They're considered "preservation" (e.g. smoked fish) or "cookery" (e.g. bread). So almost every process that humans applied to food until the 19th-20th century was basic cooking and preservation, with a few exceptions of convoluted foods.
The modern interpretation of "processing" only begins at the next level. When the process has a lot more added steps and ingredients which in practice are almost guaranteed to be less healthy. But when we say "ultra-processed" it's guaranteed that it has significant health downsides. Ultra processed food has decreased nutritional content due to the processing, and high levels of unhealthy ingredients or components (like sugar, salt, trans fats, preservatives, and all kinds of other additives). Many ultra processed foods have more sugar, salt, or trans fats than they have the purported main ingredient. I'm just looking at a jar of "pistachio cream" that has 50% more sugar than pistachio.
So for all intents and purposes, in practice, processed food makes it less healthy and ultra-processed is synonymous with very unhealthy.
> I feel the outrage against Microsoft recall is largely artificial because of how useful this is for users
It solves a problem for a small subset of users while creating a problem for all other users. The outrage you see is simply some of the other users objecting. It's artificial only if you think your needs and wants are the only "real" ones.
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