Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.

But they were at least limited in their portability and loudness and battery life. Now you can have a tiny speaker that gives up any semblance of sound quality for loudness, but will also manage to last 8+ hours.

At least on my TV, I’ve had firmware updates enable things like variable refresh rate, enable 4K/120Hz, improve the dynamic contrast performance, and fix a couple of weird bugs it had shipped with.

So far, no ghosts yet! Only haunted by the vague odor of the church it was in before, so it kind of smells like an old lady’s house, but it’s going away pretty quickly.

I went on the low side since it’s not in perfect shape and is an older (1985) Young-Chang built Wurlitzer. It was a church piano so it has some bushing wear in the keys, but still very playable, and had a broken string on D2 that was an easy $50 fix. I think after moving, tuning, the string, and eventually rebushing it in the next year or so, I’ll have about $900-1000 into it all said and done. Still definitely a pretty inexpensive piano overall, but understandable why they might not have wanted to put money into something that was probably a donation to begin with.

A $1 grand piano off of eBay. I had been looking around on stuff like FB Marketplace for a “real” piano after learning with a really basic keyboard for a while, and happened across a gorgeous 6’1" grand piano on eBay. It was reasonably close, the ad said it was in good working order, and they took very detailed pictures of basically every single flaw in the case. I called up a piano mover, and had them pick it up from the church, sight unseen. I was so worried that I’d made a mistake, given that the moving was still about $400, but I got insanely lucky, with a beautiful looking and sounding piano worth about $5k for basically just the cost of moving it.

I’d put good money on a company doing something marketing/ad related. My first summer internship was at a company that did digital ads, and the amount of alcohol that was consumed on literally a daily basis was insane. I’m talking the majority of the office being having a minimum of 2-4 drinks after about 2pm rolled around, and probably triple that on Friday.

The only party I was there for was the CTO’s birthday, in which at lunch he received a piñata filled to bursting with those little alcohol shots, and by the end of the day basically everyone had to Uber home. For 19 year old me, it was pretty unreal seeing my bosses and coworkers that drunk in the middle of the week.

Knowing how fucked up everyone was during a normal workweek in the office, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a Christmas party there was an absolute drug-filled rager.

The good news with iRobot is that they actually have pretty solid cybersecurity. They also do a pretty great job of supporting parts for old robots and make them quite easy to repair. For a typical consumer product, I feel like they’re far better than most companies in terms of how shitty they could be vs how shitty they actually are.

Or, the Rebels hire him and he simply fires a blaster at the exhaust port from a distant planet.

Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.

Bull-fucking-shit. That’s just not how any of this works.

There are plenty of companies that make appliances that last a long fucking time, and don’t have to rely on fucking DLC micro transaction AI bullshit. The reason Instant Pot went bankrupt is the same reason a ton of popular companies have recently had issues: They got bought by private equity (who also owned Pyrex and fucked them over), saddled with a shitton of bad debt, squeezed of every bit of brand value they had, and then left to fall apart as the PE firm made off with millions.

The fact that the writer correlated “quality, durable good” with “unsuccessful business and bankruptcy” is absolutely one of the worst takes, and really shows just how pervasive this disgusting idea of “must be disposable to be profitable” really is.

It’s definitely possible to recal or replace the hardware, it’s just way easier to recal that replace hardware.

One example I can think of is one project whose calibration and braking performance meant it was just eking out a pass, but because of the transition to copper-free brake pads, was now hitting the target. It wasn’t a huge deal, and we had to recalibrate it to brake a bit earlier.

VW (and Mercedes) is a pretty special case in terms of their industry pull. When I worked at a German Tier 1, it was very much a case of if they say “jump” you asked, “how high?”. They have such a massive output of vehicles, as a supplier, you’ll do anything possible to try and maintain their business. Even being on the team for NA/LATAM customers, we’d be told to sideline what we were working on to support stuff for VW/Mercedes, even though we saw literally no benefit from it as the NA team, and it could seriously hurt some of the projects we were working on. However, the reality was that the business from VW alone was larger than basically every other project we had combined, so it was worth it to piss off our other customers to keep them happy.

I also welcome standard AEB, but I’m not convinced customers are going to like it to be entirely honest. With how the regulation is written, it’s asking a lot from OEMs in terms of performance, and with perfect performance being required to even just sell a vehicle, I fear that we’re going to wind up with ultra-sensitive systems with heaps of false-positive/“phantom braking” reactions, just to ensure they pass the regs. NHTSA in all their infinite wisdom did include some very basic FP testing, but not an acceptable rate of FP per X number of miles. Also, because of the extremely high nighttime requirements, expect headlights to get even more blinding in the coming years…

Not really back to the drawing board, but more than likely recalibrating the system to improve performance. EU-NCAP /CN-NCAP are a much bigger deal, at least for vehicles that are sold in the EU/CN market, and poor performance on those can mean pushing for larger changes. But even then, they’re seldom “back to the drawing board” just because at that point it’s usually way too late in production to make significant changes.

In the US, the new FMVSS 127 requirements are a huge fucking deal, and are making huge waves in the industry right now. Because they’re regulatory, meaning if you don’t pass you can’t sell the vehicle in the US, they’ve taken what’s been a generally low priority in the US to basically priority #1, especially given how tough the requirements are.

We are quite literally going to have to rework basically every single vehicle model we sell to meet it, some of them quite significantly, so it’s a much bigger deal than stuff like the IIHS requirements.

So, I’m going to be a voice of reason here, also working for a a major US automaker: there’s a 0.0001% chance this would ever be a thing implemented, and is almost definitely just something someone brainstormed and threw in the patent/IP registration system for a nice bonus. We’re heavily encouraged to submit ideas, even if there’s no real plans to ever implement them, and you can make more than $2k for a couple day’s worth of work in some cases.

I’ve come up with some hilariously dystopian ideas, and I’m more than happy to submit them because I know we’ll never bother with implementing them, it keeps other more “ambitious” OEMs from doing it, and the aforementioned monetary bonuses. Just because something is patented, doesn’t mean it’s going into production next week.

Also, because I know what sub I’m in, before everyone crucifies me here because I work for an automaker, I do so because I want to make a change from the inside, and my job focus is primarily on making vehicles safer for pedestrians and cyclists.