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.

Now just imagine how the hype is for literally everything they've ever done, and it's on the exact same level. Once Tesla/Musk does something related to your field, it's abundantly clear what an absolute fraud he is.

And honestly, you can make a lot of really good bread quite quickly. Leaving out proofing for a bit, it's less than watching an episode of a show. Bread it also easy enough that you can totally watch a show while making it, and not worry about chopping off your fingers lol

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.

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.

Directly? No. Heavily? Absolutely.

"Phony Stark" is my personal favorite

yiffit.net

Yeah, that tracks

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.

I do this quite a bit too. I can fall asleep insanely quickly, so sometimes I'm just chilling on the couch watching something, and then I'm out. Then when I wake up I have to go digging through my couch to figure out where the heck my glasses went

Okay, I'm going to go against the grain here and say "Don't go with the really cheap online glasses".

I used eyebuydirect, Zenni, and a couple of others for many years, and was pretty happy with them, especially for the price. However, one thing I'd always noticed is that they'd wind up being pretty beat up with some large scratches in the coatings, or they'd just fail and start flaking off by around the 1 year mark (I'm pretty hard on my glasses, tbf) and I absolutely had to get new ones. I just kind of accepted that I was very hard on my glasses, and that's what happens.

However, I started going to Costco just because my insurance wouldn't cover any of the online places, and the quality of the lenses and coatings are absolutely night and day. I've had 10 pairs now (sunglasses and normal lenses), and only had one with a single scratch in the lenses, after having them go flying across a cement floor due to me doing something quite stupid.

I don't think you need a membership for their optical center either, but I'm not 100% sure.

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...