The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door. "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
Unrelated, but one of my favorite quotes from PKD is this one from Now Wait for Last Year:
---
“All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"
"I can see what it would mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."
"That's right," Eric said.
"I'd stay with her," the cab decided.
"Why?"
"Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."
"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her." "God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man.”
Note that the meaning in the book was almost wholly changed for the film. A big part of the book was that by learning to think 4-dimensionally (via the alien language), the scientists found that free will did not exist. The narrator had no choice in how to act with her child - she was simply acting out a predefined narrative...
"I suddenly remembered that a morphological relative of 'performative' was 'performance,' which could describe the sensation of conversing when you knew what would be said: it was like performing in a play."
...
"Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death."
The movie left this key message out almost entirely.
I include Arrival alongside Children of Men as an example of a case where the movie is better than the book (and I'm a big Ted Chiang fan) - changing the daughter's death from a climbing accident to a disease was much better imo.
In the book, it's impossible to act on information from the future, whereas in the film that clearly happens in the phone call near the end.
This means that if the daughter had died in a climbing accident in the film, the mother would have to have chosen to let that happen/not warn her, whereas to avoid the disease, the only option would have been not to have the child. In the book, that wasn't an option; learning the language changed her subjective experience of time, but did not give a superpower.
In the case of a disease, there's really nothing she can do, and iirc the film implies the hard choice here was to decide to have a child even knowing that will die.
In the car of an accident, there is the feeling that she could literally have prevented her daughter's death by preventing the accident, but "chooses" not to. The free will implications of that are much more interesting imo.
(To be clear, it's one of my favorite stories and also one of my favorite movies.)
I logged in just to tell you thank you for sharing, sometimes the right comment at the right time means a lot, and this is my case now it appears, so thank you.
I still think it's the right decision not to have kids.
I myself would prefer not to been born (while my life is relatively easy)
In dune there is a story part were the ruler knows what he needs to do but also realizes that he is not strong enough and knows that his son has to fullfil it (I forgot what it is about) but I feel as soon as we achieve the ability to self determine things like if we want to make kids, we should stop doing it as we might not have the right to create new life.
Don't get me wrong, this is not black and white thinking: have kids if you want.
Evolutionary everything and everyone is programed to stay alive and procreate. Fighting against it is hard.
It's easier to make this life easier, better etc than staying your ground and not making kids.
We tried actually and it didn't work out after 3 month. That made it much easier to not try again. But as you see, thinking about it and what you do is not black and white.
The vast majority of people are happy to exist, even people that experience a lot of suffering. Even if you ignore everything else, just that metric suggests on net it's better to have kids.
> "We should stop doing it as we might not have the right to create new life."
You can't get consent before hand so the best we can do is look at results after. By that it seems choosing to not have kids would be the less ethical position (though I don't personally hold that view - people should do what they want).
In addition to just being a fundamental part of humanity, a spark of intellectual curiosity in an otherwise indifferent universe, and a way to have companionship when you're old.
That's the problem: evolution drives life otherwise Evolution wouldn't exist.
Now we circumvent already things evolution purports like the strongest survivies. We also compensate for errors or flaws like eye sight, mental illness etc. We question eating meat. We cook meat. We self control and we evolved evolution by inventing the internet (highspeed human interconnect) and computers. Potentially the internet itself with all it's inputs (blogs, comments, news), processing power in-between and outputs will become a new thing.
We also do not support not lifing. If I would tell my parents that I want to stop/end my life I would not be allowed.
Why? Because of course the only true answer can be that lifing is good.
Now let's question this: we have no impact (universe will disintegrate), we have a lot of pain in the world, we can't guarantee to anyone that they will ha e a good life and there is no purpose in life either besides the purpose you create for yourself.
We can't ask someone if they want to be a life before they get born either.
In my logic the most social thing would be to be aware of everything around you and stop creating new brains to entertain yours.
How many brains in agony are okay? What is the perfect ratio? 1:10000? 1:100?
Making kids is not a logical answer it's an evolutionary one.
Lucky enough for our society my type of thinking will not propagate much anyway.
----
People are doing what they want anyway. It's just a discussion :)
Moral and ethics is a construct of a self-sufficient, sustainable and fair society. Nothing else.
> In dune there is a story part were the ruler knows what he needs to do but also realizes that he is not strong enough and knows that his son has to fullfil it (I forgot what it is about)
I thought in the movie it was cast as her choosing to accept it and cherishing the time they'd have left together? Maybe I missed the predestination theme (or maybe it was just implied... although you could say it's implied for any story involving travel or communication between different times.)
We’ll I certainly walked away with an understanding that it was all predestined, which annoyed me to no end because it felt like a ridiculous and meaningless cop out. But maybe I misread something that was actually more ambiguous?
Thank you for sharing this. I've often wondered how some folks deal with misfortune, take it in stride and work through them than abandon all hope for an easier route.
Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.
This comment needs to be internalized by everyone who has ever worked in a collaborative environment, or God forbid manage a team of people.
For all the hard charging, 10x programer, I am a builder let me work folks out there...Empathy is hard to learn, but you'll be a better person for it. I promise.
How are you measuring perseverance and endurance? I find that such claims tend to be completely made up, based on some "sense" you get from hearing a couple of viral stories.
The cabbies take is bizarre to me. Surely choosing to leave is part of reality, not a rejection of it? Why should living in reality require acceding to circumstances at every opportunity?
Unless I misunderstand the context and this quote is meant to be ironic, which seems possible.
I lived that in he Real World, for nearly 30 years. The saga of my late wife is now part of the documentary Pain Warriors. It can be watched for free on Amazon Prime and TubiTV.
What has become known as Karen's Journal is required reading at Duke school of Medicine to educate doctors about the reality of Chronic Pain. In the end the Medical Establishment failed her and she killed herself to stop the pain.
Something that pings a neuron in another brain may be the second step in a chain to me which leads me to interesting and unexpected lines of thought.
If it bothers you, depending on your client, theres a "collapse" button at the bottom of posts so you can personally skip on entire threads as soon as you know it's not for you.
Other people have different values so I, without rancour, say "carry on" to grandparent.
My wife's cousin almost died from heat-stroke in her drive-way when her car trapped her inside the vehicle in full Australian summer sun because the battery failed while she was inside checking something. Doors and windows wouldn't open. Nobody heard her calls because the new car had good sound-proofing. She eventually managed to crawl through the panel behind the back seat to get into the boot (luckily she's quite petite) and get a tyre lever and smash a side-window so she could call out to a neighbour for help.
Having watched a burly firefighter take three good swings with an axe to bust out a window (to get to the hood release of an unattended car fire), I am extremely skeptical of this claim.
Somebody on YouTube tested those emergency hammers and concluded they're basically useless. If you really want to break a tempered glass car window (I.e., any of them but the windshield), their recommendation was an automatic center punch.
This reminds me of the spark plug ceramic demos. Little ceramic tip on a spark plug (isolated from the rest of the plug) make an effective car window smashing projectile. No idea if it would work from inside the car / if you could get enough speed on it sitting right next to the window!
Right. As a firefighter, I carried a spring-loaded center-punch in the pocket of my bunker coat. No muss, no fuss. Just put the tip on a side window and press until it fires.
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards have a lot to say on the strength, composition, and properties of glass in passenger vehicles. In addition to being very difficult to break, it must also be resistant to shattering and remain in place while experiencing some pretty extreme forces.
Automotive glass is not even glass really, it's more of a composite made up of layers of various transparent materials all designed to counter balance the weaknesses of the other layers. And windshields are bonded into the body of the vehicle with a very strong plastic adhesive.
I'll admit not keeping up with the standards, but back around ~2003 it was pretty common for arrestees in police cars to escape custody by kicking the rear window out from inside the car. It's held on by glue or something and pops right off the frame in one solid piece.
Cruisers now tend to have cages to prevent this.
(This is not a solution if the car is underwater.)
Sadly, no. Unlike some better fields, the auto industry is incredibly tight-lipped about safety and crash structures. If these in-formal standards were to get out... and if the public were to know how well the industry has cornered the regulators, creating pseudo-standards that technically conform to the safety protocols but functionally make zero difference to consumer/passenger safety... there'd be riots.
Depends if you are trying to break the window from the inside or the outside. It's very difficult from the outside, and much easier from the inside (I cracked my windscreen and needed a replacement, because I was carrying a long piece of wood and it moved a little and contacted the windscreen).
1) Are you me? I've done exactly this because I knew that my car fit a 10' board. Turns out when you're buying rough lumber 10' sometimes means 10' 2".
2) The windshield is laminated glass instead of tempered. It'll crack much more easily, but it'll (more or less) stay in one piece in the frame instead of shattering out into a million tiny bits.
> Having watched a burly firefighter take three good swings with an axe to bust out a window (to get to the hood release of an unattended car fire), I am extremely skeptical of this claim.
Wrong window. You're talking about the windshield which is a completely different type of glass than other windows.
He was trying to break the side window. Tempered glass is super tough, until you damage the outer layer. Presumably the pick end of his fire axe wasn't sharp or hard enough to scratch that outer layer without a hell of a swing behind it.
Also in the "too late" vein, at least in the US, I believe cars are still required to have a latch to open the trunk from the inside. Not sure if other countries have these.
Serious question: So why are all the people who are trapped/kidnapped in the cars in the movies not able to come out and have to yell to have someone come and rescue them?
That implies that there is no way to open the latch from inside and people, including me, may take that as the truth and not even try to find the latch. I for sure didn't know that there was a way.
> However, I'm truly shocked that someone asked "how come in a movie...".
I know it sounds stupid to even ask that, but my question/concern came from that for someone who is not aware of such a thing, after watching movies I would have never even thought to look for it had I ever been in such a situation. Referring to also the story above about the women who was stuck in the car.
So, if all is true, then the movies in this case are doing a serious disservice. I know sounds naive and stupid to even ask that but most things function mostly as they do in real life, this to me seemed an odd exception.
>So, if all is true, then the movies in this case are doing a serious disservice.
Yes, modern cars have these pull tags in them. I don't know how new, but the first car that I bought new with a trunk was a 2007 model. It had them. They are even glow in the dark for easier locating in a closed/dark environment.
However, if you are ever in a real life situation trying to decide that the "movies" didn't do it this way is just a really bad way to be. Maybe the illusion/magic of Hollywood still holds for those not working in and around it, but nothing on a screen is real. Every thing presented on screen to you is there for a reason (even if what is on screen is omitting things). I've been in/around/through it for 30 years, so I could be jaded too.
I understand and not disagreeing with any of that.
Since I don’t make the point of putting myself in a trunk normally nor do I RTFM :(, my point, put in another way, was that if I had seen it in a movie I would have known that something like that exists. That is all.
Honestly, the only reason I knew about mine was the salesperson at the dealership pointed them out to me. Maybe I had an exceptional sales rep?
I've seen cars flip and roll over and continue driving in a movie, yet I wouldn't expect my car to do that. I've seen modern cars get hot wired in a movie, yet I wouldn't be able to do to a modern car. I'm just saying you're putting way too much faith in movies my friend ;-)
While we're on the subject, silencers don't turn handguns silent, gas tanks don't explode when shot, and you can die from being buried chest-deep in sand
It's too dark to search for it, so you'd have to already know where the latch is at. I didn't know about keyless trunks until my ex-wife needed a jump and the battery was in the trunk, which could only be opened electronically or with the 'latch.' Google to the rescue!
Most of the vehicles I've seen used for this purpose in movies are Oldsmobiles and such from the 70s-- long before the latches were a requirement. Modern car trunks are also way smaller than older sedans, which don't lend themselves to human transport.
If you're ever in the trunk of a moving vehicle, do what you can to sabotage the brake lights-- the wires are usually accessible and it increases the chances of attracting police attention.
I don't know about US, but in my country many cars (most?) are equipped with child safety switches for back doors. It's accessible when door is open (it's on door's inner edge) and if it's locked, you can't open door inside. It's needed to prevent children from accidentally opening doors, but you can use this feature for kidnapping purposes.
Why? I've only used my horn for telling people to get off their phone and go because the light turned green. I can't remember it ever being a necessity.
Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle? Every vehicle I've ever owned, from the 80s to now, manual or electric lock, the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not. If this isn't the case, I'm almost inclined to consider that criminally negligent.
> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not
The fact that the front doors both unlock when a single handle is pulled is because there's an electronic sensor and solenoid that unlocks everything when one handle is opened.
I had a Pontiac Vibe (really a Toyota Matrix) that had a cable in the door unlock assembly fail. You could open the door from the outside - the external door handle was physically the same part as the latch mechanism - but the external handle was back by your shoulder, while the internal handle was forward by the mirror and connected to the latch by a steel cable swaged to some aluminum pins; that connection eventually failed and the internal door handle flapped impotently.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time ignoring the problem and instead rolling down the window to open the door...
Regardless, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that an automotive engineer might decide to replace cable actuator with a wire and solenoid.
> Regardless, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that an automotive engineer might decide to replace cable actuator with a wire and solenoid.
Or with a bunch of CANBUS electromechanical hardware and some shittily written software running on the entertainment unit (with insecure cellular network connectivity).
I wonder how long before someone sets up unlockyourtoyota.ru where you can send them 0.01BTC to unlock the car you're stuck inside?
I think what GP might mean is that whether you are on the driver's or passenger's side, when you pull the handle that door opens even if it is locked.
I've noticed that on both our 1995 and 2014 Fords, when you pull the door handle it mechanically unlocks that door and opens it. (On the 2014 the other doors may additionally be triggered to unlock. However, in a no-power situation pulling the handle will still mechanically unlock just that one door.)
Chevy Express vans and trucks didn't unlock the door when you pulled the handle. You had to manually slide the unlock toggle or hit the electronic unlock button before opening the door.
I've only noticed this feature on Fords. My SAAB requires the occupant to pull up on the lock knob on the windowsill, and my Saturn requires one to turn the lock knob on the inside door handle to the unlocked position. While both require additional action besides just pulling the handle, neither relies on the car's electrical system to open or unlock the doors (and indeed, neither car has any electrical locking component in any of the doors).
He got the "electric roof" version, which had this awful hodgepodge for pneumatic rams, high pressure air hoses and couplings, and a seriously underpowered hydraulic pump - with instructions to fill the system with auto transmission fluid.
It was _not_ a well designed and reliable system, and some of the failure modes left the roof/door clamped down. He kept a pocket knife in th4e glovebox so you could stab the hoses to release the hydraulic fluid and manually push the roof open.
It wasn't until it failed closed while he was taking his girlfriend to the high school formal/dance, then ruined her dress by getting red auto trans fluid on it that he bit the bullet and threw all the supplied parts away and replaced it all with electric liner actuators...
For those who haven't clicked the link: The roof/doors are all one big assembly that hinges up and away, like Lambo doors for the entire top of the car.
My Nissan Versa has manual locks that do not unlock when the door handle is pulled from the inside, to include front doors (not a child safety lever issue). Granted, they’re manual so it’s easy to just unlock but from a human factors perspective I can see people panicking and just yanking on the door handle in a critical emergency like a fire.
I’ve always considered this a serious safety design flaw.
That's how pretty much all car doors worked for decades. As a kid I used to lock the back doors when riding around and pull the handle [0]. No, the child safety locks were not enabled.
I’m not sure this is a given. My previous Ford would unlock the front door when the indoor handle was pulled, regardless of lock state. It seems like it’s depends on manufacturer, model, and options package.
> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not
Unfortunately, this is not anymore warranted. Already in models of ten years ago, there do exist "full lock non mechanically overridable" and "lock which is unlocked through the handles". Disabling the "feature" requires intervention from the manufacturer - if it can be disabled at all.
Look, I am informed that in at least many of the current cars with RFID based keys, it is impossible to lock yourself in the car... (And the idea seems to have spawned from manufacturers coming from the territories in the world most notorious for carjacking.)
That hasn't always been the case. For example, our 1991 Saturn station wagon (with mechanical locks) would only open if you unlocked the door first with the lock lever.
> Police believe that when James Rogers got into the vehicle, a cable became loose and cut off the power to the operate the horn and locks. Rogers did not know how to manually unlock the vehicle and became trapped inside
> the 2007 Corvette has a manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat
Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the latch and not having an emergency window breaker.
Design matters, and bad designs can literally be deadly. Why auto mfgs feel the need to "innovate" with shifter designs is beyond me. The worst part is how every mfg seems to be implementing a different design of bad electronic shifters, from wheels and touchscreens to one-click-at-a-time joysticks to single-function pushbuttons for some gears with others on a scroll wheel. They've taken something and made it worse with no benefit to the user. At least with those auto-flushing toilets, the intention was good, even if the implementation is still somehow so awful decades later.
I drove a rental with a rotary-dial shifter. That is the single most braindead UX thing I've seen in a car that doesn't involve a touch-screen. We've had PRND(L) levers as the standard for shifting in automatics for over 50 years now, and the dial offers no advantages that I can see.
Probably it is a few dolars cheaper. Not enough to change the bottom line, but as always, any short term cost cutting is enough to give brain-dead Harvard MBAs multiple orgasms.
Dollars? I've worked with car manufacturers and they would sell their soul to save pennies. OTOH they tend to be very conservative with anything that actually impacts the driving part of the car.
My Ford Fusion has one of those rotary dials. Didn't like it at first, but it is nice having that air space free (not able to accidentally knock it out of gear, more room for an extra cup holder). Also the cars with a physical gear shift lever still work by activating switches, there hasn't been mechanical linkage for years in a lot of models.
>> We've had PRND(L) levers as the standard for shifting in automatics for over 50 years now, and the dial offers no advantages that I can see.
My guess is that the dial costs less, so it is done for the company not the customer. Many cases of bad design come from prioritizing the manufacturer over the customer.
I rented a Ford Edge two months ago that had one. It was quite distracting. At the end of a week, I still hadn't internalized how it worked. I had to think about it every time.
On my old Chevrolet Tahoe, I can tell what gear I just shifted into by feel (shifting into D, it has a slight tendency to overshoot the normal overdrive mode and end up locked into 3rd). And of course, this is essentially a nonissue on manual transmissions.
Most cars have a stop at D; e.g. for the ones where you pull the stem towards to to leave park, you can let the stem spring back at neutral and push it down until it stops at D, and for the ones with a button you can release the button at neutral.
[edit]
Honestly if the rotary dial had similar tactile feedback, it would probably be fine. No worse than when they moved it off of the tree as bench seats were retired for safety reasons.
It's not just auto manufacturers. It seems literally everything is being designed with a philosophy of "fuck the user" in mind. I cannot think of a single thing more complicated than a concrete block that functions better now than previous versions did 10 years ago, and I'm sure there are some things that work at least as good, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
>> I cannot think of a single thing more complicated than a concrete block that functions better now than previous versions did 10 years ago...
I've got news for you. My uncle worked in construction most his life. He told me the concrete isn't as good today as it used to be. He said in some places for shipping they "blow it around". Meaning you don't put it on a ship using a conveyor, you do something similar to blowing dust through a pipe? I never asked for more detail. He thought the handling was exposing it to humidity or in some way degrading the concrete. This would be another case of prioritizing cost/efficiency over the customer.
So even your humble concrete block might not be as good as they used to make em'
Quite a lot of electronics test & measurement equipment. Notably modern spectrum analyzers & network analyzers. Also modern arbitrary waveform generators & RF generators are vastly better than a decade ago. Other bits haven't improved nearly as much, eg the HP 3458A is still one of the best meters in the world. The Fluke 5720A Calibrator is likewise an old workhorse.
I forgot about engineering hardware. I've used some of that stuff, lots of it is good but tons of it is vendor lock in stuff as well, NI comes to mind.
My building had a dialing system replaced with one that uses a phone line to call a mobile of each resident. It can also only assing one number. Now I get the call at work if my wife orders pizza, or if i am out of the country.
It also doesnt work at all if i am in tube, or when my building forgets to pay phone bill, or movike network craps out
I'm glad to say I don't have any shit like this that I have to deal with. I've got a phone and a laptop and that's it. My car basically has a fuel controller and ABS controller in it. Aftermarket MP3 playing head unit with an aux jack.
Whatever benefits the tech firms and salespeople sold you (not literally you, anyone reading) on all this shit, if you have this stuff in your life I guarantee you your life is more stressful than mine because of it.
I'm to the point where I only buy used stuff period. Basically food and underwear have to be new. I don't think I've bought a brand new anything in over 5 years. I don't know if I ever will if this trend continues, proprietary single serve coffee pouches, internet connected stovetops, TVs that show ads separate from the broadcast, cars that track your movements and sell them to data brokers, touch screen everything, how many screens does a single person need?
But in ten years, all the used stuff will also be fully-electronic vendor-locked garbage, just older and with the cloud services down, and hence unusable.
I think it's more like as things get more complex, there are many more edge cases to check and most are very unlikely to happen statistically/practically so manufacturers don't put enough thinkin/design effort in those "details".
They're literally engineering shit people don't need now. In virtually every product. And doing UI redesigns on things that change the user friendly UX, often breaking it.
I remember looking forward to browser updates, OS updates, the next generation hardware whatever. Things used to actually get better. I actually got a new phone the other day with a newer android version, never mind that there's a fucking hole in the screen, when I changed my screen brightness there was a deliberate animated delay to the brightness changing with the slider. Seriously, who the fuck is making decisions like this?
90% of things don't need to get more complex. A touch screen on a fridge, speakers in your car that get louder as you accelerate, Bluetooth speakers that need software updates, these are not improvements to the products in any real way whatsoever.
Exactly. Couldn't they just have some system where the door handles have a magnetic dead-switch, that reverts to manual operation when no power is applied?
But the handle DOES open the door. It’s just at your feet, quite clearly marked, instead of physically on the door. It’s specifically there so that if you are in an accident you can still release the door. It’s designed With the idea the car will see a road course and is far superior to a handle on the door.
It’s sad he died but I found that handle in the first 5 minutes of owning my first corvette. It has a giant red picture of the door opening.
Hidden? It’s directly below where the “oh shit” handle is on the door, you need to move your hand less than 6” to pull it. Calling it hidden is completely misrepresenting reality. If my 7 year old knows where it is and insists on using it to open the door, I hope your 11 year old can figure it out.
From [1], I see it's a discreet, black lever with a small picture of a door opening. It perhaps is about 6" away, but in a space almost always obscured by ones legs.
Emergency controls in vehicles with proper regulation look like this [2], so they can still be used in the dark, with smoke, etc.
Humans expect tools to be at arm height. Do not work against natural assumptions. If you increase cognitive load, that's that much more attention diverted in a state where attention is already maxed out or otherwise in shortage.
The elements you're referring to are procedural mitigations to a poor design from a human factors standpoint. Those mitigations are always less preferred than managing those risks from an engineering perspective.
OSHA actually outlines the preference:
1) Eliminate the hazard outright (not possible here, you need the door to lock sometimes)
2) Engineer out the risk (they tried to do...poorly...with the manual unlock)
"manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat"
I am willing to bet my house that half the people who built that car would not find the lever if it suddenly caught fire (or any other emergency) while they are in it
> Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the latch and not having an emergency window breaker.
>> Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation
It was the battery cable or similar, which cut power to all the electronic means of getting out - including the other door. It was not "cut" in the sense of someone using a knife, it just came loose or similarly broke contact. This is a design failure, not a RTFM failure.
>> Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle?
Nope, not that model.
I had the chance to take one of the Fisker Karma development vehicles home from work. Everyone said it drove great. I got in and realized the door latch was a button. The whole car way prototype and development parts. The window was kinda small to crawl through. I said no thanks. There was a loop of string in the bottom of the door pocket to manually open it. Still nope.
In my 2021 Honda CR-V this is a configurable option - you can decide which behavior you want.
For example, you don't want your kids to open the doors while you're driving. Or you don't want a car-jacker to reach through the window and open your door.
Electronically, through the settings in the touchscreen panel on the dash. These are not child locks, but rather set the behavior of the door latch when the door is locked.
Does it have a fail-safe configuration if electricity is lost like in the examples above? If not, the ability to change configuration may not actually mitigate the failure mode
Yes, there is a manual door lock button-thing on the door next to the door latch. Though honestly I don't know if that works when the power is dead. As cars move to "fly by wire" this becomes a larger concern - less mechanical linkages, more buttons/switches + wires.
For example to open the back you push a button on tailgate and then pull to open. That button is definitely not a mechanical latch, so if the battery is dead then you're not opening the tailgate.
This would be an interesting experience - go to an auto dealer and ask them to disconnect the battery, then see what still functions.
Anything that's mechanically supposed to happen is irrelevant after the mechanism, with 2 tons of metal behind it moving at high speed, slams into something significantly more substantial than the thin layer of decorative sheet metal protecting it. You can not design things to be invincible, no matter how robust something is, with sufficient force applied in a certain way, it will fail. It's honestly an engineering marvel that people consistently are able to get out of their cars after an accident.
I'm talking more generally about cars not always unlocking after an accident.
In this specific scenario, you still have a component failure. Something that was supposed to be connected wasn't. It would be nice if they designed a better fail safe but it's not a case of "corvette handles aren't designed to unlock."
It's not about locked or unlocked. Pulling the handle is supposed to open the door. Locking prevents that. In this case, the handle doesn't mechanically unlatch the door, it does so electronically. With no power it is not possible for it to unlatch. Since locking is then a software feature, we might say those doors are locked by default and require software and electronics to make them open. Because of that there is a mechanical thing you can pull, but nobody knows where that is or that it exists unless they are told.
On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. I think it was made law to work like this? In order to prevent thefts where someone just runs a tiny rod through an opening and pulls a handle - that doesn't work anymore. If you get locked in the car while inside there is no way to open the door, you'd have to break a window to get out.
> On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside.
Teslas have an (emergency?) mechanical release on their doors. At least the Model 3 does. Given that you can't 'lock from the outside' in the ordinary sense, if this law exists, there must be some leeway.
Ironically enough, Tesla Model 3 emergency mechanical release on doors is positioned so technically “well”, passengers not familiar with how the door opens in a standard way from the inside (by pressing a glowing button on the door) tend to pull on the emergency release first (which is located on the door right next to the standard release button).
Happened to my friends at least a couple of times when giving them a ride. Imo, not a bad situation, because the worst case scenario here is that they will accidentally use an emergency release instead of the standard one on their first try, which will only trigger tesla to make a warning sound that the emergency release was used. Definitely works out better in a real emergency situation too, compared to cars with difficult to find emergency release handles, given people not familiar with Tesla doors tend to reach for the emergency handles in those by default at times.
From this video, I learned that it's quite hard to find, and if you're in the back seat, there's no emergency mechanism at all. https://youtu.be/QCIo8e12sBM?t=239
> If your car door uses electricity to open, you best know what to do when that system fails.
If your trillion-ish dollar advertising company masquerading as a social network has doors that use electricity and dns lookups to open, you best make sure your office staff and data centre technicians know what to do when that fails...
Regardless of model it's a good idea to put a emergency hammer / glass breaker in your car.
(addendum: also to rescue someone else, not blaming the driver)
If your headrests can be removed, the metal poles in them work well for this too. You jab one of the poles into the window seal, then pry like a crowbar. If done in the corner of the window it will break easily.
Be careful with those. Plenty of cheap ones have metal hammers that will simply bounce off the window like the window was rubber (I assume the cause is wrong metal used, or point not sharp enough). And this is assuming tempered glass.
When AAA tested 3 different hammers, only 1 of the three successfully broke tempered glass. All three punch style tools broke the tempered glass.
But a lot of car windows now have laminated glass. While the tools may be able to shatter the glass for those, they still stay in one sheet, (just like shattered windshields in most car, since those are laminated glass too). And it is really hard to break through that shattered but still intact sheet, with neither style of escape tool really being much help.
I have the one with the seat belt cutting blade in the handle hanging on a loop on my truck dashboard.
Separately I think all cars should be required to have manual door locks (as well as electric locks if it's a luxury car). I also think all BEVS should have a manual battery ungang lever for trapped energy emergencies.
I assume that if my battery was flat, pulling the handle on the inside would open it. I'm not at all sure though, it's been nearly over a decade since the last time I had a lock which you pushed up and down.
I have a emergency hammer/seatbelt cutter near the gearstick just in case.
> Isabel Moreno told reporters he owned a 2006 Corvette and was trapped inside when the battery went out. Fortunately, he said eventually the battery started recharging itself enough to be able to roll the window down, and he was able to get out safely.
Curious how this is possible or was this just misreported?
Yikes! Makes me think twice about being in a newer Corvette.
The DeLorean (DMC-12) is known for having the lock solenoids that get stuck energized when a relay fails. Fortunately you can pull the relay to de-energize the solenoids. (Climbing out of a window on a DeLorean isn't an option for normal-sized people.)
Many other car makers do this too. My Volvo has a remote start feature installed (that I paid for in buying the car) that is not accessible without enrollment in a (pretty much useless otherwise) monthly subscription service.
It's flat out criminal considering that I could have just bought the device with a remote at Auto Zone for 1/4 of the price (that also doesn't allow the auto maker to track/log each time I use it and where I am when I use it).
Toyota is being lambasted for forcing a subscription on a function between the key fob and the car (RF signal). There is no app to port to various device OSes. There is no server infrastructure to maintain.
Subaru's subscription is for remote start via app.
Volvo has a subscription called Volvo On Call, and it's app based. You can't remotely start the car from just the fob. So yes, you are paying basically for the server upkeep + the sim card installed in your car that enables all those services.
Subaru has the same thing on their new cars - subscribe annually to Starlink or no remote start for you! I live in a winter wonderland where remote start would be a dream but no way I am paying a cent for this feature. I’ll have to look in to the after market options.
VW diesel cars can be equipped with Webasto (auxiliary heater which burns diesel). One gets a remote (in my experience reaching up to 500 meters) which can be used to start this heater along with car's climate control. The advantage is that it consumes 1/3-1/5 of what an idling engine does, while heating interior and engine coolant much faster. The disadvantage is that it consumes battery charge, but to counteract that the car is equiped with 30-50% bigger battery. Though this was never a problem for me, from my experience on 94Ah battery it can run for hours without any effect on engine starting, while heating the car in some 10-15 minutes when it is below freezing outside.
So in my Volvo XC60 T8, the car just came with a Webasto preinstalled from factory, it was standard fit on all models(in 2020 in UK anyway). But you can only start it from the app, they don't give you a separate fob like the one you can buy from Webasto, so you have to pay Volvo's subscription to use it.
and, in the models that use the engine coolant as a working fluid, your engine is heated up to a cozy operating temperature right from the start, so you end up about even on fuel.
You’re not interested in paying for something that provides you with very clear value? So instead you wil go pay money for a different system to bolt on?
I don’t mean to criticize, but I have to admit that I cannot empathize.
In this narrow of a scope, yes - it is absolutely valuable for me to be able to pay to not die. The alternative is to be killed.
But of course the world is larger than this made up example. Context matters, and this context isn’t really relevant except to say that there are different contexts that necessitate different decisions.
But you knew that, even as you posted such a ridiculous comparison. I think your point would have been much more effective and less reactionary if you had actually made your point, instead of resorting to absurdism.
Would you find it appropriate for automakers to charge a monthly fee to be able to simply start an automobile you bought? If no, then why are you okay with a monthly fee to do so remotely? It’s rather straightforward - you’re either for usury or against it, I guess. This is usury.
(usury is not exactly the right word, but it’s the best I could think of at the moment).
It’s nuanced - I don’t approve when someone changes the terms of a deal that we already agreed upon. At the same time, I think there is a reasonable expectation that companies don’t have to support something into eternity (not that is what happened here, but in general I think support for a feature that requires maintenance is okay to have an expected lifespan).
Another nuance is that starting the car is core to the functionality, remote start is not.
If they were doing this only moving forward, for new sales, I think it would be totally fine. I wouldn’t buy that car if I cared about the feature, but I totally think it’s valid to have premium subscription addons.
In the situation where they have altered the previous deal and the service does not require maintenance by the company, it’s pretty fucked up and i would love to see a class action happen for existing owners.
That feels like apples-and-oranges to me if you're talking about a smartphone app feature. A smartphone app has to be regularly upgraded to pay nice with new OS versions, has to have back-end servers, etc. Toyota is disabling remote start functionality between the key fob and the vehicle if the vehicle doesn't have a subscription. I'm not surprised a smartphone app requires a subscription but I am surprised and disappointed that a feature on a car's key fob does.
I too am highly disappointed in Toyota here. A remote start is something you can buy at any auto store and have installed by a mechanic for a couple hundred bucks. Will they block people from going that route now? They charge such a premium for their cars and this just seems petty.
The logical next step would be to ensure that you can't do that in the name of security or if you CAN do it then the "partner" that sells that service has to pay more than you would for the privilege of being allowed on the "platform".
Toyota owns 20% of Subaru, and Subaru is also invested in Toyota. From what I understand being an affiliate in the Toyota Group is not remotely the same as them being a sub brand of Toyota.
Incorrect, all of their cars come without the option. Buying an alternate car just because of one corrupt feature is not reasonable nor effective as a protest, many new cars now leverage this tactic and there is no real choice because they get away with it based on leverage.
The responsibility is on regulators, not me as a consumer.
I think some of the reasoning behind the fee is that there's a simcard in the car that needs to be payed for and if you opt out then they don't have to pay for it. I have the same service and I can't live without the remotly started heating so for me it's worth every krona.
A remote RF device could do that without the Sim card, the same key that unlocks the car... My problem is that I paid for a device (the starter device already installed on my car) that I can't use without a membership. People have had remote start on cars for decades without needing a bloatware subscription to XM radio.... sigh
No, not the issue at all. The problem is that I refuse to pay a fee and use a tracking app just so I can use remote start features already installed on my car that don't need to be part of any paid monthly service.
My car should not require a cell phone with the maker's app installed on it, or even an Internet connection to fully operate... It's insane to think it should from a reliability standpoint.
Btw I also own a Volvo and at least here in UK you get emergency services regardless of whether you pay for the Volvo On Call subscription or not. Breakdown cover is provided for every new Volvo as long as you do the service at a Volvo garage, nothing to do with On Call subscription either.
Finished reading Ubik just the other night - the paying for every little thing was haunting, almost claustrophobic with this passage about the door (amongst other things - fantastic book though)
My wife and I need a new car sometime soon. Is there a company that makes cars that are reasonably reliable but that are without anti features like tracking, electronic everything, bs parts replacement costs due to ip, features you are locked out of via software, subscriptions, software preventing you from working on the car without a special license, ads, etc?
Look at the ways software is making the world a better place…
I'm not suggesting that they're perfect in any regard, but Hyundai/Kia do tend to implement electronics and software well enough that they're not going to infuriate you for the next five to ten years. Except even they're falling prey to over-electronicification — their absolute latest models are following an industry trend of replacing some physical buttons with touch-haptic panels. Yeesh.
Mazda are still fairly sane and their cars are quite lovely.
In the luxury German segment, BMW are the least worst. (This definitely wasn't the case 15+ years ago, but from 2010 onwards they have been quite good.)
Dacia cars are pretty much as barebones as it gets. You get a fully functional car for a low price, with very few electronic gadgets(I think the peak of sophistication is having bluetooth integrated with the radio).
> Once money finds a path, my belief is that the path gets widened
Maybe, but it does go the other way too... I used to pay per sms :)
Disruption can happen... with cars it'll probably happen when all cars are self driving, rented per trip, and yes, maybe we'll still spend more money on cars -- but we'll probably also use transportation more.
Exactly; as well, in some situations (cold Canadian Winter with an infant etc), remote start is higher priority than remote doors, or electric windows, etc. "Basic" function vs "Luxury" can get awfully relative awfully fast...
I have seen the this happen in real life with housing startups many of them use mobile apps for unlocking doors in India - nestaway [1] or Zolo[2] and others, including unscrewing the lock
Doors won't unlock if rent is not paid on time, sometimes it is not even delayed rent payments, the company will charge you frivolously for something and you will be locked out unless you resolve the payment dispute i.e. talk to support to waive/rescind the charge or pay for it, and that goes as well as talking to any support to revert a charge.
Nestaway's website is a real window into the dystopia. It's kind of refreshing to have a panopticonic nightmare conveyed by an aesthetic other than alegria for once.
We can do better than a link to a Reddit thread with a screenshot of some text. I found this on GameFAQs slightly modified from the original and posted the day after, on 2013-06-16.
-2018
-wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing vidya
-excited to play some halo 2k19
-"xbox on"
-...
-"XBOX ON"
-"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
-"Doritos™ Dew™ it right"
-"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
-reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest
-only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
-still feeling sick from the 14
-force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
-xbox does nothing
-i attempt to smile
-"Connecting to verification server"
-...
-"Verification complete!"
-finally
-boot up halo 2k19
-finding multiplayer match...
-"ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
-my mother just walked in the room
-"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
-"NO!"
-"Console entering lock state!"
-"to unlock drink verification can"
-last can
-"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
-drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
-pour the last half out the window
-"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
-the mountain dew ad plays
-i have to dance for it
-feeling so sick
-makes me sing along
-dancing and singing
-"mountain dew is for me and you"
-throw up on my self
-throw up on my tv and entertainment system
-router shorts
-"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
-"PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE"
I was going to say! Since quite a large number of HN's readership is hard at work actually building these paywalls, digital restrictions and gatekeepers, unnecessarily Internet-connected devices, and other corporate-mediated dystopias, I'd say Please Drink Verification Can is exceedingly appropriate here.
It has fun history, apparently they were going to introduce a nickel tax to get off the subway, so the legend is that Charlie never got off, because he didn’t have a nickel.
Highly recommend Ubik; I read it in part because I saw this quote, which isn't necessarily a good reflection of the actual content of the story. A little surprised nobody's adapted it as a movie yet.
In 2021 the real government funded police would have zero interest in hearing about that kind of crime - assuming UK police are anything like police here.
This wouldn't be a problem if it just charged your credit card. I do think it should be a cheaper. $0.005 would be a more reasonable price. I would definitely pay $0.1 a day to use all my doors. Maybe like my front door since its more heavy duty would be a $0.05 / use door.
This sort of stuff used to be the nightmarish imaginations of cyberpunk authors. Now it's reality. Extremely disturbing. It's getting to the point I'm starting to think technology is detrimental to human dignity.
> The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department
To add more nuance, there is an essay [1] telling the history of early maximum flow algorithms and includes this small anecdote:
[An] American asked: ".. how were you able to perform such an enormous amount of computing with your weak computers" to which the Russian responded: "we used better algorithms".
There is some truth to that, besides maximum flow, similar stories can be told about linear programming, data structures (e.g. AVL-trees), numerical computing, etc. The hardware may have been sloppy, but the algorithms-research was top notch.
This is true, and one of the reasons why I feel that we have come too far too fast in the hardware department, the degree to which Moore's law has enabled sloppy and wasteful programming should not be underestimated.
Is there any kind of index of software inefficiency? Something like "number of operations required by the software stack to display a sentence on screen", with a trend over time.
Input latency's one potential convenient proxy for this, once you adjust for display latency. "How long does it take the computer to do pretty much the most basic operation an interactive computer system performs?"
Considering an IBM 8088 did way better on that than modern computers, with like 1/5,000 of the processing power (figure ass-pulled but probably not far off), indicates to me that the trend is really damn bad.
This is very much application dependent, so you'd have to take a 1980's application, say Visicalc and extrapolate to today, say Office 365 or Google Sheets.
This you can then do for different application domains, and both in absolute terms (# cycles wasted) as well as relative terms (%age of cycles wasted).
While not unknown in the west in the past, "better algorithms" are in a way a dying breed in aerospace - these days a student will easily have a CFD package brute force through the problem overnight and be done.
My father, upon taking over his promotor's office in Warsaw Institute of Technology, found among other things a book in Russian that described analytical, symbolic methods allowing "good enough" approximated results for many airfoil/wing design tasks that are now exclusively done through CFD.
As described, in 30 minutes with pen & paper you had maybe a more coarse, but valid and in desired precision result that takes overnight run in ANSYS CFX.
CFD only looks like brute force when compared to purely analytical methods. In practice, you can't brute force a chaotic system as you quickly hit the wall. Anything complex pretty much requires you to get clever with simulation just like it did before computers with analytical approach, and/or rely on experimentation. It's especially true for rocket engine design; there's a reason why nobody made a practical RDE yet.
True, but for a large class of problems in aviation, the analytical methods can provide faster iteration before going into CFD for deep optimization, at least that's my understanding (I'm the computer science person in the family, not aerodynamic physicist :) )
> However, you're being "too smart for your own good" if you go down this route. A perfectly unbiased input would still have 50% of its inputs rejected, and already you've dropped the speed of the RNG by 50%.
To improve this situation you can use an additional trick: keep track of the sequence of thrown-away pairs, and look at them again in consecutive pairs, and generate some more random bits:
* 00 00 -- throw away
* 11 11 -- throw away
* 00 11 -- output 1
* 11 00 -- output 0
and so on..
see the paper "Iterating Von Neumann's Procedure for Extracting Random Bits" for details.
One small thing in the latest redesign:
if you have two tabs, one active, one not, the visual cues suggest exactly the opposite. The active one seems like a clickable button, the inactive one seems pushed down and not clickable.
After misclicking hundreds of times, I still couldn't train myself to go against my perception and follow the designer's "bold vision", using it feels like writing with my left hand or steering a bicycle with a crooked wheel.
This is the way. Additionally I went into about:config and set browser.proton.enabled to false, which fixed most of the issues I had with the new design.
I recognize the symptoms you describe, but I find the picture you painted a bit too pessimistic, given that in the field that I'm familiar with (theoretical CS), groups in Poland have been among the strongest and most visible in Europe in the past 10 years.
This seems like a very accurate description, especially the observation about temporal continuity, which we take for granted, but on occasions it can feel like a fragile illusion.
Relatedly, there was an unintentionally funny translation of Gmail in Hungarian, where it was supposed to say "You have no conversations in Trash", or something like that. The translation was technically correct, but it sounded very much like "No more talking in the trashcan!", which was hard to read without imagining someone shouting at a trashcan with a person inside it.
Outlook's Portuguese translation uses the word "Lixo" (Trash/Garbage) for the "Spam" button. Sometimes people report emails as spam when they're trying to delete them.
It is quite common with Hungarian translators I have been told. Hungarian translations typically do not make sense given the context, especially when that context is anything IT related. It is like they are being given sentences to translate without telling them the context, and you get some funny translations.
> It is like they are being given sentences to translate without telling them the context
This is a pretty common localization problem. Tooling doesn't always make it easy to share context with translators who are often contractors for outside agencies. Unfamiliar developers try to do string math instead of laying out full sentances to translate. People are surprised to find the same original sentence needs different translations on different screens.
Of course, Google has lots of experience with localization, so should really have this down by now.
Yes, that's exactly how low-end translation works. You get an Excel sheet with two columns, one labeled "English" and the other "Hungarian" (or whatever), and you get paid some laughable rate per word.
Van Gogh tried to sell his art for more than the price of parts. He was unsuccessful in his life due to being ahead of the curve. Much like Betamax, he died before being appreciated.
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door. "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
(Philip K. Dick: Ubik)