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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent example of how large corporations can't plan products normally any longer. You could take a college class in embedded systems design and you could ask all the students to come up with examples of edge cases where an SOS system in a car could have issues, and you're pretty much guaranteed that someone will mention both being out of range of cell towers and being old enough to be incompatible with cell towers.

Discussion would then lead to what to do about it, and busy-waiting in a loop trying to contact cell towers again and again would certainly not be a solution.

But can a corporation do this? Apparently not. I honestly wonder if designers are actively discouraged from caring about anything beyond the projected life of a product, because it could negatively impact later sales.

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To me this seems more like 10 teams of people worked on the functionality, each isolated internationally and corporately from each other, and had to solve their own contingencies, with no entity really in charge of the system as a whole.

One time I bought a car and the person trying to scare me into purchasing a warrantee told me that there were "60 computers" in like a 2015 Hyundai Elantra, which I understood to mean ICs, but that still seemed like an excessive amount and a product of commoditizing every part of a car.

Or "we'll deal with that issue when it comes up" but then it's no one's job to deal with it when it comes up and everyone either assumes someone else is dealing with it or isn't aware of it at all.

Your comment is funny to me and I agree.

It reminds me of the "Can LLMs think?" comments. Now I'm left wondering what other "classes of reasoning" are impossible for corporate entities, what they may be blind to simply due to their structure.

That makes me wonder at what point does a business lose the ability to think?

You and your friends in the garage are nimble and hard working, thinking of some way to make it, but at some point a company crosses a transition line and stops being capable of autonomous thought and becomes a machine both greater and lesser than any human.

I would hazard a guess that this transition happens at the point where the company would continue to operate even if all of the founders suddenly died.

Second guess: the moment that something starts happening in the business that the founder does not know about or understand.

Corollary: it’s inevitable

Decoder had an interesting interview with the CEO of Ford about how hard it is for car companies to maintain system standardization as vehicles become more computerized: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22444294/ford-f150-lightn...

> You could take a college class in embedded systems design and you could ask all the students to come up with examples of edge cases where an SOS system in a car could have issues, and you're pretty much guaranteed that someone will mention both being out of range of cell towers and being old enough to be incompatible with cell towers.

Those people are not in management.

A company that uses planned obsolescence probably see's these bugs as more of a feature. Out of warranty, out of mind.

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