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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

From a company that sell "full self-driving" cars that don't, you now, "self drive fully", I was kinda already expecting that whatever advertised range was, to put it nicely, a "large exageration".

The bit of code in the dashboard to exaggerate even more is a nice touch. I wonder what the commit message was for that PR ? (Or maybe Tesla does not do PRs or commits, and just let anyone build anything on their laptop and put the binaries in the car. I mean, all that "software engineering" process sounds like so much useless efforts, right ?)

Also, the author of the article takes a lot of pleasure in mentioning the EPA dozens of time - too bad the days of the agency are numbered.

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There was a time where false advertising used to be illegal.

I suppose that would violate the advertiser's "free speech".

It's very ironic that everyone is so afraid of Orwellian's "Ministry of Truth", and that we end in a world ruled by "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistical parrots, Inc."

The "Ministry of Truth" in this case is a bad analogy though, since in the story, its purpose was to redefine what is the truth according to state up to the point of forcing people ignore the proof that they see in front of their eyes through torture.

Parent wasn’t using it as an analogy though, they were saying it is ironic we were afraid of the state doing that when subtler corporate means are what we ended up with.

I don’t know if it is ironic, though — maybe more of an Orwellian inoculation that pushed the problem elsewhere.

I'm now picturing a customer support that can send henchmen to convince you that, "no, we never advertised 500m of autonomy, and your range did not drop unexpectedly while you were driving, and anyway the car was fully self-driving itself into that tree - we have logs and data and signed ToC to prove ourselves, now please sit down on this chair so we can strap you and use this big red hammer to protect your free speech."

And it' supposed to sound ridiculous and Terry Gilliam-esque, but it's now eerily realistic...

Yeah, there's a video going around where a dealership is working with Tesla to repair a car battery, but Tesla says the car has structural damage and is therefore classified as salvage, so the repair will cost $12,000+.

The guy says "Salvage is different from having structural damage, I have proof here that it's not salvage". Tesla informs the man that "according to Tesla, it's salvage, and they can't provide any more details about anything, if you want more you have to go through Tesla Legal"

So when it comes to Tesla, it's salvage if they says so, despite any other records, and if you don't like it, you can sue.

Advertisement doesn't (shouldn't?) fall under free speech though, it's not an individually held opinion etc etc.

Australia has very strong truth-in-advertising laws.

Tesla advertised there that they were now the most popular selling car, outselling Camry... and were smacked down when Licensing records showed no such thing. Made to pull ads, pay a fine.

But these laws need to be revamped. A better fine would be Tesla needed to correct their claims publicly, in the same media space with the same time/investment to correct their claim.

Else fines will just be part of the cost of the false ads.

That time is now, thankfully the consumer protection organizations and car testing organizations stepped up and will / should now test in a standardized fashion an electric car's driving range and slap them on the wrist if it's much different from their advertised amount.

"a slap on the wrist" by a consumer association is not the same as a legal condemnation. (I'm assuming the "consumer association" is not a regulator, but just a bunch of people coming together.)

It's useful for the consumer, and is supposedly part or the normal "immune system" of a free market.

However, the "legal" part has to be handled by regulators, following laws enacted by lawfully elected representatives.

This part is being slashed by lawfully elected executives (in part) and by unelected "advisors". One of whom is actively doing things that should get him prosecuted.

Also, I hope the consumer protection association is not depending on any kind of public funding - otherwise, I hope their website doesn't use banned words like "diverse".

Fraud is being pretty heavily normalized. The crypto space model is what all things are moving to imo with the feds being dismantled

I know you weren’t expecting a serious response, but Tesla does use Git. They actually use a fairly standard version of GitHub enterprise.

Using git does not mean there is a PR process in place. Git can be used just in the way the GP describes, recklessly putting binaries onto cars.

GitHub cannot be used without pull requests. Git cannot be used without commits. Whether there is a code review process or everyone self approves is another question.

GitHub absolutely can be used without pull requests. I don't say that this is a good idea.

Are you saying at Tesla, GitHub can't be used without pull requests? You can for sure (obviously) just push to whatever branch you want for your GitHub hosted repository if that's your desire.

As a newbie software engineer who has forced push to main numerous times last week without a PR. I’m surprised by this discourse on HN.

> git checkout develop ; git merge feature-branch ; git push --force

Git with no PRs.

Please at least use --force-with-lease

I've replaced CI checks on pull requests with the scream test.

Pull requests are a UI over branches, and the act of merging two branches. You don't need to use them at all.

Just because there's a PR process in place doesn't mean that it's any good. At one place, we desperately avoided some sections of the code base because we didn't want to trigger a PR that would force us to interact with the team running that section. They were slow, obnoxious and power mad.

A PR is only as good as the person evaluating it. You can't even say reliably that it's better than nothing because sometimes it isn't.

No, Tesla use Pull Requests too. It’s fairly standard GitHub usage, at least within the org I worked at. They also GitHub actions, though obviously the build tools are non-standard.

> I wonder what the commit message was for that PR?

They "trust me". Dumb fucks.

Vouching and upvoting this. In case the context got lost by the original downvoters, this is in reference to Mark Zuckerberg's leaked conversations about creating Facebook [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if (some) Tesla employees/executives indeed internally hold a similar sentiment about their customers.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-...

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