That is such a terrible example. Why are you comparing Teslas to cars where the battery pack costs more than the Tesla, instead of the myriad of competitively priced models?
5,761 karma · joined October 23, 2022
If the car has 10 places where the manufacturer saves 2 dollars, that is 20 dollars a car. At around 2.5 Million cars shipped each year that is 50 Million Euros each year profit for BMW.
The entire car industry is extremely cost sensitive, especially right now, with so much global competition and little consolidation.
The issue also isn't that the part is cost optimized. The issue is that it fails.
To be honest, this equation completely fails to represent this.
The FAA denying approval to parts based on how it was manufactured and not how it performed under testing would be totally ridiculous.
Which means what exactly? Aluminum will go soft under high temperatures as well, yet this part would not have failed if it was made out of aluminum.
The failure is not the material, the failure is someone neglecting the operating conditions or material properties when choosing materials.
This exact part could have also been milled out of some plastic and would have failed the same way. The method to produce that part is only relevant in so far it is open to more people.
In this case engineering was done by someone, who either did not understand the material he was working with, or the operating conditions in which that part was deployed.
Obviously no testing or any kind of proper engineering was done to create requirements validate them and verify them.
Being able to design a 3D model and print it does not mean you are done with engineering. It is just one step in a very long chain, which is needed to produce devices which stand up to their use.
This exact scenario happened with the dotcom bubble. Inarguably Internet services drastically changed everyone's daily lives, yet the buildup of Internet infrastructure was based on excessively optimistic predictions, leading to a bubble.
It is extremely difficult to adequately communicate about something you fundamentally do not understand. She is either lying or disastrously misinformed when she claims corporations do not fund open source projects, which are provided for the common good. This statement alone should disqualify her, because it shows that she is either lying or does not understand the point of her work.
The truth is that many important open source projects are either completely, partly or mostly supported by corporations, who provide this software for the benefit of the general public. Her prediction about the "tragedy of the commons" is not universally seen in reality. What is simultaneously true, is that many important open source projects are not funded by corporations or at least completely underfunded.
If the key leader of such a project claims that the later is generally true, any serious political debate will make her look like a liar and fool, when her opponent point out the numerous examples of the later.
Funding open source is not important because corporations just endlessly consume open source projects and never giving back. It is important because, some open source projects are neglected and inadequately funded. Not making that distinction is political suicide if you ever have to defend your budget.
You can also find out her educational background, which includes no technical qualifications. "Adriana holds a master’s degree in public policy and governance from Maastricht University and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and political science from Goethe University Frankfurt."
A person with these qualifications has absolutely zero business heading a government fund. At minimum I would want this person to either have a technical degree or some industry/FOSS experience. I don't think it is unlikely, that this women has not written a single line of code in her life.
The reason is that only such a person can adequately understand why these projects need funding and what the consequences of not funding them are.
I read their website and it is extremely embarrassing as well.
>"Lineare Algebra ist für viele Prozesse in der Mathematik, den Naturwissenschaften, der Informatik, der maschinellen Bilderkennung und dem maschinellen Lernen unerlässlich, da sie es Entwicklerinnen und Forscherinnen ermöglicht, Berechnungen extrem schnell durchzuführen."
To paraphrase: Researchers use linear algebra because it makes their calculations fast.
>No one starts a project from scratch; instead, they turn to libraries like GitHub or GitLab to download packages of code already written, reviewed, and improved by the community.
Completely false on so many levels.
>Developers spend an average of two-thirds of their time adapting open-source software to their needs
No, they don't. This is just made up. Developers develop with open source software. They do not spend 2/3 of their time "adapting" it.
>Our structure is quite unique: we’re a limited liability company owned by the German government
I know of one similar corporation. Deutsch Bahn.
>which is maintained by people selflessly.
This myth comes up again and again. It just is not true. A large part of open source software is created and maintained by corporations.
>Most people have never heard of curl or pi [Python], or the other 60 technologies we work with. But if this software goes down, suddenly the payment systems stop working.
This persons does not understand what python or curl are. They do not "go down". This is just someone not having a single clue what they are talking about.
>You really need to understand how software developers work and how the open-source ecosystem works.
Well. I guess you don't, to get 20 million in budget from the government.
>We face a classic commons problem: everyone relies on open-source software as a foundation for building their own developments, but no one feels responsible for it. Why should I invest in open-source software if my competitor is also using it and not paying for it?
Again. A total myth, this person has zero understanding of the open source landscape.
>What does open source contribute to the debate on reducing the carbon footprint of technology?
Truly an enlightening question. The answer is even worse.
It is also something which is likely to be quite harmful, since it selects for people who are great at networking over people who have good technical skills. Obviously interpersonal communication is important, but how well a 20 year old in University performs at it should not doom or make their career.
And even people with bad social skills deserve to exist and should be allowed into their chosen career. Being someone who does good work and is respectful, but not overly social, should be good enough.
But, who is this for? Matlab users? Python users? Julia users? Do you have an aim with this project or is it just for fun?
It is popular mostly because all alternatives are really bad, if "all" you want is a functional GUI to deliver some developer tool. Qt means you have to dive really deep into a C++ project. The web technologies are all far too heavy and complex and you don't really any of the power. There also are many other alternatives, none of them really do what ImGui does.
>"It’s hard to figure out exactly how much data a modern car is collecting on you"
You are a globally operating news agency. You can absolutely get some GDPR requests in and look at it. What kind of reporting is this? "We don"t know, but we also have not tried the one way which forces companies to answer this question".
BMW is a German company, just ask them for the information they have on you and they are forced to give it to you.
UFOs being what they "appear to be" can mean a lot of things. UFOs are Unidentified Flying Objects. The USSR and the Iran would have had multiple, very real, UFO sightings thought their time, due to the US military.
There is a coherent explanation where neither the US military is deceiving anyone (to a large extent), nor UFO sighting being universally hoaxes. People see flying things in the sky and interpret them as some sort of object which should not be there. Across all cases these happens for one of these reason:
- Characteristic behavior of a flying object is mistakenly interpreted as as uncharacteristic. Likely these are most cases
- The object is genuinely novel and unidentified by the observer, but actually not hostile. E.g. you are seeing this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk
- The object is unidentified, but actually hostile and coming from another nation. The USSR during the cold war and China now have very significant aerospace capabilities. Hostile spying activities are interpreted as UFOs (which is what they are).
The US military is not deceiving anyone, because they themselves can not adequately distinguish these sightings from one another. Likely they could shed some light on some of these but are reluctant to do so.
Giving all of these a "10^-3 to 10^-4" probability of being actual aliens hatching some intergalactic plot to keep humans down just seems very silly.
What? Have these people looked at what Vitamin D costs at the supermarket. If Vitamin D insufficiency has any significant detrimental effects, then 3 bucks of supplements a month surely are cheaper than dealing with the consequences.
If one hour of doctors time costs 200 bucks, then this is enough to pay for FIVE AND A HALF YEARS of Vitamin D supplements.
This seems like a completely insane statement.
What? https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hyprland https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/hyprland/hyprland/
>But couldn't for the life of me figure out how to install Arch.
I mean, come on. Sure, Arch is not for everybody, but if you are semi tech savy you could have done the internet searches I did and figured out which distros have hyprland packages. Both Fedora and Debian have them.
Arch is also not much harder to install than debian. Insert the image and go through the steps in the installer, this isn't some magic ritual. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
Yes, but it will be experience they inevitably will have once these differences will result in their OS being fundamentally broken and nobody being there to help them.
>It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".
Hilariously giving people a fundamentally broken OS, which they use based on superficial criteria is the best gatekeeper imaginable. Once the inevitable happens and their distro is totally trashed, they will never use Linux for anything again.
If you want people to have a good long term experience give them a well supported mainstream distro, instead of a fundamentally broken arch patchset.
>"actually, maybe this is something I can use".
Which is exactly the wrong thought. No, the fundamentally broken Arch derivative you are trying to use is much, much harder to use than Fedora.
By "nice" do you mean a distro which is fundamentally broken and far less supported then its parent distro?
>It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.
It is displaying the worst that is out there, just with a nice interface. These niche distros are always the worst choices, because they lack in support and are all fundamentally broken.
Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.
The truth is that Linux is mostly stable (even Arch), well supported and maintained. But this does not apply to these small hobby projects, which are just worse versions of their base distros with some ricing on top.
>FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.
At the same time I am free to warn people against this. These distros are a bad Idea and especially if you are new to Linux they will make you suffer far more than you should.
The Arch forums rightfully warn against this and do not want users of these distros, since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways.
There are multiple very reasonable distros. There is absolutely no need to make these forks.
If it were job training it would have to actually train students for jobs. But neither is that "academic" in any sense of the word nor actually practical in any way. University trains people to be research scientists in the hope this helps them do some later job.
If the goal were training students to be academics, then degree requirements for most jobs are absolutely nonsensical and universities admitting large percentages of the population would be extremely counterproductive.
If the goal were a continued education to create "well rounded" people, then why give that task to university professors and create a social environment where this is the least likely thing to happen?
If the goal is networking, then why do all that academic research stuff? Just play sports throughout the day.
How is VW aborting in any way? They do not have a new ICE Platform, they are totally all in on EVs. Whether that will work out is of course another question, but it is bizarre to bring up EV when there is also Stellantis, who do not even have a dedicated EV Platform for their cars.
What I wanted to express is that it is "just" various forms of volunteer work, which ranges between some occasional organizational work in a Verein to doing hard physical labor at 3 in the night. What the petition argues is that open source developers "deserve" the title of "Ehrenamt", which really is what I disliked about the whole thing. Because effectively it is just a designation, nobody does their volunteering for that title or any of the benefits it gives you.
The demands of the petition would be solved by just founding a Verein (which is exactly the structure you want to organize volunteer activity), but as you said, if you wanted to interpret the petition as negatively as possible, the petition wants to avoid having a Verein, which enforces a certain degree of openness and transparency about finances.