Define "modern". I have a 2017 Civic and I've had to replace the battery a couple of times. There's a holding bar that needs to be removed before the battery can be taken out, but other than that the only real problem is the weight of the thing.
You may not know this, but EVs also have oil filters and gears. They also having cooling systems. What they don't have is an engine (they have motors). But the motors have their own cooling system, and the gears have their own oil system with filters.
Every moving part - especially gears -- needs to be oiled, and whenever you are oiling metal on metal contact such as in gears, you are going to want an oil filter to catch worn metal debris, to remove it from the oil.
The difference between EVs and ICE vehicles is not that only one of them uses oil to reduce friction, but that the oil service intervals on EVs are so long that regular oil maintenance is not needed, you do it every 60,000 miles or whatever the manufacturer recommends, so it's out of mind. But that doesn't mean it doesn't require service.
Once EVs have been around for a while and there is an established market for used EVs, the people who buy them are going to want to change the oil to add more life to the EV. So it's something that is dealt with in the long-life maintenance, not the monthly maintenance. But when you do the oil service, you will curse Tesla for needing to drop the battery in order to do it, and all of a sudden you will care where things are placed and how accessible they are.
Here is a nice video -- I follow Sam Crac as one of my favorite automotive youtubers - and he picked up an old Tesla and did an oil service for it. It's a nice watch:
What if there's an efficiency in engine design by placing the filter in the middle that leads to a +2mpg improvement for the driver? Or that it fails, on average, 22k miles later into it's life? Not all hard-to-repair-yourself designs are malicious...
This is like saying you can get a 10% improvement in battery life by changing where you position the RAM on your motherboard.
There is just no universe in which placing an oil filter in one location or another is going to make such a difference. You'd have to mount it completely outside the engine, say sitting as a cylinder on top of the hood, and even there you are not going to get a 2mpg improvement.
Right but what I'm getting at is that there can be tradeoffs that might make designing for maintainability mean optimizing for something less important to the end user.
Do you optimize an engine for how easy it is to replace a filter once or twice a year (most likely done by someone the average car-owner is already paying to change their oil for them), or do you optimize it for getting better gas mileage over every single mile the car is driven?
We're talking about a hypothetical car and neither of us (I assume) design engines like this, I'm just trying to illustrate a point about tradeoffs existing. To your own point of efficiency being a trade with durability, that's not in a vacuum. If a part is in a different location with a different loading environment, it can be more/less durable (material changes leading to efficiency differences), more/less likely to break (maybe you service the hard-to-service part half as often when it's in a harder to service spot), etc.
If the engine failed due to missing oil change because of the difficulty, the whole car is gone. The waste in cost, material, and environmental impact far outweighs the savings in 2mpg improvement.
Glad to know in this hypothetical car scenario the owner decided to not get an oil change leading to the total loss of the vehicle. That seems very realistic and definitely something that car designs should be optimized around.
Or, we consider that 2mpg across 100,000 cars can save 3,500,000 gallons of gas being burned for the average American driving ~12k miles per year. And maybe things aren't so black and white. You're argument, in this hypothetical, is that negligent car owner who destroys their car because they're choosing to not change the oil is worth burning an extra 3.5millon gallons of gasoline.
I’m no mechanical engineer, but I would assume those extreme tradeoffs occur more often when repairability is not prioritized from early iterations. I.e. “boss we’re 90% into the design cycle why are you bringing up the position of the oil filter now?”
There’s definitely a programming equivalent as well…
That is fine if you are say building a race car that will be essentially rebuilt anyway in between races, or in general where 0.1% extra performace/less weight from non-repair-friendly placement might be worth it.
The US is filled with bubble cars like everywhere else. There isn't really much difference between cars across the world. Well, China is unique with like 100 automakers all searching for customers, but for most of the world, it's Toyota, VW, Hyundai/Kia, Stellantis, GM, Renault/Nissan, Ford as the top global producers and they sell everywhere. Sure there are some special models in local markets, but those are mostly rebadged versions you can get elsewhere.
Fun Fact: Along with the "Bees are disappearing" scare, which was just measurement error, there has been an "insects are disappearing" scare, due to the fact people's windshields are not covered with bugs like they used to be. However that is because cars have gotten more aerodynamic so fewer insects are hitting the windshield.
I've found the users-first mentality degrading over the years at companies. It's a bit jarring too, since a lot of my early training was pretty user-centric.
I do have a feeling that the example of bigger players is carefully followed by many of the other companies, kind of as a cult of success. And that example for a long time has been rather lacking.
Clearly, there is a thing missing here: Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user. So in that case biz just becomes a filter for users that actually are willing (and able) to fund your software. That's a good thing.
Obviously, our regulations aren't perfect or even good enough yet. See DRM. See spyware TVs. See "who actually gets to control your device?". But still...
I've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years.
It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:
- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails
- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code
For example:
- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code
- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was
- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction
I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.
Google “hospital server room”. Guess everywhere should just do the same thing with their server rooms, yeah? Works for hospitals, and look how much money the healthcare system makes! Why even pay an IT engineer, just plug in another wire bro.
Oh noe, noe no.. you want to crowdsource debugging.. describe the error and your expectations, then build software by machine learning while screwing up.
And cars are driven more than worked on, but putting the oil filter inaccessibly in the middle of the engine block is still an unforgiveable sin.
Try replacing the battery. Seems accessible enough at first, but ingenious engineering has made batteries the modern rubik's cube of auto maintenance.
Define "modern". I have a 2017 Civic and I've had to replace the battery a couple of times. There's a holding bar that needs to be removed before the battery can be taken out, but other than that the only real problem is the weight of the thing.
The real issue is that oil filters and gears are really just legacy design. EVs don’t need them.
So, similar with software design, as in other fields, often a problem goes away when you ask a different question.
You may not know this, but EVs also have oil filters and gears. They also having cooling systems. What they don't have is an engine (they have motors). But the motors have their own cooling system, and the gears have their own oil system with filters.
Every moving part - especially gears -- needs to be oiled, and whenever you are oiling metal on metal contact such as in gears, you are going to want an oil filter to catch worn metal debris, to remove it from the oil.
The difference between EVs and ICE vehicles is not that only one of them uses oil to reduce friction, but that the oil service intervals on EVs are so long that regular oil maintenance is not needed, you do it every 60,000 miles or whatever the manufacturer recommends, so it's out of mind. But that doesn't mean it doesn't require service.
Once EVs have been around for a while and there is an established market for used EVs, the people who buy them are going to want to change the oil to add more life to the EV. So it's something that is dealt with in the long-life maintenance, not the monthly maintenance. But when you do the oil service, you will curse Tesla for needing to drop the battery in order to do it, and all of a sudden you will care where things are placed and how accessible they are.
Here is a nice video -- I follow Sam Crac as one of my favorite automotive youtubers - and he picked up an old Tesla and did an oil service for it. It's a nice watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ZNHKjHalY
EVs have gears and gear oil in their drive units. There is a reduction gear that needs lubrication, as well as the differential.
They actually will need oil changes starting anywhere from the 50k to 100k mile mark.
[delayed]
But if you happen to own a repair shop, you can make a fortune from drivers who don’t know how to do it. Wink.
[delayed]
What if there's an efficiency in engine design by placing the filter in the middle that leads to a +2mpg improvement for the driver? Or that it fails, on average, 22k miles later into it's life? Not all hard-to-repair-yourself designs are malicious...
This is like saying you can get a 10% improvement in battery life by changing where you position the RAM on your motherboard.
There is just no universe in which placing an oil filter in one location or another is going to make such a difference. You'd have to mount it completely outside the engine, say sitting as a cylinder on top of the hood, and even there you are not going to get a 2mpg improvement.
If it is a part with a regular maintenance schedule, it should be designed for maintainability.
Most maintainability conflicts come from packaging and design for assembly.
Efficiency more often comes into conflict with durability, and sometimes safety.
Right but what I'm getting at is that there can be tradeoffs that might make designing for maintainability mean optimizing for something less important to the end user.
Do you optimize an engine for how easy it is to replace a filter once or twice a year (most likely done by someone the average car-owner is already paying to change their oil for them), or do you optimize it for getting better gas mileage over every single mile the car is driven?
We're talking about a hypothetical car and neither of us (I assume) design engines like this, I'm just trying to illustrate a point about tradeoffs existing. To your own point of efficiency being a trade with durability, that's not in a vacuum. If a part is in a different location with a different loading environment, it can be more/less durable (material changes leading to efficiency differences), more/less likely to break (maybe you service the hard-to-service part half as often when it's in a harder to service spot), etc.
[delayed]
If the engine failed due to missing oil change because of the difficulty, the whole car is gone. The waste in cost, material, and environmental impact far outweighs the savings in 2mpg improvement.
Glad to know in this hypothetical car scenario the owner decided to not get an oil change leading to the total loss of the vehicle. That seems very realistic and definitely something that car designs should be optimized around.
Or, we consider that 2mpg across 100,000 cars can save 3,500,000 gallons of gas being burned for the average American driving ~12k miles per year. And maybe things aren't so black and white. You're argument, in this hypothetical, is that negligent car owner who destroys their car because they're choosing to not change the oil is worth burning an extra 3.5millon gallons of gasoline.
To be fair, you are constructing an entirely hypothetical car scenario where oil filter placement leads to a 5-10% increase in fuel efficiency.
We're already in the land of the fucking ridiculous. Let's have fun with it.
I’m no mechanical engineer, but I would assume those extreme tradeoffs occur more often when repairability is not prioritized from early iterations. I.e. “boss we’re 90% into the design cycle why are you bringing up the position of the oil filter now?”
There’s definitely a programming equivalent as well…
That is fine if you are say building a race car that will be essentially rebuilt anyway in between races, or in general where 0.1% extra performace/less weight from non-repair-friendly placement might be worth it.
Not for normal car
Most cars sold in the US are not aerodynamic so it seems a couple of mpg isn't the focus anyway
The US is filled with bubble cars like everywhere else. There isn't really much difference between cars across the world. Well, China is unique with like 100 automakers all searching for customers, but for most of the world, it's Toyota, VW, Hyundai/Kia, Stellantis, GM, Renault/Nissan, Ford as the top global producers and they sell everywhere. Sure there are some special models in local markets, but those are mostly rebadged versions you can get elsewhere.
Fun Fact: Along with the "Bees are disappearing" scare, which was just measurement error, there has been an "insects are disappearing" scare, due to the fact people's windshields are not covered with bugs like they used to be. However that is because cars have gotten more aerodynamic so fewer insects are hitting the windshield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations?...
Um I’m pretty sure that’s not the only evidence for insect population declines.
I think oil filter located somewhere sinful usually in cars that are aerodynamically sound.
Except..there is never such reason. They can put the filter anywhere in the pipeline. Some even have it exactly where it should be: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/2013+Subaru+Legacy+Oil+and+Oil+...
I like the final conclusion. And sadly I don't feel like anything changed for the better on this topic since 2023.
I am afraid that without a major crash or revolution of some sort, user won't matter next to a sufficiently big biz. But time will tell.
I've found the users-first mentality degrading over the years at companies. It's a bit jarring too, since a lot of my early training was pretty user-centric.
This is definitely true. In growth companies there is way more emphasis these days on investor hype over user centricity.
For companies that have a solid competitive moat they have at best gotten lazy about user centricity and at worst actively hostile.
I do have a feeling that the example of bigger players is carefully followed by many of the other companies, kind of as a cult of success. And that example for a long time has been rather lacking.
Clearly, there is a thing missing here: Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user. So in that case biz just becomes a filter for users that actually are willing (and able) to fund your software. That's a good thing.
Obviously, our regulations aren't perfect or even good enough yet. See DRM. See spyware TVs. See "who actually gets to control your device?". But still...
> Regulations. If you have strong regulations on how you can make money, you cannot sustainably have biz antagonize user.
If that's what the regulators are optimizing for.
Stupid regulations are why we have an idiotic cookie banner on many websites.
I've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years.
It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:
- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails
- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code
For example:
- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code
- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was
- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction
I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
Which is great until you have to make changes to this kind of code, not to mention a massive refactoring.
It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.
That's the opposite of 'great'. Good code is that which can be refactored.
Google “hospital server room”. Guess everywhere should just do the same thing with their server rooms, yeah? Works for hospitals, and look how much money the healthcare system makes! Why even pay an IT engineer, just plug in another wire bro.
I would not call "you must leave the webpage open" a "working code" :)
This looks like an example of biobackend: defective IT compensated by humans
Your point is very sane, of course, shitty code was not invented now. But was it ever sold as a revolution ? Probably, too !
Does the ">" mean "greater than" or is it meant to symbolize an arrow in a ordered sequence?
More important than:
"We arrived at a little model that expresses the relative importance of various factors in software development..."
It went on the good track, but failed to generalize that ≹ is what apply among all these terms.
Oh noe, noe no.. you want to crowdsource debugging.. describe the error and your expectations, then build software by machine learning while screwing up.