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Wow the public relations sock-puppetry on HN is getting very clever and sophisticated. I really love the green account - nice touch. It really helps your authen
by hristov 10y ago
Wow the public relations sock-puppetry on HN is getting very clever and sophisticated. I really love the green account - nice touch. It really helps your authenticity to pretend like you are afraid of retribution from John Deere when you are totally kissing their asses.
Let me ask you this -- why in the world do the lines of software you write prevent a qualified mechanic from changing a transmission? You know people used to do that all the time when tractors had zero lines of software in them.
After all you are trying to very cleverly change the subject here. You are doing it very deftly, as you should, because you are not a software developer, you are a PR drone and it is your job to deftly change the subject.
The question here is not about the quality of the John Deere software, so it does not really matter how many engineers worked on it or how hard they worked on it. The problem is that the John Deere software takes away an essential right of property ownership that people take for granted.
No one is accusing the JD software of being faulty, i.e., incapable of serving it's intended purpose. People are accusing the software of having nefarious purposes and serving them all too well.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- frik 10y ago> Wow the public relations sock-puppetry on HN is getting very clever and sophisticated. Very true. There are a few companies that engage sophisticated sock-puppetry on HN like P§l§nt$er, M$, M§n$ant§ and J§hn D$$r. Ethic should be a mandatory school subject. About dongled binary signed software in hardware devices. We sincerely need a law to prevent this. Tesla cars and John Deer tractors actively prevent the second buyer market with this. And one can imagine it's going to get worse with more self-driving cars and more software in vehicles.
- barking 10y agoI can understand MS but John Deere? Hard to credit that they'd be monitoring HN. I mean how many farmers read HN?
- ehsankia 10y agoNot on either side here, but I feel like you're missing the point there. Let's say someone does modify the code, then the machine messes up and ends up killing someone. Who would be the culprit there? I guess they could have something that detects when the software is modified, but even if they did, I bet it would still be poor publicity for them (similar to when people misuse Tesla's assist and getting in accidents). Also, honest question here about changing transmission. You make it sound as if it's completely unrelated with the code, but is it? The code may very well be tuned for the hardware as it is, and changing any of it could also lead to unexpected results. Of course there's much better ways of going about it, but from a lawsuit protection perspective, I think you're simplifying an issue which is much more complex than it may seem at the surface.
- bartl 10y ago>Let's say someone does modify the code. Let's not. These farmers don't want to change the software. They only want to fix their hardware. And because of the close tightness with the software, they can't.
- bigtimeidiot 10y agoDo you think I can pull the electric motor from my Model S to replace it? When John Deere does this, HN is up in arms. When Tesla does it, it's part of an "innovative business model".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- georgyo 10y agoI think if you had the part and replaced it, your car would turn on without a Tesla engineer recertifying it.
- bigtimeidiot 10y ago>your car would turn on without a Tesla engineer recertifying it I think you're going to be disappointed.