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Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System
- claydavisss 8y agoI do not want a car that someone I've never met can "ssh" into, or any other remote access method. Think I will be holding on to my ten year-old car as long as possible.
- komali2 8y agoI mean, I feel you, they'll pry my manually driven motorcycle out of my cold, dead, hands. But I bet any automated vehicle can be remotely accessed somehow... most of the trains in Taipei are automated and I'd argue that's the cleanest, fastest, bestest train system I ever been on in my life.
- marssaxman 8y agoI hear you there! I'm planning to keep on maintaining my 1992 Land Rover indefinitely, because I don't trust these systems.
- marshray 8y agoYou're still going to be sharing the highway with them.
- LinuxBender 8y agoI thought about that as well. I am looking at a remote part of snow country. Every time someone says something can't be hacked in to, my coworkers prove them wrong, using tools that are already installed on the victim hosts.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoSource: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862643&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=62 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38... (Pages 62 through 68) Left as a reference, citation. Mods: Wouldn't suggest changing to this URL, UX is pretty ick, easier to read the Twitter screenshots.
- mzs 8y agoAny way to know those posts are not just the fantasy of a troll?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoNo, so they should be taken with a grain of salt.
- teslatech 8y agoHe mentioned the slack compromise, that happened and was not publicly disclosed.
- Scaevolus 8y agoHere's just the ex-Tesla engineer: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862643&userid=20544 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ahmedalsudani 8y agoThank you! Wayback link for time travelers: https://web.archive.org/web/20180824205834/https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862643&userid=20544 https://web.archive.org/web/20180824205834/https://forums.so...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoSometimes I miss the carburetor.
- compostable 8y agoDid you ever have to stand outside in the winter, in ice and show, with the hood propped open, spraying starting fluid into the carburetor, and manually holding the throttle open, so that your engine could get to the proper temperature? Did you ever floor a car and have the engine shut off because there was too much fuel? No thanks, I don't want to go back to those days!
- f4rtcl0ps 8y agoNo because I never lived in a frozen hellhole filled with dirty swedes and also I don't drive like an idiot
- tntn 8y agoI mean, 'JohnJamesRambo did say sometimes.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoLike those times you just say "FTW, I'm gonna spew as much unburned fuel out the tailpipe as possible".
- pmcjones 8y agoOr fiddle with the manual choke to find a setting where the engine would sort of idle. Or wish you had a manual choke, when the automatic choke wouldn't go on -- or off.
- LinuxBender 8y agoI had that happen once. I rebuilt my Rochester Quadrajet and it purred like a kitten for a decade. I eventually gave that car to my friends that had a similar model to use for parts, but it was the best car I ever had. Chevy Caprice Classic, former undercover cop car with a 350 and a shift kit. I certainly miss those days. Working on my current vehicle is a PITA. The fuel rails, coils and plugs take hours to change. On my old car, I could do that in 15 minutes even if the engine was hot. I can't even imagine how proprietary the components on a Tesla must be or how difficult it will be to fix myself.
- GW150914 8y agoWell, that was a butter clenching read. It’s not hard to understand why their chip designers bailed as soon as possible, and they seemed to perpetually bleed technical talent. Is this a matter of incompetence or the usual anything-to-win “move fast and break things” approach? The latter fits better with their marketing vs. reality gap on “autopilot” and subsequent crashes.
- compostable 8y ago>> butter clenching Excuse me, I am a native English speaker and I do not understand this reference
- maym86 8y agobutt clenching https://www.dictionary.com/browse/buttock-clenching https://www.dictionary.com/browse/buttock-clenching
- DCoder 8y agoWhen autocorrect meets "buttock-clenching", I'd guess.
- GW150914 8y agoYou are correct sir or madam! I’m leaving it though, I like the sound of it.
- MBCook 8y agoOh. I figure out what it meant, but I thought it was meant to be a ‘polite’ version. Sort of like saying ‘shucks’ or ‘darn’. Autocorrect didn’t enter my mind as a possibility.
- smsm42 8y agoThat's how I read it. I had to go back and re-read it to see it says "butter" actually. I guess I've successfully installed anti-autocorrect in my brain.
- xenihn 8y agoI hope this means we get to see YOSPOS referenced in mainstream media as an actual source.
- java_script 8y agoI hope this means HN finds the gazillion-page thread mocking HN there.
- GW150914 8y agoDo you have a link? It sounds like it could be both interesting and amusing.
- blindwatchmaker 8y agoseems to be here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3620458&pagenumber=431&perpage=40 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=36...
- 1123581321 8y agoI think a lot of HN readers over a certain age have spent time on SA. It’s easy to code switch and I wouldn’t have trouble mocking my own comments there in the house style.
- jtmcmc 8y agoexactly - i wonder if my old account is still active... probably best to stay out of SA while at work though...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sz4kerto 8y agoWhy is this interesting or surprising? Of course almost all challengers have hacky tech under the hood because they don't have the resources. Winning from that position is possible not because of generally better tech but by delivering something that the incumbents don't. Remember the demo of the first iPhone (vs the huge expertise of Nokia). Or how Microsoft won the desktop starting from a single user, cooperative multitasking system (vs all the sophisticated Unix-based systems). Or Facebook running on despised MySQL and PHP. These hacks are part of the strategy. It's risky but probably doing these 'properly' would increase the risk even more.
- TarpitCarnivore 8y agoThese are cars first and foremost. They should not be given a hand waive over "break things and move fast".
- blattimwind 8y agoIndeed. That's the driver's job.
- oxymoron 8y agoRemember the Toyota uncontrolled acceleration bug and the report that came as a result of the trial. It seems like software is a bit of a second thought for some incumbents too.
- lowry 8y agoIt is common knowledge that Toyota uncontrolled acceleration bug was completely imaginary, see for example http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game
- dewey 8y agoI started listening to that podcast a few weeks ago, that ones one of my favorite episodes. Can highly recommend it.
- Jtsummers 8y agoRe QA: To quote Dodge (via Deming), "You can not inspect quality into a product." This poster seems to think well of the QA team they had. However, It doesn't matter how great your QA team is, if the quality isn't in the system the QA team can't put it there. All they can do is tell you that you're making poor quality products, and attempt to inform management (as QA rarely has real authority) who should then act on that and work to improve the system. If quality isn't part of the corporate ethos, then they (QA) will make little difference in the end.
- Retric 8y agoQA done well is more than testing. It's managing risk and ensuring the process matches your risk tolerance. Car entertainment systems and Car breaking systems can be handled differently because the results of failure are different.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoThis is OK if you can guarantee 100% separation of concerns, but the news reports where hackers were able to take over control systems in the car through bugs in the entertainment system should be a huge note of caution.
- sjg007 8y agoI mean the entertainment system ideally should not be connected to the engine/drive train systems. That would be a risk management strategy.
- dfox 8y agoThere is difference between entertainment system and infotainment system. Infotainment systems are increasingly used as primary UI for almost anything on car that is not controlled by steering wheel and pedals and thus has to be able to communicate with almost everxthing that is in the car. Tesla is pretty extreme example of this, but it works this way for most manufacturers.
- ddevault 8y agoI used to work at SpaceX on the team that did a piece of software called "WarpDrive". It was a massive monolithic ASP.NET application, with large swaths done with ASP.NET WebForms and a slow frontier of ASP.NET MVC gradually growing when I was working there. This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech. Thankfully the rockets fly with a heavily customized Linux install.
- mandeepj 8y ago> This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. They could have bought something off the shelf. Not sure what was the value in building everything from scratch
- FLUX-YOU 8y agoMaybe all of the contractual obligations for existing products were not a good idea
- nightski 8y agoWhat like SAP? And then spend 10s of millions in customizing it for their needs and dealing with an arcane, unintuitive interface? I've seen this over and over again.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 8y agoI understand SAP's business model: common core business logic code that helps your legal compliance, then lightly customized at great expense. What I don't understand is why the UI sucks so very, very much every single time. And why it's so very, very slow. It seems like it has to be on purpose. Can anyone with insight explain it to me?
- ryeguy_24 8y agoBased on some of the details within these tweets, I would assume this person provided enough information to identify himself/herself at this point. Do software engineers typically have confidentiality agreements that prohibit releasing proprietary information?
- freeone3000 8y agoYes, but he's already marked as "former", so recovery is limited. See the Waymo lawsuit.
- ryeguy_24 8y agoSo, after separating from company, you can release all proprietary information and you'd have limited liability? I thought there would be larger recourse. Not familiar with law though.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gruez 8y ago>His NDA has expired.
- gowld 8y agoI've never heard of an NDA that says "after 3 years you can start giving away trade secrets"
- atomicthumbs 8y agoi'm sure "we use fifty different kinds of virtualization and a hundred different operating systems" is valuable information
- nutjob2 8y agoIf you release corporate secrets you can be successfully sued, regardless.
- aleksi 8y agoThread in a easier to read form: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1032939617404645376.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1032939617404645376.html
- tozeur 8y agoThank you!
- hacknat 8y agoWow, The most revealing thing, I think, is the lack of central server security. Sounds like it wouldn’t take almost any effor to MitM a Tesla car.
- mlindner 8y agoYou're welcome to try. https://bugcrowd.com/tesla https://bugcrowd.com/tesla
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thsowers 8y agoInteresting to note that Tesla's bug bounty program specifically excludes "TLS/SSL Issues, including BEAST BREACH, insecure renegotiation, bad cipher suite, expired certificates..." [0]: https://bugcrowd.com/tesla https://bugcrowd.com/tesla
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoIt's so weird to see the same bizarre hacky nonsense I would cobble together being used to run cars.
- beaconstudios 8y agoHacky cobbled together nonsense runs the modern world.
- atomicthumbs 8y agowe are all fucked six ways from sunday
- gammatrigono 8y agoDo we actually have anything better?
- outworlder 8y agoOf course we go. Good software engineering practices for one and common sense. Common sense doesn't increase share prices though.
- bradleybuda 8y agoAt DEF CON 23 there were two car-hacking talks that made an impression on me: one about hacking a Tesla [1] and one about hacking a Jeep [2]. FWIW, I came away thinking that the software architecture of the Tesla was light-years ahead of what Jeep (and presumably many other legacy manufacturers) was shipping: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OobLb1McxnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OobLb1McxnI
- emidln 8y agoI didn't watch this talk, but I had a blast fuzzing CAN messages to various ECUs when I was in that business. I would be very easily convinced that RCE and memory overwriting (aka "recalibration") were trivially achievable around 2006 MYs
- gascan 8y agoHonestly I care a lot more about reliable function than security, at least as long as attackers can't get in wirelessly. Having both would be nice, of course.
- jethro_tell 8y ago>at least as long as attackers can't get in wirelessly Do you not have bluetooth, satellite, or LTE in your car?
- vevoe 8y agoThey've been going 100mph for years now. It doesn't come as a surprise to me that they haven't gone back and made it pretty. While not even remotely on the same scale, I just spent 3 weeks building an app as fast as possible because my client's old one was causing 75% of their support calls. The code isn't pretty, but it works and it works a lot better than the old one. I know deep down that code is going to stay ugly for a while but that isn't what's important right now.
- blindwatchmaker 8y agoThey are making vehicles, not apps.
- vevoe 8y agoI understand that. I guess I was commenting more on the general messiness he was describing. I can empathize with it is all. I can see how quickly and easily it happens in the small apps I build, I can't imagine how hard it would be to reign it all in at Tesla scale at the pace they've been going.
- nutjob2 8y agoSo one ugly hack was replaced with another somewhat less ugly hack, which will be replaced by another hack at a later date. Sounds like every corporate environment I ever encountered, and Tesla it seems. It usually happens becuase they have the money to do it wrong multiple times rather than no choice but to get it right the first time.
- blauditore 8y agoIs there any way to confirm this is actually legit? I mean, theoretically one could just make such things up, no?
- symmitchry 8y agoDoes anything about this thread really surprise you though? As to be unbelievable? Do you think that other car manufacturers are that much better? I've read so many insane stories about software in Toyotas (or was it Honda?), and those are very old, very well established companies. That a company like Tesla would have rock solid software would be a miracle.
- outworlder 8y agoWell, at least other manufacturers aren't trying to pull this SSH over cell networks crap.
- jkbjotnip 8y agoIt's noted that they're using OpenVPN, so using cell network is probably a non-issue.
- stefan_ 8y agoDidn't we just have this yesterday, with the junior shocked to find that code in the real world doesn't at all look like the ruby "made with heart in Portland" stuff that has all the stars on GitHub? This is what systems look like in every industry. Look no further than the crappy Java SWT GUIs you see in those leaked abhorrent NSA powerpoints.
- calcifer 8y agoIf it was made up, don't you think it would be trivially easy to discredit by literally anyone in one of those teams? Not to mention Tesla itself?
- majewsky 8y ago
- Nokinside 8y agoThe really scary part of this is how appears that they apparently run safety critical updates trough this same crappy system. If someone manages to slip in a modification that bricks Teslas or worse, makes them do quick left turn in in the morning rush hour, they can sink the company. There are lots of people with motivation to pull it off. Either for money or for some political reason nothing to do with Tesla. Tesla is not alone. Hardware companies in general don't think about software security at all. They are security nightmares waiting to happen.
- illumin8 8y agoNot likely - he even says they do mTLS (mutual TLS, where both the client and server verify SSL certificates). While there is some cringeworthy stuff in there, I've seen way worse in healthcare when people's personal data and medical history was at stake. Nothing made me so alarmed that I wouldn't drive my Tesla.
- jaclaz 8y agoIsn't it on Reddit? Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/former_tesla_programmers_anecdotes_about_problems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...
- jpeter 8y agoWhich "shitty erp" is tesla using?
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI'm pretty sure it's in-house, IIRC what a former employee told me.
- dfox 8y agoWhich probably implies that it is significantly less shitty than hodgepodges of SAP, non-standard EDIFACT profiles and other legacy crud being hold together with CSV-transforming shell scripts started from cron used by most of automotive industry.
- ryandrake 8y agoContent aside, what is the deal with images of screenshots of a forum, then posted to Twitter? Why not include a fax machine in there while you’re at it? Just link to the forum and we can all read the text.
- MBCook 8y agoBigger medium than Something Awful. Easier to read without all the other people’s replies mixed in. Some additional anonymity for the poster. The content will stay if the original thread is removed.
- Apocryphon 8y agoThey periodically have times when the forum or at least some subforums are viewable by registration only.
- atomicthumbs 8y agoyeah i didn't bother finding out whether the paywall was operational or not, and nobody's gonna read a forum thread in 2018
- creamyhorror 8y agowelcome mr funy computer man
- coatmatter 8y agoTwitter has a character limit which is bypassed through screenshots. Screenshots also are a sort of backup in case the original content is deleted for whatever reason. Not a good backup, but a backup nonetheless. It's also faster and easier to take screenshots than it is to preserve formatting of HTML/CSS and it suits Twitter. Related topic: Azealia Banks's recent screenshots of messages relating to Elon Musk, his companies, and other things. The OP user did end up posting a link to the thread, but I never bothered clicking it. The first screenshot grabbed my attention sufficiently that I just continued looking at the next. They almost act in a similar manner to Wikipedia link previews. Twitter for better or worse is where things still go "viral". I had a love-hate relationship with it but no longer spend a lot of time there these days. There is some method to the madness...
- mlindner 8y agoWelcome to software development? Doesn't matter where I've worked. The software is always terrible.
- luma 8y agoI found this post [1] interesting: > ol' musky isn't totally paranoid - we did catch bad actors doing stuff and they were nailed to the wall. finding a real apt in your network can be some next level shit That looks like confirmation that there really were internal threats found as claimed by Elon. [1]: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862643&userid=20544#post487316145 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
- Animats 8y agoTesla can SSH into a customer's car? What could possibly go wrong?
- outworlder 8y agoNot only that, they can SSH and flash firmware for multiple devices. That in itself made me not want a Tesla anymore. I mean, they are held to lower standards than random production VMs that I manage at work, and those can't even kill anyone.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoMore than anything else, this makes the SSH keys a very high-value target. I may trust Tesla not to crash my car or violate my privacy, but I also have to trust them to sufficiently secure the SSH keys from bad actors who would (or sell them on the black market where they almost certainly would arrive in malevolent and capable hands). The latter is what scares me.
- majewsky 8y agoSometimes, when I consider the quality of the software/systems engineering work that we do, I wonder how everything is not crashing and burning all the time.
- abledon 8y agoThis was the most intense and compelling piece of writing I've read all year. I love hearing this gnarly warts & all reporting from the front lines. Guy sounded really smart, able to wrap his head around so many types of systems and roles in the company.
- amluto 8y agoI have a Model S, and Tesla pushes buggy firmware to it last week. It causes the entire instrument cluster, including the speedometer, to disappear periodically while driving. Tesla knows about the bug and it’s apparently a “high priority”. It’s not entirely clear to me that they are capable of rolling back the update.
- Shivetya 8y agoI join the III family this coming week. I am really interested in how well the updates are managed as the idea of cratering my car isn't something anyone is keen about. can you as an owner delay updates?
- rgrove 8y agoYeah, you can choose to postpone an update. The car may occasionally prompt you again, but I don't think it will force you to install it if you really don't want to. I've never postponed for more than a day or two though. I have a Model 3 and so far haven't had any problems with updates. Installed the most recent one (2018.32.2) last night.
- twblalock 8y agoIf you really need to prevent updates I assume you could find the wireless antenna and unplug it.
- rsync 8y agoThe most disturbing part of this, for me, is this line in the very first tweet: "... caused almost the entire fleet to reboot loop ..." I am not interested in being part of someone's fleet. The fact that they use this language at all to describe an end-user who has purchased an automobile suggests that their expectations and my own - of what it means to purchase and operate a car - are in deeply (possibly dangerously) mis-aligned.
- illumin8 8y agoYour post conveniently ignores the fact that over the last 20 years cars and trucks have become physical delivery vehicles for software. In fact, the complexity of the software running in any manufacturer's modern car dwarfs the complexity of the hardware in the car itself. So, if you have a car manufactured any time in the last 25 years, you're running software that hasn't likely been patched in years, has a ton of unknown defects and bugs, and might kill you if you hit an edge case that wasn't tested before it was shipped to you. I much prefer Tesla's ability to fix software defects remotely than driving a defective piece of software. For example, I had a 2009 Hyundai Genesis that worked great until I had about 75,000 miles on it, then it mysteriously started losing engine power and I had the entire computer reboot a couple times while I was driving. Imagine your entire instrument cluster going dark and losing engine, braking, and steering power while you're traveling 75 mph on the freeway. The Hyundai dealership said the only way I could get a software/firmware upgrade was by purchasing a $500 maps DVD and having them update my system manually, which takes several hours, for which I'd have to pay one of their trained technicians to do it. Fuck them. I vowed after that to never buy a car again that can't receive OTA updates. Would you buy a smart phone that can never get security fixes or updates? Given the tech in our cars now, why would you buy a car that wouldn't either?
- marssaxman 8y agoThis is why I do not have a car that was manufactured any time in the last 25 years. You can't trust software, and you definitely can't trust software developers.
- 8y ago
- kelvin0 8y agoInnovation is certainly not always 'clean' and 'pretty' (under the hood so to speak) ... any company doing bringing in something new to market (product, service) bears the same type of profile. I really don't think tesla is the 'worse offender' when it comes to the type of horror stories we read in this article.
- matthewaveryusa 8y agoSo basically the code base and politics of any large (successful) company. I wouldn't want to work with this dude. It's one thing to talk shit with your coworkers and another to do it online. I'm sure everyone is trying their best and all I'm reading are rantings from an ivory tower troll that did nothing to try and change things. I'm no fan of Tesla and I've shorted them so I guess thanks?
- lx3459683 8y ago> So basically the code base and politics of any large (successful) company. How does that invalidate anything of what he said or vindicate Tesla exactly? Do you believe that because some large companies are shitty places to work that everyone should just accept it as the status quo and shut the fuck up about it? Why are you expecting a single employee to try to 'change things' and why do you think that him speaking up about the issues is not an attempt to do just that? I don't get your attitude at all.
- finnthehuman 8y ago>So basically the code base and politics of any large (successful) company. If you say so. As an embedded system engineer, I mentioned this twitter thread when I was shooting the breeze with my boss because it reminds me we hold ourselves to a high standard even though my brain sometimes turns into a perfectionist that can only see the problems with our product. I don't know how to say this without going into full on humblebrag mode, so I'll give the condensed version. He touched on a handful of points that are common between our companies/products, and where I often worry about quality. In those cases I was reassured by the fact we don't have that severe of problems, and the way our processes are designed it would never be allowed out of the lab.
- haberman 8y agoIs there any corroboration of this? Like that this is even someone who worked at Tesla? I'm certainly not discounting that it could be real, but with so many people shorting Tesla, any uncorroborated information should be looked at with a high degree of skepticism.
- Uhhrrr 8y agoHere is one skeptical person: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/former_tesla_programmers_anecdotes_about_problems/e4qlr6e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form... My personal expectation that it's all true is about 60% right now. Some of the figures could be exaggerated or misremembered, but most of the hackiness described is plausible.
- lx3459683 8y agoThis comment hits the nail on the head: > As a long-ago ex-Googler I find it amusing to watch employees name-drop where they work, always with some underlying subtext implying authority [...] Parent comment doesn't simply imply this but explicitly uses it as the basis for calling OP out. It's amusing because the namedrop is always accompanied by some claim they felt they couldn't support solely through a sound argument.
- blaze_run 8y agoWhy did you leave out the part where he admits to name-dropping in that same thread? Also, you also left out the part where he is actually agreeing with the name-dropper person: "Meanwhile the points made are relatively sound, 100kLOC C firmware updater set off my BS alarm (assuming 98k of that wasn't some static data tables), and the 700TB MySQL DB while possible is extremely unlikely.. even given a huge JBOD setup which nobody in their right mind would plug into a single server, InnoDB tops out at 64TB per table in the best case, which means OP would need a single database with somewhere around 10 64TB tables"
- AndrewBissell 8y agoIt's certainly not at all at odds with what I would expect to be the prevailing case at Tesla. I have always heard from ex-employees that the company is schizophrenic and unfocused under the micromanagement of Elon Musk. Media reports are beginning to paint a consistent picture of "shitshow" conditions at the company. This also all fits with stories about his earlier ventures like Zip2. https://nyp.st/2PzI9ih https://nyp.st/2PzI9ih https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/the-story-of-elon-musks-first-company https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/the-story-of-elon-mus... I am short TSLA, make of that what you will.
- eyeareque 8y agoDo NDAs really just expire after three years like this ex Tesla employee claims? Something tells me that he will be sued very soon.
- extrapickles 8y agoThey can. Typically they are 2-5 years, but you have to read the specific NDA to be sure. I will never sign a NDA that doesn't expire in <10 yrs after cessation of work, as its just too risky to indefinitely hold any information secret to the level required in most NDAs. Management changes, and what the current management is fine with, future management could not, or you do some work that the company doesn't like 10 years down the road and they dig through the filing cabinet looking for something to hit you with.
- exikyut 8y agoHmm. Is it possible to include a hard-nonmodification clause in an NDA (so nobody in the future can change it), or is this kind of implied in the contractual nature?
- extrapickles 8y agoThe contract itself doesn’t change, just the interpretation of it.
- lx3459683 8y ago> "the interior is a disaster, there's no instrument cluster which takes your eyes off the road" This is the most WTF aspect of the model 3 to me and seems to confirm that there isn't going to be some last-minute mitigation. I know it was done because autopilot was expected to be mature by the time model 3 rolls out, but I don't see how it can even be street-legal when you need to look away from the road to determine your speed.
- v_petkov 8y agoCustomers seem to love it.
- dragonwriter 8y agoIn that the people who do not love it choose not to be Tesla customers, sure.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoYou have to look away from the road to look at your speed on a regular dash too.
- bobsil1 8y agoI’ve driven a P3D and it was fine. Currently driving a Toyota which also has speed in center. So do Minis.
- lx3459683 8y agoI'll take your word for it. From the pictures I've seen the vertical distance between the screen and the windshield looked big enough to block most of your view of the road when looking at the screen. Unlike a Toyota where the display is vertically positioned the same as any other dashboard. There's an entire generation of traffic safety cameras that detect people looking down away from the road and it looks to me like they'd be tripped by a model 3 driver just reading their speed...
- 8y ago
- abledon 8y agoReddit thread with more info . He goes on to do extra comments https://www.reddit.com/user/AccountJustForQuesti/comments https://www.reddit.com/user/AccountJustForQuesti/comments
- curuinor 8y agoOriginal thread was on YOSPOS, and that's not the original OP.
- mvpu 8y agoLet's look at the facts: a) Tesla is the most shorted stock in history, b) 1000s of hackers are working hard to break things like this, c) if it was possible to break it and damage the company someone would have done it already. This just feels like an disgruntled employee.
- rohit2412 8y agoLet's work the opposite way too a) car manufacturing is one of the most competitive industries, b) 1000s of engineers are working on making better cars, c) if it was possible to make profitable, affordable, self-driving electric cars, somebody would have done it. Comes off as a snake oil salesman.
- GW150914 8y agoCounterpoint: when you ignore Musk’s Twitter tirades about shorts, and his uberfans’ subsequent aping of those tirades a simple truth remains: Tesla is one of the most overvalued stocks in history, and far from being mustache-twirling villains with limitless resources and no morals, people shorting TSLA are doing so in anticipation of reality catching up with the listed price. They’re not undermining Tesla, they’re not hoping for it to fail, they’re just waiting for the stock price and the reality of the company to intersect. It would be a lot less frustrating talking to hardcore Tesla/Musk fans if you didn’t have to wade through conspiracy theories to do it.
- amluto 8y agoIs this all available in some format other than Twitter? Does anyone have a link to the actual forum?
- beltex 8y agoWhile were on the topic: USENIX talk from VP of software at SpaceX (2016) https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/presentation/hosein https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/... (Speaker was concurrently interim VP of Autopilot at Tesla for a bit as well) Few interesting bits: - Speaker’s background is SRE at Google - Engineering culture: Authority, autonomy, accountability. Blameless postmortems - High Integrity C++ & MISRA coding standards - The spacecraft has multiple onboard computers, all running Linux - Tripe String Architecture, 3 redundant computers, whose results are cross checked with majority voting before being applied in real time, given radiation tolerant over radiation hardened hardware
- dna_polymerase 8y agoA company with such an awful engineering ethic is pushing for mass-market self-driving cars. Given what happened after the Uber incident, I can only hope those idiots at Tesla don't ruin it for all of the players.
- digi_owl 8y agoThis reads like something out of a cyberpunk story...
- adreamingsoul 8y ago"subforum of a subforum, a little-known place for funy computer forgotten by time" Does anyone know what forum they are referring too?
- atomicthumbs 8y agoyospos
- astrange 8y agoYOSPOS
- cc-d 8y agoOh no. I happened to see the link to this guy's twitter earlier today in the HN comments (prob where OP saw it too, judging by timing), read the posts, and thought to myself "wow, i'm surprised how this has been posted to HN and seemingly hasn't garnered any response at all". In the few hours after I stopped procrastinating at work today, every post in that thread has went to multiple thousands of likes/share/etc. Guess that's my answer.
- person_of_color 8y agoThis guy must have started as a New Grad, because every company has infinite kludges like this. You would be shocked to find the amount of Perl/Tcl glue in any ASIC company, for example.
- altitudinous 8y agoEvery IT system in the world is the worst in the world according to some tech who performs firefighting on it. These tweets apply to nearly every system. Singling out Tesla is pretty unfair!!!
- killjoywashere 8y agoGM:William C. Durant:Alfred P. Sloan Tesla:Elon Musk:?
- fouc 8y agoDoes the timing of this seem suspicious? How is the shorting going?
- IndrekR 8y agoLink to the original forum posts: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862643&userid=20544 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
- shpx 8y ago> China has a law in place that mandates all electric cars send real time telemetry to their government servers - model s/x/3, NIO cars and any other electric car if they're driving already complies with that law to be road certified. don't be surprised if that becomes a mandate in other countries Free software cars when?
- njharman 8y agoTwitter is a horrible format for this. I has hoping to find a link to something readable instead it's all epeening over rtos and windows.
- a-dub 8y agowoah woah woah woah. the computers on teslas are managed?! there are programmers/sysadmins at tesla that can ssh into any car at any time. these computers can steer and operate the car. thanks but no thanks!
- bestCauliflower 8y agoI was not aware that a tesla would need so many backend services as he says, but I guess that it makes sense. Do you think that someday they could open up their platform (out of necessity maybe) to third party providers for each of the services? Some competition would mitigate the broken services issues.