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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

    What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

    And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.
















  • Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

    On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

    I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

    I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.


  • Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.

    A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.