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wvenable

21,223 karmajoined 18 лет назад
https://www.codaris.com

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wvenable
·3 дня назад·discuss
> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
In my experience, there is no advantage to pausing on some random icon I don't want. I always have to re-orient anyway. Tapping an icon on the screen is instantaneous. There's also some extra complexity in what grid of icons you currently have selected and how to move between them.

But that advantage goes away for any element that isn't currently on the screen. So navigating between pages or submenus or slide up drawers is much more fiddly than the dial and much more susceptible to the "car shake" issue.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
Of course, cars are always evolving, that's why a new model comes out every single year. Ironically, the screen elements of cars always become the most dated part. I don't feel there is nearly as much fashion in the touch screen as the physical elements.

Tesla is the exception that proves the rule; its fashion was its unique minimalist touch screen style compared to other vehicles. Car companies copying that design are making it passé.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
It's a good argument except the basic controls needed for a car haven't changed in decades: We all need the same climate controls, media controls, etc.

For deep car settings, those have been screen controls for over a decade now and that makes sense.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
> The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times

At that point though they might as well be physical buttons! It's all the disadvantages of a touch screen and none of the advantages.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
I have this knob and I don't understand your point. With the knob or the touch screen, you need to look at the screen to see what you're doing. The knob merely controls a cursor.

I find the knob considerably more distracting. First you have translate the motion of the knob to the cursor moving on the screen. Secondly, you have to cycle through all the options so you have to spend even more time looking at the screen. It's significantly faster and less distracting to just reach out and tap the button you want.

Other physical buttons are great but the knob is a terrible UI.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
You cannot touch the touch screen on a Mazda with the commander knob unless you're in Carplay/Android Auto and only if you've found the buried setting to enable it.

It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
Wait till have they have to swipe up from the bottom of a touchscreen to do the same thing. In many ways, it's all the same buttons with the same icons but now they're inside of menus!
wvenable
·4 дня назад·discuss
This is a timely article for me because I test drove a 2026 Mazda CX-5 and then ultimately purchased a 2025 instead. Disliking the giant touchscreen wasn't the only reason but it certainly was one of the reasons. The screen actually makes the entire experience feel cheaper compared to the extremely nice feeling buttons on the older model. They even cheapened-out on the steering wheel buttons on a car where those are now the only buttons!

It was an incredibly frustrating drive -- I could barely successfully navigate the radio using the screen or the wheel buttons. I'm sure I would have gotten more used to it but it just wasn't what I was looking for. I'm a software developer, I deal with this technology every day, and I just didn't want that to be front and center on my drive as well.

Now that being said, the commander knob on the older Mazda cars is also a terrible user experience. Turning and pressing physical knobs to change the climate control, volume, or radio stations is very satisfying and user-friendly. But the commander knob is a joy-stick for controlling an on screen cursor -- so you both have to be constantly looking at the screen and you have to translate knob motions to the movement of that cursor. It should be unsurprising that simply reaching up and pressing an icon on the screen is significantly easier and less distracting.

Luckily I'm almost always in Carplay / Android Auto so it's best of both worlds -- you can press physical buttons to do most of the major tasks (open music, open maps, select favorites, volume, climate control, etc) but then press the screen when that makes sense.
wvenable
·8 дней назад·discuss
Eventually used cars will be today's new cars.
wvenable
·8 дней назад·discuss
> CarPlay is bad for the car manufacturer and is far worse than the modern car software.

I have a new car with actually pretty decent modern car software; far better than the decades of crap software I put up with my last car. Carplay is still better. And in another decade, Carplay will be even better and my decent car software will be the same.

(And the car software and Carplay actually play very nicely together -- it is not all or nothing)
wvenable
·8 дней назад·discuss
I think that ship has sailed, my friend.

My last car could accept a double DIN head unit but I never put one in because then I'd lose any way to control all the settings in the car. And that was a car from 2014! The integration is even tighter now.
wvenable
·8 дней назад·discuss
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" -- Upton Sinclair

This is the CEO of Rivian's software arm -- his job is to create and sell software that runs in the car. Carplay and Android Auto effectively make him unnecessary.

If you listen to the interview, he has bold ideas about how the car should somehow be the center of one's computing ecosystem. It's ridiculous because the smartphone is already the center! And people like that! And it just makes sense! They're fighting this dumb battle because they have to. But ultimately every car manufacturer wants to get away from Carplay so they can own that tiny fraction of computing that happens on the drive to and from work.
wvenable
·8 дней назад·discuss
I only got a car with Carplay this year... before that, phone in a dash mount.

But just getting into you car and having it project your phone interface instantly from your pocket on a screen that is part of the car is really nice. I don't even have a super large screen (10.5 inches, widescreen) but it's significantly better than looking at my phone. It even integrates with the heads up display.

> It's hard to really imagine the experience of maps or music being improved by seeing it on my dashboard screen compared to right next to it on the phone.

It might be hard to imagine but it shouldn't be. I would find it very hard to go back to fiddling with my phone rather than have it nicely integrated into all the buttons and dials on my car. Never taking my phone out of my pocket and forgetting it in the car -- I did that a lot. The audio integration across the radio, phone apps, and navigation is perfect -- Bluetooth doesn't come close and was always a frustration. It's just better in every way, that's why people like it.
wvenable
·19 дней назад·discuss
In many countries, Whatsapp is texting. You wouldn't expect a dumb phone to do email but you would expect it to do minimal texting.
wvenable
·21 день назад·discuss
You missed my point.

The system designers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) are absolutely trying to build a system that gives the best and most accurate answers possible.

The model itself does not have goals, intentions, or an internal concept of "best" or "accurate."
wvenable
·21 день назад·discuss
I understand how the system works. I also know that the free LLMs are dumb as rocks. But they're not all dumb as rocks -- it's a continuum. You're the person who doesn't seem to understand that it's not all or nothing.

AI companies are trying to build a system that gives the best and most accurate answers possible -- that's the whole point of it all.
wvenable
·21 день назад·discuss
> It is not designed to give you the most accurate answer, it is designed to give you the most likely series of words following your prompt.

That's not specifically true either; training is more complex than that. ChatGPT had to be trained, for example, to answer questions in a chat format.

> If an LLM is trained on 10 jackasses thinking bleach is a medicinal drink..

Again with the hypotheticals! You literally cannot discuss this subject without hallucinating things that don't exist. LLMs are trained on huge corpus of information from books to videos to reddit posts. Ultimately, statistically, it's going to predict the most common answer to something. Yes, that might be wrong but the vast majority of the time it's going to be right. And you know what, in the real non-hypothetical world, it works great. As much you don't want it to. You can hypothetically hallucinate as many weird unlikely scenarios as you want but that doesn't make it true.
wvenable
·21 день назад·discuss
> And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it?

But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can. It's not perfect and I don't expect it to be perfect. According to my personal experience it's definitely good enough for a lot of things like recipes, coding, hobby stuff, and home repairs.

You're expecting me not to trust my own personal learned experience using AI as if somehow all my continued successes are worth nothing because you can invent some wild hypothetical. The more I use it, the more I understand its limitations and avoid them.
wvenable
·21 день назад·discuss
I think you might have reached a nonsensical level of AI contrarianism when it leads you to the statement "doing stuff isn't essential"