The good news with iRobot is that they actually have pretty solid cybersecurity. They also do a pretty great job of supporting parts for old robots and make them quite easy to repair. For a typical consumer product, I feel like they’re far better than most companies in terms of how shitty they could be vs how shitty they actually are.

Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.

Bull-fucking-shit. That’s just not how any of this works.

There are plenty of companies that make appliances that last a long fucking time, and don’t have to rely on fucking DLC micro transaction AI bullshit. The reason Instant Pot went bankrupt is the same reason a ton of popular companies have recently had issues: They got bought by private equity (who also owned Pyrex and fucked them over), saddled with a shitton of bad debt, squeezed of every bit of brand value they had, and then left to fall apart as the PE firm made off with millions.

The fact that the writer correlated “quality, durable good” with “unsuccessful business and bankruptcy” is absolutely one of the worst takes, and really shows just how pervasive this disgusting idea of “must be disposable to be profitable” really is.

I have a 150mi EV and a PHEV. I won’t be bothering with another PHEV, unless I need something that can tow long distances. Every long distance trip I’ve taken in our PHEV since ~2020 would have been almost identical to a trip in an EV. Drive about 3 hours, and stop for 20 minutes for food/restroom, and back on the road. Even with our PHEV, which can do over 600mi on a tank, we were naturally stopping at almost the exact same points as I would when I planned out the same route in an EV.

As minimal as it is in a modern car, dealing with the ICE side of it just isn’t worth it in a daily driver from my perspective. I have an old classic that’s ICE, and if I’m going to be doing oil changes and such, I’d much rather do them for fun on that, than be required to on my commuter.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty true at least internally, though their dumpster fire reputation is changing that. I’ve worked at a number of Tier 1 automotive suppliers and OEMs, and I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve had to listen to “We should do ‘thing’ because that’s what Tesla does”. It’s leading to a lot of shitty and anti-consumer practices, but fortunately I think some of the smarter leadership is finally seeing that they were shitty ideas all along, and was nothing more that techbro bullahit.

Another adjacent life hack is when assembling flat pack furniture, use a quality wood glue on all the joints and connectors, but especially those little wood dowels. It won’t make it indestructible, but it’ll hold up far better over time.

Knowing many people who’ve worked for him, you have about 6 months at a MuskCo brand company max before you really know what a piece of shit he is, and either a.) leave ASAP, b.) convince yourself it won’t be so bad and hang on for ~2 years, or c.) fall into the cult of personality and believe that Daddy Elon loves his little proles and cares very much about all the hard work you’re doing [EMPLOYEE NUMBER HERE].

The absolute last stop on the “Musk is Tony Stark but IRL epic gamer Redditor and likes weed and Rick and Morty!” train was when he called that cave diver a pedophile. It was apparent well before then, but anyone acting like they had no idea what a piece of shit he was after that either didn’t hear about it, or was willfully ignorant because they wanted to continue pretending that basing their entire personality around a billionaire wasn’t a terrible idea.

I assume you’re probably thinking of all the “pre orders” they supposedly had. However, the take rate of zero-commitment “pre-orders” from 5 years ago for a product that was 50% cheaper with significantly better specs has been pretty low, especially given that far better vehicles have become available since it was announced.

This was one of the really interesting plot elements in World War Z, where towards the end of the war where they couldn’t really afford to be wasting resources on prisons, they brought back corporal and public punishment. They’d put people in stockades to let the entire community know they were caught doing something like stealing their neighbor’s firewood, or publicly lashing executives who were war-profiteering, and only imprisoning the absolute worst offenders who were incapable of integrating back into society.

For a silly zombie novel, it honestly has a phenomenal amount of prettt interesting social commentary, and is absolutely worth a listen to the unabridged audiobook.

I’m approaching 30 and will gladly use all of those both ironically and unironically.

Just like cable!

“Backorder” meant “Idiots with a couple hundred dollars”. “Orders” were a whole $100 fully refundable deposit. It was a complete non-commitment, and I know a ton of people who literally bought them solely to resell their “spot in line”.

I knew a dude who put in an order for 5, just to ensure he could sell his “spots on the list”. Dude was a service tech that couldn’t afford even the fake $40k price, let alone the current $100k price. I’ve seen tons of stories like his as well, so there’s a 0% chance even 20% of those are actually converting to sales.

I work on automotive software, and honestly have no issue with issues like this being portrayed as a big deal. I’m sick of how often I’m seeing management push shit software deliveries with the line “We’ll OTA it later, it’s fine for now.”

Screens have been in cars for a very long time at this point, there’s absolutely no reason we should be seeing issues like this aside from half-assed software being shoved out the door because we’ll hopefully fix it later via OTA.

This bumper sticker is almost meaningless unless you only bought an early Model S. It was pretty apparent even by the time the Model 3 came out Elon was a gigantic piece of shit, and would be running the company into the ground. Reminder that him calling a rescue diver a pedophile was 6 years ago, and that was only the most public first example of his douchebaggery.

He was technically a founding member, but left the company. Literally all of this is because he’s jealous he can’t pull a Tesla and claim all the credit for another tech company.

This is also what a lot of people forget how it was at the time, thinking “if only” they had been early adopters and how they’d be millionaires. I was one, and had found it was great for traveling said “trade route”, but also watched when Mt Gox collapsed and tanked the price 75% while stealing millions from people, and decided to take my winnings and leave the table.

How many people would see that shit and be like “Yes, I’m going to hold onto this for the next 10 years when it’s worth something” and then sit through the number of 50+% loss events that happened?

You would have done exactly what 99% of early adopters did, and considered yourself incredibly lucky that you managed to make 1000% returns and sold.

IIRC some inverters are able to sync up with alternative power sources, but the documentation is extremely limited and seems to be reserved mostly for large-scale systems. I know my Solaredge system has slowly been implementing using both at the same time, but the documentation is pretty unclear as to how this works. I know at the very least it’ll allow you to use a 2-wire start to kick a standalone generator on when the batteries are low, but don’t know much else about how it’s currently set up

I’m guessing the commenter above is in the EU and operating at 50Hz normally, so running at 60Hz wouldn’t be a great idea. A backup battery and such operate in the same way when islanding.

Yes, it will actually work. I know it’s very much not to code, but when we lost power for over 10 days, I did this to keep our furnace running and us from freezing to death since it was -10F out.

I only have a small 120V generator, but hooked both legs to hot and backfed via our EV charger’s outlet, since its a 50A circuit. Like you said, nothing 240V worked, but that little 3kW generator did a great job powering basically the whole house with no issues.

That winter was definitely a big driver for me to get a backup battery system so our solar could power the house.

If only there was some sort of sensing technology that wasn’t purely optical, that’d be pretty neat. Maybe even using something like radio, for detection and ranging. Too bad no one’s ever come up with something like that.

Not only that, but took out the radar, which while it has its own flaws, would have had no issue seeing the train through the fog. While they claimed it was because they had “solved vision” and didn’t need it anymore, it’s bullshit, and their engineering team knew it. They were in the middle of sourcing a new radar, but because of supply chain limitations (like everyone in 2021) with both their old and potential new supplier, they wouldn’t continue their “infinite growth” narrative and fElon wouldn’t get his insane pay package. They knew for a fact it would negatively affect performance significantly, but did it anyway so line could go up.

While no automotive company’s hands are particularly clean, the sheer level of willful negligence at Tesla is absolutely astonishing and have seen and heard so many stories about their shitty engineering practices that the only impressive thing is how relatively few people have died as a direct result of their lax attitude towards basic safety practices.