I wonder if AI labs could be bailed out - like banks.
See, they kind of became a national asset and letting it go down, will leave USA watching China taking the lead for a very long time ahead. It just can't happen - right? So we'll just all fund it in taxes.
BMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous year model with better specs.
I worked on BMW infotainment for a time. My opinions are my own obviously, I don't even work at BMW anymore.
So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.
Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.
I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.
Isn't what you are describing known as Zonal Architecture (as opposed to Domain Architecture) and supposed to be the hot new way of architecting automotive platforms? Tesla was pioneering it. The Volkswagen Group spent billions to get their hands on Rivian's zonal architecture platform.
But bafflingly to me, almost zero of my coworkers seemed to be aware of it. They would just get the seemly weird orders from above and would execute them, without figuring out the end goal, and this does result into some bad software engineering (because people don't know the end goal they don't know what they can optimize, so they just don't).
I strongly disagree. The step from the F series to the G vehicles was big, quality improved a lot, specially for the 3 series (F30, F31 vs G20, G21) and the X3 (the G01 feels like a 5 series). The materials, assembly, noises during driving, but specially the driving dynamics and robustness are incredibly high.
It’s also true though that the last wave of G models has improved driving dynamics but cheapened out in interior materials. Peak BMW interiors happened between 2019-2022 with the G01, G30, G05 and iX, i4. Being my favorites the iX and the G01.
BMW also has the best infotainment system after Tesla. And it still integrates well with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
Mechanically, you're probably right, but the screen-centric controls of the newer generation are _awful_ by comparison to the F generation's physical buttons and dials (this isn't BMW though, it's the whole industry).
My wife and I both have F31s, which we will drive until we can no longer source replacement parts unless the industry comes to its senses first (unlikely). Any time we've ever looked at plausible replacements, the screen-based controls are an immediate hard no.
So this happened only because google is so big, that it can point to any website and say that it's not safe. Even if owner of a site just don't want to be in their search engine in the first place.
How on earth we ended up with this company bother anyone including those that want their services? Imagine that you could get your driving license banned because you did not buy a toyota...
Yup, LLMs are not "artificial intelligence" - they just generate most probable token, until their authors hardcode functionality for specific community tests.
Yes, in theory that’s what an LLM is / how an LLM works, but I think we’re a little bit past the “expensive auto-complete” analogy given all the layers of wrappers we’ve built on top of LLMs to package them into the applications being interacted with here, no?
Fundamentally though there is missing but implied information here that the LLM can’t seem to surface, no matter how many times it’s asked to check itself. I wonder what other questions like this could be asked with similar results.
Looks nice. I'd love to have a way to select anything on the screen or at least have a button to copy more info, like manufacturer name of a found device.
I think the benefits of either clean code (sepearate methods) and commenting "what" are of different kind:
- clean code one, for me it just reads easier, specific bits of the larger operation are not surrounded with noise coming from other bits like it is in the commenting "what" one. I can focus more on each step, and that can make it easier to spot a bug or to refactor/adjust/extend, as now I'm more like on a given page of Lego set instructions
- the commenting of "what" one - yeah, this obviously makes it quicker (but probably not easier) to see the larger picture. It has benefits, but I believe this helps more hacker/scripter kind of people than programmers
See, they kind of became a national asset and letting it go down, will leave USA watching China taking the lead for a very long time ahead. It just can't happen - right? So we'll just all fund it in taxes.
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