greazeball posted:

Go fast, ~disrupt~ things, leave a Craigslist ad liquidating the office chairs at a modest discount

hobbesmaster posted:

The real question is whether or not all the batteries are used in wear leveling or not. If so it'd be like paying to "upgrade" your SSD by unlocking all the memory used for wear leveling.

Slanderer posted:

That is not a real question

A Man With A Plan posted:

For the CPUs at least part of the reason for same chip different speeds/prices is that due to irregularities in the manufacturing some chips simply aren't able to run at as high a clock speed as others without errors or overheating. To avoid throwing the worse ones away they just lower the performance specs until the function reliably and sell them cheaper.

For a car related example, the two lower range Mustangs have the same ecoboost engine, but in the cheaper of the two it's limited to 130 mph. Some car magazine decided to see what would happen if they removed the governor. Turns out that it could hit 150mph, right up until the cheaper driveshaft in that model exploded.

Neither of these are what tesla is doing, exactly. That's "pay us to use the fully functionality of the hardware you bought, and if you try to get around it, we'll try to shut down your car".

A Man With A Plan posted:

For the CPUs at least part of the reason for same chip different speeds/prices is that due to irregularities in the manufacturing some chips simply aren't able to run at as high a clock speed as others without errors or overheating. To avoid throwing the worse ones away they just lower the performance specs until the function reliably and sell them cheaper.

quote:

For a car related example, the two lower range Mustangs have the same ecoboost engine, but in the cheaper of the two it's limited to 130 mph. Some car magazine decided to see what would happen if they removed the governor. Turns out that it could hit 150mph, right up until the cheaper driveshaft in that model exploded.

Neither of these are what tesla is doing, exactly. That's "pay us to use the fully functionality of the hardware you bought, and if you try to get around it, we'll try to shut down your car".

Condiv posted:

tesla being able to remote do a poo poo ton of stuff to your car without your permission is a disaster waiting to happen

Ynglaur posted:

Perhaps, but it has some safety benefits as well. After one of the early accidents that resulted in the batteries catching fire, their engineers figured out that raising the chassis by an inch would reduce the chances of tgat happening in other accidents without significantly changing how the car performed. So they pushed a firmware update to do that.

I'm not sure I'd personally like that, and there is definitely room for issues, but its not all bad.

If its any consolation, most automobiles can do this today, just not remotely. If your car has a recall on, I dunno, the accelerator pedal, they're probably updating the firmware at the same time.

shrike82 posted:

Yeah the CPU analogy doesn't really work because in most cases they're binning based on the frequency they can run stably at.

shrike82 posted:

I can speak for finance (as an industry) and data science (as a vocation) but Matlab’s becoming increasingly irrelevant with most shops shifting wholly to a stack with R or Python.

It’d be interesting to read a post-mortem on Matlab’s business model - they did the usual Windows/Photoshop thing of getting their claws into you in college with student licenses and people ask to use them at work, but I wonder what uptake is at colleges these days v OSS equivalents.

ShadowHawk posted:

At first, but it's not at all uncommon for later CPUs in a generation to keep binning even once almost all of them could run at the high specs. Sometimes the demand for the budget version is greater than the amount of slightly worse CPUs you accidentally make.

blowfish posted:

Yeah and that's quite scummy.

silence_kit posted:

Yeah, I'm sure Intel sells a ton of potential i7s as Celerons.


If you have problems with that, then you must have major issues with much of the software industry where they often charge large amounts of money for software that has almost zero marginal production cost. You probably also probably have issues with the publishing and entertainment businesses as well.

blowfish posted:

Yeah and that's quite scummy.

ANIME AKBAR posted:

At the very least Matlab can rely on loyalty from many academic fields, including my own, where basically every bit of code exchanged between groups is matlab. I can't imagine having to create publication-quality figures without matlab anymore.

And also lol at most of the python vs matlab coding examples google is showing me, none of these people know how to use matlab properly.

edit: otoh, gently caress indexing from 1

Cicero posted:

I don't see how software locking a battery is fundamentally different from software locking software. If you have a lite version of an app it'd cost the company nothing to let you have the full version instead, but they don't do that for free because they need/want more money.

Like I can see how on the surface it looks sillier, but under the hood it's just the usual price discrimination.

Patrick Spens posted:

Why is that scummy? The cheaper car having cheaper parts in it seems pretty reasonable.

Cicero posted:

I don't see how software locking a battery is fundamentally different from software locking software. If you have a lite version of an app it'd cost the company nothing to let you have the full version instead, but they don't do that for free because they need/want more money.

Like I can see how on the surface it looks sillier, but under the hood it's just the usual price discrimination.

blowfish posted:

IIRC there were some straight up "buy license code to unlock more core" CPUs though.

Condiv posted:

tesla being able to remotely do a poo poo ton of stuff to your car without your permission is a disaster waiting to happen

shrike82 posted:

lamo, i didn't realize Tesla was doing price segmentation by firmware

Tesla (temporarily) remotely extends range of vehicles for free in Florida

Ynglaur posted:

See: food in most public schools. When bureaucrats try to create a healthy meal, you end up with a peanut butter sandwich with an inch of peanut butter thats inedible.

blowfish posted:

it's my loving car and by god i'm going to use it to the fullest extent possible (gently caress whoever built it)

Discendo Vox posted:

That's not "bureaucrats," it's decades of reduced funding and privatization. School meals were and are a massive boon for society.

Ynglaur posted:

Since this tends to happen with centrally planned food, I think you just reinforced my point.

Ynglaur posted:

Since this tends to happen with centrally planned food, I think you just reinforced my point.

RuanGacho posted:

It would be pretty cool if we could set up a meal system that gave school kids decent food and also educated them on how to make it.

quote:

Thanks to new trends in civic technology, that’s beginning to change. Young tech workers have increasingly noticed the wide-open opportunity to bring disruption to outdated social programs. With a user base of nearly 43 million Americans, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food stamps, is ripe for innovation.

Analytic Engine posted:

RuanGacho posted:

It would be pretty cool if we could set up a meal system that gave school kids decent food and also educated them on how to make it.

boner confessor posted:

you realize that the "public school food is lovely" thing is because public schools don't really cook food anymore and instead contract out to major foodservice firms like sysco or us foods? it's literally the same food they serve in prisons, supplied by the lowest bidder on the free market

or are you trying to say that huge food conglomerates are also "centrally planned food"

Ynglaur posted:

I didn't explain very well. I'm saying that in the US, an unfortunate result of having the government centralize food distribution is that it inevitably gets privatized, and the lowest bidder combined with bureaucratic rules results in bad food that is bad. I'm sure that 1" peanut butter sandwich is completely up to spec, so to speak, but it doesn't result in a good outcome.

Acinonyx posted:

We would get these big tins of meat, blocks of cheese, etc. from the government to supplement our meal program, I assume because all our kids were from impoverished families. I hadn't realized that 'government cheese' was actually a thing and not just a saying.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Cost of marketing note: We bought and paid for a month's worth of Blue Apron for the aged parents. (They adored it.) In return, we got to give three free one-week boxes of Blue Apron to friends. Mine -- I am my own best friend and have multiple email accounts -- was two meals for a family of four, which hit the maximum benefit of $71.00. There are two more out there.

I have no idea what the true cost of a BlueApron box is; I think I've heard they're selling at a loss, but I'm not sure. But they're giving away a lot of free goods in response to a 4-week purchase, in hopes of luring more people to subscribe. You have to give a credit card number, of course, but you can cancel after getting the free shipment. I can't see Blue Apron as the Columbia Records of food, given that most people will notice an extra hundred dollars on the credit card.

mobby_6kl posted:

The high cost of customer acquisition probably wouldn't be such a big issue if everyone actually stayed with them afterwards, but I recall reading that people cancel their subscriptions at a particularly high rate.