Hey man, you made a successful product, wrote a great article, and are now getting attention for it. You don't need to respond to every person who wants to nit pick at your title :)
I think there's a lot of people talking past each other here. Sourcing parts internationally, preventing counterfeiting, slow iteration time, inventory management...all this logistical stuff is hard enough that the conventional wisdom in the software business world is to never attempt it. You're here presenting a counterexample and that's wonderful. The people criticizing aren't talking about this though, they are talking about whether logging digital inputs on an esp32 counts as a real hardware project and they act as if you've insulted their expertise in [signal processing/antenna design/insert specialty here]. You didn't do that, most of us know you didn't do that, but the word "easy" sets a lot of engineers off.
Just ignore the noise and keep writing great articles. My personal request, if I may - I'd like to hear how you did injection molding since I always assumed that was out of reach for small business.
I mean mods are always about tradeoffs. You're generally not smarter than the team of engineers that designed it, but you probably do have different goals, that's where the opportunity to improve an aspect of the car comes in.
I think it should be done with a clear understanding of what you're giving up, but some people don't want to put practicality first and that's okay.
Dude...gp comment was making the completely inoffensive point that politics has more complexity than pro/against Trump. It's almost too obvious to say, but it wasn't really being factored into the discussion so it was worth pointing out.
It's like the blandest thing a person can say, don't get triggered and be a jerk about it.
From the details I read in the post you are almost certainly wrong, not to mention being reallying condescending.
The interviewer has control over the room. They steer the conversation. They could have stopped this at any point. Instead they encouraged OP to go deeper for 90 minutes.
That wasn't OP misunderstanding a question, that was an interviewer enjoying the power trip.
I'm sorry but you're logic really doesn't add up. If a part goes from $30 to $285 because of massive insurance premiums, that indicates that the insurance company expects things to go wrong.
The real reasons oem parts cost more is always some combination of these three things:
1. They use more expensive processes and materials.
2. They charge more because they can. People are willing to pay a premium for "genuine" parts.
3. They have a "dealer network" to support, which is convenient but expensive to maintain.
#1 is the only thing I want to pay for. Ultimately it's on a case by case basis whether oem is worth it and you never know for sure.
But I'm really thankful non-oem parts exist, just as long as they're labeled as such and not comingled.
I thought that article was impractical and totally divorced from reality.
Effort can't be fairly measured so in practice the attempts toward "effortocracy" always seem to replace objective systems with a mess of human biases.
Look at college admissions: instead of SAT scores colleges want to look at skin color and how sympathetic your essays sound. That doesn't measure how much a person has overcome in life, it measures a person by how they fit in to the admissions office's prejudices.
The merit based approach, giving academic opportunity to people with a history of academic success, isn't as fair as we want, but it is useful. Broken, gameable, biased measures of effort are neither fair nor useful.
For greenfield side projects and self contained tasks LLMs deeply impress me. But my day job is maintaining messy legacy code which breaks because of weird interactions across a large codebase. LLMs are worse than useless for this. It takes a mental model of how different parts of the codebase interact to work successfully and they just don't do that.
People talk about automating code review but the bugs I worry about can't be understood by an LLM. I don't need more comments based on surface level patter recognition, I need someone who deeply understands the threading model of the app to point out the subtle race condition in my code.
Tests, however, are self-contained and lower stakes, so it can certainly save time there.
Chill out...the most condescending comment here by far is yours, and the "well ackchually" that sent the thread of the rails is your comparison between cancer cells and needing insulin. If you don't want people to poke holes in an analogy like that don't make it.
Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
The percentage change is the same for everyone. If a consumer pays 10.05 instead of 10.03, they pay 0.2% more.
If a store games prices to charge 0.2% more on a million transactions it's still 0.2% for them. Except the rounding on multi-item purchases isnt predictable so it would probably take a miracle of data engineering and behavioral science to hit 0.1% benefit on average.
Meanwhile stores are using 30% off coupons and buy on get one free to get people in the door, whilst hiding double digit price increases.
Worrying about the two pennies is stupid on either side of the transaction. Don't listen to the professional complainers.
As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.
Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.
They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.
The author wants to find content when he is looking for something specific. He does not want his attention grabbed by something he wasn't looking for, no matter how educational it may be.
Multiple people have clearly explained this to you in several comment threads and you're still insisting it makes no sense. At this point the only question is why you don't want to understand.