Rivian have always struggled to bring down the cost of manufacturing their EVs. This is one of the biggest issues they have when you are making an EV battery & motor are 2 of the most important components of the car. In Rivians case they both are sourced and not done in-house. They got carried away making a luxurious car, custom screen setup (rather then leveraging Carplay or Android Auto) & good looking interior. If you want to be in a profitable in first place they should done total inverse, focus on making a great battery & motor like Tesla did and try to source out other things. This is one of the reasons why BYD and Chinese EV companies are destroying all their competition, they do majority of things in-house.
I’m. It sure why no one is producing a commodity “skateboard” platform for other companies to build their vehicles on. When Tesla showed off this design prior to the Model X (iirc), the idea of a company that could optimize batteries and motors to sell a blank canvas chassis seemed obvious.
That’s part of the idea behind VAG’s MEB platform and GM’s Ultium and the platforms based on it. Ford is using MEB and Honda is using Ultium platforms for the moment.
I think the issue with unibody cars is eventually you’re constrained on how much a base platform can be changed without the OEMs’ commitment to modifying the layout. The Honda Prologue and the Blazer EV have the same silhouette.
> an EV battery & motor are 2 of the most important components of the car.
No. In free market not exist predefined constant priorities. Free market is dynamic system, which constantly change.
In 1960s and before, people buy any affordable machine, but in some niches preferred machines with good dynamics and (or!) with good fuel economy, so yes, good engine and transmission was important, and invested huge resources in them.
In 1980s most machines become very similar, and market demand for beautiful design and comfort, with good enough engine.
European geography is specific, it have big market of powerful 3rd party manufacturers of engines, new manufacturer just not have chances, but it's design market is not filled (nobody could name VAG designs bad, but they lack spice).
Also important thing, modern automobile is not simple thing, to fill all areas (engine, design, comfort), manufacturer need very large team. So to save design costs it is good to avoid some areas, for example to focus on comfort and interior.
So for Rivian is wise to TRY save costs and focus priorities on design/comfort and outsource EV battery & motor.
BTW not all people know, BMW initially was not just focused on dynamics, but sacrificed comfort to save weight, and they was small manufacturer with moderate sales, even once considered to save costs on avoid US market.
I cannot prove, but looks that BMW sales grown magnitudes, after them made pivot, to dynamic-luxurious direction.
Similar to BMW history was with Porsche, their sales grown with Cayenne, which is hated by many fans.
And also important thing - Tesla with Musk have ambitions to be big manufacturer, but not all other companies have such ambitions.
The real problem is that data needs to be deleted over time. There is not much of a use case for customers for go back last year and see who called them and obviously there are use cases like criminal investigations or spying. But customer has no power or ability to dictate how long their records are store and how they are used. Companies should provide tools and features to their customers empowering them with their data.
Non-murder criminal offenses typically have very short statutes of limitations.
A lot of this could also be solved by encouraging the federal government to enforce federal privacy law as written more aggressively. A good incentive would be to amend the privacy statutes to permit the FTC to keep the funds extracted from settlements and penalties in-house. This would allow them to increase staffing and create a positive feedback loop to deter wrongdoing. This would have a negative effect on incumbent companies and practices, but it would not take long for the message to get across and for practices to change accordingly.
Congress tends to prefer keeping agencies on its own budgetary string which paradoxically limits what the agencies are capable of doing. The laws that we think protect us do not protect us because many of them are within the exclusive jurisdiction of a federal agency with very limited powers and funds. In the US the leadership likes to create the illusion that it has made "Bad Problem" illegal by writing it into the law, but it does not like creating the conditions in which "Bad Problem" could be solved, whether it's because the tradeoffs involved are tough to contemplate or because keeping "Bad Problem" around as a visible enemy is clever politics.
> Non-murder criminal offenses typically have very short statutes of limitations.
There's a hidden assumption here. The expectation is that data retention and potential privacy violations are a necessary evil because anyone may later be under investigation for a crime. The data could go uncollected, it isn't AT&Ts job to retain private information on all of us just in case an investigator wants it.
Take telecoms out of it and consider a convenience store. Police would like to have video recordings of whatever moment in time they are investigating, but that doesn't mean the video has to be recorded and retained. A shop owner can choose to record videos and only retain them for a week if they want, or they can have cameras installed but not even recording if they're okay with just the effect of deterrence.
Many civil claims have short statutes of limitation as well. It's not really that good for these companies to maintain regular business records going back to infinity that are subject to discovery in disputes that are not even related to anything the telecom company did. Complying with the discovery requests and subpoenas is expensive. The fetish for the somewhat imagined benefits of big data creates open-ended liabilities for these companies. But the pressure that law enforcement and the spy agencies put on the telecom companies to facilitate this has been an open secret for a long time now.
A lot of this is on the federal government and Congress for leaving an area in which it has power dormant and within its relatively exclusive control. Thanks for the conversation.
That's another bandaid. The root cause is customer data collection mandated by outdated regulation. People should be able to digitally sign or provide a public key for their personal information without providing the raw text to 3rd parties. Various 1970's style government tax and regulatory rules need to be updated as well.
They have a financial incentive to never delete your data. Storing old data forever creates a perfect paper trail to sell to advertisers and perfect the shadow profile they keep on all of us.
I agree that deleting all your data after a year makes sense practically, but they'll never do it because it makes them too much money to keep it around.
When I was a child I grew up on one these old homes with Jaali design and as family grew we added in few extension to the house with modern look and feel. During peak summer you can feel the difference in room temperatures in old vs new section of the homes. Jaali design essentially helps in partially blocking sun, you still get the light inside the home and it magnifies the surface area to loose all the heat very easily.
SQL is around since the dawn of relational database and its hard to replace. The best option for mass adoption is to have drag and drop tools with visualizations like no-code ETL. Template like and markup language or framework are easier to adopt for new developers but majority of the population still tend of stick with the original language.
> The best option for mass adoption is to have drag and drop tools with visualizations like no-code ETL.
No. I've worked with BI tools and when things get complicated you end up needing to go back to text to express the weird bits and every company has a few queries with weird bits in it.
I also will gladly agree that it's network effect is what makes it so hard to replace (as opposed to some perceived perfection of the language - it definitely isn't perfect) but SQL has evolved significantly over time. Core SQL hasn't - but Postgres in particular has pushed the envelope on what can be done with WINDOWs, CTEs, and aggregate modifiers. I think it's a bit misleading to say the majority of the population still tend to stick with the original language since, at a previous job we did attempt to write "neutral SQL" that would execute on MSSQL, Postgres and MySQL - but in most shops you'll have a chosen dialect and you'll be able to make use of more recent and advanced language features... So the majority of the population is using modern SQL just like the majority of programmers that'd describe themselves C/C++ programmers can't grok ANSI C.
If we still use math 100 years from now, we'll still use SQL. It's a fine way to query relational data, and relational data is a fine way to model reality.
I'd like to hear from people that think I'm wrong.
> If we still use math 100 years from now, we'll still use SQL.
Those are incongruent. Do you mean Western notation?
> It's a fine way to query relational data
It's quirky, but good enough for ad-hoc queries that I think it will be hard to overcome the momentum in that area.
It's not fine for application work, where you need things like composition. We've tried to solve those problems with ORMs, but the ORM is starting to fall out of fashion due to a number of problems of its own. SQL is not a great compiler target. I do eventually see something lower level built for programmers, not data analysts, rising up here. If SQL is compared to Javascript, something akin to WASM, perhaps.
ORMs, when best used (and we use them even though we're pretty SQL literate and maintain a lot of SQL) will survive forever, nothing beats an ORM for really dirt simple expressions that you want to be trivially testable. Never in my life do I want to see someone write an UPDATE query against a single table with no shenanigans with dynamic field support using string gluing to properly stitch in all the columns - this is something a known tool can do better, this is a great opportunity for an ORM.
A non-great opportunity for an ORM is anything I'd call a "report query" (some complex read-only query involving a lot of JOINs, a bunch of WHERE clauses and possibly some nested aggregation for funsies) - this is where you pull out the SQL (or alternative query language!) because an ORM will struggle to properly support all the functionality you need and because trying to tune a query being produced by an ORM (even just to make sure it's well aligned with logical indices) is a task that yields nothing but endless frustration.
Never in my life do I want to see someone write an UPDATE query against a single table with no shenanigans with dynamic field support using string gluing to properly stitch in all the columns
These are just convenient features that most ORMs provide and can exist entirely outside of ORMs, they are not the primary purpose of ORMs.
You are correct by their design. But by usage I've found that to be by far the most valuable thing that ORMs deliver. Making use of ORMs to power an ActiveRecord system in your codebase has only ever, to my observation, lead to pain. Querybuilders that are equipped with more advanced functionality around type security and response decoding are quite a valuable tool.
I meant "still use math" as a proxy for "still use formal languages to communicate".
Maybe in 100 years AI will be so powerful that we'll just ask our question in natural language and get the answer we need. Or maybe in 100 years AI will have harvested us for the iron in our blood. Either way we wouldn't need SQL anymore.
Then the statement resolves to "If we still use math 100 years from now, we'll still use math.", which is a rather silly statement. SQL and Western notation are interesting to compare in that they are the dominant, but not exclusive, languages used to describe their respective mathematical domains.
SQL does not fully implement Relational Algebra or Calculus, which are isomorphic.
See Many of Chris Dates' books and things like Tutorial D which do meet the ALgebra.
SQL is near enough the theory to work and also has had so much effort put into making it work fast, reliably and scale for volume that a new language has too much to overcome even if it can deal with all cases. So it won't be replaced soon.
However 100 years is longer than SQL had been around so a proper relation server could come around, there is just too much uncertainty.
It's pretty obviously silly to have an unavoidable text parser in between code and data. We've reached the point where it's fairly low overhead, but it's still not nothing.
> SQL is around since the dawn of relational database
There was a decent amount of competition back then, though. It seems the industry eventually settled on SQL to be compatible with Oracle's dominance. Postgres didn't gain SQL support until about a decade in.
Postgres used QUEL in the early days, as did its predecessor Ingres. MRDS, the first commercially available relational database, used a language known as Linus. Alpha was the language originally envisioned by Codd to describe his relational model.
Code source control is a vital aspect of software development in the modern era, and no-code tools are incompatible with that unless they are also able to output their representations as plain code so that tools like "diff" work as expected, in which case you might as well stick to SQL.
There have been code source control tools based on the AST see Envy for Smalltalk.
Hopefully eventually we will dump the limitations of text based tools and use one based on the structure of programs. I don't want to know line 123 has changed I want to know that function fn in module m has changed or that function X was added on this date.
That is so true! Have you ever used SSIS? A really powerful tool, but even small changes can cause hundreds of changes in the underlying XML, which makes change control a nightmare. Forget branching and merging anything other the most minor changes.
Because of this reason, vast majority of new generation query languages are translated into SQL but in fact it is not a great language as a target language. I think SQL should more focus on features as an efficient intermediate language rather than adding more and more ad hoc "convenient" features that don't really play well with other language features...
I recently went through a car buying process and it was extremely brutal. You signup paying for Doc fee ($600), even gas, other hidden fees, and outrageous charges. Another issue I noticed was you are forced into buying overprized accessories like first aid kit ($150), car mats and even cargo nets. After all this we ended up buying from craigslist as to my surprise some of these charges cannot be even waved, you don't stand a chance as people are willing to pay for these things and dealership just move to next customer.
The real issue is that each party wants to blame other side and for all the problems. Negotiations and compromise are non-existent, and this is the real reason why progress is people feel that their progress is getting stagnated.
This isn’t completely true. There are some high profile issues that are deadlocked on ideological grounds, but there’s legislation passed every session through compromise and bipartisanship.
This can also be an overall industry trend as now all big players have native apps for smartphones/tablets. People might prefer to use phone or tablets compared to desktops.
Problem is big companies dodge taxes and that needs a fix.
Example -- you buy a smart phone you pay sales tax (consumer or normal people), what they should do is put something like 0.5% or some small Federal tax which companies have to pay on sale. Because most of the time companies park their profit offshore and pay nothing in tax.
Facebook might have a short term problem with PR or public trust but eventually these things will settle down. Unless and until major stock holders push for change in business model not much is going to happen.
"Facebook's Class B shares, controlled by Zuckerberg and a small group of insiders, has about 18 percent of the shares, but they also have 10 votes per share."
So what you are proposing is going to be happening approximately never.
I can't recall last time a C-level company executive get into trouble for using deceptive tactics, every S&P500 company does this to some extent. When they get caught, in majority of cases it is a gentle slap on the wrist or given more of a timeout and reallocation of their position. Also unfortunately using public money and delivering a bad product is not a criminal offense, more like being sloppy at what you do. With big lawyers involved she might get sometime in a fancy hotel like prison or some restrictions on trading stock or fundraising.
> According to the indictment, the defendants also allegedly made numerous misrepresentations to potential investors about Theranos’s financial condition and its future prospects. For example, the defendants represented to investors that Theranos conducted its patients’ tests using Theranos-manufactured analyzers; when, in truth, Holmes and Balwani knew that Theranos purchased and used for patient testing third party, commercially-available analyzers. The defendants also represented to investors that Theranos would generate over $100 million in revenues and break even in 2014 and that Theranos expected to generate approximately $1 billion in revenues in 2015; when, in truth, the defendants knew Theranos would generate only negligible or modest revues in 2014 and 2015.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/us-v-elizabeth-holmes-et-a...
The point I am trying to make is way things work in US, most likely C-levels and high level officials of companies get away with it. I am sure there are cases when folks got into trouble. Apple had Antennagate for one of the iphones and even with a class-action lawsuit people got like $15 reimbursement. For these huge companies in most of the time amount of fines are more like margin of error in accounting spreadsheet.
One is a company that built a product with a design flaw effecting only one aspect of the product (cell radio) that was only triggered under certain circumstances (placing you fingers in certain positions). A civil lawsuit against the company caused the company to issue a fix (free bumper case which insulated the antenna) that retroactively fixed all products that shipped with the flaw.
The other is a medical device company that sold a product that didn’t work, giving incorrect results that directly informed how people treated or even detected health problems. People inside the company knew this and lied anyway, repeatedly, and then those people induced and conspired with others to hide their fraud. Those specific people are now facing criminal charges.
> Also unfortunately using public money and delivering a bad product is not a criminal offense, more like being sloppy at what you do.
They lied to FDA auditors in what sounds like a criminal conspiracy to defraud investors, business partners, and the patients whose blood tests were processed there.
Here's a fun one: a telecom CEO (named Elizabeth, too) was forging customer signatures - signatures of people she had known and worked with in many cases - to show to investors.
And she took money from friends and employees, and told them they were getting shares in the company. In reality she used the money to pay off her lifestyle expenses.
To be fair, she probably intended to make good on the investments once the company was wildly successful.
The amazing thing is, the company had hired a new CEO and is actually still operating. Last I heard.
She didn't just "using public money and delivering a bad product". She lied to investors and regulators. That is called fraud and it is definitely a criminal offense. Her defense rests on proving she did not do it knowingly or with the intention to defraud. Nevertheless, yes she could get away with it. And yes, this being the United States race and class is involved but more so class in this case.
