Track_ShovelSo anyway, I'm radicalized, rule
GormadtHere’s a great vid on airbags for motorcycles
Fun fact the manual ones are better
Motorcycle Airbags Exist – But No One Uses Them?
sin_free_for_00_daysThat dude annoys me so much, but his content is usually pretty good. Great points on the different air bag systems.
no bananaI feel pretty much the same. I love what he’s doing. He’s doing a great job. But he is annoying.
Wow really? What do you find annoying about him?
I don’t know exactly. His delivery I guess. He seems like someone I would absolutely never want to hang out with. But his videos, the ones I’ve seen over the years, have had solid content.
Wild. I always thought he seemed fine. Pretty self-aware and just Canadian.
Personally it’s not like I hate him or anything I just find the delivery a bit grinding to listen to but overall the channel is solid and I still watch most of his videos. They’re always informative and interesting.
poppyI’m guessing it’s the dry delivery of “bad” jokes don’t click with a lot of people, but yeah it just feels more self aware Canadian to me. 😅
It reportedly checks subscription upon putting the vest on and supposedly won’t turn off mid ride.
Gradually_AdjustingThe problem is the subscription, not how it was implemented
Yes, but also from an implementation perspective: if I’m making code that might kill somebody if it fails, I want it to be as deterministic and simple as possible. Under no circumstances do I want it:
PsaldornIf the customer is dead, they definitely can’t renew.
Who wouldn’t tout your service if it saved them?
But also… why the fuck does this require a sub?
Norah (pup/it/she)The argument the company makes is that it allows them to sell the device for cheaper upfront, which means that more people can afford to have one. They sell them for $400. But also fuck them, nobody ever died from HP disabling printers.
Also, if they genuinely wanted to make it more affordable up front in order to get the safety device in more hands, they could charge a chunk initially and then a regular payment plan for so many months. Not paying in perpetuity or we disable it.
But also… why the fuck does this require a sub?
Because “fuck you, we’re rent-seeking and you can’t do anything about it,” that’s why.
It checks the service when booting up before a ride. After that it doesn’t connect to the internet. If you’ve gone past your grace period of 60 days it won’t boot up at all, and it will alert you that the device isn’t active.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of the subscription but it’s important to have accurate information. Did you even read the product page?
That information changes none of my issues; if you don’t see the plethora of potential implementation bugs involved, either you don’t code professionally or you shouldn’t be.
I code professionally, specifically I develop very resilient medical software. From a software perspective, as long as the developers are competent I have no issues with the device. There are so many other things you could take issue with when it comes to the vest, but I’m telling you software just isn’t one of them.
I’m sure the developers are competent, but the reason I care about the design decisions is the same reason the electric brakes on cars don’t interface with its infotainment system; the interface inherently creates opportunities for out of spec behaviour and even if the introduced risk is tiny, the consequence is so bad that it’s worth avoiding.
If you have to have an airbag be controlled by software (ideally the mechanism is physical, like a pull tab), it should be an isolated real time device with monitoring your accelerometer and triggering the airbag be it’s only jobs. If it’s also waiting to hear back from another device about whether your subscription ran out before it starts checking, the risk of failure also has to consider that triggering device.
It can be done perfectly, but it’s software so of course it has bugs.
So go purchase one of the many many different products with a higher up front investment.
If I needed one, I would. But keep in mind that consumers have limited power (voting with our dollars), and top-down protections are essential.
Yes we should definitely make it harder to get safety equipment that nobody really wears anyway because subscriptions == evil.
Did you throw out a strawman on purpose just then or were you trying to make a real point?
And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.
Safety features should work if everything else fails. Their failure mode can’t be “fuck it, it didn’t work”. Which is directly opposite to the failure mode of a subscription based service.
This is why:
The FTC needs to do its job and start outlawing all these obscene subscription business models for things that are rightfully products, not services. Where’s my goddamned First Sale Doctrine, FTC?!
Commercial Software Engineers need to be professionally licensed, so that proper consequences can be applied for unethical “fail-deadly” designs like this one.
As a software engineer, the thought of my code being responsible for someone’s safety is fucking terrifying. Thankfully I’m not in that kind of position.
From experience though, I can tell you that most of the reasons software is shitty is because of middle or upper management, either forcing idiotic business requirements (like a subscription where it doesn’t fucking belong!) or just not allocating time to button things up. I can guarantee that every engineer that worked on that thing hated it and thought it was fucking stupid.
Licensing would be overkill for most software as it’s not exactly life and death. I think in this case since it’s safety equipment it really should have been rejected by NHTSA before it ever hit stores.
I can guarantee that every engineer that worked on that thing hated it and thought it was fucking stupid.
As also a software engineer who was also a civil engineer-in-training before switching careers, I think one of the big overlooked benefits of being licensed is that it would give engineers leverage to push back on unethical demands by management.
tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺Dear manager please clarify the specifications for product. From the discussions in the last design meeting i felt the specifications to potentially be ambigious about their compliance with critical safety regulation. Please reply with the clarified specifications.
Management can always just fire the engineering team and hire one overseas. It’s not like it’s even that difficult to do.
I don’t think you understand what being licensed means. It means the state requires that people doing that job hold a license. Offshoring would become illegal.
I just don’t see how it would help. It would require legally defining what is or isn’t an unethical or unsafe software product, in which case why wouldn’t you just… regulate the product.
That’s easy with civil engineering: did the thing collapse and kill people? You dun fucked up. But bridges and buildings and tunnels don’t have EULAs with liability disclaimers.
Anyone who paid for this piece of shit vest almost certainly had to accept some sort of license agreement that disclaims any liability on behalf of the manufacturer. It’s a safety supplement meant to reduce the risk of a fatal injury, not prevent them altogether.
You’d also end up with a situation where an overseas team develops the software and you just have a licensed engineer on retainer to rubber-stamp it. It’d probably kill what little domestic software development we have left, because however much time and money it costs to get licensed will jack up everyone’s salary requirements that gets licensed.
It would also mean heavy restrictions on the import of any software, which pretty much fucks… everyone. It’d likely kill the Internet or make it even shittier, because you could only visit websites developed by a licensed engineer. Every website visit requires the downloading of software: the Javascript frontend.
It would also effectively kill open-source, because the legal liability would override the warranty disclaimer in every single open source license. Why would you put something out into the world for free if all it would do is open you up to litigation?
Could a well written law take this all into account? Certainly. Would you realistically expect it to, though? I don’t think so.
This is managements fault, not the engineers fault.
We have to implement the requirements we are given. If we don’t, we get fired and they hire someone else who will do it.
If we don’t, we get fired and they hire someone else who will do it.
If we were licensed, any replacement would be similarly ethically bound to refuse and that tactic wouldn’t work.
And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.
If there’s a bug in your car’s airbag, you’re also fucked.
Pop verification neck to continue.
My dad worked for AAA. Once he got a call because a lady’s car errored out and thought she didn’t have her seatbelt buckled mid-drive, so it shut the engine off. On the freeway.
Even without a subscription, failsafes should always fail safe.
Thorium reactors have a cleverly dumb failsafe. If reactor control fails, there’s a plug that melts and drains the contents into a container that’s not fit for runoff neutron generation.
That’s an example of a failsafe that fits its purpose. It’s still possible to fuck it up, but it would take a lot of effort to do so.
This gets posted occasionally and while I agree, the subscription for an airbag is one of the dumbest things ever, it’s not the only way to buy the thing.
It’s available as a one-time purchase instead, which obviously is what everyone here would choose, but it’s a fairly high price, and their argument for offering a subscription model is that they want the price barrier for safety equipment to be lower. There are other ways to do it, but the option of a subscription is fine IMO as long as the one time purchase remains as well.
Why would you want computerized airbags? I don’t trust the software to not have bugs
bob_lemonUhhh… Every single airbag is computerized. There is always some software involved in the evaluation of the acceleration data.
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is acceleration >threshold: toggle airbag) is a much easier and reliabel process than:
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is there an internet connection? is the subscription verified? is acceleration > threshold: toggle airbag)
Yes. Which is why the latter is not happening.
I’m not defending the subscription model, but that check is very obviously not done during the crash, but during startup, when a couple of seconds delay is not fatal. And if it fails I assume the entire thing just turns off completely.
It’s even worse because if you have an issue with the activation, your airbag is useless even though you are a customer.
But a security device should not come with a subscription, period. If you want to make the barrier of entry lower, offer differed payments.
So you stop for gas in the middle of fucking nowhere, the vest doesn’t get an internet conenction for veryfying your subscription and you are fucked, even as a paying customer.
It still boils down to a complex and much easier failing system, that could deny you critical safety features. I mean this also adds an entirely new dimension of hackability. Someone could hack into the server for the subcription verification and deliberately mess it up, or depending how poorly it is coded, could even access the vests of customers during their ride and disable them.
The system to trigger the airbag should never ever have a remote connection of any sort.
Once it’s activated, it won’t turn off for any reason, except if you turn it off or it runs out of battery.
So you could turn it off by accident, or it runs out of battery, or you stay the night somewhere on a longer road trip and it fails to reactivate in the morning because lack of internet connection. The issue still stands that there is another layer of failure that can also deny the product to paying customers for infrastructure problems that are out of their control.
starman2112You gotta make sure you know what you’re criticizing before you criticize it. They try to contact you for a full month if you miss a payment, and even then if you happen to be on a ride when the subscription ends, it doesn’t deactivate the airbag. It won’t just stop working in the middle of nowhere because it doesn’t have a connection. The system to trigger the airbag is only connected to the system that checks the subscription in that when you turn the vest on pre-ride, the latter is what turns on the former. After you turn on the vest, it cannot deactivate the airbag until the vest is turned off and back on again.
Subscriptions are still absolutely shit, but you’re making assumptions about this product that aren’t true.
Shit sorry update 3900.12 that introduced buy now pay later at the checkout actually broke that logic. Customer service got reports that it actually does turn off that fail-safe, mostly from relatives of deceased and coroners.
Discussed in sprint meeting this morning and it was agreed the upgrade can’t be rolled back due to agreements with vendors so the bug remains in production. Will be fixed in an upcoming release tbd.
Uhhh… Every single airbag is computerized.
Uhhh… not motorcycle airbags. See the Turtle 2 airbag.
Arthur Bessethe option of a subscription is fine IMO
That is bullshit. If they want to lower the price by renting it out, they could perfectly well licencese local dealers to rent it out, who can go after the customer in the same way, like they could for people who rented vehicles and didnt pay/return them.
The subscription based model instead proves that the production costs cannot be that high, that in case of a run out subscription, they’d rather lose the product.
Also the development costs of the subscription and the technical equipment to validate subscriptions, including running the servers etc. are a significant cost factor, without which they could lower the price of the product.
Nooo don’t bring logic and reasoning here. I’ve got preconceived notions to feel smug about.
If you cannot conceive of why a subscription for a physical device that needs literally norhing extra to function is bad … you are a mindless consumer. Keep consuming, you brainless worm of a walking wallet.
We can only hope to achieve the level of radical free thinking as you Winston Smith.
Thanks for the context but
I feel like price for the one time purchase is set deliberately high because they want people to actually pay for the subscription instead. If their goal really was to make their products more accessible, just allow people to pay in installments and take some recurring interest fees for the financing.
And, in any case, the product should work no matter whether I’m late with the monthly fee or not. That’s just bullshit.
proleAlso, do you need a persistent internet connection at all times so it can check if you’re subscribed at any moment it may need to in case of a crash? In a fast-moving vehicle? What an awful idea.
Yeah, what happens with lag, does it deploy around your corpse or in the ambulance?
If I recall correctly, it checks the status in the background every so often. It’s not going to reach out for the status at the moment of impact.
It checks status when you switch it on before your ride, and warns you with LEDs if it can’t activate.
It won’t ever switch off during your ride unless it runs out of battery.
It won’t ever switch off during your ride unless it runs out of battery.
It will continue to activate for 60 days after the last payment, then the “in motion” module (it’s not klim’s tech, it’s in motion’s tech and subscription) won’t turn on before a ride. It doesn’t need to connect to the internet to work while riding, it syncs over wifi. They specify it won’t stop working during a ride.
Also, you can still buy the system outright. Having a subscription entitles you to a new detection module after three years though