Buying a Chinese EV in Canada feels like such a gamble given the current geopolitical situation. Like what happens if things reverse and you can no longer get parts or support for these cars? Let's say you can get parts and third party shops open up to fill the support gap, how sure are you you'll continue to get the software updates these cars rely on?
While I'd love to consider a Chinese EV as my next car, there just seem to be too many early adopter risks here outside of the car itself.
I used to think like you. I'm in Norway, I currently own a EU-made BEV and my previous car was also an EU-made BEV, and to be honest I don't think it's much better with those.
Parts are quite bespoke regardless it seems given how integrated everything is now, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the parts (or at least sub-components) come from China anyway so might very well be affected by a global event.
Also, software updates aren't frequent and manufacturers are very opaque regarding support. That is, they defer you to local dealer for software support, and the dealers don't know shit.
Feels like cars have become much more disposable in the past decade or so. I'm definitely not planning on having my next car living 20+ years.
Meh. The entire geopolitical situation is unstable. If BYD is hoping to build manufacturing and infrastructure here, and they are willing to make significant investments, it makes sense for us (Canadians) to pursue that, while continuing to strengthening our ties to Europe, and making sure that any thoughts of Canada as a vassal state to the United States are consigned to the dustbin.
We had a close relationship with the United States, but we have been burned pretty badly, and it's up to the Americans to show that it's worth returning by stabilizing the rule of law, and eliminating the capricious and nonsensical trade barriers that have been implemented.
I would say that the more-exhausting way to live would be to be unaware of this, to accept the “we’re a family here” lie at face value, and to be passed over and screwed over at frequent intervals without knowing or understanding why.
You don’t have to go full Patrick Bateman corp-bro, but keeping in mind the phrase “we don’t fire family” and adjusting your approach based on that counter-example can help you to keep things appropriately transactional and not be taken advantage of.
The least exhausting way to work a job is to find people to work with who are smart, well adjusted, and genuinely interested in cooperating to make money together.
While I agree that some copyright law probably goes too far, I don't understand how you could advocate for 0 copyright? What incentive will people have to produce creative works in that case?
This is an incredibly tired argument. Look at open source software - MIT/Apache license is of course relying on copyright but the incentive has nothing to do with the government granted monopoly that copyright brings.
The main beneficiaries are and always have been large companies with big portfolios of works, not actual people doing the work. And there are lots of business models for big companies that don’t require government making up and enforcing rights and still make profits. I don’t think we should to further and drop patents too which are exclusively used to limit competition and do nothing for innovation.
The same ones they have now where music labels and publishing houses take over the copyright for their works. Starving artists will sign away their copyright if it means money.
>If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.
I don't think this is entirely true. In a lot of cases vibe coding something can be a good way to prototype something and see how users respond. Obviously don't do it for something where security is a concern, but that vibe-coded skin cancer recognition quiz that was on the front page the other day is a good example.
Exactly… back in 1975 Fred Brooks was advising programmers to “plan to throw the first version away” (The Mythical Man-Month) and it’s still true today. Just the tools to build that rapid prototype that have changed. Once it was Ruby on Rails, once it was Visual Basic 6, very often it’s still Excel macros…
Wasn't part of throwing away the first version because of all the knowledge you gain while actually building it? So that you could build it much better the second time, with much better abstractions/design? If you had AI code it the first time, you don't gain that same knowledge.
You still do from operating the software.
You see what problems users have using it, which types of problems they tackle with it.
By the end of running the software for a month you will have typically learned a boat load.
But you and the parent are both ignoring that, in the real world, prototypes constantly (in fact, nearly always) get shipped straight to production and not updated or rewritten, precisely because they solve a pressing problem, and if they solve it well they get real users right away who start bringing up new feature requests and bugs before the prototype can ever be fixed.
This was a constant pattern in software engineering even before LLMs, but LLMs are making it much worse, and I think it's very head-in-the-sand behavior to ignore that. It's akin to going "well, you can't blame the Autopilot because the person should have been fully-attentive ready to react at any millisecond". That's not how humans work, and good engineering is supposed to take real-world human behavior into consideration
I've spent a good chunk of my career fixing or rewriting messes created by human developers. A majority of startups that succeed need this at some point, whether it's because of time and resource constraints during initial development, experience and competence issues, poor choices that got baked in, or whatever.
Right now, vibe coding just means there might be a lot more of this, assuming vibe coding succeeds well enough to compete with the situations I described.
I've stopped using the word "cheap" to describe situations like this as the word has too many negative connotations. I tend towards "inexpensive", "cost-effective", or "low-cost". I find it better describes my intent to describe something as not costing much but not speaking to poor quality which I feel like the word "cheap" has come to imply.
I showed the model a picture and any text written on that picture and asked it to guess a latitude/longitude using the tool use API for structured outputs.
That was in addition to having it transcribe the hand written text and extracting location names, which was my original goal until I saw how good it was at guessing exact coordinates. It would guess within ~200km on average, even on pictures with no information written on them.
Some Chinese exporters are definitely splitting the cost of these tariffs with their American importer counterparts. While this isn't as significant as "China pays all the tariffs", it's also not "Americans pay all the tariffs".
Though, I haven't seen any analysis on how common this is, so the effect might be negligible in terms of how much "the Chinese" are paying for these tariffs.
I've come across some other comments on Chinese forums. Some importers buy products for 10 RMB from China and then sell them in the U.S. for 10 USD. Later, they use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices to 15-20 USD. They couldn't care less whether you impose 100% or even 200% tariffs – they'd still profit unless the tariffs reach 1000%.
Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.
Why is that the case? If an item (from every manufacturer) costs $5, and there's a new tax on it, making it cost $10, why would this be split between buyer and seller? The seller needs to make a certain margin on it, and it's not like the competition can sell any cheaper, or they already would have been.
If demand is elastic, then the seller has to lower prices (and their margin), otherwise people don’t buy their stuff (because they can do without). In this situation, the seller eats the tariffs, That’s the case for nice-to-have things like luxury goods and entertainment. If the seller cannot do that, e.g. because their margins become negative, they will just stop doing business (in the US or entirely).
The other end of the spectrum is stuff people cannot do without, in which case the seller has no incentive to lower their margins because their customers don’t have a choice. Then, tariffs are entirely paid by the buyer.
In reality, everything is in between and accurately estimating how much everyone will be paying is very difficult. What we can predict with certainty is that prices can only go up, and that some businesses will fold because they cannot absorb the loss.
This isn't an inherit issue with LLMs. You just need to set up some prompts that you can default to for different use cases. For example, you could set one up that is told to only provide the function arguments, and return value.
While I'd love to consider a Chinese EV as my next car, there just seem to be too many early adopter risks here outside of the car itself.