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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • You need to do more research. Valve has in total about 300 employees, and maybe a dozen work on SteamOS. Their priority will always be to maintain it for Valve-produced hardware. If you’re expecting golden unicorns from SteamOS on a PC, you will be very disappointed.

    To make matters somewhat worse it’s based on Arch, which is one of the more difficult distros to work with from a user perspective - Valve uses it because it provides more flexibility to aggressively optimize it for their specific hardware. You will not get the experience you are thinking you will get from it.

    Fedora on the other hand is based on and funded by Red Hat, which is one of the largest names in enterprise Linux. It’s been in production for PCs for over 20 years. On top of funding, Red Hat also has employees working on it.

    Red Hat was purchased last year by IBM for $34B USD, roughly 3x what Valve as a whole is estimated to be worth. If you want a so-called “mighty corporation” backing your OS… valve ain’t it.






  • No worries, nothing grouchy sounding there :)

    My statement is sourced by me working in R&D in the automotive industry on these modules… an ESP32 does not come close to the amount of computing resources needed to move and process the absolute boat load of information required to make decisions for autonomous driving.

    Flying around doesn’t need the same level of object detection, path-finding, decision making and so on that a vehicle that is capable of killing anyone in or around it needs. And on top, it has to be able to do that at highway speeds, without ever making a mistake - because of the killing everyone in or around it part.

    Further, it needs to deal with all the random stuff all those people are doing around it all the time… again, without ever making a mistake.

    So it needs to be able to see something, identify if it’s something it needs to be concerned about, figure out if it might be doing something that needs to be addressed, make a plan, then execute it… in like a few milliseconds. with a virtually unlimited number of potential obstacles, while obeying traffic laws, and still get the occupant to their destination.

    Without killing anyone.

    And that’s just the ADAS subsystem.



  • With the current level of tech in a car, you’re already likely pushing 300GB in total. There’s dozens of high-compute ECUs doing all sorts of things, running some *nix OS and using anywhere from a couple GB to well… way more.

    to reach full driverless capability, those will need to become more powerful, the software will require more memory, and the number of compute modules will likely increase as well for sensors and other stuff.

    300GB IMO is probably a conservative estimate.



  • That’s true, but it’s also a bit more complicated - you can’t just jam a handful of 18650 cells together and have it work. They need to be matched with cells having similar capacity and internal resistance and depending on the operating characteristics the tolerance can be quite low.

    So it is possible to make your own packs or repair ones, but you have to test each cell in the existing pack, as well as test each cell your want to replace in and make sure that they’re all in tolerance to each other.


  • Car infotainment

    Before it was called infotainment, it was standardized. Your vehicle had either a DIN or double-DIN sized deck and replacing it meant getting a new deck in the right size and the wiring harness for your vehicle.

    Now, every vehicle uses their own specific sized HMI, the computer(s) driving that is buried somewhere else in the vehicle, and it’s so tightly coupled to the car’s specific CAN/ethernet interfaces using signalling that’s only somewhat standard across manufacturers so even integrating a third-party head unit into all of that would likely mean losing a whole bunch of features.

    Most people just use Android Auto/Carplay now anyways