It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.

Their response was to send me here: https://www.haier-europe.com/en_GB/technical-assistance/contact-us/

If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com

Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P

In case you forgot, we’re mammals too. The only freedom you’re rushing towards is the freedom of death, but at least we get big vroom vroom sound make happy on the way

Probably depends on how comfortable you are at reading assembly instructions for your specific CPU, but I think generally the contextless source code is probably preferable. Either way you’ve got a headache of an investigation in front of you though.

here’s an example of what it might look like with either option

It depends on the specifics of how the language is compiled. I’ll use C# as an example since that’s what I’m currently working with, but the process is different between all of them.

C#, when compiled, actually gets compressed down to what is known as an intermediate language (MSIL for C# specifically). This intermediate file is basically a set of genericized instructions that are not linked to any specific CPU. This is useful because different CPUs require different instructions.

Then, when the program is run, a second compiler known as the JIT (just-in-time) compiler takes the intermediate commands and translates them into something directly relevant to the CPU being used.

When we decompile a C# dll, we’re really converting from the intermediate language (generic CPU-agnostic instructions) and translating it back into source code.

To your second point, you are correct that the decompiled version will be more efficient from a processing perspective, but that efficiency comes at the direct cost of being able to easily understand what is happening at a human level. :)

The long answer involves a lot of technical jargon, but the short answer is that the compilation process turns high level source code into something that the machine can read, and that process usually drops a lot of unneeded data and does some low-level optimization to make things more efficient during actual processing.

One can use a decompiler to take that machine code and attempt to turn it back into something human readable, but will usually be missing data on variable names, function calls, comments, etc. and include compiler-added optimizations which makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct the original code

It’s sort of the code equivalent of putting a sentence into Google translate and then immediately translating it back to the original. You often end up with differences in word choice that give you a good general idea of intent, but it’s impossible to know exactly which words were in the original sentence.

I completely agree with that message, but until we get to that point there is a clear utility for EVs.

Shifting urban development to be less car-centric overall will take decades of effort, if not generations, and we can’t expect people to quit their commuter job, sell their car, and find an overlap of employment and public transport that works for the planet when there’s no social or infrastructural support for it.

In the meantime, to me at least, it makes sense to transition to EVs instead of ICE while that infrastructure is developed. It seems to me that perfect (a public transportation focused society) is becoming the enemy of good (reduced emissions for the sea of single person vehicles we currently have), or at least that is frequently my perception when every thread talking about EVs has people in the comments mentioning manufacturing costs as a hurdle, when the only plausible alternative is ICE vehicles with more environmental impact

Asking purely from a point of ignorance - is that not the same for ICE cars? Sourcing of battery components is a clear difference, but ICE cars also require materials to be sourced, manufactured, transported, usage input costs, drive on the same infrastructure, and also require disposal after they’re no longer operable.

Are these metrics truly that different between EV and ICE cars? If not, then all we’re really saying is that “making cars is not good for the environment” which, while accurate, seems like an insane point to use against EVs when comparing them to ICE

Conversely, not every aspect of society needs to be monetized and capitalized.

There existed a time when players made guides because they were passionate about the game, not because they were trying to hit engagement metrics or ad revenue breakpoints. The website GameFAQs, for example, holds thousands of user created guides, and many of them are extremely high quality.

Obviously this is not to say that we should expect all creators to work for free, especially if they’re trying to make a career of it, but there’s decades of precedent for passion-driven user created content and I don’t think it’s right to label it as entitlement when talking about the loss of those elements in a shift towards icy veins/maxroll paid guides.