I rented a BMW from Sixt in the USA earlier this year. I wanted to use the ConnectedDrive features, but it was blocked by BMW because the vehicle VIN was (correctly) registered as a Fleet Vehicle (i.e. a rental car) and thus none of those features were allowed with that car.
I have rented BMWs in the Netherlands and don't recall being able to use these features either.
Thus you seem to have encountered a situation which BMW and Sixt know about and have procedures in place to prevent, but their Italian subsidiary seems to have missed it with a certain batch of fleet vehicles, or just this specific one. I'd report it Sixt and move on.
I've rented beamers with Sixt at LAX and O'Hare, the latter just a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have any issues connecting to bluetooth so that I could use CarPlay. Could it be inconsistencies in how their BMW fleet is set up?
I ususally set up the bluetooth connection before driving off the lot, just so I can get staff assistance if it doesn't work - not being able to connect to the car is enough for me to insist on a new vehicle if they're unable to fix it.
Bluetooth and carplay do indeed work as you need to be connected to the vehicle. I used those features too. The ConnectedDrive feature discussed here is when you install the BMW app on your phone and register the VIN number of the car to your personal BMW account, verified by tapping some buttons in the vehicle while linking, and "owning" the car in your BMW app. This gives access to things like remote location tracking, starting the car from anywhere to get the airco etc working.
n.b. Doing this in a rental car probably violates some of the terms and conditions one would have to agree to when linking the car, like "I promise this is _my_ car and/or I have permission from the owner to link it to my personal BMW account"...
Amazon Q. Claude Code is great (the best imho, what everything else measures against right now), and Amazon Q seems almost as good and for the first week I've been using it I'm still on the free tier.
The flat pricing of Claude Code seems tempting, but it's probably still cheaper for me to go with usage pricing. I feel like loading my Anthropic account with the minimum of $5 each time would last me 2-3 days depending on usage. Some days it wouldn't last even a day.
I'll probably give Open AI's Codex a try soon, and also circle back to Aider after not using it for a few months.
I don't know if I misundersand something with Cursor or Copilot. It seems so much easier to use Claude Code than Cursor, as Claude Code has many more tools for figuring things out. Cursor also required me to add files to the context, which I thought it should 'figure out' on its own.
> I don't know if I misundersand something with Cursor or Copilot. It seems so much easier to use Claude Code than Cursor, as Claude Code has many more tools for figuring things out. Cursor also required me to add files to the context, which I thought it should 'figure out' on its own.
Cursor can find files on its own. But if you point it in the right direction it has far better results than Claude code.
It went through multiple stages of upgrades and I would say at this stage it is better than copilot. Fundamentally it is as good as cursor or windsurf but lacks some features and cannot match their speed of release. If you re on aws tho its a compelling offering.
I remember asking Amazon Q something and it wouldn’t reply cuz of security policy or something. It was as far as I can remember a legit question around Iam policy which I was trying to configure. I figured it out back in Google search.
I've been down this path, and if my experience is more common, then it really boils down to the classic "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM", and here IBM -> Confluent.
StreamNative seems like an excellent team, and I hope they succeed. But as another comment has written, something (puslar) being better (than kafka) has to either be adopted from the start, or be a big enough improvement to change— and as difficult and feature-poor that Kafka is, it still gets the job done.
I can rant longer about this topic but Pulsar _should_ be more popular, but unfortunately Confluent has dominated here and rent-seeking this field into the ground.
I'm biased because I recently introduced ClickHouse at my company, but everything I've seen so far makes me think analytical and observability use cases like this "just work" in ClickHouse.
Just like Postgres became the default choice for operational/relational workloads, I think ClickHouse is (or should) quickly become the standard for analytical workloads. In both cases, they both "just work". Postgres even has columnar storage extensions, but I still think ClickHouse is a better choice if you don't need transactions.
A rule of thumb I think devs should follow would be: use Postgres for operational cases, and ClickHouse for analytical ones. That should cover most scenarios well, at least until you encounter something unique enough to justify deeper research.
I started with orientdb than switched to Neo4j. Orientdb was good for starting tbf, but we talking about 10+ years back. Now i would definately default to Neo4j
Note that you will need a thread pool that’s large enough to handle 1 second (or whatever flush timeout you set) of events in your app concurrently. If you have thousands of events per second, plan accordingly.
I’m concerned that a lot of commenters don’t appreciate the difference between a queue and a log. Kafka is not a queue.
I think like most have said is that it’s just not a popular topic anymore to blog about but it’s still used. OTOH logs like Kafka have become more ubiquitous. Even new and exciting systems like Apache Pulsar (a log system that can emulate a queue) have implemented the Kafka API.
The design of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, specifically the tunnel part, makes a lot of sense now. Imagine a US navy port (Norfolk) being inaccessible if this happened there.
The Navy has long required that the sea lanes from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Newport News Shipbuilding to the ocean have a deep-draft passage with no bridge, for just that reason.
Which is why there's a tunnel -- when Virginia looked at replacing the ferry that ran between the Eastern Shore and Norfolk/Virginia Beach, the US Navy objected to a bridge over fears it could collapse. (An accident, sabotage, etc.) That's also why I64 has a bridge-tunnel design, as well.
This was also a major concern around the construction of the Golden Gate bridge; that during a time of war an enemy could have destroyed it to trap a large portion of the Navy's Pacific Fleet in the bay.
I have rented BMWs in the Netherlands and don't recall being able to use these features either.
Thus you seem to have encountered a situation which BMW and Sixt know about and have procedures in place to prevent, but their Italian subsidiary seems to have missed it with a certain batch of fleet vehicles, or just this specific one. I'd report it Sixt and move on.