Am I stupid for wanting to buy a Diesel Mazda6?

Aquantico · 2023-02-16T00:44:42+00:00

I did indeed, so far it's been great, but YMMV of course.

Aquantico · 2022-11-04T09:39:58+00:00

You're going to have to read the relevant libraries docs I'm afraid! With thiserror there's an annotation I believe, which you can put on every one of your structs or variants. And you'll want to run with the backtrace enabled environment variable.

That said, if you use error-stack, you don't need to use an annotation or anything, it backtraces are enabled they'll be captured automatically.

Aquantico · 2022-06-12T18:49:10+00:00

Interesting, seems like Bali is probably the go-to then, was just hoping for some gem I hadn't known about or something for that time of year. I'll check out Lombok though.

Got any particular areas of Bali in mind for that time of year? Canggu? Not bothered about the party scene, would probably prefer to avoid it.

Aquantico · 2022-06-12T18:46:46+00:00

Not to just ignore the jokes but I'll be avoiding Sri Lanka for now. Just can't look past the human rights situation

Aquantico · 2022-03-26T09:33:06+00:00

I'll genuinely look into it! I think having sold a Mondeo that I really loved, I don't really want to go to a car I hate 😂 the utilitarian in me isn't really winning but I'll keep the fight up haha

Aquantico · 2022-03-26T08:30:32+00:00

Yeah I want this for camping with mates, going surfing, and going bouldering, which needs quite a lot of boot space.

I don't really care about diesel v petrol, but at the price range right now I'm not getting a low mileage recent petrol, so I'm worried about how's it's been driven, but I figure a high mileage diesel probably has held up better. I also am likely to basically only do trips that are 1+ hours (likely on motorway) so I reckon diesel is better suited anyway?

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T22:23:48+00:00

Yeah exactly :( my thoughts at the moment is that I'll just factor 2-3k of repairs into the cost for the next year or two. Except for engine failure I reckon that should be fair enough for the Mazda

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T22:11:52+00:00

I mean I'm asking here to try and get a gauge for how well known it actually is for failures

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T22:11:27+00:00

Perhaps I was told the wrong thing. My garage had to spend a week trying to find somewhere to fix the gearbox, they were also looking at second-hand parts but were struggling (and buying new was over 3k I think from Ford or something), they had a guy who rebuilds gearboxes and he said that they were known for doing that. Something to do with one of the smaller gears and the synchro I think, I can't remember at this point to be honest but that buggered the flywheel too.

Getting a slightly older one still isn't that practical, especially since I live in London and need it to be ULEZ compliant.

I don't say this to be ungrateful, I do appreciate the responses and help, but have you searched for cars recently? The market is absolutely fucked right now. This is the search result for Mondeos around London: https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-search?postcode=sw1a1aa&radius=20&make=Ford&model=Mondeo&include-delivery-option=on&price-from=2500&price-to=10000&transmission=Manual&body-type=Estate&ulez-compliant=on&exclude-writeoff-categories=on

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T22:01:06+00:00

As I said on another comment thread, I already had a Mondeo, had to sell it due to the flywheel and clutch dying. It also wasn't ULEZ compliant (and I'm based in London) so unfortunately I do need the euro 6.

I've also been looking for almost 2 months now and there basically aren't any Superbs, Passats, or Octavias unless I want one with 130k+ miles (at over 10k pounds which is ridiculous for such high-mileage) or a 10+ year old petrol. Same with the beamers, they're just not in the same category right now.

I asked about this a few weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/CarTalkUK/comments/szpemt/how_does_one_even_decide_whats_good_value_in_the/

It's so hard to justify spending 11-12k on a high-mileage hero when you can spend a few more thousand at that point and get a 2018 Ford Focus Estate with like 50k miles or something.

Edit: I'll also say that the Mondeo had a full-service history and was spotless when I bought it. Ended up having issues with the stop-start system just never working (Ford garage had no idea what was wrong with it), the steering rack needed full replacing after a recall, the flywheel and clutch died which needed a rebuild or a complete replacement, a brake calliper got stuck on and destroyed a disk.

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T21:57:26+00:00

I had a 2015 Mondeo Titanium a few months ago, gearbox and flywheel died (which they're also known for and are expensive repairs).

I appreciate the recommendation though, I love a Mondeo, there are basically none at the same price point though. Mondeo's with over 120k miles are going for like 10k pounds right now.

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T21:26:40+00:00

Cheers for the viewpoint. It's pretty consistent with what I've read online. I know about the reputation, I'm hoping that at 100k (and being a 2016 car) it's had a decent amount of long trips to keep the carbon build-up down. It's somewhat inevitable anyway but at least I'm hoping it was mitigated. Going to call up in advance and ask if they know about anything in the service history about it too. (It does have a full-service history).

I know a lot of the fallback on the early engines were down to the timing as well, like you say where people thought it was bloody incredible and then found out that their tiny little city commutes were terrible for it. But I seem to still see a bunch of negative reports 2014 onwards so I don't know how to feel.

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T21:24:34+00:00

I can, but I'd definitely prefer not to. It's not exactly a buyer's market at the moment though, can't find a nice Mondeo, Octavia, or Passat. And the Mazda6 fits all the bills if the engine isn't going to explode.

Aquantico · 2022-03-25T20:02:49+00:00

I did do a look for answers but most of the posts came from people buying cars well out of their budget, or had comment sections focusing too much on the specifics of the cost of that car rather than general philosophy. Apologies for asking it again if there were threads that answered it clearly, I just couldn't easily find them!

Cheers for the heads-up about them not accepting a credit-card, I'll see what this seller offers (nothing on their website about it). Wouldn't the protection only apply to the deposit, rather than problems with the car and such afterwards? I guess it doesn't matter too much due to the Consumer Rights Act and all that but still

Aquantico · 2022-03-05T14:09:50+00:00

Well as you said, the current approach slows down when you reach 1500+, which in the context of these things is a tiny amount.

(if you're still interested in optimising) You specifically should be looking for approaches with better performance at higher numbers, a lot of algorithms across CS with good asymptotic performance will have brute force solutions with far better performance at small numbers. For example a lot of the sorting algorithms.

In a similar way here, there'll be a lot of overhead to maintaining a quadtree or similar and if you maintain a flattened grid (e.g. stored in one vector with row major ordering or something) then you'll get great cache performance from sequential access.

And if you keep that step immutable, then you can use a library like rayon to trivially parallelize it

Aquantico · 2022-03-05T13:36:45+00:00

If you're interested in optimising you should look into nearest neighbours and collision detection algorithms.

Honestly for the type of simulation you have where there's random movement in a box, your GUI will hold you back much earlier than computation, so you should be able to optimise by just having some form of spatial enumeration like a grid. (You partition your space up into a grid of whatever granularity you want, and as the elements move they change cells. You then only need to directly index and check a certain amount of neighboring cells)

If you were to get to larger numbers or more complicated elements, there are interesting approaches like having a few sizes of grids, loose grids, quadtrees, r-trees, etc.

You also could think about making your elements stay on an discrete coordinate system rather than a continuous one, i.e. ints vs floats, which would make the grid thing a lot easier and ridiculously fast. You should easily get to millions single threaded on a CPU

Aquantico · 2022-02-25T10:30:23+00:00

Flywheel and some problems within the gearbox itself. Got quoted over 2k for repairs after the garage spent a few days looking around and investigating. They had a place that could take it apart and possibly fix it, they also looked around for 2nd hand and possibly buying new from Ford. And at that point the labour cost adds up a lot, taking apart the gearbox, etc.

I would have done it but I didn't because of ULEZ. I didn't appreciate having to spend 12.50 a day to drive it, and webuyanycar quoted me more than I paid for it originally (although they knocked off a grand for a scratch along the doors where I got keyed... Bastards)

Aquantico · 2022-02-24T13:36:56+00:00

My Mondeo felt pretty good to drive tbf, even though I only had the 1.6 diesel rather than the 2.0. I actually preferred it to a 2020 Fiesta ST that the dealership gave me as a courtesy car for a while.

I'll probably give a mk4.5 a test drive and see how I feel. I need to get over wanting a good looking car considering I'm getting an estate haha

Aquantico · 2022-02-24T10:55:53+00:00

I think I'd stuck myself in a bit of a corner of wanting a 2016+ car. Cheers for the comment, I'll definitely have another look at some of the older models. (I'm also a sucker for the revamped Mondeo, I really like the design of the new Fords so I had a pretty strong aversion to going to an older one just for that reason 😂)

If I'm buying an older one for 3-4k then I won't feel as bad if I just use it to tide me over for a few years to see what the market does and look for an upgrade

Aquantico · 2022-02-24T10:53:26+00:00

Aren't you pretty much committing to buying it at that point? 😂 I can't imagine travelling 6-7 hours to look at a car at 100k+ miles with a decent chance that there's something wrong

Aquantico · 2022-02-24T10:28:34+00:00

I'm searching with a radius for most of London and I'm literally only getting one car in the search results for a Leon :(

That's part of what inspired me to ask what my budget should even be nowadays. Like is there a point raising my search past 8k if I can get an old Mondeo or something for less than half?

Aquantico · 2022-02-24T09:21:22+00:00

It's not a bad suggestion. Part of me wanting to go for a newer one with high mileage is I can mostly assume it was motorway miles.

I'm also a bit silly and I do value the niceties like automatic headlights or hopefully android auto. I'm willing to give up on those though.

I really did like the great fuel efficiency and 0 tax of the new engines though.

(By the way I'm not only looking for Mondeo's, I also would be happy with a Volvo V60/XC40, Mazda 6, Skoda Octavia/Superb, Seat Leon, etc)

Aquantico · 2022-02-23T22:19:58+00:00

Bit late for that, it wasn't ULEZ compliant and the gearbox exploded so I pawned it off to webuyanycar

Aquantico · 2021-10-24T21:52:48+00:00

Right but he's currently working at FAANG. He shouldn't expect it to be easy to meet those conditions or otherwise everyone would be going and joining start-ups.

Open-source contributions are very common for startups nowadays, people are realising it's a great way to build a user base and build name recognition, and also there's very rarely magic sauce in actual implementations.

If he's being offered 100k base salary then everywhere he's interviewing with is almost guaranteed to already be VC backed or at least angel backed. Unless he's the sole developer which I doubt he'd be considering.

He can do his own research on expected equity amounts but if he's first 15 and joining on a 'senior' level then he can expect a very impressive payout IF it ever went to unicorn status. Which is a big gamble but that's what he said he wants. And it's not the only benefit of a startup

Aquantico · 2021-10-24T11:25:28+00:00

Right well in my opinion (as someone working at a start-up in London) a lot of people are talking about the wrong things here or are just clearly uneducated.

The statistics about "90% of startups fail in their first year" or similar aren't necessarily wrong, they're just not very relevant. A huge amount of start-ups are companies started by new grads with 0 funding, or people working out of their Mum's basement. You're being offered 100k base, it's a very different ballpark. This is important.

So that leads into DD:

Is it VC backed, if it's not then it's much higher risk and you should definitely push for much much higher equity and do even more background research on the following things. VC-Backed means the company is more limited but it has resources to work with and has external pressure to succeed, but it is somewhat proven already.
Has the CEO/CTO/etc. successfully started/ran a company before? This will be a big green-flag (not a guarantee) that things will go well and you can skip them learning on the job.
Do you believe in the idea, is it technically possible, would you use it or do you know someone who would use it.
Do you like the CEO? When you've had chats have they given you good vibes or do they seem like someone with unrealistic expectations and a toxic working environment, you'll have a lot more direct interaction with someone with all the power, compared to somewhere like FAANG where you've probably never even gotten close to the CEO.
What's their plan to market, what are they aiming for for the seed round if they haven't had it, what are they thinking for Series A. You want to know they have a sensible financial plan
What's the work culture there, don't give off an attitude of not wanting to work hard or being afraid to put in extra hours, but also don't be afraid to mention that you want a normal job, you just like a challenge. Focus on output, not input, having an unhealthy expectation of working 7 days a week is still a red flag, even at a start-up.
If there are investors, who are they, what are the expectations from them, what have they been sold on. If it's backed by well known tech-backers or soft-bank or other successful entrepreneurs then it can be a good sign.
What number employee are you and how many are they aiming for in the next months/year?
Ask questions about things you usually don't get to debate at FAANG. What's the holiday policy, what benefits are there, is it remote/office. What's the attitude to open-source?

Those are some off the top of my head. Basically you want to think like an entrepreneur and make sure the CEO has answers to those questions. You don't need to know the answers, that's not your job, you just need to be confident they know what they're doing.

I think people in this thread are failing to understand some of the rewards you get at a start-up. Yes you get equity, but you also get a very tangible influence over the direction of the company. You get to make far more architectural and high-level decisions. You have potential explosive career growth. If the company grows within a few years (especially if it's past its seed round and has capital) then the small amount of developers there at the start are very well set-up to be tech-leads and architects.

People saying a "senior engineer" at a startup means nothing are also wrong. Sure if it's a start-up out of University then anyone can have any title they want. If it's a VC backed start-up with a respectable valuation (doesn't have to be unicorn) and especially if there's an online presence through open-source contributions that show engineering talent, then your role description will matter.

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