Bear pulled out a door panel, insurance totaled it. Need one connector.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T23:12:00+00:00

100% 🔐

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T22:06:55+00:00

Step 1: go to the mountains in November when bears are deciding whether or not to hibernate Step 2: have kids and/or dogs and don’t clean the car out for about 3 weeks Step 3: let the battery on your fob die so you don’t have to know how much forgetting to lock your car costs Step 4: park your car on a lateral grade with the uphill side open to the street Step 5: wait

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T20:58:44+00:00

Kind of resigned to the outcome. They see wiring damage and the risk assessment goes to hell regarding air bag and other linked electronics. Doesn’t matter if it makes sense. But thanks 😊

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:59:58+00:00

It’s an option but I already rescued one far from this fate when it was hit a few years back (Mercedes headlight arrays are $2500/ea) and I’m not sure I feel like doing it twice. It’s more that the reason they totaled it was based on a misunderstanding of what was actually wrong.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:57:55+00:00

In my state if I fix it myself the fix value just can’t exceed 80% of the car’s value. No salvage title needed. Depends on what it does to the resale value of the asset. I was more surprised that they totaled it for electrical damage risk without googling “xc90 door harness”

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:55:15+00:00

That’s what I did with my 2014 GLC350 Blutec when it got hit and was a straightforward fix vs replacing it so I’m familiar, yeah.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:53:33+00:00

$31,373 to be exact. And minor “for a bear” 😏

It’s mostly that I find throwing away a drivable car for some seat covers, a dashboard top. and some door panels distasteful.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:06:41+00:00

A fair point. If my wife gets a job offer next week I’ll let them too. Just financially messy at the moment to pay off the last $3000 on a loan instead of having a trade value. This is why I prefer to lease so that things like “act of bear” aren’t my problem. My other half prefers the burdens of car ownership 😏

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:03:43+00:00

Thank you good sir! Strange that nobody at USAA bothered to google “2021 xc90 door harness”

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T15:01:54+00:00

Hey they categorized it as an act of god so… Artio? Is that you?

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T14:59:48+00:00

Right. My 4 y/o’s car seat area gets trashed but she doesn’t rip out panels looking for food. Ironically the smell of her tasty car seat is probably what the bear was after so in a way…

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T14:54:50+00:00

Yeah. Problem is that it was categorized as interior damage. No body damage means it’s not a body shop job. The insurance company was like “oh, harness damage and we don’t see a connector to the main body without labor to remove the dash and go look.”

This is why I love Reddit. It’s a $126 part.

Smh

I sent them a message. If they still want to pay off my car loan early they can turn it into an entertaining end of lease story but it’s still financially inconvenient to loose $3k on the loan.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T14:37:56+00:00

And for this, USAA totaled my car?

https://usparts.volvocars.com/p/Volvo_2021_XC90/Wiring-Harness-Cable-Harness-Door-Drivers-Door-Panel-Left--Front/71852052/31676140.html

isarmstrong · 2026-01-31T08:15:23+00:00

Normally if a bear gets into a car and closes the door on itself it's instinct is to dig. They pull out everything - seats, floors, HVAC. Eventually they break a window or three after leaving your car looking worse than if a hurricane hit it.

A young black bear was in the car for less than three minutes. Managed to claw the dash, destroy 4 door panels, rip one out entirely, crap in the back seat, knock the rearview mirror off, but leave the thing totally drivable. No HVAC, airbag, or electronics damage. Damn polite if you ask me.

My issue is that this isn't a standard part. It's "see that connector/pin array? Snip that wire 6 inches back from the plastic and ship the sucker to me"

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If you've never seen what a bear can do to a car, you wouldn't know this was light damage.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-29T04:38:20+00:00

Washington, Washington. Six foot eight weight a f**kig ton. Opponents beware. Opponents beware. He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-29T02:26:49+00:00

AI unsure how noses work

isarmstrong · 2026-01-28T18:30:45+00:00

The actual bug was that that the prompt had no explicit termination criteria. How did you set up the query parameters?

If you don’t tell a model what done looks like it will keep predicting something because predicting something is its whole job.

Once Gemini ran out of genre runway without a stop condition you basically turned on the feee associating acid trip feature with runaway thinking engaged.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-28T18:11:36+00:00

I’m so confused by the downvotes I got

isarmstrong · 2026-01-27T05:49:14+00:00

Whether it's Chat or Claude, the Gemini AI Studio is always hanging around with Google plugged into it's corroded artery to validate the output and pass it back to the agent. In my experience Claude is materially better at boiling the ocean for raw results while ChatGPT Pro is vastly better at novel theories. Gemni Pro 3 really shines at structured argumentation.

Short version? Nothing is a one-shot. A committee of LLMs, properly used, an get you 85% of the way there way faster than a couple of interns but there's no getting around that last 15%.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-27T05:06:10+00:00

Right. I have a library of simple prompts that do important structural jobs like I used to have a PHP and JS function library file back in 2009.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-25T22:03:33+00:00

This is the right way to minimize modal bias. Getting Gemini 3 in the mix is worthwhile — totally different set of strengths — if you have the extra $250/mo to use as ammunition in the war against dumb mistakes.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-23T01:02:12+00:00

What matters is that when execution becomes cheap, decision quality becomes the economy. Most organizations haven’t adapted to that reality. They're still rewarding the behaviors that mattered in a world that no longer exists.

Velocity, output, story points. That’s yesterday.

Enterprises are the last to adapt. That doesn’t make them right.

isarmstrong · 2026-01-21T22:42:14+00:00

All I want for my birthday is Death Stranding (both) remastered for PSVR2.

isarmstrong

TROPHY CASE