Elon Musk loves to speak confidently about shit he knows nothing about. This leads to him being a confident speaker on every topic… I just wish we could figure out a way to shut him up.
Obligatory
The rockets are fine. SpaceX has a team specifically designed to distract Musk and keep him away from the actual work on the rockets. Tesla didn’t have that though. That’s how we ended up with that lame presentation with the weird “S3XY” acromin. That was really the point I realized that he was just an idiot frat boy with too much money. He really is his own worst enemy.
the thing about spacex is everything they do is because of nasa and government.
the only thing spacex has going for it is the fact that they can spend a billion dollars exploding a rocket five times before it slightly works the sixth whereas the government can’t do that.
As someone who does know about this field, and absolute despise Musk, that’s not quite true. SpaceX is very successful thanks to help from the US government, and despite the influence of Musk, but also because they are a team of very competent people who have actually innovated and pushed the boundaries of launch vehicles. To say they have nothing going for them and are being propped up by the government is not at all accurate, and they have been much more succesful than traditional government contractors.
To say they have nothing going for them and are being propped up by the government is not at all accurate
That isn’t what they’re saying though, is it? They’re saying that SpaceX has the ability to fail more than NASA, because they’re not a government organization funded solely by taxes.
Admittedly I think the biggest failures that hurt NASA were incidents when people, not rockets, blew up. It’ll be interesting to see if things change if/when there is a death from a SpaceX rocket.
People die in work related incidents all the time. The only thing different about deaths from NASA incidents is that they are (usually) spectacular incidents (like massive explosions or cabin fires…not good things, just stunning) and high-profile.
SpaceX does well because they basically ignore Elon.
That’s definitely true. That should still not take away from the accomplishments of the SpaceX engineers. ULA had the same exact opportunities but completely wasted them.
Oh sorry yeah that was poorly worded. I don’t mean to say that SpaceX engineers are failures, what they’ve accomplished is nothing short of incredible. But failure is an inevitable part of the engineering process of iterating and improving your solution. NASA doesn’t have the luxury of quick iteration cycles like SpaceX does (comparatively), because each iteration means more money out of the taxpayers’ pockets.
very successful thanks to help from the US government
Yes, it’s a help, not the only thing they have going for them.
At first, I was like, “now that the governments haven’t pursued space for 20-30 years, I think it’s great that the private sector can finally push for space exploration and inventions and space stuff.”
But now…I don’t really like the idea of Space X sending up and downing thousands of satellites including heavy metals through our atmosphere every year, just to keep a shitty proprietary network online.
It’s my atmosphere, but it’s not my network. Space X can fuck off my night sky for all I care.
Also in the next couple of years, they’re expecting so many “retirements” of satellites that they can’t guarantee safety for the people on the ground. They’re literally expecting an “acceptable” number of people to die from this.
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/falling-spacex-satellites-faa-report-space-junk/
Etc.
“‘The problem isn’t the Starlink satellites surviving, reentering, hitting somebody,’ says Moriba Jah, an associate professor at UT Austin. ‘The problem is other older objects.’”
Boeing and Lockheed Martin also spent billions of government dollars blowing up rockets, but SpaceX is still cheaper and delivering faster.
Do not downplay their engineering accomplishments.
What’s your source on the spacex team distracting him? I can’t find anything supporting that. I do find some interviews from anonymous employees saying it’s calmer now that he’s so focused on twitter.
And yet they managed to obliterate a poorly-specced launchpad, causing massive damage to a nearby town and wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem.
I can’t remember NASA ever doing that.
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Maybe I’m out of the loop - what’s he been saying about software?
One example that stuck with me is that he said some shit along the lines of 80% of Twitter’s microservices being superfluous and he’ll be shutting them off.
Yes, the dev teams just spent 4/5 of their time building shit no one asked for. It just annoys me so much, because anyone with basic reasoning should be able to work out that this cannot possibly be the case, but it’s easy to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.
Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.
Yeah. As a software dev, it was pretty awkward explaining this to colleagues who rely on Twitter/X.
“It sounds like you think Twitter is a software company and that Elon is utterly unqualified to run a software company. That can’t possibly be true, right?”
…Then we end up doing the “Concerned Padme” meme…
I’ve heard horror stories on the programming subreddits of incompetent managers that require their employees to write X new lines of code per week. Those code bases probably could have huge chunks taken off.
Clearly that hasn’t happened here
When he took over twitter there was a bunch of stuff he was spouting about things like Twitter’s stack needing a full rewrite and such. Going so far as to fire the engineer that challenged him on it during a live spaces thing if I recall correctly.
Ah yes I remember that. I thought maybe there was something new he was going on about specifically.
He would have to know what he’s talking about to be specific.
You would think so… And yet months of instability on a previously rock solid platform says he did not.
He asked employees to print out their code so he could review it.
He also seems to have the idea that the best developer is the one who produces the most code. That shows a pretty major lack of understanding of how software development works. Sometimes the best day is when you produce negative amounts of code.
This post’s image man
It’s not that hard™
Oh. This post’s image has him talking types in January and the “obligatory” image above has someone saying he’s been talking software in December, so I thought maybe Musk has been spewing about software for a few weeks or something.
December from '22 not '23. The image was from a few months after he took over twitter and was still going on about that stuff and how it was doing all these useless things that needed to be removed or rewritten. I just remembered another one about how he was going on about a single request to twitter causing thousands of RPCs or something? I think that’s not really unheard of in a microservices infrastructure and it’s not like they’d be synchronous. There’s probably tons of calls that go to things like tracking, analytics, or cross DC sharing I would imagine for such a large and high volume service like twitter.
Okay gotcha. Yeah I just thought I missed a new headline or something.
needed to be removed or rewritten
Literally any developer can tell you that. It doesn’t even matter what codebase we’re talking about. It always needs to be rewritten.
Twitter is a software, he’s been saying stupid stuff about how it works for the last year+
Okay gotcha. Thought maybe there was a headline I missed.
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Well, not spreading his posts or not reacting to things he says is probably the best way.
If reacting to something always makes it more likely to occur, you have just made reacting to things Elon Musk says more likely to occur.
The irony isn’t lost on me, but it’s not always. It’s just a good way to handle attention seeking people that you don’t want to seek attention anymore.
Well, looking at ChatGPT and other LLMs, they also lie confidently. Maybe there is a correlation and Elon is just a poor AI.
He doesn’t notice he’s the Duning-Kruger effect personified.
Oh, thanks for pointing that out.
I was formulating an angry rebuttal in my head, then saw your comment and realised I hadn’t noticed the username. Of course it’s Musk. That’s rebuttal enough.
Press X (formerly Twitter) to Doubt
Fuck me, that’s good. I noticed the X after my first laugh attack and had a second one. Fuck you dude, my ribs hurt.
Remember when people were calling this dummy the “real life Tony Stark”? Lol.
I was one of those. In my defense, 2012-2015(ish) he really was doing cool things. Tesla and Space X were super innovative and brought optimism. Then a time traveler stepped on a bug, the whole Thailand pedophile fiasco happened and it went downhill from there. Now we have yokes, dumb turn signals and the whole cybertruck, not to mention removing ultrasound sensors to save a few cents and the whole Twitter debacle. At least space X is still somehow unfucked?
In case it helps… I’m sorry.
he really was doing cool things.
He was buying cool things
The thing is after Peter Thiel made him a multi-billionaire against his best efforts, he did actually put that capital into industries that desperately needed someone to prove to the boomers that you could, and should, make money in them.
There’s a whole lot to say about his credit stealing, ego, and the system itself, but the fact remains he does have an eye for talent (that he can exploit for gain)
So, sure, he was just the bankroll, but that doesn’t mean the companies didn’t desperately need that.
That’s fair enough!
I’m just so used to people calling him an engineer and an inventor, while, as you say, the cool things he did were as an investor.
I think the problem was he started to believe his own hype that he was a super-genius that knew everything about everything.
I mean I don’t know the nitty gritty details of building an electric car or building rockets. But neither does Elon Musk. Which would be fine except that he tries to talk about these things like he does understand all of the details. Nobody knows everything about everything, it’s only an idiot that tries to act like he does.
But then he tries talking like he’s an expert in a field I am familiar with and it’s like… there’s points people could make on this subject, but that’s not one of them.
Same. Can’t judge about auto industry or rocket science, but I know a thing or two about software. And… Yeah, everything he’s said about Twitter internals (and sw dev in general) is brain dead.
I think he always believed his own hype. Heck there was a point where I was somewhat into his hype.
Though I never liked Tesla’s interior design philosophy of “just put all the controls on a giant tablet and call it a day”
Truth is we didn’t know enough about him to gain an opinion. So imaginations ran wild. I mean there are people who have been saying how bad he was since the whole PayPal thing. It’s just those companies weren’t big enough at the time for it to gain any gravity in the public eye.
Then Tesla and spaceX happened, and people thought what he was doing was awesome, because a lot of it was and it was easy to look past the parts that weren’t.
Now however the fact he can’t keep his mouth shut and has become a twitter addict has kinda ruined our public opinion on him. If he had just stayed quiet and not bothered with the whole buying twitter thing, people might not care much about him. And the Epstein stuff and affairs and shit didn’t help him one bit. He’s right to mistrust the media - that shit is like a gourmet breakfast for them.
Basically he revealed himself in the public for what he truly is. A cold blooded greedy ass tycoon with an ego the size of the planets he’s trying to colonise, with a modern style nerd-hipster science theming and old school conservative ideals.
I accept and believe your apology. Just pop yourself in the nose once, and we’re totally square buddy.
its amazing how elon was once so milquetoast and inoffensive that he was a guest on the big bang theory and then he was like you know whats good? nazis.
What you mean? He is!
The netflix adaptation… Lmao
If it’s a Netflix adaptation, then wouldn’t it be an overly drawn out true crime documentary?
We could always start a theory that Elon is the Zodiac Killer. He probably doesn’t deserve that level of notoriety, but it would make for an overly drawn out crime documentary. Just bring in some “experts” off of Ancient Aliens, along with the phrase “could it be” so you have some standing when you’re inevitably sued for slander.
How can we start a rumor that ElMu is the Zodiac Killer when everyone knows that Rafael “Ted” Cruz was the Zodiac Killer?
I think you mean The Asylum version of Tony Stark.
At least around 2015 when SpaceX landed a rocket for the first time, it really does look like he’s the real life Tony Stark. People change, sometimes for the worse.
That one line in Star Trek Discovery is more hilarious by the day. I have no fucking idea what the writers were thinking.
Which line?
The one where Captain Lorca lists the Wright Brothers, Cochrane (the inventor of warp drive in the ST universe), and Elon Musk as tech visionaries of their eras.
Ah thought so just wanted to confirm. Yeah I think I dropped the show not much later than that line.
Well, Tony Stark is a fictional character in a fictional universe, so real science or how the real world works in general don’t need to apply to him and he only needs to conjure up some cool sounding tech words for the audience and the plot will do the rest. So Elon Musk is indeed like Tony Stark, only issue is he is also indeed the real life version so has no plot to back him up and all the rules of real life still apply.
It didn’t hurt that he was in Iron Man 2. Pepper for some reason is bending over backwards to be deferential to him in the early Monte Carlo scene.
He’s the kinda guy whose only programming experience is learning Python for 3 hours 6 years ago, yet he thinks he’s the programming god.
musk the kind of guy that if he said Java is here to stay, I would start learning another language.
It’s kinda amazing how someone can work so hard to sabotage their own public image.
Musk wants Twitter to fail. He bid on it for a laugh and when his bid was accepted he tried to get out of it.
They made him buy it and he’s been butthurt ever since. He wants everyone involved to suffer, because then the decision to hold him accountable was a bad decision.
He doesn’t give a fuck about people, or technology, or even the money he sunk on it. So it looks like he’s shaving his eyebrows to spite his face. It doesn’t hurt, so he doesn’t care.
4D chess isn’t real. Sometimes, rich and powerful people do dumb things. Sometimes they’re not very smart and have a visible personality disorder. Searching for an underlying clever motive is an exercise in your intelligence - not theirs.
I don’t think “they made me buy it so I’m breaking it” is really a 4D move. It’s more like a 4th grade move.
“So” is the mistake. He’s not breaking it on purpose. He’s just a fucking idiot. He is exactly as smug and incompetent as he appears.
“I’m going to do what I want despite all advice and consequences” doesn’t need to be intentional or unintentional to be what it is
… and what it is, is completely different from secretly pursuing a complex goal that only looks like an idiot immune to good ideas.
In light of recent accusations: an idiot off his tits on meth, and immune to good ideas.
He’s not hurting the people who made him buy it.
If he really wanted to be rid of it he could have instead done nothing. Put someone in charge with the impossible task of “make this profitable in 5 years” and then shut it down after 5 years because “it’s not profitable”.
Showing his ass to the world and ruining future potential for investment by looking like an incompetent idiot is not a “secretly intelligent move”.
Sure he’s not hurting them, but he’ll still keep riding the pony into the ground, because he owns it, he’ll do what he wants. He’s not making intelligent moves, because his choices aren’t reasoned they are just whims.
Right, he’s an idiot.
What? The people who made him buy it got paid already. I’m sure they’re laughing every time they see it drop in value.
They’re probably doubly laughing because he fired them for supposed incompetence, yet Elon tanking the price is evidence that they were doing a much better job. You could very well see a suit for wrongful termination in the future.
You underestimate his incompetence
Clearly this man has never read a book on type theory or compiler construction.
Clearly this man has never read a book
Clearly this man has never read
Clearly this man has never
this isn’t a joke. you haven’t made a joke.
Clearly this man is fun at parties…/s
See I get what you were doing there, it was funny. But the downvotes thought you were putting down the thread jokes for real. You were basically pointing out that the best jokes are actual life.
Yea, they’re just spitting facts. Elon would have to be an actual man to ever.
Truly one of the statements of all time
Yeah, it’s just rude. I have never, and it’s a serious condition.
Clearly this man has never been to a party
This man…
There’s some evidence that he read Atlas Shrugged, which is about a poor executive who “suffers” under increasing government regulation. It’s like a bible for CEOs
Who are you quoting?
That other poster is likely trying to deliver a point, that Musk probably never read a book, by clipping the sentence of the other poster.
Yeah, this is a classic example of a problem that looks very simple if you haven’t researched it at all, but it’s an absolute mess once you start digging into the details.
Shut the fuck up, Lonny. You’re out of your element.
I’m the Tony Stark.
For the curious, this is about as easy as it gets for proper type inference. You could leave out the one or other thing (most prominently, polymorphism), but that kind of stuff would hardly qualify as even a toy example.
I won’t claim that J. Random Hacker will have issues understanding it – it’s a neatly tied bundle of necessary complexity without any distracting parts (like efficiency), if you sit down with the thing (ideally starting the whole series from the beginning) you’ll be able to grok it (and have learned a lot). However, understanding HM isn’t the same as being able to extend it, which includes proving soundness of the system, that kind of stuff is a specialised field within a specialised field within academia with more open questions than answered ones. The reason Rust doesn’t have HKTs? Because their interaction with lifetimes is insufficiently understood. Those kinds of questions can easily start 20+ years of research only to be answered with “yep that’s inherently unsound/uncomputable/whatever”.
Oh, EDIT, forgot: AI-enabled typing is obviously a completely braindead idea. I don’t need a second lazy, impatient, hubristic idiot looking at my code, I need something to catch mistakes. Something deterministic, rule-based, pure unerring logic. Which is exactly what type systems are and do.
This must be one of the best comments I have read so far on lemmy. Thank you. :)
AI-enabled typing is obviously a completely braindead idea.
I agree. However, and I know I’m practically reading tea leaves here, but I read that last line as a suggestion that AI would replace programming outright.
Musk’s greatest innovative genius is finding new ways to be annoying.
Elon what the fuck are you talking about
Apparently he thought the conversation was about whether or not a compiler can understand a type at compile time. The answer is yes. Yes they can. But I’d love to see Elon struggle through the description of why he thinks it’s “easy” and why what he said is relevant.
whether or not a compiler can understand a type at compile time
In many / most(?) compiled languages that’s because the type is specified at compile time. With interpreted languages that’s often not the case, and in that case determining the type can be extremely hard.
Quick, somebody teach this man JavaScript.
Actually on second thought, let’s just give him a marble notebook and crayons and tell him that’s JavaScript.
A notebook and crayons? I think you’d just get back stick figure-esque drawings of cybertrucks with notes like “bulletproof” and “anti-gas attack”.
Just like the poor Tesla design team.
Wasn’t PayPal coded in PHP? That might explain a lot of things…
JESUS CHRIST MAN! Is the internet still not broken enough for you!?!?
That’s a load bearing “done right”.
starting to see why twitter breaks every day since elon bought it
elon is basically chip morehead from the chipadmin episode of sales guy vs web dude
There’s no “arrange-by-penis”.
He definitely wants a programming language where the array indicies start at 69 and end at 420.
Maybe he’ll ask AI to make it for him.
1 == “1”
It’s not that hard
