• @[email protected]
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    251 year ago

    I remember hearing a while back that Musk made an executive decision at Tesla to not use LIDAR. I thought: “That’s a stupid decision. At least invest in making it better if you think its not sufficient” and I had a quite negative view of his engineering abilities ever since. Seeing as a Tesla can be fooled by a projector these days, I’m willing to die on that hill. I will admit that he is an exceptional businessman, most people would piss away a fortune if given one, but an engineer he is not, not by a loooooooong way.

    • @[email protected]
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      91 year ago

      I mean, you still need object detection and recognition with lidar, don’t want to stamp on the brakes for a leaf.
      And using only the primary sense of humans does kinda make sense.

      still think it’s tough call. Would be great if you don’t need it. And don’t know how expensive it would have been, especially at the start for all the people needing the hardware but not actually getting the use out of it.

      otoh the only really successfull company in the space - waymo - uses it, that seems like a really strong sign

      • @[email protected]
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        101 year ago

        Yeah, in my mind I thought of it more as a “why not” in addition to vision. Like why make it only as capable as the humans its trying to replace when it can have even more data to work with? Probably would have been even more expensive though

  • Hot Saucerman
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    1 year ago

    If there’s anything the new millennium has taught me, it’s that rich people are only successful because they already had money or because they’re ruthless, cruel, assholes. (Elon ticks both of those boxes.)

    Twenty-three years on, it’s totally clear that rich people are no smarter than poor people and all the people arguing that poor people have a “future planning deficit” because they have so much more they have to think about to stay afloat are actually proving poor people are probably smarter than the rich, ACKSHUALLY.

    Because if poor people can figure out these rich jerks are making piss poor decisions that have no long-term planning involved, while they don’t have the same crushing weight of poverty hanging over them, it must mean they’re the dumbest of dumb fucks.

    Climate change is the proof in the pudding that the rich have just as bad (if not worse) long-term planning skills than the poor. They’re willing to throw away the future of the entire fucking planet for MOAR PROFIT NAOW.

    • Saik0
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      101 year ago

      Because if poor people can figure out these rich jerks are making piss poor decisions that have no long-term planning involved, while they don’t have the same crushing weight of poverty hanging over them, it must mean they’re the dumbest of dumb fucks.

      This is legit something I try to explain all the time to people. The answer ultimately is as simple as “life is not fair”.

      This is also the same logic as to why I automatically dislike people who happen to just fanboy for famous people in general. That basketball player you idolized might not have the slightest clue about economics… So looking to them for economic-based political views doesn’t really make sense.

    • @gizmonicus
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      11 year ago

      Being poor is expensive in so many ways. If you can buy things with cash, you don’t pay interest rates on anything or carry high interest balances on CCs. You can buy nice modern cars with a warranty that won’t break down all the time and cost money to constantly repair. Like the linked article says, you don’t have to waste energy and mental cycles on thinking how you can feed your kids today, and spend it instead on your career or investing your money. Having no money is a trap. It’s very hard to get out of that situation unless you start from a position of privilege.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          111 year ago

          He bought Twitter. And fired everyone, and broke the entire thing, and just after that people started realizing that he is, in fact, an idiot.

                • Hot Saucerman
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                  1 year ago

                  I kind of wish I knew the identity of the kid in question… so I could shake his hand.

                  Also, memory of this incident is likely why his mom canceled the cage fight. She remembers him being hospitalized in a fight.

  • @[email protected]
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    -71 year ago

    Yes, you know how people who don’t know what they’re doing routinely start super successful car companies and massively successful space exploration companies that launch more mass to space than the rest of the world combined, any chump can do that, trillion dollar car companies grow on fucking trees!

    Elon haters are fucking pathetic.

    • pancakes
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      31 year ago

      Well when your dad owns an emerald mine, you come from insane wealth and privilege, you don’t “start” businesses rather just buy the work from under the people who actually built the business, and throw a weekly temper tantrum on social media because someone hurt your feelings, it’s pretty easy.

      It’s wild that Elon fanboys actually attribute much of his success to him. His operating of Twitter alone shows what a colossal failure and idiot he is.

      • @[email protected]
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        -11 year ago

        His father owned stocks in an emerald mine, he didn’t own the whole thing, his father also beat the everloving shit out of him on a regular basis.

        Second, twitter, for the first time since its founding, has a chance to be profitable, if that is a “colossal failiure”, you’re delusional.

        I don’t care how much you like him or hate him, but to assign all the bad things that happen to his companies as his fault, and to assign all successes of his companies to someone else is intellectually dishonest.

        • pancakes
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          1 year ago

          His father owned stocks in an emerald mine, he didn’t own the whole thing

          Weird to split hairs like this when the result of being part owner in the emerald mine meant “We had so much money we couldn’t even close our safe.” (Elon Musk, 2018). Sorry if I don’t worship the ground of an entitled, mega-priviledged, rich kid who was funded by his father.

          …twitter, for the first time since its founding, has a chance to be profitable…

          There is 0 evidence of this and if you live in the real world, you’d know this is not how things work. Just because a group of delusional incels view him as a messiah, doesn’t mean the market agrees. Everything he’s done since buying Twitter shows how disconnected to reality he is.

          • @[email protected]
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            01 year ago

            In the grand scheme of things, his fathers money was a drop in the bucket, you can call him mega-priviledged all you want, if the world gave you ten times the amount of money musk’s father gave him(a figure that still hasn’t been given, so it might be zero, considering his relationship with his father), you couldn’t do 1/10th of what he did. Until he sold x.com, his mother was living in a rent-controlled apartment. Also, i didn’t know that having your father beat you was a privilege.

            The evidance is that musk hasn’t needed to sell any more tesla stock to cover the company’s expenses.

            Look, mate, I’m not trying to convince you, if you’re looking for a boogieman, you’ll find him. Whether it’s musk or bezos or zuck or bill or whomever, doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Hahahaha…he didn’t start Tesla or spaceX

      He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as “co-founders” and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

      There’s speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

      Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I’d still be singing his praises… Except he hasn’t.

      He’s not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

      Every time he’s tried to start something, it failed - he can’t build a team to save his life.

      He’s good at hype and having money, I used to say “he’s a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up… That’s not the worst thing to be”.

      Now? He’s convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They’re driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

      I can’t say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could’ve done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn’t have done it from scratch