this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 345 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The French had a pretty good way of shutting up insufferable rich asshats.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Does it rhyme with “vaseline”?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I’ll grab my gasoline

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Maybe I'm out of the loop - what's he been saying about software?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This post’s image man

It’s not that hard(tm)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Twitter is a software, he's been saying stupid stuff about how it works for the last year+

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

He asked employees to print out their code so he could review it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Well, looking at ChatGPT and other LLMs, they also lie confidently. Maybe there is a correlation and Elon is just a poor AI.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

He doesn't notice he's the Duning-Kruger effect personified.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

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.