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.

[–] vis4valentine@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He is now pissing away a fortune with twitter.

[–] vcmj@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

True that, he did good on that front for a while though. He got too confident

[–] TheYang@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] vcmj@programming.dev 10 points 1 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

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 10 points 1 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.

[–] Cayenne05dingos@geddit.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What happened?

[–] vis4valentine@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

its an ironic meme about people who just realized Elon is an idiot.

[–] thedarkfly@feddit.nl 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did Musk do something that made people realize he's an idiot?

[–] vis4valentine@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] primalmotion@lemmy.antisocial.ly 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, he left a lot of clues that he is a total idiot well before buying twitter

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Like making fun of a fellow student in elementary school for their father committing suicide until the kid threw Musk down a flight of stairs. Even his dad Errol had no sympathy for that one.

He's literally been a fucking shitheel his whole life.

[–] primalmotion@lemmy.antisocial.ly 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dang it.. so close..

[–] dingus@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Literally every single billionaire.

[–] Galven@lemm.ee -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Flemmy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 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

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