bluerabbit

He is a capitalist applying capitalist solutions to problems. You don't have to like capitalists but for all its flaws the system does function, and taking a profit is table stakes. The consumer who opts in to his way of doing things gets a car with a reduced dependency on fossil fuels, advanced safety features, and some level of self-driving capabilities. On the flip side they are deeply proprietary, in constant communication with the mothership and very expensive. For everyone else, Tesla is pushing the industry along so we will get more EVs to choose from sooner than we might otherwise have done. Can you really say his activities are anti-consumer? I don't think so - it's just that you and I are not his target consumer.

The real damage of Facebook is their monopoly created through network effects. I am not anticipating a monopoly on electric cars or internet access any time soon.

Yes, it's fair to say he's kind of a dick but it's not the full story. His goals for electric vehicles and universal internet access are noble ones. Wanting to put people on Mars seems like a waste of time to me, but so are most human pursuits and this one's at least interesting. His use of social media is juvenile. His attempt to help the kids trapped in the cave was ham-fisted attention-seeking. I don't give a toss if he smokes weed, that's not my business.

I'm not going to try to put him on a single-axis scale of good/bad. Doing so is a popular hobby among those who wish to have endless arguments with the "other" on social media. The guy's useful for some things but not others.

I really like Rust but there are lots of situations I wouldn't use it. Some examples:

• If I want very strict control over dependencies, a very small number of dependencies, or dependencies with specific/trusted origin.
• If I was building software that won't be actively maintained for years but might need adjustments later. The Rust ecosystem is a fast-moving target and upgrading a library could cause a huge cascade of other changes.
• For the most hassle-free integration with an important library like Qt, particularly if a Qt GUI is the main point of my application.
• Most web front-end. Using WASM to control the DOM with glue code is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
• (?) Probably most event-driven apps like GUIs. Rust's lifetimes mostly stay out of your way but they only work on the stack. Synchronisation between potentially multiple threads is very in-your-face and explicit, compared with say Java's "synchronized" methods. It's only early days for Rust GUI frameworks so I will wait and see. Maybe they'll come up with something great.