4 ms·

> Anyone who has had to do with the manufacturing side of car makers (German ones anyway) knows how highly optimized from end-to-end their processes are. It see

by mk89 9y ago

> Anyone who has had to do with the manufacturing side of car makers (German ones anyway) knows how highly optimized from end-to-end their processes are. It seems doubtful that anyone could leapfrog this amount of accumulated process knowledge and optimization simply by way of being new. I think with this way of thinking there will never be progress. It's thanks to this try-and-fail that this man was able to build things that nobody thought to be feasible. We are talking about mistakes that were done in the '80s, meaning that this man is trying to leverage what we have nowadays and he still can't, which is pretty sad, considering how advanced we think of ourselves compared to 40 years ago. Sometimes it's this way of thinking that really prevents innovation: we tried, it didn't work. Sure, you tried under different circumstances, I am quite sure you gave up on that for whatever reason and you are fine with it. Good lesson. However, there will be a new generation that will make it, no matter all your "I told you so". I want to see if in the future, when we'll have highly developed AIs, we will think "oh, 200 years ago we tried already and it didn't work".

blattimwind 9y ago
This is about punching pieces of metal into a car, not about inventing a sentient AI for 4D chess.
- mk89 9y ago
  Sorry, but this comment is really diminishing the entire purpose of years and years of studies in AI.
  - mk89 9y ago
    I think I misunderstood the parent comment. I can't delete the answer, though :) sorry about that!
dannyw 9y ago
Well, trying to build AI using failed papers from the 1980s have near zero value today. What Tesla is doing is like building a modern app but refusing to do A/B tests or code review or version control, generally universally accepted methods in the current industry, and going back to re-try software development patterns of the 1980s that failed.
- otoburb 9y ago
  >>Well, trying to build AI using failed papers from the 1980s have near zero value today. I think if you had picked any other example you'd have been correct, but many current-day AI advances are based on decades old techniques. One caption from an article about Geoff Hinton states: "This publication from the mid-1980s showed how to train a neural network with many layers. It set the stage for this decade’s progress in AI."[1] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one...
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Cheers for the correction!
ubernostrum 9y ago
The issue is not one of carefully acknowledging the past and noting that some of its lessons don't apply. The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture. This is why the n-gate summaries love to describe Hacker News reinventing everything from first principles -- there's this ingrained assumption that it's literally impossible for anyone outside of SV to have ever had any kind of relevant experience or possessed any kind of relevant knowledge, and so there's no point in studying the history at all. Tesla is now learning, in a very painful way, why hubris is traditionally considered a major flaw, and that maybe this stuff is harder than they thought and they could have benefited from standing on the shoulders of some giants.
- mk89 9y ago
  > The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture. Is that the same arrogance of the opposite party saying "I told you so, son"? I have never been in the Silicon Valley, so I won't talk about that. Yet, I think that this mentality creates at least 1 good thing after trying 99 times. I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path, that you need to always follow what your "parents" have been telling you, etc - and this is due to the environment I live in, unfortunately. If Musk had been able to achieve what he had envisioned, now we would be talking about something totally different - OMG, what a genius, how come we didn't come up with that earlier? How come this young man made something we thought impossible, despite all the studies, etc.? And so forth. That's the same cowardice that doesn't allow us to think further, to think bigger. He does, he fails, he tries, he fails again, and who knows, maybe he makes it. If he doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. Without that way of thinking, we wouldn't have put our foot on the Moon.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path Who said it has to? I didn't. What I said was that Silicon-Valley-type people often display a certain amount of hubris in believing that nobody else has ever done what they're trying to do, and therefore disregard free knowledge that others obtained at great expense. Musk is attempting the revolutionary, never-before-heard-of, herculean task of... building a factory to make cars. Strip away all the PR-speak from Musk's and Tesla's public announcements and statements, and that's what you find underneath. "Build a car factory" is not a new problem. We have over a century of prior art on things people have tried, what succeeded and what failed. It's the willful ignoring of this prior art that I'm complaining about; other companies have learned about the advantages and disadvantages of automation, for example, but the whole enterprise of Tesla is wrapped up in so much mythology around breaking new ground and being completely new that they were constitutionally incapable of admitting "yeah, this is a thing other people have done, too, maybe we should study how it went for them and learn from that".
threeseed 9y ago
> I think with this way of thinking there will never be progress. This position is completely fair. But the company taking these risks should never, ever have been Tesla.
buvanshak 9y ago
>It's thanks to this try-and-fail that this man was able to build things that nobody thought to be feasible. Can you list a couple of things that this man built, that everyone thought not possible?

by mk89 9y ago

blattimwind 9y ago

This is about punching pieces of metal into a car, not about inventing a sentient AI for 4D chess.

mk89 9y ago
Sorry, but this comment is really diminishing the entire purpose of years and years of studies in AI.
- mk89 9y ago
  I think I misunderstood the parent comment. I can't delete the answer, though :) sorry about that!

dannyw 9y ago

Well, trying to build AI using failed papers from the 1980s have near zero value today. What Tesla is doing is like building a modern app but refusing to do A/B tests or code review or version control, generally universally accepted methods in the current industry, and going back to re-try software development patterns of the 1980s that failed.

otoburb 9y ago
>>Well, trying to build AI using failed papers from the 1980s have near zero value today. I think if you had picked any other example you'd have been correct, but many current-day AI advances are based on decades old techniques. One caption from an article about Geoff Hinton states: "This publication from the mid-1980s showed how to train a neural network with many layers. It set the stage for this decade’s progress in AI."[1] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one...
- dannyw 9y ago
  Cheers for the correction!

ubernostrum 9y ago

The issue is not one of carefully acknowledging the past and noting that some of its lessons don't apply. The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture. This is why the n-gate summaries love to describe Hacker News reinventing everything from first principles -- there's this ingrained assumption that it's literally impossible for anyone outside of SV to have ever had any kind of relevant experience or possessed any kind of relevant knowledge, and so there's no point in studying the history at all. Tesla is now learning, in a very painful way, why hubris is traditionally considered a major flaw, and that maybe this stuff is harder than they thought and they could have benefited from standing on the shoulders of some giants.

mk89 9y ago
> The issue is how Musk typifies a certain sort of arrogance that runs through much of Silicon Valley tech culture. Is that the same arrogance of the opposite party saying "I told you so, son"? I have never been in the Silicon Valley, so I won't talk about that. Yet, I think that this mentality creates at least 1 good thing after trying 99 times. I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path, that you need to always follow what your "parents" have been telling you, etc - and this is due to the environment I live in, unfortunately. If Musk had been able to achieve what he had envisioned, now we would be talking about something totally different - OMG, what a genius, how come we didn't come up with that earlier? How come this young man made something we thought impossible, despite all the studies, etc.? And so forth. That's the same cowardice that doesn't allow us to think further, to think bigger. He does, he fails, he tries, he fails again, and who knows, maybe he makes it. If he doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. Without that way of thinking, we wouldn't have put our foot on the Moon.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path Who said it has to? I didn't. What I said was that Silicon-Valley-type people often display a certain amount of hubris in believing that nobody else has ever done what they're trying to do, and therefore disregard free knowledge that others obtained at great expense. Musk is attempting the revolutionary, never-before-heard-of, herculean task of... building a factory to make cars. Strip away all the PR-speak from Musk's and Tesla's public announcements and statements, and that's what you find underneath. "Build a car factory" is not a new problem. We have over a century of prior art on things people have tried, what succeeded and what failed. It's the willful ignoring of this prior art that I'm complaining about; other companies have learned about the advantages and disadvantages of automation, for example, but the whole enterprise of Tesla is wrapped up in so much mythology around breaking new ground and being completely new that they were constitutionally incapable of admitting "yeah, this is a thing other people have done, too, maybe we should study how it went for them and learn from that".

threeseed 9y ago

> I think with this way of thinking there will never be progress. This position is completely fair. But the company taking these risks should never, ever have been Tesla.

buvanshak 9y ago

>It's thanks to this try-and-fail that this man was able to build things that nobody thought to be feasible. Can you list a couple of things that this man built, that everyone thought not possible?