5 ms·

Musk’s reality distortion field must visibly bend light. He manages to accomplish so much, but also manages to peddle a lot of absolute monorail-level bullshit.

• fastball 6y ago
  That article has very TSLAQ-type vibes, and in fact links to two TSLAQ sites at the bottom. None of which are honest about how things have progressed.
  • perardi 6y ago
    I…don’t even know what TSLAQ is, but, where’s that Hyperloop, battery swapping, and robotaxi?
    • fastball 6y ago
      TSLAQ is a coordinated effort by TSLA short-sellers to generate as much bad press about Tesla as possible in order to tank the price and make money on their short positions. Ensuring said bad press is accurate/fair is certainly not the primary goal. Disclaimer: I don't own any TSLA stock.
    • crazypython 6y ago
      > TSLAQ is a loose, international[1] collective of largely anonymous short-sellers,[2] skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO, Elon Musk.[3] The group primarily organizes on Twitter, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag,[4] and Reddit[5] to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. > Tesla Ticker Symbol + "Q" which is the NASDAQ notation for bankruptcy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSLAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSLAQ
    • nickik 6y ago
      First of all, Musk literally never said he would develop a Hyperloop. He literally said, here is an idea, I'm not gone do it, somebody else might want to try. Why don't people understand this? Tesla had a battery swapping but realized it was a terrible idea and instead built the largest global chairing network in the world instead. Are you seriously gone shit on somebody because they changed strategy with more information and build something that is actually more impressive? Yes, he was wrong about Robotaxi, or at least its delayed. Nobody bats 100%. But if you are actually honest with yourself and start in 2000 and look what he said, compared to what he did. Literally nobody else on the planet predictions are closer to what actually happened in terms of large scale problems.
  • rainyMammoth 6y ago
    Ah yes because any voiced criticism of Tesla must be rooted into big short money.
    • fastball 6y ago
      No, because TSLAQ is literally mentioned in one of those website's footer.
• api 6y ago
  It's because of the former that he is able to command the latter. Musk isn't super-human. He's a good engineer with great intuition for how to solve hard problems and a good "first principles" approach. He also has a great work ethic. There are tons of Elon Musks around. What's rare is people as visionary and competent as him who are also rich and well-connected. Having someone who actually knows something in a position to make decisions about the allocation of large amounts of capitol yields results so amazing that they appear super-human, which buys him a hell of a reality distortion field and a lot of slack for being eccentric. Musk got rich more or less by accident. The systems that advance people to those heights select for competence in the areas of social and financial advancement, not practical engineering or creativity, hence his rarity. Of course today it's probably better than it ever has been in all of history. Historically the way to wealth and power was to brainwash a large number of people into killing (and risking their lives) for you and then sitting back and reaping the reward. That's still a thing, but at least now there are other routes.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/5uqpA3beAhc https://youtu.be/5uqpA3beAhc I used to think like you, then I see these driverless demonstrations and negotiated left turns with zero user interaction. I have this feeling that we will be surprised like we were when AlphaGO won...
  • arithmomachist 6y ago
    Being able to steer the car effectively is only one part of an enormously complex engineering problem. A fully autonomous vehicle would need to: 1. Be robust to bad visibility, not an easy task in computer vision. 2. Have access to extremely detailed maps that include things like driveways and parking lots. These maps would need to be continuously updated. The labor required to make and maintain such maps will limit how many places cars can be fully autonomous. 3. Understand the etiquette of the road. For example, a person seeing a car stop in the street near a parking spot would assume the car is about to parallel park and give it room to pull off the maneuver. An autonomous vehicle wouldn't give it so much room, because it can't reason about context in that way. 4. Negotiate ambiguous situations requiring interaction with other drivers. There are frequently situations where it's not clear who has the right of way from the rules of the road. People resolve these by gesturing with their hands and with their cars. A fully autonomous vehicle would need to understand these signals.
    • michaelmrose 6y ago
      Number 4 is just a deal breaker you can easier expect a car to reason about what other cars are doing, or trying to do, than respond to human gesticulation. One might easier imagine cars communicating with one another over a local connection of some sort.
    • ganstyles 6y ago
      Curious about 2. I don't have these and I've never been in a car accident. Presumably the onboard sensors would tell the autonomous car what to avoid?
• bob33212 6y ago
  He has been pretty honest that predicting the maximum of a derivative of an S-curve is very hard.
• dheera 6y ago
  Personally I think he understands everything. The problem is the stock market and SEC which set up laws that encourage and incentivize bullshitting. Everything from letting a free market full of idiots to determine prices, to quarterly earnings reports, is set up to encourage every form of BS. If we want to optimize for reducing bullshit, the stock market and rules around it need to be restructured.
• amelius 6y ago
  Musk is just a brand created by investors to secure their investments.
  • wtf_is_up 6y ago
    Tesla's best product is their stock.