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.
The French had a pretty good way of shutting up insufferable rich asshats.
Does it rhyme with “vaseline”?
Yes. Yes it does :D
I’ll grab my Ovaltine.
I’ll grab my gasoline
Obligatory
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I’m out of the loop - what’s he been saying about software?
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.
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
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…
This post’s image man
It’s not that hard™
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.
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.
Twitter is a software, he’s been saying stupid stuff about how it works for the last year+
He asked employees to print out their code so he could review it.
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.
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.
Well, looking at ChatGPT and other LLMs, they also lie confidently. Maybe there is a correlation and Elon is just a poor AI.
He doesn’t notice he’s the Duning-Kruger effect personified.
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.
Yes the compiler/interpreter can figure it out on the fly, that’s what we mean by untyped languages. And as stated both have their merits and their faults.
Elon doesn’t know what the words mean and just chimes in with his AI future BS.
Yes the compiler/interpreter can figure it out on the fly, that’s what we mean by untyped languages.
Are there untyped languages? You probably meant ‘dynamically typed languages’.
But even statically typed languages can figure out most types for you from the context - it’s called ‘type inference’.
Most of my code is untyped. First I type it, then I realize it’s all wrong and use backspace to untype it.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve read all week. Congrats. Lol
Assembly probably? So low level you kinda just play with bits. That’s all I can think of for an untyped language. Everything else I’m aware of is dynamically or statically typed
I kind of feel like “untyped” is a term that doesn’t really have a proper definition right now. As far as I can tell when people say “untyped” they usually mean it as a synonym for whatever they consider “dynamically typed” to mean (which also seems to vary a bit from person to person, haha). Sometimes people say assembly is untyped exactly for this reason, but you could also consider it to have one type “bits” and all of the operations just do things on bits (although, arguably different sized registers have different types). Similarly, people sometimes consider “dynamically typed languages” to just be “unityped” (maybe monotyped is more easily distinguished from untyped, haha) languages at their core, and if you squint you can just think of the dynamic type checks as a kind of pattern matching on a giant sum type.
In some sense values always have types because you could always classify them into types externally, and you could even consider a value to be a member of multiple types (often programming languages with type systems don’t allow this and force unique types for every value). Because you could always classify values under a type it feels kind of weird to refer to languages as being “untyped”, but it’s also kind of weird to refer to a language as “typed” when there isn’t really any meaningful typing information and there’s no type system checking the “types” of values. Types sort of always exist, but also sort of only exist when you actually make the distinctions and have something that you call a “type system”… In some sense the distinction between static and dynamic typing is sort of an arbitrary implementation detail too (though, of course, it has impacts on the experience of programming, and the language design makes a bit of a difference in terms of what’s decidable :) (and obviously the type system can determine what programs you consider to be “valid”)… But you can absolutely have a mix of static type checking and dynamic typing, for instance… It’s all a little more wishy washy than people tend to think in my opinion).
Well like asembly has “int types” and “float types” as there’s specific instructions for those operations but those instructions don’t actually care if the bits are for a float or an int. Types in a language are used to restrict the valid operations. In a statically typed language you cannot call
cat.bark()ordog.meow()because the property’s of the type, what things you can do with it are known before the program runs. In a dynamically typed language such as Pythoncat.bark()might or might not be valid so it has to check at runtime for a method throwing an error if it doesn’t exist.Static/Dynamic typing is a difference of when. Java has static typing but you can also just pass raw Objects around and cast when needed. It even throws a runtime exception similar to how Python or JavaScript would fail. However Java is of course ultimately statically typed everything just shares a common parent class and has types at runtime which allows for some some psudo dynamic behavior
There’s operations that treat bits like floats and operations that treat them like various kinds of ints, but the meaning of bits is in the eye of the beholder. There’s even good examples of mixing and matching integer and floating point operations to clever effect, like with the infamous fast inverse square root. I feel like people often think mathematical objects mean something beyond what they are, when often math is kind of just math and it is what it is (if that makes sense… it’s kind of like anthropomorphizing mathematical objects and viewing them through a specific lens, as opposed to just seeing them as the set of axioms that they are). That’s kind of how I feel with this stuff. You can treat the bits however you want and it’s not like integer operations and bitwise operations have no meaning on supposedly floating point values, they do something (and mixing these different types of operations can even do useful things!), it just might not be the normal arithmetic operations you expect when you interpret the number as a float (and enjoy your accidental NaNs or whatever :P).
The difference of static and dynamic typing being when you perform the type checking is partially why I consider it to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction for a language (obviously decidable static type checking is limited, though), and projects like typescript have shown that you can successfully bolt on a static type system onto a dynamic language to provide type checking on specific parts of a program just fine. But obviously this changes what you consider to be a valid program at compile time, though maybe not what you consider to be a valid program overall if you consider programs with dynamic type errors to be invalid too (which there’s certainly precedence for… C programs are arguably only real C programs when they’re well-defined, but detecting UB is undecidable).
I guess “untyped” could mean “weakly typed”, like how shell and DOS batch are, where everything is a string until you say “hey I want to do math on this” at which point the interpreter turns it into a number, does math on the number, and then turns it back into a string before saving it back to the variable
Most statically typed languages can’t because they don’t implement Hindley-Milner type inference.
VBA you can declare everything as variant.
Is that untyped?
assembly
Well that would depend on the definition and what you exactly mean by untyped.
The untyped part is usually referring to the way the programmer interacts with the language, for example not setting a type for variables and parameters. But then there is the question of is the programmer ever allowed to explicitly set the type. And further more, if the programmer explicitly set the type, does this mean the type can’t change at a later point? And another question could be, can the programmer check or enforce what type a variable or parameter is? And the question, if there is only one type of data in the language, would that be a typed or untyped language? But I would consider these to be details and all fall under the untyped umbrella, with untyped just meaning not-typed.
Then there’s the question of the technical implementation of the language. Defining a language is one thing, actually having it run on a real system is another. Usually technical systems at some point require explicit types. Something somewhere needs instructions on how to handle the data and this usually leads to some kind of typing instructions being added along with the data. But depending on how many abstraction layers there are, this can soon become a very pedantic discussion. I feel what matters is the design, definition and intend of a language. The actual technical implementation isn’t what matters in my opinion.
I feel like there are so many programming languages and technical systems at this point, every variation and exception exists. And if you can think of one that doesn’t exist, expect a follow up comment of somebody pointing out it does exist after all, or them having started a project to make it exist in the near future.
Would you say OCaml or any ml family language would be untyped since they have type inference?
From what I know about those I would consider those to be typed languages. Even if the programmer doesn’t explicitly assign the types, he needs to be aware of them and take into account what type something will be. I am familiar with F# and it’s strongly typed for example.
We’re also at the point where traditionally untyped languages can be strictly typed (strict typescript), and typed languages can be weakly typed (Java’s var)
Untyped as in written? Or is this programming term I’m not familiar with?
By typed they mean declairing a type for your variables.
In some languages, variables needs to be told what kind of data they can hold. That’s it’s type. For instance a number without decimals would be an integer type. While text might be a string type or a list of character types.
Other languages don’t require types and sometimes don’t even support them. They will just infer the type from the data that’s in the variable.
If you see Elon Musk please explain this to him.
If you see Elon Musk please explain this to him.
I’m an idiot, and I still don’t think I could dumb it down to his level.
Might be able to call assembly untyped. Everything beyond that I think would be called either statically or dynamically typed, maybe weakly typed?
It’s actually hieroglyphics.
Remember when people were calling this dummy the “real life Tony Stark”? Lol.
I was one of those. In my defense, 2012-2015(ish) he really was doing cool things. Tesla and Space X were super innovative and brought optimism. Then a time traveler stepped on a bug, the whole Thailand pedophile fiasco happened and it went downhill from there. Now we have yokes, dumb turn signals and the whole cybertruck, not to mention removing ultrasound sensors to save a few cents and the whole Twitter debacle. At least space X is still somehow unfucked?
In case it helps… I’m sorry.
he really was doing cool things.
He was buying cool things
The thing is after Peter Thiel made him a multi-billionaire against his best efforts, he did actually put that capital into industries that desperately needed someone to prove to the boomers that you could, and should, make money in them.
There’s a whole lot to say about his credit stealing, ego, and the system itself, but the fact remains he does have an eye for talent (that he can exploit for gain)
So, sure, he was just the bankroll, but that doesn’t mean the companies didn’t desperately need that.
That’s fair enough!
I’m just so used to people calling him an engineer and an inventor, while, as you say, the cool things he did were as an investor.
I think the problem was he started to believe his own hype that he was a super-genius that knew everything about everything.
I mean I don’t know the nitty gritty details of building an electric car or building rockets. But neither does Elon Musk. Which would be fine except that he tries to talk about these things like he does understand all of the details. Nobody knows everything about everything, it’s only an idiot that tries to act like he does.
But then he tries talking like he’s an expert in a field I am familiar with and it’s like… there’s points people could make on this subject, but that’s not one of them.
Same. Can’t judge about auto industry or rocket science, but I know a thing or two about software. And… Yeah, everything he’s said about Twitter internals (and sw dev in general) is brain dead.
I think he always believed his own hype. Heck there was a point where I was somewhat into his hype.
Though I never liked Tesla’s interior design philosophy of “just put all the controls on a giant tablet and call it a day”
Truth is we didn’t know enough about him to gain an opinion. So imaginations ran wild. I mean there are people who have been saying how bad he was since the whole PayPal thing. It’s just those companies weren’t big enough at the time for it to gain any gravity in the public eye.
Then Tesla and spaceX happened, and people thought what he was doing was awesome, because a lot of it was and it was easy to look past the parts that weren’t.
Now however the fact he can’t keep his mouth shut and has become a twitter addict has kinda ruined our public opinion on him. If he had just stayed quiet and not bothered with the whole buying twitter thing, people might not care much about him. And the Epstein stuff and affairs and shit didn’t help him one bit. He’s right to mistrust the media - that shit is like a gourmet breakfast for them.
Basically he revealed himself in the public for what he truly is. A cold blooded greedy ass tycoon with an ego the size of the planets he’s trying to colonise, with a modern style nerd-hipster science theming and old school conservative ideals.
I accept and believe your apology. Just pop yourself in the nose once, and we’re totally square buddy.
its amazing how elon was once so milquetoast and inoffensive that he was a guest on the big bang theory and then he was like you know whats good? nazis.
What you mean? He is!
The netflix adaptation… Lmao
If it’s a Netflix adaptation, then wouldn’t it be an overly drawn out true crime documentary?
We could always start a theory that Elon is the Zodiac Killer. He probably doesn’t deserve that level of notoriety, but it would make for an overly drawn out crime documentary. Just bring in some “experts” off of Ancient Aliens, along with the phrase “could it be” so you have some standing when you’re inevitably sued for slander.
How can we start a rumor that ElMu is the Zodiac Killer when everyone knows that Rafael “Ted” Cruz was the Zodiac Killer?
I think you mean The Asylum version of Tony Stark.
At least around 2015 when SpaceX landed a rocket for the first time, it really does look like he’s the real life Tony Stark. People change, sometimes for the worse.
That one line in Star Trek Discovery is more hilarious by the day. I have no fucking idea what the writers were thinking.
Which line?
The one where Captain Lorca lists the Wright Brothers, Cochrane (the inventor of warp drive in the ST universe), and Elon Musk as tech visionaries of their eras.
Ah thought so just wanted to confirm. Yeah I think I dropped the show not much later than that line.
Well, Tony Stark is a fictional character in a fictional universe, so real science or how the real world works in general don’t need to apply to him and he only needs to conjure up some cool sounding tech words for the audience and the plot will do the rest. So Elon Musk is indeed like Tony Stark, only issue is he is also indeed the real life version so has no plot to back him up and all the rules of real life still apply.
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It’s kinda amazing how someone can work so hard to sabotage their own public image.
Musk wants Twitter to fail. He bid on it for a laugh and when his bid was accepted he tried to get out of it.
They made him buy it and he’s been butthurt ever since. He wants everyone involved to suffer, because then the decision to hold him accountable was a bad decision.
He doesn’t give a fuck about people, or technology, or even the money he sunk on it. So it looks like he’s shaving his eyebrows to spite his face. It doesn’t hurt, so he doesn’t care.
4D chess isn’t real. Sometimes, rich and powerful people do dumb things. Sometimes they’re not very smart and have a visible personality disorder. Searching for an underlying clever motive is an exercise in your intelligence - not theirs.
I don’t think “they made me buy it so I’m breaking it” is really a 4D move. It’s more like a 4th grade move.
“So” is the mistake. He’s not breaking it on purpose. He’s just a fucking idiot. He is exactly as smug and incompetent as he appears.
“I’m going to do what I want despite all advice and consequences” doesn’t need to be intentional or unintentional to be what it is
… and what it is, is completely different from secretly pursuing a complex goal that only looks like an idiot immune to good ideas.
In light of recent accusations: an idiot off his tits on meth, and immune to good ideas.
He’s not hurting the people who made him buy it.
If he really wanted to be rid of it he could have instead done nothing. Put someone in charge with the impossible task of “make this profitable in 5 years” and then shut it down after 5 years because “it’s not profitable”.
Showing his ass to the world and ruining future potential for investment by looking like an incompetent idiot is not a “secretly intelligent move”.
Sure he’s not hurting them, but he’ll still keep riding the pony into the ground, because he owns it, he’ll do what he wants. He’s not making intelligent moves, because his choices aren’t reasoned they are just whims.
Right, he’s an idiot.
What? The people who made him buy it got paid already. I’m sure they’re laughing every time they see it drop in value.
They’re probably doubly laughing because he fired them for supposed incompetence, yet Elon tanking the price is evidence that they were doing a much better job. You could very well see a suit for wrongful termination in the future.
You underestimate his incompetence
He’s the kinda guy whose only programming experience is learning Python for 3 hours 6 years ago, yet he thinks he’s the programming god.
musk the kind of guy that if he said Java is here to stay, I would start learning another language.
I constantly feel the need to argue with this dumb fuck and his 99% wrong opinions. I usually have to take a step back, remember it’s not worth it, and then move on. It would be a great help if I had a Firefox add-on that precedes all of musk’s tweets with "retard weighing in: ", just as a reminder that he’s also allowed a point of view, despite his mental issues.
I remember someone once created a firefox addon that made all of Trump’s tweets look like they were drawn with crayon. Someone should make a new version of that for Musk.
Pretty sure you‘re only using the r-bomb and „mental issues“ in a joking way but its kind of not funny.
Musk is a spoiled, unempathetic, overhyped idiot who claims to be autistic… perfect example that autistic people can be cretins as well.
But a lot of autistic people are getting called the r-word and its not ok. Mental (health) issues are not a stigma. They are okay and normal. Being an asshole isnt normal or okay though.
By definition you can’t be normal if you’re neurodivergent…
By the “divergent” part of the word, you’re right.
It would be like saying “it’s normal to be abnormal”. While it’s true that not everybody is identical, and everyone has their quirks, by defintion “abnormal” is not “normal”.
No idea if you‘re trying to offend people but „not normal“ is a term used to exclude people from a social group. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/normal
The term used to distinguish from is „typical“.
From the very source you provided:
[…] by Late Latin normālis had also come to mean “according to a rule”, from which modern English senses of the word derive: in the 1800s, as people began to quantitatively study things like height and weight and blood pressure, the usual or most common values came to be referred to as “normal”, and by extension values regarded as healthy or desirable came to be called “normal” regardless of their usuality.
I don’t think anyone of sane mind would argue against the notion that it’s more desirable, and by definition healthier, to be born neurotypical than neurodivergent.
just exchange the word neurodivergent with black or jewish and neurotypical with white or christian and you see the problem.
Provided you are “sane”.
“Just completely change your argument and it becomes problematic” is hardly convincing. In fact, you’ve committed a classic logical fallacy.
Yesh kinda weird how ok a lot of the users here are with using the r-word slur.
A little disturbing, ngl. Some might have grown up in a time or place where getting bullied and mistreated was no bid deal. Its actually good to see these things changing.
Irrelevant question ahead->
I have read that Google is dumb and potentially malware carrying extensions sometimes slip through their security and onto the chrome store. Is it true and how does it apply to Firefox
This is true and also an issue for Firefox.
It is difficult to address, and if the extension isn’t open source you should be especially careful.
That said there are extensions with security reviews performed by the Mozilla foundation and you can see that on the extension page.
If I was still on Twitter, that would be a great idea.
dont question kings /s
For the curious, this is about as easy as it gets for proper type inference. You could leave out the one or other thing (most prominently, polymorphism), but that kind of stuff would hardly qualify as even a toy example.
I won’t claim that J. Random Hacker will have issues understanding it – it’s a neatly tied bundle of necessary complexity without any distracting parts (like efficiency), if you sit down with the thing (ideally starting the whole series from the beginning) you’ll be able to grok it (and have learned a lot). However, understanding HM isn’t the same as being able to extend it, which includes proving soundness of the system, that kind of stuff is a specialised field within a specialised field within academia with more open questions than answered ones. The reason Rust doesn’t have HKTs? Because their interaction with lifetimes is insufficiently understood. Those kinds of questions can easily start 20+ years of research only to be answered with “yep that’s inherently unsound/uncomputable/whatever”.
Oh, EDIT, forgot: AI-enabled typing is obviously a completely braindead idea. I don’t need a second lazy, impatient, hubristic idiot looking at my code, I need something to catch mistakes. Something deterministic, rule-based, pure unerring logic. Which is exactly what type systems are and do.
This must be one of the best comments I have read so far on lemmy. Thank you. :)
AI-enabled typing is obviously a completely braindead idea.
I agree. However, and I know I’m practically reading tea leaves here, but I read that last line as a suggestion that AI would replace programming outright.
Elon what the fuck are you talking about
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whether or not a compiler can understand a type at compile time
In many / most(?) compiled languages that’s because the type is specified at compile time. With interpreted languages that’s often not the case, and in that case determining the type can be extremely hard.
Musk’s greatest innovative genius is finding new ways to be annoying.
That’s a load bearing “done right”.
Quick, somebody teach this man JavaScript.
JESUS CHRIST MAN! Is the internet still not broken enough for you!?!?
Oh look, a dipshit who never wrote a line of code.
Well, according to the first biography about him, he was coding quite a lot in Zip2 and perhaps also some in early PayPal. Bit the code was supposedly hastily written and very bad.
Not true. He worked on a game once.
It wasn’t very good like most of the Sega CD games.
Neat! To save others a search, “Post Production - Ground Control” turned up for my search.
Edit: If I ever worked on a Sega CD game, I would wear that as a badge of pride. It wasn’t a good game system, but it was an interesting era in the history of gaming.
I tend to think people shit on Musk more than they should, but holy shit does it bug me when a CEO talks about engineering problems with such bravado.
He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
Rod Hilton about Elon Musk.
The guy is an idiot who LITERALLY got fired for incompetence as CEO.in the past. He is a scammer and should be treated as such, so no, people aren’t shitting too much on him. If anything, they aren’t shitting enough, there are still way too many oblivious fan boys out there that think he is a genius. He’s not.
Anything he says that makes sense engineering wise usually comes from someone on his team, anything else is just outrageously stupid, and clearly from his “genius mind” like this blurb/cert/tweet whatever the hell its supposed to be called.
Don’t forget defrauding the federal and state of California governments to get them to pull funding from vitally needed high-speed rail projects because it would hurt Tesla’s bottom line. Fucking hyperloop.
California HSR has been a zombie project for a while. Even before Musk was a factor, there were annual plans but nothing ever got done, year after year. It’s probably going to take intercity projects to become popular and economical for something as ambitious as long-range passenger rail to actually receive serious attention.
The guy was a the senior software dev at his first startup. Not sure if he’s written a line of code since then, but he’s at least spent some time in the trade
He wrote code that was so bad, all that was kept from x.com when it was bought was its name. The actual code was taken from another company acquired at the same time.
1 == “1”
It’s not that hard
