There’s not much information about xAI, but diversity is already an issue

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    1 year ago

    Elon is an asshole but he isn’t an idiot as some would claim.

    There are multiple quotes from aerospace engineers that do and don’t work for him noting he understands and contributes.

    John Carmack who is considered a world class coder and also had a rocket company has publicly stated Elon both knows rockets and coding.

    • Friendship@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Elon does seem to be able to speak at least on some level about rocket design. His statements and very public beefs with his own engineers at Twitter however demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of coding for large scale infrastructure like Twitter.

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        1 year ago

        He has a team of skilled coders. If you follow some of the complaints about twitter you find out the infrastructure is kinda fed up.

        Apparently programmers where getting incentives for how many libraries they created and how often they where used.

        This lead to reinventing basic things like load balancers and web servers from scratch vs very optimized open source solutions. Essentially reinventing the wheel instead of new features .

        George Hotz known for various coding and hacking projects was there and did an interview recently where he discuss how the code base was next to impossible to maintain in its current state at Twitter.

      • Ragnell@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        STEM Self-Importance Syndrome, where knowledge in one aspect of STEM leads someone to believe they have knowledge and understanding of EVERYTHING even though there’s actually a lot of big differences between Rocket Science and Computer Programming.

        Rocket scientists are pretty susceptible to this because “It’s not rocket science” is an actual phrase used to mean “this job is easy.” Computer science is not rocket science, but it’s not easy either and it’s not something a rocket scientist can just jump in and do.

        • stopthatgirl7@kbin.socialOP
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          1 year ago

          See also Stockton Rush, who thought because he studied aerospace, he knew what he was doing going into the ocean.

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            1 year ago

            Appropriate that he named the company Oceangate, since that’s what any scandal would be nicknamed.

    • Ganondorf@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Elon is an asshole but he isn’t an idiot as some would claim.

      It’s honestly too difficult to tell since he’s constantly grifting and lying his way through life. For immediate example, he was making some fairly false statements about how rapidly his team “could colonize mars”. To seem impressive and “make the sale”, he threw out some wild number of how many colonists they could get settled by a certain year (number was maybe a million, timeline was maybe 2050, I’m forgetting at this point) but the moment anyone who was actually good at math, astronomy, engineering or rocket science examined that number and timeline it was clearly bull shit with no possible way to accomplish it.

      He’s smart enough to be in a room with folks smarter than him, but everyone else is carrying the load while he takes credit.

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        1 year ago

        He’s smart enough to be in a room with folks smarter than him, but everyone else is carrying the load while he takes credit.

        Curious if you think the same of Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and many others who clearly have stand out products etc but where not engineering them themselves but maybe solving the supply chain issues, pushing the design etc? Do we get iPhones or Model T without them building the companies, teams and pushing their products to specific goals?

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        the moment anyone who was actually good at math, astronomy, engineering or rocket science examined that number and timeline it was clearly bull shit with no possible way to accomplish it.

        It is absolutely true that ANY time estimate that comes out of his mouth is a hopeless stretch, we all know what everyone through about his plan for reusable rockets a few years back and now SpaceX delivers more cargo to orbit than all other providers on earth, and almost all of them combined even.