I really enjoy your contributions in non-political threads, and I think you sometimes get treated unfairly and held to different (and unrealistic) standards by some people here.
But shit like this is where you lose me. In your mind, you are the only person intelligent enough to look at Musk’s actions and not his politics. Only you are capable of seeing that if he does something dumb, it was because it was a bad idea, and if he does something brilliant, it’s because it was good idea.
But no one else can evaluate his actions through anything but a political lens? Absolute bullshit, and you lose respect when you trot out such stupid arguments.
Internet cookie for you! For years I have dreamed of opening this clinic, held back only by my complete unwillingness to have anything to do with urology.
Does this sound like the guy who will run a company town like an employee paradise or dystopia?
I mean I may not be as smart as Sam or anything who can perfectly deduce good Musk from bad Musk. I am just a mere mortal after all. But I don’t think Musk is the type that would run a company town in a way beneficial to the employees.
My point was that it was an easy avenue for him to take if he had any interest in philanthropy. The fact that he’s clearly not shows that he doesn’t give a shit.
The first is that a lot of your counterarguments were so absurd that they came off as you being a fanboy. They required you to ignore facts on the ground, or paint them as not actually facts.
Second, when you did this, you regularly included swipes at the rest of us, because apparently we were living in an echo chamber. You kept accusing us of being political when we were just repeating what the actual experts said.
Look at the stuff you were getting made fun of for. Two examples that come to mind: You defended Twitter’s repeated malfunctions as an inevitable aspect of agile programming, which it is not. You referred to the rest of us as “mere mortals,” telling us you see Musk as above us—a god among men or something.
That stuff is dumb. It doesn’t mean I have political motivations to point out that this is dumb. And the fact that you can’t seem to acknowledge this or other arguments were bad makes you come off as a fanboy.
Just because you’re not to the level of “Musk can do no wrong” doesn’t mean you’re not clearly biased towards him, towards this guy whose social media you follow. Towards someone who you admire.
Actually that’s what we’ve been saying. And that he has been making mistakes. We are told that we just don’t understand him, as he’s such a genius, and that he isn’t making a mistake, he’s just at 20,000 feet.
No one has said he’s a moron, and most have acknowledged that he’s pretty smart. Genius is a higher mark, and there’s many who question that.
Yes, the evidence is that many things that he tries to do fail. Which is why it is unreasonable to expect them to succeed because he is involved.
Basically, anytime someone says something negative about him.
And you assume that he not only is being completely selfless, but that his plans will work out exactly as he intends.
No, not really. Maybe that’s what you are seeing, but that’s not what is actually happening.
If you could launch rockets with straw, you’d be in competition with Musk.
You can also be extremely smart in general but be a complete moron in some areas or in some instances. (In fact, I’d wager that it’s impossible to always be smart.)
Those ‘counterarguments’ are just suppositions that *could be an explanation. It was meant to stir debate. Instead I got mocked.
Holy shit. Grow a pair. This is the pit. I get attacked in far worse ways than being accused of being in an echo chamber. In this thread. Every day I log into the SDMB I am confronted with accusations that I am a liar, that I’m stupid, I’m a Trumpist, whatever. I offer the most most mild contrary opinion about something, and it kicks off a multi-hundred post pit thread calling my character into question. Which you happily take part in.
My attitude now is that if you want a serious discussion, take it out of the Pit. If you want to bring the debate into the pit, you better be ready for me to fire back at you if you insult me, because I’m not your punching bag.
First, ‘mere mortals’ is a common phrase in my house, and started with my flight instructor who would constantly say things like, ‘You may be able to do that, but we mere mortals follow the procedures’. It’s just a turn of phrase. If you took it to mean that I think Musk is some sort of God, well, that’s on you. It’s a stupid interpretation.
Second, the agile thing has been blown WAY out of proportion. The fact is, in Agile the idea is not to design the living shit out of something, but to design to the minimum viable product and get it out into the wild, then figure out what needs to be improved and iterate. You write code that can be easily refactored so you don’t have to write the perfect application the first time because rewriting is cheaper.
I said that Musk intentionally brought the ‘agile mindset’ to rocket development, choosing to build minimum-viable rickets and iterate the design after they fail, rather try to design the perfect rocket right out of the box. That appears to be Blue Origin’s strategy, and it’s not working very well for them.
I then speculated that Musk might be bringing the same philosophy to Twitter - push features out fast, get feedback,. refactor. I believe I even said that the approach might not work in social media and could get him into trouble.
It was speculation based on previous evidence of how Musk works. It wasn’t a claim that’s that’s WHY he was doing everything he was doing, but one explanation as to what might be going on. I couched it that way, too. But of course, it got read in the worst possible way, mocked, and then turned into a giant pile-on.
Now in your mind it’s somehow one of the worst things I’ve said. You might want to think about how over-the-top that belief is about what was offhand speculation about why he might be doing whast he’s doing.
By the way, what’s your experience with agile? Are you a software engineer? How many years did you spend working in it? Do you have any trainig in agile? Have you ever run an agile team, or headed an agile product development? I’ve done all of those. What are your qualifications for saying that the speculation was dumb? Do you get the difference between all agile methods and the specific Minimum Viable Product aspect of it that I was talking about? You seem awfully sure that it was a terrible, dumb idea, so can I assume you are really experienced in agile development to have such a strong opinion of it?
You know, my feelings about Musk have not changed, and for a long time I assumed he was a full member of the left. I just don’t give a shit. I evaluate engineers on their engineering. I don’t care about his politics. I think Burt Rutan is a genius, and I couldn’t tell you who he votes for. I still think Hyperloop is the dumbest thing ever, and it looks like Musk has made a number of mistakes at Twitter. That doesn’t change the fact that he has made spectacularly good choices at SpaceX, and turned Tesla from being a little company modifying a Lotus Elise to be electric into a manufacturing powerhouse and one of the most profitable car companies on the planet.
I also appreciate that he gets his hands dirty. As opposed to Jeff Bezos, whose desire to have a rocket company caused him to just hire a bunch of rocket people to build him one, Musk educated himself on rockets and led the entire effort. And the results speak for themselves.
Blue Origin and SpaceX formed at almost the same time. During that period, Blue Origin produced a suborbital rocket and a large rocket engine that has yet to fly. SpaceX bult the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, the Kestrel, Merlin, Draco, SuperDraco and Raptor engines, multiple launch pads, mass manufacturing of rocket engines, Starlink V1 and V2, and Starship with the biggest launch tower in history. Blue Origin has yet to make orbit, and SpaceX lsunches more mass to orbit than all other launch providers and governments combined.
Elon Musk deserves a lot of credit for that success. If he did nothing else valuable and is only a rocket savant or something, he still will have changed the world.
I teach software engineer, in addition to being a professional software developer at different levels for 14ish years. I was given a citation in the army (one of two) for providing outstanding leadership on a national level development project (we did not use Agile development paradigms in that project).
Yes.
One of the core tenets of Agile, which is why it is becoming less popular, is fast (although I don’t like to use that term but it is more about rapid iteration) but with quality. The problem is that it is hard to do both, especially since Agile development processes accumulate technical debt that becomes difficult to pay off. Many companies have found that they simply cannot do it successfully. It is easy for an quasi-competent manager to push the rapidity, it is much harder to also the required level of quality. Unfortunately, many people (even those ‘trained’ in Agile development) treat it as shovel it out to the customer as quick as you can to have them test/approve it.
I agree with all of that. In practice, I saw agile processes come apart all the time. The backlog turns into backdoor way of doing waterfall, technical debt grows because of hard sprint deadlines, some developers assume that unit testing and refactoring means they don’t have to focus on code quality, and coherent UI design is really hard when you are adding features incrementally over time. There are lots of other problems. Most companies, as far as I can tell, are starting to just pick the best of various methodologies of Agile, LEAN, etc. and ignore the stuff that isn’t working. I don’t know that many are doing pure agile these days, but they might be. I’ve been out of development now for a few years.
But the minimum viable product is still an excellent concept, as opposed to trying to figure out all requirements and design a complete system up front. That NEVER works. You spend six months on huge up-front design and embed your requirements guys with customers for six months, then build your giant software only to discover that it’s obsolete, or the requirements were wrong in the first place, or that once you start building in the real world the design needs to be changed and a whole lot of work scrapped and all your carefully built documentation is out of date.
Iterative design and construction to minimum viable products seems like a much better way to go, when it can be done. It was the philosophy Musk brought to SpaceX, and it worked there beautifully. They have made numerous changes to their designs as each incremental rocket was tried in the real world. If they had gone the waterfall route like Blue Origin did with New Glenn, they might still be working on their first rocket.
By the way, with all the talk about commute times to Boca Chica, you guys should know the “company town” that the articles are talking about is near Austin, TX and is meant for the Boring Co and Starlink factory workers. It has nothing to do with Starbase/Boca Chica.
An exception? Wow, you certainly aren’t a fanboi or delusional in your belief that the left was in love with Elmo before discovering he was ‘not of the body’. I’d like to remind you of this post
which you certainly did see as you tried dismissing Adam Something’s flamingly leftist criticism and mockery of Elmo long pre-dating Twitter as being ‘some rando on the internet’ rather than bothering to look at what you were responding to. Nothing unusual about that for you, of course. Your allegedly being one of the biggest critics of the hyperloop doesn’t do you any favors when you consider it to be the exception for Elmo, and don’t see the idiocy but instead presumably genius (since the hyperloop was the exception) inherent in the Vegas Loop, the Dugout Loop, Starship Earth to Earth, the Tesla Semi, and the Mars Colony. All of which make the hyperloop a shining example of Elmo’s brilliance in comparison.
Oh, come on, Sam. What you were getting mocked for was not the mere speculation that Musk’s approach might possibly be justified in such-and-such a hypothetical way. It was all your defensive doubling-down bullshit about how you would have eagerly staked your hypothetical professional future, or encouraged your hypothetical coder son to stake his professional future, on the chance of impressing Musk. Like this.
As I pointed out in that thread, you keep flipflopping between cautious caveats that nobody can be absolutely sure what’s going on or what’s going to happen, and bizarre hypotheticals expressing a degree of confidence in Musk that your own caveats don’t justify.
That’s why you get piled on and mocked, because rhetoric like your hypothetical encouragement to your hypothetical tech-professional son to try to “hitch his wagon” to Musk and “impress a billionaire” is so comically at odds with your claims to be merely “speculating” about how Musk’s strategies might possibly prove successful.
