• xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    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.

      • Bonehead@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • Bumblefumble@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              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.

              • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                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.

                • jasondj@ttrpg.network
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                  10 months ago

                  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.

              • Bumblefumble@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                That’s definitely true. That should still not take away from the accomplishments of the SpaceX engineers. ULA had the same exact opportunities but completely wasted them.

                • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 months ago

                  Oh sorry yeah that was poorly worded. I don’t mean to say that SpaceX engineers are failures, what they’ve accomplished is nothing short of incredible. But failure is an inevitable part of the engineering process of iterating and improving your solution. NASA doesn’t have the luxury of quick iteration cycles like SpaceX does (comparatively), because each iteration means more money out of the taxpayers’ pockets.

          • bstix@feddit.dk
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            10 months ago

            At first, I was like, “now that the governments haven’t pursued space for 20-30 years, I think it’s great that the private sector can finally push for space exploration and inventions and space stuff.”

            But now…I don’t really like the idea of Space X sending up and downing thousands of satellites including heavy metals through our atmosphere every year, just to keep a shitty proprietary network online.

            It’s my atmosphere, but it’s not my network. Space X can fuck off my night sky for all I care.

            Also in the next couple of years, they’re expecting so many “retirements” of satellites that they can’t guarantee safety for the people on the ground. They’re literally expecting an “acceptable” number of people to die from this.

            https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/falling-spacex-satellites-faa-report-space-junk/

            https://www.clickorlando.com/news/space-news/2023/10/19/faa-warning-falling-spacex-satellites-will-soon-pose-fatal-risk-for-earthlings/

            Etc.

            • Mac@mander.xyz
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              10 months ago

              “‘The problem isn’t the Starlink satellites surviving, reentering, hitting somebody,’ says Moriba Jah, an associate professor at UT Austin. ‘The problem is other older objects.’”

          • MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            Boeing and Lockheed Martin also spent billions of government dollars blowing up rockets, but SpaceX is still cheaper and delivering faster.

            Do not downplay their engineering accomplishments.

        • Pringles@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          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.

      • hemmes@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Maybe I’m out of the loop - what’s he been saying about software?

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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            10 months ago

            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…

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            10 months ago

            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

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          10 months ago

          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.

          • hemmes@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Ah yes I remember that. I thought maybe there was something new he was going on about specifically.

          • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            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.

          • hemmes@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • Squibbles@lemmy.ca
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              10 months ago

              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.

              • bleistift2@feddit.de
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                10 months ago

                needed to be removed or rewritten

                Literally any developer can tell you that. It doesn’t even matter what codebase we’re talking about. It always needs to be rewritten.

      • aberrate_junior_beatnik@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        If reacting to something always makes it more likely to occur, you have just made reacting to things Elon Musk says more likely to occur.

        • squirmy_wormy@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          The irony isn’t lost on me, but it’s not always. It’s just a good way to handle attention seeking people that you don’t want to seek attention anymore.

    • derpgon@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Well, looking at ChatGPT and other LLMs, they also lie confidently. Maybe there is a correlation and Elon is just a poor AI.

    • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • hemmes@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Even in untyped can’t you explicitly set your type either with declarations or wrapping the value in quotes for a string or something?

      • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Programming term. Variables in programming languages can hold different types of data, such as whole numbers, floating point numbers or strings of characters (“text”). Untyped languages figure out on the fly what can and cannot be done to the content of a variable, while typed languages strictly keep track of the type of content (not the value) to catch bugs and improve performance, for example.

      • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

      • jtk@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 months ago

        Might be able to call assembly untyped. Everything beyond that I think would be called either statically or dynamically typed, maybe weakly typed?

    • Tja@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • Tja@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          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.

        • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
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          10 months ago

          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.

      • BoastfulDaedra@lemmynsfw.com
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        10 months ago

        I accept and believe your apology. Just pop yourself in the nose once, and we’re totally square buddy.

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • molave@reddthat.com
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      That one line in Star Trek Discovery is more hilarious by the day. I have no fucking idea what the writers were thinking.

    • Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      It didn’t hurt that he was in Iron Man 2. Pepper for some reason is bending over backwards to be deferential to him in the early Monte Carlo scene.

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      musk the kind of guy that if he said Java is here to stay, I would start learning another language.

  • QaspR@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Clearly this man has never read a book on type theory or compiler construction.

  • Skates@feddit.nl
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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      10 months ago

      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.

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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          10 months ago

          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.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        By definition you can’t be normal if you’re neurodivergent…

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          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”.

          • Gabu@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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              10 months ago

              just exchange the word neurodivergent with black or jewish and neurotypical with white or christian and you see the problem.

              Provided you are “sane”.

              • Gabu@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                “Just completely change your argument and it becomes problematic” is hardly convincing. In fact, you’ve committed a classic logical fallacy.

      • Legendsofanus @lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        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

        • Cypher@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Apparently he thought the conversation was about whether or not a compiler can understand a type at compile time. The answer is yes. Yes they can. But I’d love to see Elon struggle through the description of why he thinks it’s “easy” and why what he said is relevant.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • hemmes@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Actually on second thought, let’s just give him a marble notebook and crayons and tell him that’s JavaScript.

      • Kata1yst@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        A notebook and crayons? I think you’d just get back stick figure-esque drawings of cybertrucks with notes like “bulletproof” and “anti-gas attack”.

        Just like the poor Tesla design team.