191–200 of 542 posts
>I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design. Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.
He must mean reviewing designs and prototypes, not actually creating things.
Why do they discuss the speed of the line? Isn't the finalized output a much more useful metric? (e.g. one car per hour)? If there's a ton of work done at the various checkpoints, the pace is slow but maybe the length of the line isn't very far?
Also a bit of an outdated mental model. Had the privilege of touring the tesla factory recently... one neat tidbit that stuck with me is the host described "the line" more like a river with many tributaries joining in all along the watershed.
So if you wanted to have a non-softball engineering discussion about "the line", you would ask questions like which tributaries are the bottlenecks, how much parallelism is there, are improvements marginal or do you wholesale upgrade entire sublines at once, what's the caching strategy, etc.
It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd. "Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon footprint is still huge!" "Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!" "Yes, he's paving the way to Mars, but what has he done for world hunger?" And it not just with Musk, but really with anyone who has been successful. I would have t…
And let's not forget the millions of people who worked to generate wealth that could be transferred via, and taxed by, PayPal, accruing the fortune with which to start all these projects in the first place. If I didn't "know better" I'd be tempted to conclude that the luck of being in the right place at the right time with a good idea, is the main difference between Elon and the rest, or at least that any intrinsic differences are not as great as you might think. Heck I'm a "visionary" too, just add one billion dollars and tons of free time and see what I come up with! (Campaign coming soon to Kickstarter, LOL)
Man is at once animal and rational, and sometimes the rational side reacts against our own animalistic urge to designate an alpha ape and worship only that one ape. Many of us got into technology as a way of breaking down this same kind of bullshit hierarchy that you can find in so many other places & domains of human life. Technology was supposed to be the great equalizer. In some cases it has worked that way but in others it has only amplified the disequilibrium. It seems we can't escape our inner ape.
Therefore is it "technologists" to whom you should be appealing here for greater reverence? Maybe it's not your technological side, but your ape side, that wants to be more reverent.
Having watched a good number of Elon Musk interviews, I wish more interviewers would ask more direct questions. Asking Elon general questions usually results in fairly similar responses to what you have heard before or read in his biography.
I'm curious -- what would you ask him?
But the answer might be shorter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit. Two of the three items on the GP's list have already been done and complainers seem to be in denial about that. Startup industry is a great place to find tons of PR bullshit though, so I wonder if this isn't people projecting their own guilt...
Only one has been done, building rockets. It's not safe to say he paved the way for the electric car revolution since there hasn't been one.
Why can't this just be good old HTML than a scribd walled garden? A horrible interface with ads shoved on your face.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit. Two of the three items on the GP's list have already been done and complainers seem to be in denial about that. Startup industry is a great place to find tons of PR bullshit though, so I wonder if this isn't people projecting their own guilt...
Only one has been done, building rockets. It's not safe to say he paved the way for the electric car revolution since there hasn't been one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Affect like how? As of today they're useless, except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.
I suppose I should have wrote "will affect". If we end up colonizing Mars, or even getting one person to land on Mars, I think Space X will have been involved in creating competition in the aerospace industry at the least. My point was that his ideas are ones that have potential for huge amounts of change. Whether or not we will see that change is another matter.
How would one go about meaningfully contributing to solving problems in genetics without having done the work leading to a MD or PhD (or both)?
Researchers in our institute were amazed how easy it is to use e.g. google forms to gather data in a reasonable format. Once you get data in a reasonable format you can help them with transforming it/joining it with other sources/cleaning them up. ETLs and data integration are often completely foreign concepts to them.
And that's researchers, you might still start calling them quite computer-competent after you talk to the people in the clinic. All the research is for nothing if it's not brought to "bedside" to benefit the patients in a clinical setting, outside all trials. For that you need to make sure genomics pipelines are automated and reproducible and only clinically relevant information gets to the oncologists (or other doctors) deciding on treatment. This is still not quite there even in the best places.
I think most of the really world-changing stuff will just be hard work on relatively easy problems. It's hard to get excited about these (compared to the latest neural networks or distributed high performance systems) but they need to get done
Having watched a good number of Elon Musk interviews, I wish more interviewers would ask more direct questions. Asking Elon general questions usually results in fairly similar responses to what you have heard before or read in his biography.
I'm curious -- what would you ask him?
He has always said the chances of SpaceX succeeding was very slim - but at what point(after any particular technical achievement) he realized the this might work out.