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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

ycombinator.com

381–390 of 542 posts

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#381

I like the things that Elon Musk has done and tried, but what irritates me are all the sycophants in the media who think he's a genius wizard rather than a smart entrepreneur and don't take some of his claims with a grain of salt.

Are any of his claims even original? It's not like needing to spread humans to other planets is original, yet it seems like everyone's worshiping him over such statements as though it's a new idea.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#382
post #87

Why does Elon continuously talk about AI as if it's taking over the world? At this point, Siri can barely understand me saying the word 'salad'. Slow down Elon... slow down..

my theory is that Elon does not truly believe that AI poses an immediate threat but that he needs to spin it that way because people are more open to the idea of augmenting themselves (neural lace) in face of an existential threat, whereas without that it would more likely be spun by the media as being unnatural, "playing god" and all that jazz

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#383
post #357
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also appeared in an episode The Simpsons. His acting was awful, but he did put himself out there.

Was he appearing as himself? If so his acting would by definition have been perfect. :P

IMO bad amateur acting often involves people reciting lines in a weird stilted way instead of just talking normally. I don't know how to act like someone else, but I can act like myself at least.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#384

I would be far more interested in how to build a successful business. Everyone asks Elon about his big ideas, but how do you turn those big ideas into reality, specifically? I have never seen anyone ask him those questions. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Jessica Livingston because that was the primary topic. A missed opportunity in my opinion. I hope the rest of the interviews are more about the nuts and bol…

The way I see it PayPal essentially helped an established incumbent monopoly (US credit card companies) with issues at the time maintain and extend its global relevance, lock down domination of cross-border consumer payments, meaningfully extend US intelligence sector surveillance, and continue to fuck the little guy. Only Europe and China are building a resistance now, 15 years later. That you have 5 or 10 rich people coming out of that little cash-cow who feel like publicly playing god with humanity's future or that they deserve some kind of respect for the 'achievement' is pathetic. Any number of people could have built that better, or with morals. If they had any sense they'd be ashamed at what they've done, and how it has seemingly irrevocably crumbled in to bigcorp screw-the-customer service mode. Besides, we all know the real e-vehicle revolution has already happened, right here in China.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#385

I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.

>>I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly.

You are surprised? Are you forgetting that Hacker News itself was, as of a few months ago, a horrible experience on mobile?

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#386
post #352

I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.

Yeah, kudos to Scribd for perhaps the maximum LOC codebase for "how to make plain text completely fucking unusable". There's real irony there in it being an article about delivering value to society through making useful technology.

Especially ironic considering sama/YC funded Scribd. Really shows the quality of their work!

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#387
post #352

I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.

Yeah, kudos to Scribd for perhaps the maximum LOC codebase for "how to make plain text completely fucking unusable". There's real irony there in it being an article about delivering value to society through making useful technology.

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#390
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, kudos to Scribd for perhaps the maximum LOC codebase for "how to make plain text completely fucking unusable". There's real irony there in it being an article about delivering value to society through making useful technology.

OK, I was able to clean it up into plain text and post it to Pastebin: http://pastebin.com/vcEe9KWP Used the $$ selector in Chrome to find Scribd's .ff0 elements, copied them into SublimeText, did some regex work to clean out the tags (a span element for every line? with absolute positioning? Really Scribd?), and then exploited the fact that paragraphs got jammed together with no whitespace between the last punctuati…

Thank you very much.
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