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Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

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Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#251

Post by leesec »

darkpuma wrote: post #246
hndamien wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “every expert” may be stretching the truth, unless you are proclaiming that Tesla has no experts working on this.

> every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla I'm saying that when you ask people not getting a paycheck from Tesla, they say that LIDAR is required. Very notably including Mobileye, who severed their connection with Tesla over this disagreement. Mobileye is particularly notable since they invested heavily into camera-only solutions; Mobileye has a strong financial incentive to dismiss LIDAR, yet they don't. It's…

Required for what, the self driving cars that don't exist yet? Radar and computer vision is simply a separate approach, not a wrong one. Tesla is as much an expert in the field as anyone, given that, you know, they have the best self driving commercial product by far.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#252

Post by tomatocracy »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #217
mdpopescu wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade. In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1]. [1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-st…

> As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade. Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways". Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose y…

Oracle weren't the only game in town then though. Sybase and db2 were around, widely deployed and enterprise worthy at the time. The sales and lockin tactics which earned oracle notoriety were not unique either but they did that part 'better'.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#253

Post by darkpuma »

leesec wrote: post #251
darkpuma wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla I'm saying that when you ask people not getting a paycheck from Tesla, they say that LIDAR is required. Very notably including Mobileye, who severed their connection with Tesla over this disagreement. Mobileye is particularly notable since they invested heavily into camera-only solutions; Mobileye has a strong financial incentive to dismiss LIDAR, yet they don't. It's…

Required for what, the self driving cars that don't exist yet? Radar and computer vision is simply a separate approach, not a wrong one. Tesla is as much an expert in the field as anyone, given that, you know, they have the best self driving commercial product by far.

>"Required for what, the self driving cars that don't exist yet?"

Required for Level 5 automation. Tesla claims to be selling the required hardware, waiting only on the software and legislation allowing it. All other players in this field are focusing on a combination of cameras, radar and LIDAR.

Since LIDAR is expensive and the self-driving hype is real, Tesla have a strong short term financial incentive to forgo the former while claiming to sell the later. Combine that with virtually every other expert in the field saying they're full of BS, and I think the picture becomes crystal clear. Elon covers for himself by promoting conspiracy theories about grand industry-wide plots to keep an underdog down, and that has worked very well for him so far. But like most conspiracy theories, this is one you should think critically about.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#254

Post by roguecoder »

justicezyx wrote: post #173
Robotbeat wrote: post #145

Glad to hear Tesla is adding more women. I truly think women in leadership are a grossly underutilized resource. EDIT: Doubly so women of color. If anyone needs a different perspective, it’s Elon. I hope he listens.

No, the person is valuable because it’s own independent thoughts leadership and vision etc. It has little to do with gender. Please do not pay attention to gender and potentially downplay woman’s own intellectual power.

Science suggests that it does matter, at least if you care about profits, innovation or group performance. For example, from MIT: https://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-te...

Not to mention now being a legal requirement in California.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#256

Post by gammateam »

nottorp wrote: post #150

Yay, that settles it. Now I definitely can't afford a Tesla. The car maybe, but the legal team that should go with it, nope. Current owners, make sure you have a lawyer on retainer.

haha wow, what a perspective.

thanks for this

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#257

Post by tomatocracy »

corodra wrote: post #146
geofft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange…

The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem. There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear…

For every one of those database migration success stories, there's a potential TSB style disaster though[1]. Problems with migration are real and potentially very serious. It's not just cost if it goes to plan that needs to be considered - for business critical systems, 'don't fix it if it isn't broken' is a good adage for a reason...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#258

Post by justicezyx »

roguecoder wrote: post #254
justicezyx wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the person is valuable because it’s own independent thoughts leadership and vision etc. It has little to do with gender. Please do not pay attention to gender and potentially downplay woman’s own intellectual power.

Science suggests that it does matter, at least if you care about profits, innovation or group performance. For example, from MIT: https://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-te... Not to mention now being a legal requirement in California.

See my comments below about reasoning order.

I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.

Please do not read any more than what stated in the comments. Your comment implies I disapprove more women being helpful or something along the line of not valuing gender diversity, which is not being mentioned at all in the comment.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#259

Post by joefourier »

darkpuma wrote: post #239
golfer wrote: post #88

Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember Larry very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.” [0] Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-e…

> "Elon stretches the truth constantly." That's putting it gently. Putting aside his twitter spats, Tesla is still prominently advertising "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" [0] even though their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars[1][2]. [0] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot [1] https://www.…

Level 5 self driving is still theoretical at this point, and theoretically speaking, there is no reason to assume LIDAR is absolutely necessary for it. Computer vision based pipelines are theoretically capable of providing the same depth information as LIDAR, using stereo, camera arrays or even monocular SLAM.

The main obstacle for self-driving car is much more on the processing side than on the sensor side. After all, humans are able to drive with audio + stereo vision that's not even 360 degrees.

It could very well be that the reason Tesla's statement about "full self-driving car HW" is inaccurate is because of the lack of sufficient onboard computing power rather than the lack of sensors (IIRC they have an Nvidia X2 and GP106 onboard, which only have a total of about 4 SPFP TFLOPs).

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#260

Post by theptip »

Waterluvian wrote: post #31
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it's a billion-ish USD at today's price of about $332/share. That's about 3% of Larry's reported net worth.

Geez. Okay I didn't realise he was hyper rich. Well, I'm delighted for anyone to want to support electric cars.

FYI Larry Ellison engages in high profile conspicuous consumption...

He has a ridiculous $150m yacht, and a Hawaiian island, among other assets.

https://www.superyachtfan.com/larry_ellison.html

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