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

Post by village-idiot » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:29 AM UTC

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.

Post by cbm-vic-20 » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:34 AM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #7

tsomctl wrote: post #5

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's ve…

Yes, Oracle is bad. No, I don't love or even like them. But quoting Bryan's dramatic speeches every time Oracle or Ellison are mentioned is adding next to nothing to the discussion at this point. It's a great way to incite anger though.

Post by zepearl » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:37 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #225

zepearl wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I'd like to add that in my opinion "successful" is probably quite risky to use in general, meaning that there are multiple levels (e.g. successful for yourself, for the company/government, for the investors/people, for the future maintainability, etc...) and timelines (e.g. now, in 1 year, in 10 years, ...). For example Stephen Elop can probably be considered "successful" as having managed to be CEO of No…

Agreed. I was referring to people that are able to get to the top of their games because they are able to "get shit done." Whether that shit is good or bad is another issue entirely. Without getting too political, take Donald Trump, who in my mind kind of exemplifies this definition of success. Whatever your thoughts about Trump, he's definitely not lazy, and his early morning tweet storms seem to signify that he get…

Post by darkpuma » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:54 AM UTC

joefourier wrote: post #259

darkpuma wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 al…

Post by darkpuma » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

microtherion wrote: post #178

ryanmarsh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It’s not surprising at all how emotional and “short” sighted people are being about Ellison because “Oracle sucks”. I despise Oracle as much as the next guy but if I were in Elon’s shoes I’d want Ellison on my board. The car business is tough, really tough. At one point the database business was really tough. Ellison achieved a near monopoly. Despite our views on the quality his software. Tech people were not h…

As far as I can tell, the positive qualities that Ellison could bring to the table (sales skills, toughness) are ones that Musk largely already has, and, what's more worrying, it seems likely that Ellison will enable the character flaws in Musk that the two share (hyperbole, unscrupulousness). Meanwhile, Ellison adds nothing I can see in terms of manufacturing and and little in terms of adult leadership. I would argu…