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Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

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Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#41
post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#42

I’m still looking for a concise term for “someone who claims to be an expert but immediately reveals beyond any doubt that they have no clue what they’re saying, simply by opening their mouth on the subject.” Having Tesla engineers over to review Twitter code is definitely that. It’s ridiculous.

[flagged]

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#43
post #3

> One former Tesla engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the matter but was not involved, said Tesla engineers would have trouble capably assessing Twitter’s code. Distributed systems, the large-scale and spread-out network that Twitter is composed of, are not the automaker’s specialty, the person said. > The “idea of Elon being flanked by his Tesla engineers reviewing Twitter code is…

What hubris to think that your system is so complex that other engineers couldn't understand it.

The hubris is thinking Tesla engineers (who are offered worse pay and wlb relative to Twitter) are coding masters of every domain. I won't even snipe at their own software here.

It takes a long time to onboard to a big mature infrastructure that is serving hundreds of millions of users for people moving from a similar company, even longer if your day job is whatever Tesla engineers are doing.

And that's onboarding, not pretending to be an expert which seems to be the role they're taking on.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14 months ago a lot of people said it was “laughable” that Tesla thought they’d have a working prototype of a humanoid robot in under a year… I’ll take Tesla engineer’s over 95% of the industry any day.

No. Most of us correctly noted that no matter how much effort Tesla puts into Optimus, it won't be as good as Honda's Asimo demo for years. Let alone Boston Dynamic's demos. Or Disney's stunt robot. ------- So we're mostly laughing at the wasted effort. Of course it's possible, other companies made humanoid walking robots like 20 years ago. The other questions, like how to actually make money from them, remain unansw…

The differentiator with Tesla’s bot is not in the way it walks, but the way it learns and “thinks” - Tesla engineers are building Artificial General Intelligence into their bot:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellige...

In a few years I think even the general public will be able to understand the difference between Asimo and Optimus. It will be remarkable to see Optimus performing tasks independently.

Update: it’s fair to be skeptical, but bear in mind the concept of a desirable EV was an “I’ll believe it when I see it” until Musk’s sheer force of willpower made it happen. He delivers later than he promises, but he does tend to deliver.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#45

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping. It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.

I think what you’re saying is not untrue. But this isn’t that. There would be an entire process performed over many months (some of which should have happened during due diligence.) Imagine if Elon bought an airline and asked them to line up all the planes on the tarmac for review.

> Imagine if Elon bought an airline and asked them to line up all the planes on the tarmac for review.

I could unironically imagine Elon doing this

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#46
I dunno why any Twitter engineers would be really trying that hard right now.

Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14 months ago a lot of people said it was “laughable” that Tesla thought they’d have a working prototype of a humanoid robot in under a year… I’ll take Tesla engineer’s over 95% of the industry any day.

No. Most of us correctly noted that no matter how much effort Tesla puts into Optimus, it won't be as good as Honda's Asimo demo for years. Let alone Boston Dynamic's demos. Or Disney's stunt robot. ------- So we're mostly laughing at the wasted effort. Of course it's possible, other companies made humanoid walking robots like 20 years ago. The other questions, like how to actually make money from them, remain unansw…

The same way Musk’s other effort make money: government subsidies.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#48

I dunno why any Twitter engineers would be really trying that hard right now. Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.

See also: Tumblr losing Yahoo/Verizon nearly a Billion dollars with it's own implosion.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#49
post #25

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping. It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.

They were asked to print their code and typically this is done as part of diligence _before_ closing. This is not sop. It’s Elon making a show of things.

Very rarely does due diligence involves actual critique of code on paper. Or code reviews at all, for that matter.

Edited: technical review isn’t code review.

Re: Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said

#50

For a variety of performance car nerd related reasons, I’ve not paid too much attention to Tesla. But iirc, there have been a couple threads here and elsewhere about Tesla making “expedient” choices in Eng, with a lot of horrible bodges around critical components. It definitely left me with an impression that Tesla was a place with low engineering quality — though again, I have no source at hand here, and don’t feel…

Tesla Model S owner here. The software on iOS and car is several years ahead of the competition. It embarrasses luxury German automakers. It’s made with the user in mind, it is elegant, and it is innovative in many surprising ways.

For balance, there have been bugs - the linking of key fobs to driver profiles has always been glitchy, and Tesla’s decision to use an inadequate eMMC chip was shortsighted given the volume of data logging. This caused issues for a few owners when the chips started to degrade over time. But to Tesla’s credit they later offered a free chip upgrade to all owners, and even covered the costs of those (like me) who got a third party replacement.

I rate Tesla’s software engineering. I’ve had years of issue-free OTA updates and sheer pleasure from driving the car. And having access to the car via an API is cool too :-)

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