In fourth grade, I went to the library and noticed a book with a tripod on the cover blasting people with a heat ray. Of course I checked it out. I didn't know what scifi was at the time, and had never heard of HG Wells. Anyhow, I loved every word in the book, and devoured scifi ever since.
Another seminal book for me was Lord of the Rings, which I read in 6th grade.
What I find off-putting is the emoji style used. They look like images you'd find in a first grade workbook, or on sticker sheets handed out to first graders. I quit using emojis on my phone because of that "playmobil" look.
I suspect this trend started with the yellow happy face. Barf.
On the Craigslist homepage (on desktop) there is a gray navbar on the left side of the screen. That area has a calendar and some group of links below it. The second group of links below the calendar includes "best-of-craigslist" link.
I like that the Craigslist site design is utilitarian and hasn't changed much over the years. The downside is that stuff like this can hide in plain sight.
>"I'd be getting scared when a cat reaches the 20kg threshold" - most likely even 10kg cat will shred you before you could blink. They're insanely fast and surprisingly strong for size. Furry explosives they are
An angry cat in full fight mode will absolutely put a human in hospital, and the bites and scratches are teeming with potentially deadly bacteria.
They may be unique - a super-successful predator that has persuaded a more dominant species to look after it by looking cute and feeling soft and making relaxing noises.
my cat at its peak weight is about 8kg, and that's the size that i'd get a bit nervous around if i didn't know it's a tame housecat that runs away at sight of a mouse...
I've watched a lot of horror shows that had no effect on me. But this one wasn't a horror show, it was for real. I found it very disturbing. I couldn't believe what I was watching.
According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines. He's willing to go too far, having to sometimes put a part back in.
Everything in the manufacturing process is also challenged to justify its existence.
This is how he managed to reduce the costs by 90%.
Isaacson’s “biographies” are glorified puff pieces. Musk is as unrecognizable in his as Jobs was in his.
Both Tesla and SpaceX had teams keeping Musk busy on bs just so that the engineering teams could do their work.
The second he took control, we got the cybertruck and the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship).
> Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part
This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.
Musk is very lucky to be moving such quantities of money that his companies are big enough to protect themselves from him, if you ever wonder how Musk would fare on a tight budget, look no further than the Oceangate.
Do you remember when he bought Twitter and fired everyone, and the mass media and employee outcry was that a) the service would stop working and b) he would bankrupt the company, yet a few years later it’s massively more successful than Twitter ever was as a public business?
Regardless your thoughts on Elon, his drug habits, and his political brashness, I don’t think you can say he’s in any way close to the Oceangate guy. There is something legitimately special about him and his collective.
Yes, Twitter is so “successful” Musk had to write off 50% of his “investment” out of the gate, and had to come up with an AI-hyped merger with SpaceX to compensate the banks that went in with him.
The only reason Twitter has more active users is that it removed some of the protections for bots, in particular broad filtering coming from certain country involved in a war.
You don’t think Musk is any close to the Oceangate guy? Let’s review some interesting decisions by his companies then:
- Musk mucking around with the blue checks and the bot filters in Twitter skyrocketed the amount of scams in the platform.
- Tesla uses very strict NDAs and settlement to silence the reporting of accidents
- The infamous electric door handle that locks up Teslas when power goes out was an obvious point of failure, it was ignored, people died, and now several countries have legislation against it
- Reportedly Musk had safety lines and other safety features in the factories removed for serious reasons like “not liking yellow”
- Any understanding of how to parse public insurance data will show you Tesla’s have accident rates that are multiples of other brands
- The Starship, a vessel that is intended for human transport, has no safe abort system, no way to fit one in its current state, and no plans to modify that.
Just a reminder that even a very SpaceX-friendly count (in which flights that did not attempt to land are considered “good”) puts the current reliability rate at <40%.
As a naive boundary, for clearing the 97.5% predicted crew survival, SpaceX would need to fly in the order of 300 good Starship launches.
Are you seriously claiming that as a fact? You really believe 12 minutes is too long for a bot or something? Because that has to be the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.
Measuring bot activity became harder after the API changes (I wonder why!), but there’s been some attempts at finding ways to estimate bot activity. All those measures are compatible with increases in bot activity, and incompatible with bot decline.
This is not what I personally believe. This is what experts in web analystics believe. Bots don't behave like that. They don't simulate human browsing activity by staying on a site for 10 to 12 minutes, entering the site directly (through url or bookmark), and browsing 14 pages during their visit.
Bots are perfectly capable of simulating long user sessions. Many large-volume scrapping traffic for example simulate lots of long persistent user sessions.
Twitter is definitely not more successful now than before. So many people left and are gone forever.
I would read a deep dive though into the history of Twitter (with the financials) to understand better and I do get that for a single product company there really is a point at which you give up on finding the next big thing and just optimize on your main thing and you really just need a few dozen awesome people and a rotation of new hires to keep things rolling but not thousands of engineers.
Maybe I’m overstating “massively more successful” but to my understanding “X” has roughly twice the active use count that Twitter did, although that includes Grok.
That said, do you remember these kinds of articles?
> Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse
> “Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks.” Melissa Ingle: “I don’t see how it lasts the month.” “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system, and very soon.”
Elon was firing people left and right and literally physically destroying Twitter’s data centers. I remember hundreds of these hysterical articles and tweets that very clearly did not come to pass. He obviously did something more clever than the authors of these articles expected… is all I’m claiming.
I haven't posted anything on this HN submission yet, but all I'm claiming is that Twitter was so successful under Elon's management that he thought it was better to roll it into SpaceX than to keep it independent. Kind of like solar city was merged into Tesla to bail it out and then it winded down after the acquisition while nobody is looking.
Yes, and Tesla and SpaceX are both ridiculously overvalued by any fair measure.
But we can separate the financial inanity of his empire from the question, which is whether Elon is a capable engineering mind or simply an ‘Isaacson puff piece recipient’.
He also unbanned a lot of people and got Trump back, got to ride the AI wave with Grok, pushed paid subscriptions and implemented paying people for tweeting. I would argue growing the platform by bringing back people that were brought back for violating the original rules is not a win. Nor is attracting people to the platform that follow those people, Nor is riding the AI train.
And even with all of that, the new users, the AI, the paid subscriptions, None none of that actually fixed the major underlying issues that Twitter is not profitable. Jack Dorsey couldn’t fix it and neither did Elon. I think he just realized having a modern media platform he controls is more powerful than it making money. He inherited a platform built by someone else, and keeps the lights on with a skeleton crew. I don’t see that as a success
More to the point, MAUs are a measure of reach and not revenue or business health.
Looking at this from an investment standpoint (as if, e.g., I were establishing funding requirements for a pension fund or an annuity or some other such financial vehicle), MAUs are a nice to have because they can establish a counterfactual[0] for volume, but I'd be looking at the performance of X's products relative to the financial performance of X's customers buying those products (e.g., for advertisers, things like conversion and customer acquisition cost come to mind), legal exposure (because of, e.g., CSAM distribution) and other tail risks, and also whether there's an existential risk to the liberal democratic order that enables the financial vehicle I'm working with to operate at all, among other portfolio-level risks.
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0: Well, kinda. The counterfactual actually comes in when we ask questions like, "If the reach changes, what happens to the economic performance?" Relying on MAUs as a baseline measure of the reachable population based on observation enables us to establish these kinds of counterfactuals.
> yet a few years later it’s massively more successful than Twitter ever was as a public business?
Twitter has certainly been a glowing success at becoming a right-wing propaganda chamber for Musk but as a commercial venture not really. Revenue is down 60% since Musk bought it.
It also doesn't factor in the dramatically reduced costs. It's likely that X is already significantly more profitable than Twitter was. And with less dependency on advertisers, which is a huge win in and of itself.
Look man I'm not a fan of Elon, but it's ridiculous to say the starship is the "worst". It's coming out of early development and has had some minor success already.
>This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.
It seems to me that partisan/political hate blinds some people so much that they are becoming ridiculous.
"This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case"
Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. While not a full scientist, I doubt that "his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down" anytime often.
Have you ever been in such a situation that you describe, or is this just your prejudice speaking? AFAIK the discussions in SpaceX revolve more around things like "can this part be 3d-printed", "do we keep the actuators for part X or can it just stick out into the wind" or "should we use landing legs or not", which have nothing to do with high-school physics and everything to do with actual engineering tradeoffs.
"the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship)."
This is what tells me that you are speaking in bad faith. Starship is not yet a finished product. Judging it now makes about as sense as judging Edison's lightbulb a year before it was introduced into the market.
Starship has several issues to fix, but we can already see that a) the Raptor engines are about the best on the planet, doubly so when considering their extremely low unit cost; b) the vessel itself is very tough and performed well even in really bad situations; c) the heat shield developed a lot and the last Starship (the one which was dragged to the Christmas Island) survived reentry in very good condition; d) the amount of control (belly flops, slowing down to hover) that they have over that huge thing is unique in the history of spaceflight.
> Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Clarification, Musk bought a B.A. in physics. In the Paypal S-1 in 2002, [1] Paypal's lawyers claimed that he graduated with a B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Economics in 1995.
Yet the actual degrees subpoenaed from UPenn indicate a B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Economics in 1997, two years later. He could not even remember the year he graduated or the degree he received just 5/7 years after their purported completion. I have yet to meet a single person who actually graduated from college who can not accurately recollect the year of their graduation, have you?
Most likely he did this because he was in the USA on a student visa and dropping out of UPenn in 1995 made him a illegal immigrant which his brother, Kimbal Musk, corroborated in a interview [2].
Small counterpoint: I'm 42 years old, and I would have to look at my resume to see what year I graduated college. By time I graduated I was already working full time, had a contracting company on the side, and had a family. College was just a thing that was happening, another job, it wasn't a huge life-defining event. I remember the people I met and the projects I worked on, but there's no way I'd be able to accurately tell you the exact year it was over. (I just checked the resume, I was off by 2. Yikers.)
Really, your lawyer asks you what year you graduated for a legal filing and you would give the wrong year? Not even bother to go check, just fly by the seat of your pants?
He was the chief engineer and head of product at SpaceX and Tesla for over 20 years, respectively.
On Falcon 1 and 9 he worked directly on major components of the vehicles.
In Tesla, he was heavily involved in the design of every single product they came out with. He also micromanaged Model 3 assembly automation in 2017-18.
>"According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines."
This removal of surplus-age is common in the automotive industry, and one of the reasons that cars are such an amazing value. It seems like Musk's remarkable ability to achieve cost reductions (at least in the aerospace context) is attributable to his pursuit of vertical integration. Airframers (aeronautical vehicle designers & manufacturer) are bound by the costs dictated by their component suppliers, especially after a configuration has achieved regulatory approval. SpaceX has managed to avoid being 'held hostage' by pseudo-monopoly suppliers.
yes and no. Like you said, automotive and aviation industries are bound by a lot regulatory and path dependent constraints.
Elon's strength is his willingness to pull the plug and transition away from suboptimal solutions. This is bolstered by his willingness to double down.
Imagine if Boeing said "screw all this recertification technical debt for the 737 MAX airframe, we will start fresh. Customers can take it or leave it"
According to a version I heard, Boeing engineering did say more or less just that, at which point Southwest, the near-monopoly in some regions, said something like, "Oh yeah? Then we'll plan to leave it."
And Boeing upper management overruled the engineers.
There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good.
Unfortunately, two of the 3 crews did not understand the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. The 3rd crew did, and landed safely, and the media never reports on that.
The runaway stab trim procedure is a "memory item", meaning pilots shouldn't need a checklist to deal with it.
But doesn’t apply to MCAS because the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct.
The MCAS system wasn’t documented, pilots weren’t trained on it, it didn’t indicate anything distinct in the cockpit, and it could rapidly put the plane into an unrecoverable attitude where pilots no longer had the physical strength to overcome the forces involved.
I know how the stab trim system works. I worked on it (for the 757) for three years.
Yes, it applies to MCAS.
> the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct
Nope. MCAS failure manifests itself as runaway trim, and the emergency procedures for it are exactly what is needed to recover from it.
1. the stab trim switches override the MCAS signals. Override. That means the pilot can trim to normal using the column mounted trim switches. The column switches will power the trim back to normal. No physical strength is required.
2. there's a "stab trim cutoff" switch on the console. That turns off the trim system. MCAS cannot bypass it.
The proof is the 3rd MCAS incident. The pilots trimmed it back to normal, and turned the stab trim system off.
That's all they had to do.
This is supposed to be a "memory item". The other two crews did not remember the memory item. Boeing even sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating this information. It was ignored by the EA pilots, who did everything wrong (including overspeeding the airplane at full thrust).
The narrative you wrote is the typical one in the mass media, which is utterly wrong. The proof of that is they ignore the 3rd incident which didn't fit the narrative.
I've talked with two 737 pilots about this. They agree with me, though I knew I was right anyway.
Food for thought: ever wonder why the stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent place on the center console in easy reach?
You just took Boeing adding a secret system that can cause a plane to crash and then blamed the pilots who were unfortunate to be a victim of malfunctioning sensors and then put all the blame on them because pilots who didn't want to die inside a deathtrap aircraft figured out how to avoid their own death the moment they realized that the MCAS crashes were not an isolated incident?
What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of? That they had some perverse incentive to die?
Nope. I wrote: "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"
> What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of?
Not following the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. This is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning a checklist is not required.
There were 3 MCAS incidents:
1. crew trimmed to normal with the thumb switches, then turned off the trim system. Flew the rest of the flight, landed safely.
2. crew trimmed it back to normal at least 11 times (if I recall correctly) and never turned off the trim system. Crashed.
3. Boeing Emergency Airworthiness directive was sent to all MAX pilots. In a nutshell, it says to restore normal trim using the thumb switches then turn off the trim system. EA pilots instead turned off the trim system while the airplane was pointed down at full throttle. Crashed.
The two 737 pilots I talked to about this both asserted pilot incompetence.
Personally, I assign half the blame on Boeing and the other half on the pilots. Flying is not a joke. Not paying attention to an Emergency Airworthiness Directive is not acceptable.
> "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"
It was purposefully deceptive -- Boeing management actively decided to hide its existence from pilots.
The narrative that the pilots were at fault was Boeing leadership covering their ass.
The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.
MCAS would also re-activate with a five second delay, just long enough to confuse pilots.
More importantly, deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.
This is a Catch-22 scenario: Activate the electrics and be killed by MCAS, or deactivate the electrics and be killed by physics.
I could go through each of your comments in this thread and point out how NTSB crash investigators proved that Boeing was directly or indirectly at fault in almost every aspect, but I don't want to write out ten pages. Others have done so already, more eloquently, and often with more colourful language. Most professional pilots were rightly furious with Boeing.
Boeing's arguments have been mutually exclusive with each other: "Just remember how to operate MCAS... which we hid from you!" and "Just disable the electric trim... which will pit you against forces you can't overcome"... "Which is not a problem because you can turn electric trim back one... but then MCAS will try to kill you again"... "It won't do that because it is dual redundant... an option... that nobody purchased... and we didn't even tell most customers about."
I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths -- I know one of each and I'm now intimately familiar with the self serving arguments that make no sense, especially in combination.
> The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.
I'll pick this one. I've heard it before. Runaway trim is uncommanded movement. It does not have to be continuous, it can stop and start. That behavior can certainly happen with a short circuit or faulty wiring. It's like the speaker connections on my home stereo - the connectors corrode over time, and the sound cuts in an out randomly.
The MCAS behavior absolutely presents as runaway trim behavior. Remember I worked for 3 years on the 757 stab trim system. I know what runaway trim is.
> deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.
That's why the instructions provided to the pilots said to use the thumb switches first to restore normal trim. All three crews had managed to do just that to restore normal trim. The second instance the pilots restored it ELEVEN TIMES and it never occurred to them to then turn off the trim system.
You might want to review the first incident. The MCAS system came on 2 or 3 times, and each time the crew used the thumb switches to restore normal trim. Then they turned off the trim system. The flight continued and they landed safely. They knew nothing about MCAS - they just followed the runaway stab trim procedure.
> I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths
Being nasty doesn't lend credibility to your arguments.
This is exactly correct in the context of the decision as it played out, but stretches and re-engines are very common in commercial airlines. Changing that decision without reinforcing the safety culture probably would have ended in the same place.
Wasn't the whole point of the MAX that they had reached the limit of what their existing design had, but due to the demands of the airlines, as well as their current position in the market, they felt it was an easier idea to extend the lifespan of their already tired design by using software to overcome the physical limitations of the aircraft? I do understand that the airplane would have flown fine without the MCAS system, but then it would not have satisfied all their requirements.
Taking a step back, I think it's more than that. It's just the company structure. It remains to be seen if SpaceX and Tesla survive long term. But if they do, a lot will be attributed to the company structure that Elon designed. When you have a company that does stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1InUlHXv718
You just think to yourself, even if the airplane was completely safe, and they are incredibly safe, this is just not a great look. Both doors accomplish the task but little thought was put into the operator of the door. The little things matter and I notice them more and more everywhere I go with a lot of legacy American companies.
My point was more too highlight his approach to problems, not make the argument that this would have been successful or profitable for Boeing.
In fact, I would say there's probably a very narrow set of circumstances where his back to the drawing board approach can be deployed successfuly.
That said, the 787 Dreamliner remains statistically one of the safest widebody long-haul aircraft in commercial aviation history, which I think is a Counterpoint. It achieves this despite any more globally diverse supply chain, and moving production out of unionized Boeing manufacturing plants.
Safety by Design and design for manufacturability can help eliminate the possibility of quality issues during production.
Sure, that is no accident. Elon seeks out markets ripe for disruptive engineering innovation.
His approach probably wouldn't work as well if you threw him in as CEO of a random company like JC penny or Pizza Hut. Other CEO's are good at different things - like squeezing the extra 0.1% out of a 40 year old brand or product line
Now I'm thinking about him firing the pizza cooks and bringing in a crack team of engineers to redesign the concept of Pizza from first principles.
That's basically what happened at DOGE, there was a hilarious quote from one of the software engineers he brought in that they thought the government would be full of useless and overpaid people, like silicon valley.
How does something like this happen despite Ford knowing all the 'secrets' a company like Tesla or the Chinese know? I have a few guesses:
1. Its the structure of the company. In this video the presenter talks a lot about all the hoses and clamp connectors etc. The cooling department thinking they had to stay relevant made sure the car incorporated a design that had all this nonsense.
2. Maybe they didn't put their 'A' engineers on this car. Its plausible: the F-150 is their massive money maker. However this car was supposedly developed under some skunkworks program and yet here we are.
3. Maybe there was sabatoge from elsewhere (suppliers, middle management etc.) You watch a movie like Ford vs Ferrari and while im sure a lot is dramatized, I can't help but think man they were talking about the dysfunction of Ford way back then?!
Then we have Youtube documentaries like this one about the Ford Taurus SHO talking about how they screwed up so much that they had one chance left to get serious...like what? Shouldn't they be serious every day? Thats what the Chinese are doing.
The presenter further added how they had to ship entire engine blocks to Japan so that they could 'fix' them and unlock 80 more horsepower that Ford just left on the table. If factual, this should be a total embarrassment: You had to send your handiwork to a entity with a better reputation so that they could 'fix' your mess?
At some point, you have to acknowledge that the naysayers were wrong: Thinking (especially among the short community) was that Tesla had some cool ideas but their implementation was horrific, they couldn't just make up for 100+ years of institutional knowledge that the legacy companies had. The Tesla cars showed some of this thinking: quite poor build quality, poor after sale support, poor parts network. These things improved over the years but still isn't perfect.
But at the same time you have to acknowledge that the legacies suffer from their own problems that dont put them as far ahead as newcomers as you'd think. Sometimes a lot of that institutional knowledge becomes a liability when a paradigm shift occurs.
Slight aside, he also has driven capability that was challenging to justify existence for, and was later removed re: Dragon 2 propulsive landing via SuperDracos, landing legs, and the ballast sled. I'm sure the Dragonfly programs matured their abort programs, but surely, that was a ton of time and effort wasted.
And then, there are the gems: War of the Worlds, and Lord of the Rings.
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