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“It’s not that hard”
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Elon Musk loves to speak confidently about shit he knows nothing about. This leads to him being a confident speaker on every topic... I just wish we could figure out a way to shut him up.
Obligatory
The rockets are fine. SpaceX has a team specifically designed to distract Musk and keep him away from the actual work on the rockets. Tesla didn't have that though. That's how we ended up with that lame presentation with the weird "S3XY" acromin. That was really the point I realized that he was just an idiot frat boy with too much money. He really is his own worst enemy.
the thing about spacex is everything they do is because of nasa and government.
the only thing spacex has going for it is the fact that they can spend a billion dollars exploding a rocket five times before it slightly works the sixth whereas the government can't do that.
As someone who does know about this field, and absolute despise Musk, that's not quite true. SpaceX is very successful thanks to help from the US government, and despite the influence of Musk, but also because they are a team of very competent people who have actually innovated and pushed the boundaries of launch vehicles. To say they have nothing going for them and are being propped up by the government is not at all accurate, and they have been much more succesful than traditional government contractors.
That isn't what they're saying though, is it? They're saying that SpaceX has the ability to fail more than NASA, because they're not a government organization funded solely by taxes.
Admittedly I think the biggest failures that hurt NASA were incidents when people, not rockets, blew up. It'll be interesting to see if things change if/when there is a death from a SpaceX rocket.
People die in work related incidents all the time. The only thing different about deaths from NASA incidents is that they are (usually) spectacular incidents (like massive explosions or cabin fires…not good things, just stunning) and high-profile.
SpaceX does well because they basically ignore Elon.
That's definitely true. That should still not take away from the accomplishments of the SpaceX engineers. ULA had the same exact opportunities but completely wasted them.
Oh sorry yeah that was poorly worded. I don't mean to say that SpaceX engineers are failures, what they've accomplished is nothing short of incredible. But failure is an inevitable part of the engineering process of iterating and improving your solution. NASA doesn't have the luxury of quick iteration cycles like SpaceX does (comparatively), because each iteration means more money out of the taxpayers' pockets.
Yes, it's a help, not the only thing they have going for them.
At first, I was like, "now that the governments haven't pursued space for 20-30 years, I think it's great that the private sector can finally push for space exploration and inventions and space stuff."
But now...I don't really like the idea of Space X sending up and downing thousands of satellites including heavy metals through our atmosphere every year, just to keep a shitty proprietary network online.
It's my atmosphere, but it's not my network. Space X can fuck off my night sky for all I care.
Also in the next couple of years, they're expecting so many "retirements" of satellites that they can't guarantee safety for the people on the ground. They're literally expecting an "acceptable" number of people to die from this.
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/falling-spacex-satellites-faa-report-space-junk/
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/space-news/2023/10/19/faa-warning-falling-spacex-satellites-will-soon-pose-fatal-risk-for-earthlings/
Etc.
"‘The problem isn’t the Starlink satellites surviving, reentering, hitting somebody,’ says Moriba Jah, an associate professor at UT Austin. ‘The problem is other older objects.’"
Boeing and Lockheed Martin also spent billions of government dollars blowing up rockets, but SpaceX is still cheaper and delivering faster.
Do not downplay their engineering accomplishments.
What's your source on the spacex team distracting him? I can't find anything supporting that. I do find some interviews from anonymous employees saying it's calmer now that he's so focused on twitter.
Here's someone talking about it.
There may some breaks in that armor if you look at their recent actions that sound a lot like Musk speaking through them.
And yet they managed to obliterate a poorly-specced launchpad, causing massive damage to a nearby town and wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem.
I can’t remember NASA ever doing that.
Maybe I'm out of the loop - what's he been saying about software?
One example that stuck with me is that he said some shit along the lines of 80% of Twitter's microservices being superfluous and he'll be shutting them off.
Yes, the dev teams just spent 4/5 of their time building shit no one asked for. It just annoys me so much, because anyone with basic reasoning should be able to work out that this cannot possibly be the case, but it's easy to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.
Yeah. As a software dev, it was pretty awkward explaining this to colleagues who rely on Twitter/X.
"It sounds like you think Twitter is a software company and that Elon is utterly unqualified to run a software company. That can't possibly be true, right?"
...Then we end up doing the "Concerned Padme" meme...
I've heard horror stories on the programming subreddits of incompetent managers that require their employees to write X new lines of code per week. Those code bases probably could have huge chunks taken off.
Clearly that hasn't happened here
When he took over twitter there was a bunch of stuff he was spouting about things like Twitter's stack needing a full rewrite and such. Going so far as to fire the engineer that challenged him on it during a live spaces thing if I recall correctly.
Ah yes I remember that. I thought maybe there was something new he was going on about specifically.
He would have to know what he's talking about to be specific.
You would think so... And yet months of instability on a previously rock solid platform says he did not.
He asked employees to print out their code so he could review it.
He also seems to have the idea that the best developer is the one who produces the most code. That shows a pretty major lack of understanding of how software development works. Sometimes the best day is when you produce negative amounts of code.
This post’s image man
It’s not that hard(tm)
Oh. This post's image has him talking types in January and the "obligatory" image above has someone saying he's been talking software in December, so I thought maybe Musk has been spewing about software for a few weeks or something.
December from '22 not '23. The image was from a few months after he took over twitter and was still going on about that stuff and how it was doing all these useless things that needed to be removed or rewritten. I just remembered another one about how he was going on about a single request to twitter causing thousands of RPCs or something? I think that's not really unheard of in a microservices infrastructure and it's not like they'd be synchronous. There's probably tons of calls that go to things like tracking, analytics, or cross DC sharing I would imagine for such a large and high volume service like twitter.
Okay gotcha. Yeah I just thought I missed a new headline or something.
Literally any developer can tell you that. It doesn’t even matter what codebase we’re talking about. It always needs to be rewritten.
Twitter is a software, he's been saying stupid stuff about how it works for the last year+
Okay gotcha. Thought maybe there was a headline I missed.
The French had a pretty good way of shutting up insufferable rich asshats.
Does it rhyme with “vaseline”?
Yes. Yes it does :D
I'll grab my Ovaltine.
I’ll grab my gasoline
Well, not spreading his posts or not reacting to things he says is probably the best way.
If reacting to something always makes it more likely to occur, you have just made reacting to things Elon Musk says more likely to occur.
The irony isn't lost on me, but it's not always. It's just a good way to handle attention seeking people that you don't want to seek attention anymore.
Well, looking at ChatGPT and other LLMs, they also lie confidently. Maybe there is a correlation and Elon is just a poor AI.
He doesn't notice he's the Duning-Kruger effect personified.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Oh, thanks for pointing that out.
I was formulating an angry rebuttal in my head, then saw your comment and realised I hadn’t noticed the username. Of course it’s Musk. That’s rebuttal enough.