I hate to say this, but you're now living in a world where the value of artisanal code is rapidly approaching zero. If you still cling to beautifully written code as your core qualification, you're having a rough future ahead of you.
And I say this with the bitterness of someone having lost a big part of what made me enjoy this line of work.
If anything his companies are doing well despite of him, not because of him. There's level-headed and competent leadership in them resisting his bullshit.
The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
> The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
Three sucesses.
Not so successful: Solar City, Neuralink, TBC, X.
(X exists, but before it was valued-and-bought by one of Musk's other companies, it appeared to have lost about half its value).
After 10 years, it is not particularly good to have to caveat that with "once it passes the FDA, assuming it's real".
The main problem isn't even the tech, though the tech isn't as good as it seems either.
Their main advance hasn't been the BCI: other teams also do this, main limiting factor is product lifetime rather than electrode count (though yes their count is higher).
The surgical robot is a much more interesting thing than the BCI. But even with the robot, "interesting" rather than "amazing" because (1) what else can that robot do? (2) what does it cost to use? (3) was it reliable enough for humans, or the reason for all the animal welfare issues? (4) some other BCI teams working on delivery via blood vessel and less invasive is better.
Main thing though for any sucessful medical tech is cost. Even with FDA (or non-US equivalents, somehow I don't even know the name of my local equivalent), medical interventions are famously expensive enough in the US to bankrupt and insurance in the US is famously reluctant to pay the full costs.
And up a level, the problem with Neuralink is their output suggests a lack of care to detail, of emphasis on speed over quality, and of having inherited Musk's personal attitude problem when faced with criticism.
TBC is The Boring Company, Zip2 was one of the three sucesses (and not IMO the x.com that became part of PayPal, that looks to me like pure luck for correct timing in the dot.com boom before the bust).
Hyperloop was a tech not a company and if I listed every tech he's done wrong I'd be rightly accused of misunderstanding how R&D investments are necessarily gambles.
paypal succeeded _despite_ musk and required a boardroom coup to remove him from leadership because he was about to tank the company. if he had is way nobody would remember paypal besides a couple people with merch for a long defunct company.
I'd still restrict this to an ability to pursue ideas that others find too risky with relentless persistence and a laser focus. He is able to get something off the ground and make others believe in it, but not good at actually running a stable business. And that's fine, mind you, I absolutely respect what has built. But the person who is responsible for turning SpaceX from an incredibly risky bet into a profit machine is Gwynne Shotwell, not Elon Musk.
Of course it’s still early days for all these companies and they’re not exactly fiscally solid, but if Tesla had not made all those cars, someone else would have.
As a European, I can assure you we have the same problem. Healthcare providers still get payed by the insurance for the work they do, so there’s both an incentive to bill them for as much as possible and also to upsell special premium services the insurance won’t cover for, like better filling materials, invisible aligners, these kinds of things. As a layman, of course you never know if what they are offering you is really the right way, and asking different doctors for their opinion can also lead to wildly different diagnoses.
Perversely though, there is another incentive for doctors to spend as little time as possible with each patient, because they need to justify all time spent and procedures done to the insurance, which is naturally suspicious of the provider to overbill. Thus, they require tons of documentation the provider has to fill out, and neither that nor just talking to a patient for longer than usual are line items they get paid for, leading to appointments being as short as they can manage - usually rushing in, working through the list a medical assistant prepared, annoyedly answering a question if you can manage to slot it in, and rushing out to the next person.
Having a general sense of ease that a malade won’t ruin me or be a death sentence is a good thing, really, and I cannot imagine living another way. But we haven’t really figured it out yet fully either.
While some of that might be true for some countries with publicly funded dental care, it’s certainly not true for regular healthcare. Doctors are paid fixed salaries, there’s no incentive for them to perform unnecessary procedures. Quite the opposite in fact, departments have strict budgets and so they have a strong pressure to ensure all procedures are medically justifiable, and cheaper / simpler / preventative options have been tried first.
Individual doctors working for a clinic are paid a flat salary, true - but the clinics themselves, or the small doctors running their own office are absolutely dependent on accurate billing to the insurances. They have an incentive to optimise their margins, even if patients are not paying directly, and that means both trying to spend as little on care as possible while getting back as much as possible from the insurance providers.
It sounds like you’re describing a country with a public-private hybrid system. Certainly in the UK and the Nordics, the systems I’m most familiar with, there is no “getting back as much as possible from the insurance providers”, as there are no insurance providers. The hospitals are run by the government, funded by regional governments, and have fixed yearly budgets, not treatment dependent billing. The only exception is some privately run GP clinics that may bill per service rendered.
People say 'Europe', speak as if their experience is the same across the continent, and anyone with a different experience is somehow not in the Europe they mean. It's very annoying.
European healthcare is run very differently across the continent. 'Insurance' can mean a [state] social insurance institute that the doctor must bill. Some countries would employ the doctor directly as part of a nationalised health system. Some places it might be the municipality or city that would then get some subsidy from central government. Some it is a mix of all of this. 'Free' healthcare might actually mean a few hundred Euros, or literally nothing.
This! We went to a pediatric dentist with my kid on Monday, with a referral from another dentist, both private. After small talk, their first proper question was: "Do you have insurance?". Before I could respond, my wife responded affirmatively. Insurance here in Ireland means private insurance. After an x-ray, we were presented with a menu of treatment options ranging from around €2k to €5k.
Later I requested the clinic to share the x-ray with me and consulted with another pediatric dentist from another EU country. His assessment was completely different, and recommended very minimal intervention.
My point was that for the specific critique raised here, the European (or the be exact, the German) healthcare system doesn’t really offer much of an improvement, but suffers from similar problems. The fact that you don’t pay yourself doesn’t change the incentives medical professionals have in terms of getting paid for their work.
> Attacking a NATO country would mean total war for Russia.
Is that so? I wouldn't trust the USA to commit to its NATO responsibilities anymore. The rest of NATO, torn as it is, could just as well find all kinds of reasons why this particular attack isn't a "real" attack, just to avoid the confrontation.
I wouldn't bet on that scenario happening, but as Russia, I wouldn't dismiss it outright either.
Europe has 4 times the population of Russia. The only successful attacks in the past 20 years have been against politically divided countries, like Syria, Venezuela and Ukraine (civil war since 2014). Iran is united, and so is Europe.
Lavrov has indicated he knows Russia would lose a conventional war against Europe by saying that an attack by Europe would start a quick (i.e. nuclear) war.
I agree that the US would stay out, especially if it is nuclear.
Multiple European governments are about to flip right. I’m not convinced a La Pen administration would send French troops to protect the Baltics or even Poland.
Lavrov says all kinds of things. Whatever he utters serves a purpose and has no logical relation to truth.
Don’t underestimate the capability of the EU to gridlock itself with decision paralysis. If we were decisive actors, we would have long stopped tolerating the hybrid attacks Russia is deploying against us today. Europe is anything but united now! We’re still purchasing oil from Russia. We can’t even agree on acting against the shadow fleet, or sanctioning all oligarchs, or applying second order sanctions.
A drone loaded with explosives targeting a German airport? We were merely lucky that it had a technical defect, or it may have been a disaster of epic proportions. Do you recall what the reaction to that was? I thought so.
Until we manage to gain some kind of unified agency, you better hope Russia cannot handle the logistics yet.
When you say pointer heavy, just how heavy is that pointer?
In traditional brainfuck, a single < suffices to move The Pointer one cell to the left.
For a dialect of brainfuck where The Pointer is 3x as heavy as is traditional, you'd have to apply 3x the effort, i.e. <<<, in order to move one cell to the left.
Cursed bogocomputing idea of the day: a variant of brainfuck where The Pointer is physically simulated, with mass & momentum. < & > apply impulses. The Pointer continues to move across The Array with momentum after you apply an impulse.
I've been using https://www.irccloud.com for years, it takes care of all these things and also has an app / push notifications. It's still IRC, but it takes care of a lot of the annoying parts of it that made it feel dated.
It's as centralized as everyone running their znc on Hetzner. It's mostly just a bouncer with a nice web interface (Like The Lounge) and a rudimentary app for people who want to pay someone to run this setup. You'd still connect to Libera and other networks and there's zero lock in.
I never worry about presence in any form of chat. I don't care if people are there when I message them; it's up to them to pick up my messages at their convenience.
Crashed client / bouncer should mean it's still in their local log. Bots can also deliver messages pretty commonly. Usually it's `.tell nick message` and next time that nick connects and posts they'll see it.
Not just technically. Proteins, and the molecular machinery producing them, are just that. Look at the flagellar motor. It's a marvel of (natural) engineering.
You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
It’s not that. It’s that their lawyers won’t let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period.
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”
Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.
It’s a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue.
The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
The point I was making was that knowing what GNU means in the first place probably requires some cultural background that many people lack, especially younger ones.
Right, and the point I'm making is that you can learn this from Google once you notice there is a difference from how common commands work on Linux and MacOS. You don't need to know about GNU, you just have to wonder why its different.
…and a team with experience and the hardware and the workflows to do this at scale, repeatedly to avoid drift, with proper infrastructure for evaluation and testing, and all of this work is somehow the core domain of your business.
And I say this with the bitterness of someone having lost a big part of what made me enjoy this line of work.
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