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This sums up my and many others timeline of his understanding of engineering diciplines: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958 https://mastodon.

• hparadiz 23d ago
  Posts like this is why HN is made fun of now in circles where real engineering happens. In reality you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because it would be well over your head.
  • jcranmer 23d ago
    In reality, you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because he's making stuff up and hoping your inability to understand him comes across as genius rather than bullshit.
    • hparadiz 23d ago
      [flagged]
      • jcranmer 23d ago
        Sorry, I'm too busy trying to check an algorithm to convert floating-point numbers to strings for correctness to deal with people playing the "I'm a rocket scientist, therefore everything is easy to me" card. And yet somehow Elon isn't that (see his most recent SpaceX, where he quite literally uses that to justify his competence to build orbital data centers).
        • hparadiz 23d ago
          [flagged]
          • jcranmer 23d ago
            Thank you for putting words into my mouth that I didn't say. Especially when they're quite literally the opposite of my message. Although, given that I pointed out that Elon literally did the exact same thing, why do you trust him when he does it? Or is it simply that you're unaware that he does stuff like that?
            • WalterBright 23d ago
              > why do you trust him when he does it? His companies have made many monumental engineering achievements at his direction.
              • jcranmer 23d ago
                His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements. He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors. But also don't oversell that: only Tesla and SpaceX have been successes, and he's had to have them bail out is other failed companies: SolarCity, Twitter, and xAI. The Boring Company also doesn't seem to be particularly successful either, and he never got around to building a company to build Hyperloop in the first place.
                • WalterBright 23d ago
                  The Boring Company is profitable. > His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements. Those achievements wouldn't have happened without him. > He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors. SpaceX employees are top shelf engineers and scientists. Being able to do that makes Musk a great CEO. Can you name any other CEO who has been able to do anything like what Musk's companies do?
                  • watutalkinbout 23d ago
                    Steve jobs was not a great engineer. He was ruthless, manipulative and lacking empathy - like Musk.
        • WalterBright 23d ago
          I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem. Once you understand engineering, transferring that skill to another engineering discipline is not that hard. For example, the equations for Newtonian mechanics, electronics, beam design, rotating inertia, etc., are interchangeable. > his competence to build orbital data centers Since nobody has yet built an orbital data center, nobody is competent at it yet.
          • nrr 23d ago
            > I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem. It might have been medium difficult back in 1985, but the state of the art has progressed in the intervening 40 years. The constraint of correctness makes things trickier because it further imposes three requirements: completeness, uniqueness, and determinism. Unless the implementer has the skill to prove these properties about the algorithm they've implemented, such an implementation is likely not to achieve those requirements.
            • WalterBright 23d ago
              There was no test suite for it available that I could use for correctness checks, so I did what I could. I also implemented IEEE 754 floating point in asm. For that I did have an exhaustive test suite, and passed it 100%.
              • nrr 23d ago
                We didn't have this definition of correctness until 1990 (due to Steele and White), and it wasn't until the past decade or so that we got a published algorithm (most recently, I think, Dragonbox, due to Jeon when he was still working on his PhD at UCSD), with mathematical proof[0], that satisfied all of the requirements of being complete, being unique, and being deterministic. (Though, Steele-White expresses these slightly differently, as preserving information, having the shortest possible output, and rounding correctly. Completeness, uniqueness, and determinism seem to be equivalent and are easier to prove.) -- 0: Available at <https://fmt.dev/papers/Dragonbox.pdf https://fmt.dev/papers/Dragonbox.pdf>. It's pretty easy to understand either with a numerical analysis background or after having worked through volume 2 of Knuth's TAoCP.
      • BenzeneDream 23d ago
        What an odd comment. You think because he is the CEO of a rocket company that naturally he is beyond making stuff up and talking BS? Have you ever watched an interview of his? And why are CEOs as smart as engineers now. This isn't Twitter. You don't have to suck up to him. He won't ever see this.
        • hparadiz 22d ago
          You are the odd comment. It's been like this my entire life. I was like 20 when Elon was near bankruptcy when Tesla was basically nothing. Then I watched him found SpaceX and again almost run out of money. I then watched him make electric cars a reality from nothing. I then watched him turn the space industry completely upside down. You think elons a bad guy? Whatever. You lost your moral high ground as soon as you started lying. I've watched him give hundreds of interviews with off the cuff engineering specifics. I don't care if he sees this or not. Tired of humoring morons. This isn't reddit. You don't have to suck up to the commies.
    • WalterBright 23d ago
      I bet that Russian rocket engineer who spit on Musk is regretting it now.
  • elar_verole 23d ago
    Just watching him play POE should show you he's not the genius you think he is
    • hparadiz 23d ago
      Just proving my point here. Trying to win an argument because vidya.
      • deleted 20d ago
        [deleted]
  • doc_ick 23d ago
    At one point didn’t he say there was no sql in Twitter? I can follow that all the way to the dumpster that statement is.
  • nyc_data_geek1 22d ago
    "Underground tunnels are immune to surface weather conditions (subways are a good example), so it wouldn’t matter to Hyperloop if a hurricane was raging on the surface. You wouldn’t even notice." Musk, Twitter, 2022 This is, on its face, an utterly idiotic and untrue statement. Look at the subways in NYC anytime it rains
• ralfd 23d ago
  That link is from 2022 presumably about the twitter purchase. People like the guy in the link thought Twitter would go offline hard after firing almost all of the company, instead Elon was right and there was so much fat to cut.
  • sixothree 23d ago
    Yeah, twitter is doing great. /s
    • guywithahat 21d ago
      Since he bought it MAU are up 150 million people, and it seems to be more profitable (although that's not as clear in their most recent filings). Company valuation is down, but I think it's generally agreed he overpaid with the 44 billion takeover, current company market price is slightly above what it was before he publicized his intention to buy it. It's doing a lot better since he bought it as far as I can tell.