>BTW I think it’s utterly irrelevant whether someone “gets” PEMDAS or not. That’s not math. To the contrary, it belies a rote, formulaic way of thinking that is almost inimical to math.
Being able to "get" PEMDAS in particular doesn't matter. Being able to "get" things like PEMDAS matters a great deal. Understanding that there are rules that bind the squiggly lines on the page is an idea about as central to mathematics as any I know.
Names are not arbitrary in the least. They are deeply connected to history, family, religion, and ancient tradition. They are meaningful in just about every way a thing can be meaningful.
You can consider those things unimportant, but society as a whole does not agree with you.
Considering all the completely wacky names that American parents are choosing for their kids these days, it seems that modern American society no longer agrees with you.
So how do you measure productivity? I see no definition of "Developer Velocity" in this article or the linked ones, nor do I see an explanation of how it's measured, nor do I see any real attempt to prove its validity. They simply assert that they have a meaningful metric, which is begging the question.
>generative AI tools such as CopilotX and ChatGPT have the potential to enable developers to complete tasks up to two times faster
I'm surprised McKinsey is willing to endorse ChatGPT, which is one of their major competitors in the information-free drivel market.
The author is also a non-physicist, though he'd disagree with that characterization. He is a famous crackpot. Ask him to actually derive all of physics from these principles and he'd fail completely.
>This is the most common mistake the anti-Musk crowd makes. They fail to differentiate between a person being intelligent and having good self-control. They are not the same thing.
"Smart" does not just mean "high intelligence", as you very well know. In common parlance people use "smart" to mean an ill-defined combination of intelligent, knowledgeable, careful, and wise. A smart person is one who can deal with complexity and make good decisions.
Deliberately misinterpreting what someone has said in such a way that it is obvious nonsense, then claiming what they said is obvious nonsense, is not a clever trick. All too often effective, but not clever.
I am not willing to conclude Musk is especially smart, for the record. SpaceX seems pretty competent, but Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, and several failed projects are technically dreadful in numerous ways. What can be attributed to Musk's intelligence, what can be attributed to his behavior, and what can be attributed to the fact that any fool with a big enough bag of money can hire brilliant people? I do not know.
What I do know is that every time he speaks on a subject I know well his remarks are word salad.
>Elon doesnt have that experience, and every mistake is at-scale.
Several of his mistakes have, I am sure, been born out of ignorance. This is not a good explanation for his decisionmaking in general. Nearly everyone, whether in the industry or not, has been able to foresee the consequences of his actions better than he has.
His worst decisions have been born out of emotion. He has throttled access to websites like the New York Times and slandered organizations like NPR because they don't praise him enough. He rebranded the company to 'X' because he is still hung up on his failures in the '90s. He writes pathetic and incoherent rants at 2:00 AM and demands every user see them because he is deeply insecure. He desperately wants to feel popular, even if it has to be by fiat. He has done the wrong thing, time and time again, because he is weak.
Being able to "get" PEMDAS in particular doesn't matter. Being able to "get" things like PEMDAS matters a great deal. Understanding that there are rules that bind the squiggly lines on the page is an idea about as central to mathematics as any I know.