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For all the hate: Elon ships. And OpenAI ships.

People claim OpenAI is closed, that they are controlled by Microsoft, that they don't care enough about safety...

But the fact is, Anthropic, Google Brain, even Meta -- OpenAI blows them all out of the water when it comes to shipping new innovations. Just like Twitter ships much more now with Elon, and how SpaceX ships much more than NASA and Blue Origin.

If you disagree, give me just one logical reason why. It's just a fact.


As if shipping was the end goal...


I've said this before and I'll say this again: Space is not a amateur game.

I see a lot of young SV types thinking they want to build a deep tech space company. And they can. But it requires a couple years of deep training in of aeronautics and physics before you even know what's going on.

Elon for instance spent years studying space on his own before launching SpaceX. Elon's at a different level, but we can at least learn a few things from him and SpaceX.


Buddy elon doesn't even understand basic physics, like classical motion and energy equations. Or do you not remember the time he was talking about "compressed gas thrusters" on Teslas? Such a system would be laughably ineffective and all it takes to understand that is a high school physics equation.


Elon probably knows more engineering than Jim Farley or Dave Calhoun. I don't think you have a good handle on CEO competence in this industry. Musk is running circles around these guys.


Elon’s arguably the greatest founder in history. Either him, or JP Morgan. He doesn’t need to be more like a physician, physicians need to be more like him.


Ah yes, person is great because they started off with resources other people don't, and were able to leverage those resources to get even more resources. Truly, we should all emulate that.

Oh, most people don't start off rich? Oh what a shame.

Elon bought Tesla, Elon is only vaguely a part of SpaceX, and every single other venture he has been involved with has either gone nowhere, been a scam/grift/lie (boring company, hyperloop, neurolink though it shouldn't be judged just yet) or even classic nepotism with Solar roofing.

Elon is such a good businessman, which is why he bought Twitter at the peak of it's valuation, continually flakes on all it's bills, publicly admits to losing half of that peak value, saddled it with a billion dollar a year debt, erased any brand recognition it might have to replace it with a stupid domain name he has been obsessed with for twenty years, lost half of the advertising revenue, blocked it off from public access, fired anyone who isn't a sycophant, and repeats really dumb conspiracy theories about fucking everything.


There are tons of people that start off rich and do nothing with it. There are tons of people who start poor and go nowhere with that, or start poor and become rich, and still do nothing with it.

Yes, he was fortunate to be born above an arbitrary rich/poor line that many other people weren't. How about instead of judging him based on something he had no control over (the irony in that judgement is palpable), judge him for what he has done, regardless of where he started from.

I'm not at all a Musk fanboy but he is undeniably a "great" person. He's got ~several~ achievements that would make him a great person, which reinforces the point even more.


> Oh, most people don't start off rich?

How rich did Elon start off?


Other than having fairly wealthy parents and family?

His payoff from paypal is not something most people will have access to. The dot com boom was basically a lottery.


Before Paypal he sold a rudimentary yellow pages search engine to Compaq for $305 million so that they could merge it into their search engine.

Compaq managed to sell AltaVista for $2.3 billion 6 months later and not long before the crash so maybe it wasn't the stupidest move on their side.


How wealthy were his parents and family? How many other people have parents and family that wealthy, or wealthier? How many of them end up being $100+ billionaires?


Many people are "fairly wealthy", yet don't end up as billionaires e.g. many doctors, lawyers or SWEs.

Elon family riches is uncertain: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine


To be fair he made most of his initial wealth during the dot.com psychosis...

Not saying he isn't one of the greatest businessmen in history (well... assuming he's running Twitter to the ground for shits & giggles anyway) but selling a company for hundreds of millions back in those days does not necessarily was not necessarily that different from winning the lottery (being at the right time and the right place was enough).


> To be fair he made most of his initial wealth during the dot.com psychosis...

And now make money in another, partly self-created psychosis


Tesla is pretty legit though, SpaceX too. Whatever I might think about him as a person I don't see how can someone deny that Tesla is running circles around all traditional car manufacturers.


They falsify so much, I don't know what is happening there. All I know they get lot of funding, which has happened with complete scams (everyone says it can't be a scam, until they knew it all along) and successes, and everything in between.


They delivered almost a million cars this year, I don't see how could they falsify something like that.

>They falsify so much

What do you even mean by that? Whom did Tesla scam?


Physicians don't study physics, they have medical degrees. You're thinking of physicists.


> physicians need to be more like him.

What does being a founder have to do with being a doctor?

Or a physicist for that matter?


I'm not sure what strawman you are talking about, but every space company in SV I have seen has been started by domain experts, mostly aerospace and hardware engineers.

There are also a lot of space companies focusing on a narrow niche that doesn't involve rockets — sometimes imagery (Planet, other satellites), sometimes 3D printing, etc. It's not like deep training in aeronautics will make you an expert in 3D printing in space - there's not a 101 guide to the space, it's novel tech.


> Space is not a amateur game

So you're saying that the people who designed and launched the Viking lander back in the 70s (it landed on Mars when Musk was about 5) were amateurs?

Well as far as Mars exploration is concerned they achieved much more than him with basically stone age tech compared to what's available now...


I once said that "just as there's no founder like Elon, there's no Java expert like Andrew (project author)"

Andrew's Java skills are at a different level. I only briefly met him once, but he used to be a core contributor to Oracle's Java magazine. 80% of the "Unix greybeard" type advanced Java knowledge I have is due to his articles.

Happy to see he's still building. Thanks Andrew!


Thank you for such kind words!


Ok why are you doing this? To see if some end around to another language GC is faster?


I can see it being used to bootstrap OpenJDK, particularly on platforms other than Windows, macOS or Linux.


So, where is Andrew's x/twitter?



seems his blogspot is also full of stuff http://binstock.blogspot.com/


Elon was (sadly) right. His cuts were painful but they produced a much leaner and more productive company at Twitter. They actually ship now.

Nat Friedman once said on Twitter that tech companies are 2-5x overstaffed and everyone knows this.

I hope the same positive outcome comes out of T-Mobile, and not just people losing their jobs. And I hope they find new jobs soon.


Since his cuts Twitter seems like it would be worth a lot less than he paid for it. And twitter shipped before him.


Hard disagree. What's the last major feature Twitter shipped before Elon? Keep in mind they had 8000 employees

Just in the last one year, we've gotten: Twitter Notes, long form video, checkmarks for everyone, subscriptions for creators, edit tweets, see # of replies and likes on a tweet

Yes, Twitter is worth less than he paid for it. He's partially responsible, he's been too erratic. But I'm optimistic with this shipping velocity, in a couple years the company will be worth much more.


Editing tweets was in testing in Sep 2022 before the acquisition.

Subscriptions was released in 2021 then called Super Follows.

Notes was rolled out in Jun 2022, before the acquisition.

Basically, half the things you attribute to Musk are the major features they released before him.


I think Fleets and Spaces were both released in the couple of years pre-Musk. (Fleets was later removed.)


One major feature they shipped was not ostracizing half their users. All shitter ships now is ways to get at liberals.


"And I hope they find new jobs soon."

Where, exactly? If everybody is 2-5x overstaffed and is cutting people, where are all those people going to go? Form startups to sell things to people forming startups because they were laid off?

People like Nat and Musk want people burning themselves out with overwork and blame organizational and management issues on people not working hard enough. The truth is at most tech companies the real organizational waste is bad leadership and poor direction, people not having clear goals and work, and burning too many cycles trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction.


Twitter once was a profitable business that had 8,000 well paid employees. Now it's in the path of bankruptcy.

Hurray Elon


Ship what exactly?


Twitter Notes, long form video, checkmarks for everyone, subscriptions for creators, edit tweets, see # of replies and likes on a tweet

And that's just in 1 year


Hey Elon get back on twitter. You've literally made two same posts. I don't understand why you would care so much about this unless you are Elon.


Easier to ship when you have so many fewer users.


I think he means it functions just as before but with a fraction of the staff.


Twitter's algorithm code is canonical good Scala - https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm


Congratulations! Elon's team over at X.ai, who I'm helping advise, is choosing between Hugging Face and a locally hosted alternative.

What would HN recommend? I prefer Hugging Face as it has a stronger community built in but others prefer a open source project we can customize.


If you’re hosting for your own use, unclear why you wouldn’t just do that directly on cloud instances. If you’re trying to share models with others publicly, then HF is the best option right now.


What does X.ai seek: democratization or centralization?

If it wants everyone to fork its models, having the model on Huggingface and using its libraries will increase adoption, as people are used to that format, having the quantization built-in, etc. Having to perform model conversions slows things down, despite TheBloke’s constant efforts to convert every format to every other.

If the model will only be accessible through CLI, APIs, or a website UI, then custom can make sense.


Goodness, good luck and congrats!

I am curious however, why name drop Elon and X.ai when asking this question?

With all due respect, I'm not sure how that is going to advance the technical conversation, and in some regards may indeed de-rail it and hinder the mentoring you might receive?

I hope I do not sound combative!

I am generally curious, as I see this behavior at $JOB, but in reverse. "My customer is seeing this." "I have a customer that is asking Y."

I am generally curious on the different perspectives that teammates can come from, that can drive them to take wildly non-congruent approaches, even with similar career experiences.


>I am generally curious, as I see this behavior at $JOB, but in reverse. "My customer is seeing this." "I have a customer that is asking Y."

You work at a business and you think it's name dropping for a colleague to bring up specific customers' needs?

I'm trying to see the steel man version of your argument, but I'm not getting it. GP is working for a well publicized AI startup and shared that they are evaluating HF versus alternatives. I thought it was useful information, and it's germane to this thread.


Why not both?

Y'all could host models on HF, and use the HF format/download code (which is quite good).

But make a pretty frontend for it.

Down the road you could just host your own backend implementing the HF API, if such a thing is necessary.


Are you able to provide a bit more detail on what they're doing, or is it still all hush-hush?


If you want to get things done, don't use Haskell.

You'll be fighting against the type system constantly. You'll be asking questions on Stack Overflow only to get no response. You'll be rewriting software that's in other language's standard library.

Productive programmers don't use Haskell.


You're not wrong, but the thing to know about the type system is once you get it it's like this amazing thing. You start to think about your program in terms of the data it manipulates, you'll find yourself just without effort writing the code that does exactly what you intended, it's pretty wonderful. But on the way there it is painful.


The bathed in a suffusion of blue phase. (or should that be purple?)


The compiler/type system is your friendly assistant. Learn to use it, and it's your greatest asset.


This is nonsense.


I feel intense nostalgia when reading articles like this.

The rich social events and intellectual discussions of America’s past have turned into depravity and crude dancing, and curse filled lyrics.


I’ve tried notebooks but wikis like Confluence are much better.

They force you to structure your thoughts in a way that others can understand.

Notebooks are extremely unorganized and un-understandable after a few days.


Sorry, where’s the hypocrisy?

Zoom never said video calls are the best way to work.

They said video calls offer a level of globally distributed collaboration unprecedented in history. And that’s true.


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