Elon Musk

seems like we should have a thread on this guy, idk

Who he?

It's really an anagram of "Nole Skum."

Suk Lemon

ahe's kinda like tony stark, so i gather from ten mins research, but without the weapons and with clean energy and space

it's kinda surprising he isn't more well known all things considered

seriously. if wiki is even half-accurate shouldn't he be a fixture on Time mag or something?

His family sound really annoying. Was married to, uh, somebody who was in that St Trinians film, uh, the one with Russell Brand.

You realise that if he was ever to become involved in some sort of scandal and subsequent cover-up, newspapers could use the headline, "Elongate"

if he was caught cheating he'd be THE MUSKRAT

dude owes his company's survival to gov programs but
says it's no big deal if Romney wins and makes good on his promise
to obliterate them all.

lots of companies do well out of govt contracts/programs, i'd imagine.

so hyperloop huh

people on twitter so mad. trying to understand why. i guess it boils down to:

1) shouldn't we fix BART / buses / systems that working class people use before building toys for rich people

2) LA-to-SF only is ridiculous, there's like a whole state in there

3) nobody wants to hear half-baked plans from an arrogant rich dude

still, i mean, it's pretty cool, right?

1) shouldn't we fix BART / buses / systems that working class people use before building toys for rich people

There are lots of problems everywhere all the time. Can't let it stop technology from moving forward.

2) LA-to-SF only is ridiculous, there's like a whole state in there

There's a whole country, even! LA-to-SF sounds like a perfectly fine beta test.

3) nobody wants to hear half-baked plans from an arrogant rich dude

Not all rich dudes are arrogant. Elon Musk has never struck me as anything close to that.

people on twitter so mad.

who do you follow?

i'm not getting that impression from all the tech ppl i follow

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

You might be right, Johnny, dunno. I was just trying to figure out why there was this explosion of contempt all over my twitter feed after the announcement.

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

i do follow tim but i guess whatever he said didn't stick

cool monorail bro

lol

i have a plan for a train that goes from boston to atlanta in 10mins, its called lasertrain and ill give you some cool drawings of it in a couple weeks, its ridiculous no one is building it btw it only costs $10

im not gonna build it tho cause im kinda busy

even i can afford that

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

isn't his point that hyperloop would be fraction of the cost and twice as fast?

the douchey thing is that he made a big ol deal abt something thats not at all real

Which is how 70% of architecture and urban planning works.

sure 70% that sounds totally realistic too

I meant 94% sorry.

To me, it really sounds like a kickstarter project... but from a billionaire.

i mean who knows maybe its revolutionary technology but its so preliminary its p comical to call a press conference abt it

maybe this is the best way to convince someone else to give it a shot idk

LOL "elon musk"

This should keep us occupied for a while: http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop

markers, here are some of the people that were entertainingly scathing: kalebhorton, quartzcity, tcarmody, mikesonn

I wasn't scathing about Musk (I am about futurism in general) - if anything, he has a good track record on quixotic tech quests. I hope he's successful with this. I also hope there's a state left that can use it.

unveiling this while CA is deep in the hole with it's bullet-train project (something I support wholeheartedly btw) is pretty arrogant

Knowing how CA politics works (and the CA rail projects are amazingly political), how would you expect a non-arrogant to even get traction with this?

I have no doubt that Musk will solve the Hyperloop technical issues. I very much have doubts about him navigating Sacramento.

I was describing this to my wife today and kept calling it Supertube.

Bad connotations...

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/supertrain-1_7696.jpg

lol @ the "open source" pdf proposal. build a section of the thing and then get back to us when you have it working.

Musk says the Hyperloop is best for distances of 900 miles. Beyond 900 miles, he thinks you're better off in a supersonic jet.

Lol

I never use my supersonic jet anymore as parking is always a total bitch

I have to say I rather like Elon Musk. He's made a massive pile of money and rather than sitting on it or managing it in mundane ways; he's making risky bets on thinks he's passionate about: Cars, Rockets, vacuum tubes.

Hyperloop seems a bit ridiculous to me, vacuum tube powered trains and trains in evacuated tubes are an old chestnut, almost as old as railways themselves. However, he's built a commercially viable private space programme and a car company* in the last ten years so anything is possible.

*Tesla isn't really a car company it's a power train company and if it is still making cars in 5 years I'll be surprised.

ya i'm kinda ll for crackpot genius billionaires actually doing interesting stuff, up until they become str8 up supervillains obv

lol @ the "open source" pdf proposal. build a section of the thing and then get back to us when you have it working.

― wk, Tuesday, August 13, 2013 2:23 AM

he might do this

is this dude one of the crazy silicon valley libertarian types or is he just beloved by them?

iirc he has liberal tendencies mixed in w the libertarianism

xp I heard him speak and he seemed not crazy and to have some kind of social or at least environmental conscience, unlike the usual libertarian types, but maybe he's just better at hiding it

(I like him too fwiw and right now he seems one of the most likely "crackpot genius billionaires" to solve some hard problems which are overdue for solving, so I hope he carries on with that. Also hoping that one day I'll get to see/read his computer game that appeared in some 8-bit micro type-in listings mag in the 80s)

he's not as bad as some of the other silicon valley libtards, I'll give him that.

nonetheless, this is a stupid proposal

Thanks to @YIMBY_Princeton for inspiring me to check in on the Tesla forums, this Model Y trim discoloration (apparently caused by touchless car washes) is another classic. https://t.co/HhAaqK4U8l pic.twitter.com/zHbN7eij3k

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 18, 2021

$TSLA - @elonmusk, you need to get to precision within inches first before you even attempt centimeters.#bitcoin #BTC https://t.co/duPnkKBeqs pic.twitter.com/WZyHzO6dHC

— phoenix10 (smartish) (@phoennix10) May 18, 2021

https://i.imgur.com/Hn04JBH.png

how many other value analysts do you think there are?

I already answered your question.

The author posted this video in the comments. It's a truck full of traffic lights. pic.twitter.com/h2LwyL65ck

— FSD in 6 months (@FSD_in_6m) June 2, 2021

"President Musk says his invasion of Iran is justified, as their leader is hiding a secret program to develop trucks full of traffic lights"

At least they weren't driving behind this dude:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/be/80/ab/be80ab95c0cfe1630be6c520ccaadf67.png

Karl please replace the stoplights in that video with little icons of Doof Warriors.

I have to say, there's an amazingly huge difference between how these cars look when they drive by you (sleek, great!) and how they look/feel when you sit in them (plasticky, cheap)

i think lag000n comparing the model 3 to a nissan was about right.

I actually had a long conversation with a Tesla-owning acquaintance over the weekend, and he loves his car. If there's any real criticism he has, or at least conceded, it's that the car components are indeed pretty cheap compared to similarly priced luxury cars. There were one or two other little things that bugged him, too, but he was otherwise really positive about the last year and a half of Tesla ownership. I still think that the biggest game changers are not the design/car, per se, but features that could be implemented by competitors for a lower price some time in the near future. He said he felt comfortable being part of what he considers an experiment. He professed not to be a Musk sycophant, fwiw, but he thinks the guy is a Jobs like genius. Which I guess tracks, as Jobs was an asshole weirdo, too.

please don't mock my former upstairs neighbour

dang xpost, Steve Jobs did not live above me

Now into CumRocket coins

He professed not to be a Musk sycophant, fwiw, but he thinks the guy is a Jobs like genius

hopefully musk has similar thoughts on personal health care

Now we have No Jobs, No Hope, and No Musk

Don't get me wrong, I could easily see myself buying a car from Tesla, and I don't think Elon Musk is some kind of genius, I just think the engineers who designed the car are by most accounts good at designing functional cars and it has features that appeal to me enough that the "look and feel" deficits don't bother me too much (if they did, I wouldn't be driving a beater now)

what about being locked inside a burning car because the locks stop working? that seems like kind of a dealbreaker to me idk

tbf, you could accomplish this in any car by engaging child safety locks, getting in the front and starting the car, putting a brick on the gas pedal, and hopping in the back

maybe you can't even open a tesla's rear doors by opening the window and using the exterior handle, though

yeah I think Teslas are for the most part good cars, but I'm not sure what if anything Elon has to do with that, virtually every idea he's ever had for Tesla has either never came to fruition or has been incredibly dumb

He once had an idea that Tesla's stock price should be higher -- that sure came to fruition.

what about being locked inside a burning car because the locks stop working? that seems like kind of a dealbreaker to me idk

I used to have this same issue about cars with no manual window handles -- what if my car went underwater and the electricity shorted out and I couldn't get out? I dunno, I have come to feel that things like my car catching fire or plunging into a lake are highly highly highly unlikely, much more so than other accidental deaths I might suffer, and if that's the way I go, that's the way I go, it's just not a big enough sliver of probability to affect my car purchase.

I just think the engineers who designed the car are by most accounts good at designing functional cars

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, June 7, 2021 4:18 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

they are by the measure of average number of defects exceptionally bad cars fwiw, idk if thats the engineers fault tho

Guayaquil (eephus!) at 4:03 7 Jun 21

what about being locked inside a burning car because the locks stop working? that seems like kind of a dealbreaker to me idk

I used to have this same issue about cars with no manual window handles -- what if my car went underwater and the electricity shorted out and I couldn't get out? I dunno, I have come to feel that things like my car catching fire or plunging into a lake are highly highly highly unlikely, much more so than other accidental deaths I might suffer, and if that's the way I go, that's the way I go, it's just not a big enough sliver of probability to affect my car purchase.


probably worth noting that Teslas catching on fire is incredibly common compared to other vehicles

probably worth noting that Teslas catching on fire is incredibly common compared to other vehicles

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, June 7, 2021 2:36 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this isn't backed up by any data I've seen

yeah tbf i don't think that's true. they share the same danger as all EVs: if a fire starts it's incredibly hard to put out.

key difference seems to be how hard it is to *get* out

^^^

also:

they are by the measure of average number of defects exceptionally bad cars fwiw, idk if thats the engineers fault tho

― lag∞n, Monday, June 7, 2021 2:27 PM (six hours ago)

oh of course. if they catch fire you definitely die a terrifying death, a death that doesn't happen in other cars, and the software is buggy. but tbf they don't catch fire more than other cars.

Hopefully it is possible to improve upon the baseline of 30-50k traffic deaths per year in the US

https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/a-new-report-highlights-the-incredibly-high-environmental-cost-of-teslas-bitcoin-investment/

In 2020, Tesla delivered 181,000 vehicles. You could argue that its romance with Bitcoin erased the environmental benefits from more than 7,000 of those EVs. De Vries says that if a buyer purchases a Tesla by making payments over 48 months in Bitcoin, the carbon footprint of the Bitcoin transactions would exceed the total lifetime emissions savings from driving an EV instead of a gasoline-powered car.

They note that Bitcoin mining consumes almost as much energy as all the the world's data centers combined, and produces CO2 emissions that match the carbon footprint for the city of London. The paper estimates that Bitcoin generates 90.2 million metric tons of carbon gases per year. That volume exceeds by almost two times the total annual reductions achieved by the replacement of gasoline-burning cars by electric vehicles, as calculated by the International Energy Agency.

jfc. if true, the inventors of bitcoin should be taken before the Hague. like essentially we're talking Captain Planet villain level "I've built the world's greatest POLLUTION MACHINE" level accomplishments.

at least Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that has any environmental impact, and the rest are all green

If you were me and I were you, I'd tell you how not all currency is green.

It's not easy being me or green

Ugh, libertarian bitcoin bros are all over Twitter (as well as Reddit etc). Basically the dudes who used to desperately argue that tort law would save the planet, now they've just settled on making hollow claims that their pet ponzi scheme isn't "technically" an environmental catastrophe.

For me Musk pulling Tesla plants out of CA and moving them to TX would be a deal-breaker but apparently that's not enough for my brother. I am seriously thinking it's getting close to the time when we should boycott entire states.

what if my car went underwater and the electricity shorted out and I couldn't get out? I dunno, I have come to feel that things like my car catching fire or plunging into a lake are highly highly highly unlikely, much more so than other accidental deaths I might suffer, and if that's the way I go, that's the way I go

FWIW, there was a case a few years back where I live, where an Audi SUV slipped into water and the controls for the doors and windows shorted out. The vehicle took a few minutes to sink and the four people trapped inside drowned, slowly. Two of them were kids. It really brought home to me that that's not the way I want to go.

if you drive a newish car (i.e. a shitty IOT gadget on wheels) then i recommend putting these in glovebox/armest/keyring https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0042VTYXM

Ugh, libertarian bitcoin bros are all over Twitter (as well as Reddit etc). Basically the dudes who used to desperately argue that tort law would save the planet, now they've just settled on making hollow claims that their pet ponzi scheme isn't "technically" an environmental catastrophe.

These dudes (I mean, c'mon, that's 99% of the ones I've seen) are everywhere. The latest twist seems to be arguing that we are constantly on the verge of the tipping point where somehow all of the energy used to mine bitcoins is going to magically disappear because of.... something. This is the part where their tweets consistently become more vague.

what's an IOT gadget?

internet of things, see https://twitter.com/internetofshit

The latest twist seems to be arguing that we are constantly on the verge of the tipping point where somehow all of the energy used to mine bitcoins is going to magically disappear because of.... something.

proof of stake. as opposed to "proof of work", which is how many cryptocurrencies work now. "proof of work" means rising energy use dedicated to solving complicated math problems. proof of stake is the magical thing that everyone working with etherium swears they very much care about and have definitely been focused on from the beginning.

proof of stake will apparently save everything because it will be a way to validate the blockchain more efficiently. how does it work?

HOW DOES ETHEREUM'S PROOF-OF-STAKE WORK?
Unlike proof-of-work, validators don't need to use significant amounts of computational power because they're selected at random and aren't competing. They don't need to mine blocks; they just need to create blocks when chosen and validate proposed blocks when they're not. This validation is known as attesting. You can think of attesting as saying "this block looks good to me." Validators get rewards for proposing new blocks and for attesting to ones they've seen.

If you attest to malicious blocks, you lose your stake.

PROS
Staking makes it easier for you to run a node. It doesn't require huge investments in hardware or energy, and if you don't have enough ETH to stake, you can join staking pools. It allows for increased participation, and more nodes doesn't mean increased % returns, like with mining.
Staking allows for secure sharding. Shard chains allow Ethereum to create multiple blocks at the same time, increasing transaction throughput. Sharding the network in a proof-of-work system would simply lower the power needed to compromise a portion of the network.

CONS
Proof-of-stake is still in its infancy, and less battle-tested, compared to proof-of-work. Staking is more decentralized.

the only con is that it doesn't work yet and that the vast majority of cryptofucks don't give a shit about the efficiency and never will. that's Proof of Stake

yeah, they're going to build up a crypto-ecosystem based on millions of pieces of shit buying expensive mining equipment and dedicating themselves to this task and community for about a decade, and then suddenly they're going to shift away from that and calmly explain to the very worst people on earth that their mining equipment no longer works for ethereum (which will probably cause them to repurpose the expensive pointless electricity hogs for some other similar person, or throw it in a gas station trash can rather than recycling it)

listen, you may have bought an old factory in Nigeria and filled it up with mining equipment because they had cheapest electricity in the world, but it turns out that we in the cryptocommunity you belong to actually really care about the environment.

maybe they'll eventually introduce PoS and everyone will adopt it. maybe not. but either way, anyone participating in it now just doesn't give a fuck, it's obvious. i wish people would just say "i don't care about energy and the environment and never will". it's the pretending that they actually do that drives me nuts

Genuine thanks for that KM, that's definitely a better explanation than I've seen on twitter yet even though it still sounds like so much wishful thinking smoke and mirrors.

Staking allows for secure sharding. Shard chains allow Ethereum to create multiple blocks at the same time, increasing transaction throughput. Sharding the network in a proof-of-work system would simply lower the power needed to compromise a portion of the network.

ilx ideas: autoreplace "sharding" with "sharting" on this website

the cryptocommunity

CHINA CRYPTOCURRENCY MINING EQUIPMENT IS MOVING TO THE USA IN BULK!

The USA is about to become the crypto hub of the world and #Dogecoin/#Bitcoin will rise again. MASSIVELY.

— Matt Wallace ⚠️ (@MattWallace888) June 21, 2021