Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
wsj.com
wsj.com
Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-ellison-hearsay-we-c...
To be fair, in my mind this is the one most common trait I find in successful entrepreneurs and leaders. I've seen leaders who I didn't think were particularly bright, or extroverted, or empathic, but man, did they not get stressed out by obstacles that came in their way. They either sidestepped them or overcame them, but they did not dwell on them and let those obstacles lead to self doubt.
This is one reason why I think sociopaths are over-represented in leadership positions. They are not burdened by a conscience that can lead to self doubt in times of stress. Of course, it's possible to have this "does not get discouraged by big obstacles" attitude and not be a sociopath, but it is certainly an area where sociopaths have a natural advantage.
In any case I think that it would be safe to say that sociopaths have at least the embedded advantage of being "quicker", as they most probably ponder less than other people about in/direct consequences of their actions.
Without getting too political, take Donald Trump, who in my mind kind of exemplifies this definition of success. Whatever your thoughts about Trump, he's definitely not lazy, and his early morning tweet storms seem to signify that he gets by on little to no sleep. Of course, he may cause WWIII in the process.
being swiss, if he gets little or no sleep (because or routine work or anything which he triggered himself) I would judge that as mismanagement :)
Fortunately for me I'm happy with my own definition of "success".
I wouldn't say it's that they don't get stressed, but that they are able to quickly compartmentalize it and move on without dwelling on it.
On the "are they just great at hiding" question, at least in my experience this isn't really possible. Personally, I have severe negative physical effects in response to long term, chronic stress. I sleep poorly, get severe intestinal issues, etc. At some point it becomes pretty impossible for me to just "hide it" - I'd LOVE to be able to quiet my body's physiological responses, but I'm just not capable. In seeing how some of my colleagues dealt with the same stressors, I can assure you they weren't just "hiding it" - if they were experiencing the same physical effects I was, at some point it would have been impossible to hide.
Edit: I would be absolutely interested in hearing Larry's wished next steps, but I don't think that board members usually release statements (I think that they only "steer" the CEO, help "facilitating" whenever issues arise and perform overseeing activities), right?
That's putting it gently. Putting aside his twitter spats, Tesla is still prominently advertising "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars"[0] even though their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars[1][2].
[0] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
[1] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mobileye-ceo-tesla-self-d...
[2]https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-self-driving-cars-luminar-...
> every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla
Besides, the fact that I can drive my car relying primarily on two eyes and a brain suggests that it must be possible to extract and process the information to drive a car with stereo vision, and without LIDAR. LIDAR may become cheap and small enough that it should be added purely from a safety perspective - more better information is better. However, I think plenty of experts would agree that theoretically it is possible without.
Here are some experts that think it works without LIDAR, so you may wish to edit “every”. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09839.pdf
>"The autopilot feature [19] in cars produced by Tesla Motors enables autonomous driving on highways through a combination of a forward-looking camera and radar. Due to the limited field-of-view, these cars cannot execute autonomous driving in cities which require surround perception."
So while you may have found some experts who think Level 5 automation can be done using only CV, you've only reinforced my main point that Elon Musk is not a trustworthy person.
I'm saying that when you ask people not getting a paycheck from Tesla, they say that LIDAR is required. Very notably including Mobileye, who severed their connection with Tesla over this disagreement. Mobileye is particularly notable since they invested heavily into camera-only solutions; Mobileye has a strong financial incentive to dismiss LIDAR, yet they don't.
It's obvious why Tesla doesn't either put LIDAR in all their cars or remove the self driving hardware claims from their advertising; Elon wants to have his cake and eat it too.
More from mobileye:
> Level 3 – Autonomous Under Certain Circumstances [...] Mobileye expects this additional redundancy to be covered by additional sensors like radar and lidar (for shape and object detection) and by Mobileye’s REM™ localization map for identification of safe drivable paths and knowledge of intersections and other traffic signage or instructions.
https://www.mobileye.com/future-of-mobility/history-autonomo...
Harsher words than mine, from GM’s director of autonomous vehicle integration Scott Miller:
>“The level of technology and knowing what it takes to do the mission, to say you can be a full Level 5 with just cameras and radars is not physically possible,” said Miller. He went on to add that Musk is “full of crap.”
https://futurism.com/gm-expert-calls-elon-musk-full-of-crap-...
An article about the angular resolution limitations of radar (overcoming this is exactly what LIDAR is for):
>Raj Rajkumar, who researches autonomous driving at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks those assumptions concern one of Tesla's key sensors. “The radars they use are apparently meant for detecting moving objects (as typically used in adaptive cruise control systems), and seem to be not very good in detecting stationary objects," he says.
>That's not nearly as crazy as it may seem. Radar knows the speed of any object it sees, and is also simple, cheap, robust, and easy to build into a front bumper. But it also detects lots of things a car rolling down the highway needn't worry about, like overhead highway signs, loose hubcaps, or speed limit signs. So engineers make a choice, telling the car to ignore these things and keep its eyes on the other cars on the road: They program the system to focus on the stuff that's moving.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tesla-fire-truck-crash-autop...
If you search around for this, you'll find there are A LOT of people calling BS on Tesla's claims that cameras and radar are adequate sensors for Level 5 automation. Tesla's website hints at none of this. The only caveats I see from them are concerning software and regulation:
>Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval. Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.
Required for Level 5 automation. Tesla claims to be selling the required hardware, waiting only on the software and legislation allowing it. All other players in this field are focusing on a combination of cameras, radar and LIDAR.
Since LIDAR is expensive and the self-driving hype is real, Tesla have a strong short term financial incentive to forgo the former while claiming to sell the later. Combine that with virtually every other expert in the field saying they're full of BS, and I think the picture becomes crystal clear. Elon covers for himself by promoting conspiracy theories about grand industry-wide plots to keep an underdog down, and that has worked very well for him so far. But like most conspiracy theories, this is one you should think critically about.
I am not opposed to LIDAR. I just think it is unnecessary and that computer vision is likely to get good enough before LIDAR gets cheap enough.
LIDAR currently being very expensive (and a bit bulky) is obviously the reason Tesla hasn't put LIDAR in their cars. I don't really fault them for that, I fault them for their deceptive advertising. The LIDAR industry has not yet progressed to the point where it makes sense to bring a car to market with hardware ready for Level 5 automation, so Tesla should stop claiming they've done so.
Assuming the current Level 5 automation hype doesn't fizzle then smoulder for decades like the AI craze of the 60s, then it's success will coincide with rapid advances in size and price of LIDAR.
But this is an important factor to consider when evaluating safety statistics. Humans operate cars in all sort of adverse conditions and human accident rates include accidents in those kind of conditions. Accident rates for autonomous systems that refuse to attempt operation under anything less than ideal conditions won't be directly comparable to human accident rates... but expect this to be glossed over by automotive marketing departments who will eagerly compare apples to oranges as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
The main obstacle for self-driving car is much more on the processing side than on the sensor side. After all, humans are able to drive with audio + stereo vision that's not even 360 degrees.
It could very well be that the reason Tesla's statement about "full self-driving car HW" is inaccurate is because of the lack of sufficient onboard computing power rather than the lack of sensors (IIRC they have an Nvidia X2 and GP106 onboard, which only have a total of about 4 SPFP TFLOPs).
>"Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval."
Well, spinning hyperbole that fires up the clickbait is definitely effective advertising.
Are there any companies that are taking the purely computer vision approach then?
>"(IIRC they have an Nvidia X2 and GP106 onboard, which only have a total of about 4 SPFP TFLOPs)."
Can you say how far off is that compute power from what is actually required for a "full self-driving" car?
Calm down a second.
Elon/Tesla are trying to do things differently/do things that other people are not or think can't be done.
To name a few"
Every "export in the field" said you can't land an orbital class booster vertically.
Every "expert in the field" has not figured out how to save billions and years digging tunnels.
Every "expert in the field" seems to design electric cars that look like a cartoon joke.
Every "expert in the field" was pretty sure Tesla could never be profitable.
Don't confuse "has never been done before" with "Can't be done". Let the results speak for what's possible.
As someone that doesn't know anything about self-driving cars, how can this be true? Humans can drive cars with only visual input. Why can't AI?
Lidar lets you get a high degree of accuracy for certain variables in your model - because you can know fairly accurately when and how strong the signal you sent out is, you can have a fairly high degree of confidence when you get reflection of how far away the object is, and feed that into your persistent idea of the world, versus having to use a bunch of heuristics to try and extract that from purely audiovisual data.
(That's my understanding, at least - I don't work in that industry.)
Google/Waymo has obviously been throwing a ton of resources at nailing computer vision, their recaptcha that's plainly training such a system is doubtlessly just the publicly visible tip of an iceberg. Yet they're still investing into LIDAR as well. If Google/Waymo is bearish on a pure CV solution, I don't see any justification for Tesla thinking they can do it. Not in any near future.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-i...
If you had vision that bad, the State of California would not let you get a drivers license, they require at least one of your eyes to be 20/40. Anyway, the point of the GP is that the brain isn't the only piece of wetware doing image processing, but more to the point the current state of the art CV really is not up to the task.
And it really doesn't seem like it's going to be there anytime soon.
Just because humans use vision to drive, doesn't mean that we should restrict ourselves to vision for cars. Also, as another comment points out, our visual system does a lot more than just 'see' in the literal light/color processing sense that a camera does
Elon has publicly trashed LIDAR plenty of times. I think you should treat his rants as defenses of his products' reputation, not earnest impartial engineering appraisals. If Elon were to admit that LIDAR will play a vital role in Level 5 automation, he'd be admitting that his company has been mistaken or lying for years. I think Elon's personality precludes him coming clean on something like this.
> "it's not enough to build a full self-driving vehicle."
As far as I know, nobody is trying to build a Level 5 system using only LIDAR. The serious teams who are working on this problem are all using LIDAR in addition to cameras and radars. LIDAR can't read a street sign; cameras and computer vision will obviously play an important role in Level 5 systems for that reason and more. But the teams that aren't trying to use automation hype to sell luxury cars don't share Elon's enthusiasm for CV/radar with no LIDAR.
Ellison has been talking about what he called "Network Computing" since the mid 1990s. He said "We need computers that do less not more". He was laughed at and ridiculed, but today Chromebooks are the implementation of his "Network Computer" vision. "Computers that do less" are now a reality.
What we know today as "cloud computing" was first envisioned by Ellison in the mid 1990s. He called it "network computing". He talked about why it is important to "centralize complexity" and keep the end-user devices simple. Meanwhile Steve Ballmer was touting the "power of the local hard drive". Ellison's vision seems like commonsense today, but it wasn't back then.
There are lots of other things. For example he was the first to move Enterprise applications to the Web when web-based applications weren't a thing yet. Oracle Parallel Server was his idea. He even wrote the first implementation himself.
Ken Olsen (Digital Equipment Corp) is also reputed to have shared this view as far back as 1987 [1].
[0] https://www.computerworld.com.au/slideshow/334210/pictures-r...
[1] https://slidex.tips/download/don-t-forget-the-network
EDITED to fix URL [1]
That’s incorrect. Acquisition of Sun cane much later. “Network is the computer” is very different from Ellison’s Network Computing because in Ellison’s vision complexity is centralized and end-user devices are glorified dumb terminals which is very different from Sun’s “Network is the computer”
So, Musk was required to introduce more outside independence to his board, per agreement with the government. He chose one of the least credible board members he could, and one who owned a lot of shares in Tesla to boot. Aha. I think I understand now.
Boards full of non-shareholders tend to prioritize the paycheck they get as board members, so they tend to not want to rock the boat or get into conflicts with mangement.
Those that are shareholders first tend to have a bigger incentive to confront or fire management if they start doing things that are bad for shareholders.
Wouldn't a person with a lot of stock not want to take a big risk without reason at any time?
I wrote "normal paycheck-people during normal times (to ensure that no big risk is taken without reason)"
> Wouldn't a person with a lot of stock not want to take a big risk without reason at any time?
(honestly, I'm not sure if I understand the double negation correctly) If you got the stock (or options) for the price of "1" while becoming CEO or similar, you'll probably desperately try to raise that stock price above 1 while your "empire" lasts.
And of course as you mention there is the possibility that Ellison is irrational.
Regarding irrationality -- see e.g. this[0] Shamus Young post about the video game industry. IMO, this general sort of irrationality is everywhere. Businesses in general tend to be irrational because they're run by suits, whose primary motivation is not actually accumulating money for the business but rather prestige for themselves, which you get by doing business-y things, regardless of whether those actually make money. For all his reputed greed, that's how I actually expect Larry Ellison to act.
The theory is good, but in practise it doesn't always work out that way.
As an example, take IBM. In IT circles they're very well known - for ~10+ years now - as an incompetent organisation, with an aggressive sales force targeting high level (non-technical) execs.
Their only real interest in being scoring short term sales wins, but their ability to deliver results for any useful length of time rarely lines up.
In theory, IBM should be having trouble closing sales these days. That's the equivalent of "If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them".
However, that doesn't seem to be the case.
And with IBM, when things go badly wrong (very common), IBM just breaks out the lawyers and attempts to shift blame. eg "it's the customers fault / hackers did it / competitor did it" (etc)
Telsla could unfortunately drive down the same dark road (for their customers).
Having Ellison anywhere involved is really not a good sign. :(
Absolutely. I have no doubt Larry will do what is good for shareholders.
I also have no doubt that Larry will not do what is good for consumers, but that's a separate question.
Edit: reading others’ posts about him in this thread. Okay, wow. Not sure how accurate this information is though.
Which Sun didn't have any issue with Google about the use of Java for Android. But Larry did. He saw $$$.
Maybe I am wrong about the above but that is my impression of what I have read. Open to corrections.
The Google lawsuit came later. Remember the purchase was in 2009, when Android was still in its early days in terms of adoption and market share.
But, now that means doing business with a company owned by One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison? I wouldn't dare. The way his most well-known company treats its clients is so grotesque that I wouldn't even want to work at a company that uses its products. They are extremely abusive.
For the first time in Tesla's history, with all its obstacles and negative press, I now fear for the brand reputation.
This report is a good starting point (PDF) [1]
Edited to add : Check the appendix at the end (Appendix – Anecdotal Feedback). It may cure you from the idea of ever wanting to license any Oracle products if you have any say.
[1] http://www.itassetmanagement.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/...
[1]https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lanai/@20.7523285,-158.324...
Essentially, he bought a pineapple farm that happens to cover most of the island.
He has a ridiculous $150m yacht, and a Hawaiian island, among other assets.
Every time I consider closing out my Tesla short position something like this happens and I get more confident that something is awry.
> The Oracle chief executive told shareholders at the company's annual meeting Friday that the technology is a fad that doesn't have a clear business model, despite the fact that Google , Microsoft and practically every other tech company is singing its praises.
> "I think it's ludicrous that cloud computing is taking over the world," Ellison told about 100 shareholders who attended the meeting at the software maker's headquarters. "We think it's very hard to make money in this thing."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 [2] https://www.forbes.com/2008/10/10/ellison-cloud-computing-te...
I despise Oracle as much as the next guy but if I were in Elon’s shoes I’d want Ellison on my board. The car business is tough, really tough. At one point the database business was really tough. Ellison achieved a near monopoly. Despite our views on the quality his software. Tech people were not his customers, CIO’s were. He gave them exactly what they wanted.
Ellison is shrewd, not stupid. Churning out shit cars would be stupid. Helping Elon cut waste and increase sales would be shrewd. Perhaps Ellison, if anything, could temper Elon’s boundless optimism and pet projects.
The retort here might be that people who have a track record of being "good at business" are good at all business. I personally don't buy that. I think too much executive decision-making is guesswork based on pattern-matching to prior experience for that to hold; if you have no prior experiences with a matching pattern, you're no more or less qualified than the next smart person making it up as they go.
Well now we’re just tossing back and forth our own biases and hypothesis. I understand your point. It makes sense. Not sure I agree.
The only thing I would add is, cars are big purchases for people. Oracle was a big purchase for CIO’s. Don’t forget for a second that Oracle was sold to a person. Talk to some Oracle sales people about this. I think you’ll find it similar to car sales in many ways.
are you buying a battery-backed electric power storage substation?
didn't think so..
tesla isn't just about cars
which isn't to say i like musk or ellison
Meanwhile, Ellison adds nothing I can see in terms of manufacturing and and little in terms of adult leadership.
I would argue that the ideal director in terms of complementary skills would be somebody like Tim Cook (even though Tim himself would probably be too likely to have conflicts of interest to serve).
One of the BIGGEST things we need to do is STOP punishing honest companies and politicians.
In the 2008 financial crisis we BAILED OUT banks who basically gambled.
Banks who were honest didn't benefit by being honest. They should have been able to buy up the entire industry at a penny.
The political system has the same issue now. Trump lies and the GOP continues to support him. Honest politicians lose because people want to be told what they already "know" not hard truths.
Their position on coal is a good example.
There was no "gambling." The system was rigged, and the bailout proved that the rigging went all the way to the top.
http://www.walgreensbootsalliance.com/about/senior-managemen...
I think the point you meant to make is that being a senior manager at a big company doesn't rate highly enough to warrant a dedicated Wikipedia page - which is more a comment on Wikipedia's notability criteria.
Let's agree that it is impressive and commendable for her to have achieved such a level of seniority at Walgreen's.
He's a corporate sociopath who focuses completely on squeezing the maximum possible revenue from customers by any means possible. This strategy often takes the form of threatening to sue customers after aggressive software audits. It seldom takes the form of trying to meet the customer's needs via good customer service or quality software.
Maybe he's being brought in to fight the right to repair and help lock down Tesla's to maximize some sort of dealer /service model?
Or maybe this is some sort of long play to get Tesla stuck on Oracle's platform :-)
To answer your question, this changes nothing. He's been a major shareholder for a long time and now he's 1 out of 11 board members.
I hate Oracle too. But I agree, it probably will have little to no impact.
Still, just thinking about Larry Elison makes me like Tesla a little bit less. Brr...
Not really. From the far end of any spectrum, someone in the middle looks like they're on the other side. To anyone else, it looks like there's plenty of Kool-Aid and astroturf all around, and the tone police are usually the worst offenders.
thanks for this
Kind of like using SpaceX to fund SolarCity and then using Tesla to bail out SolarCity so that SpaceX bond holdings doesn't go bust?
Right... so SpaceX doesn't go bust. Not "so he can personally enrich himself". Nothing I've seen thus far from Elon indicates to me that his decision making is based entirely on his personal net-worth. In fact most of his moves show the exact OPPOSITE - that he doesn't care at all about his personal wealth and he cares about changing the world/completing his vision.
I have absolutely no issues with him using one company to prop up another because he needs both to reach his end-goal. If he was using one company to bail-out a failed investment so his bank account looks a little better I've got a LOT of problems with it.
And you think the reason Space-x exists is to make Elon richer? Or you think it's because he wants to see humans colonize the universe?
The entirety of Oracle's existence is to make Larry rich.
While I think Elon needs to get off twitter and never post another message there again, I think his reasons for founding Space-X and Tesla go far, far beyond personal wealth. There are a million other investments he could've gone in on to enrich himself without risking everything.
It doesn't matter if SpaceX's stated mission is a vanity Mars project, or something easier, and actually useful, like eradicating malaria, or stopping AGW, or bringing about the Worker's Paradise to Earth. You don't pilfer a publically traded company to fund it.
I'm curious what gives you this impression. I'm a Tesla owner and consider their customer service their biggest shortcoming at present. Fortunately, the quality of the vehicles and mission make up for it in my mind.
And that's before I get into describing the Oracle business model of locking customers into platforms that are nearly impossible to migrate away from.
How anyone still uses Oracle is beyond me anyway...
Exhibit A -> "What the hell is cloud computing?"
Still not quite the level of Dropbox '14.
NOTE: I’m a liberal arts major who was hired straight out of college during the GFC of 2008 for a non-technical role by Oracle and then later they trained me and put me in an engineering slot (!) so I’ll always be in their debt/totally bias. The above story I thought was somewhat relevant / interesting nonetheless + I hate Bank of America and now bank at USAA.
GM went bankrupt in 2009, still here.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motors_Liquidation_Company
Almost certainly a default would result in a purchase from one of the traditional car manufacturers that wants to destroy a potential rival, scoop up battery IP and get a hard start on automation. Ford even have the cash on hand to refinance the debt.
What Ford or one of the other large automakers bring to the table is a track record of mass producing cars. That’s not something Tesla has done yet.
"On or after Dec. 1, 2018, to the debt’s maturity date, the holders can decide to convert the debt into Tesla shares. If Tesla’s stock is above the $359.87 stock price, the holders will likely convert the debt into equity, relieving the company from using $920 million in cash required when the debt comes due in March." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/08/elon-musks-tesla-stock-boost...
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-to-pay-march-convertib...
This is a far cry from bankrupt in March.
Ellison is a butt, but he understands fierce competition very well. As other automakers start gunning for Tesla hos advice will be an asset.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We don't catch all of them, though. If people see two current threads about the same things with lots of comments, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com would be helpful.
All patents will be closed and litigation against all other electric car makes will ensue.
I would be less concerned with adware and more concerned about short-cutting best practices. For example, prior to Oracle acquiring Sun, they used to build packages that would move the compiler (out of the way) and drop in their own packages under /usr/bin to make Oracle re-linking happy. After the acquisition, all of the push-back on such practices were bypassed. They did similar things in linux RPM packages. Oracle RPM's would install files to /tmp, move files owned by other RPM's out of the way and move their files from /tmp to /bin, thus bypassing any dependency conflicts.
Now imagine them applying this mind-set to the Tesla cars. I am curious what could go wrong.
But quoting Bryan's dramatic speeches every time Oracle or Ellison are mentioned is adding next to nothing to the discussion at this point. It's a great way to incite anger though.
If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the hit.
When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world. When a PC crashes, you also have the hardware manufacturer to blame for faulty hardware. What about OS and other system customizations the manufacturer puts in there? Those coukd crash it too? All the public hears is "My Windows crashed." and Microsoft looks bad.
No fault is brought upon the consumer who thought a $220 PC was going to be a quality machine, not does it fall to the non-brand foreign bargain PC manufacturer for building a $220 that's doomed to provide an awful experience. Instead, the world hears that "Windows Sucks."
Given this, I appreciate why a company would opt to do the things Tesla has done in order to protect its brand. However, I try to avoid doing business with companies who do this, as I value consumer freedom.
Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on.
That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the upgrade, which is marked up 3X, 4X. Apple is recent -- anyone remember Sun?
RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.
But the real fight on stable RAM was over ECC, IBM is the only giant that took an actual stand on insisting on quality at a price. Apple realized they could keep the price.
Can you source this or is an opinion? I don't have facts by I think drivers are #1 issues for hard crashes.
No. This is the same Apple who one year ago was charging $1200 for 48GB of memory.
It's the laptops where everything is soldered on.
[citation needed].
As a consumer, I wasn't able to buy detailed service manuals for cars or TVs for long before I couldn't get one from Apple.
Is Tesla planing to open car services in all locations were regular services are or you will have to send the car back to the dealer so they send it back to Tesla and wait 3 weeks like you have to do with Apple.
About Apple,
-1 Apple sells expensive products and non-Apple PCs and phones come in different price ranges, so in average Apple products will be better quality.
- 2 Apple products break too, I have such a laptop and many other people can confirm that they have hardware issues and we also see that until justice is involved the issues are not acknowledged
- 3 Apple always had a good image in some demographics and it is not correlated with the fact they are trying to hide the hardware schematics, try to stop third party to repair the products, the good reputation was because of the software and hardware.
For the Apple fans that will downvote, also leave some factual reason why I am wrong, something like why do you think the new anti-repair movement is increasing Apple branding or what fact I got wrong.
If you're really "lucky" it will happen while you're traveling out of state, and Tesla will tow your vehicle to the nearest facility and give you one of their rentals or partnered rentals, some of whom have "no out of state" policies on the replacement vehicle (remember, you're already 'out of state' - how are you planning to get home?).
My only consistent hardware error on a Mac was my 2005 iMac (the 42lb one) when I upgraded the RAM and chose the wrong speed/timing. Genius bar told me to replace it with the stock RAM and it worked fine.
So yeah, upgradability and easy-maintenance can easily lead to problems even with a reasonably knowledgeable consumer or repair shop.
Hardly. A fatality collision is rarely the subject of an NHTSA investigation, and "serviced by unqualified/unlicensed auto repair facility" is one, a big get out of jail card, and two, hands a whole world of liability... to said facility, not Tesla.
Wow I didn't know this. I have hard time believing this. Where can I find this for my subaru 2019.
I had no idea this existed. thanks.
Ugh.
No, but he might put some board level pressure to get more rigorous about profitability. I know that's a dirty word around here, but Tesla is not exactly well known for it's cashflow prowess. Those are the types of things board members do...not figure out whether service manuals come with the product.
It's meeting the letter of the law, not the spirit.
Just like how in those few states where access to service manuals is legislated, Tesla makes you 1) make an appointment, 2) pay a fee, 3) show up to a designated location, 4) not be allowed to take copies, or photographs, and only allow your own hand written notes (no computers allowed), and 5) sets a time limit.
Additionally, I can't imagine that a service manual would be valid for that long considering that a lot of the service on a Tesla is mostly on the software side. They'd have to offer a hardware manual for the extremely limited amount of hardware and then a separate software website/app/portal to handle the software side. You'd likely be paying a subscription and they'd need to separate off whatever platform they're currently using at the service centers. Again, doesn't seem very cost-effective for the tiny base that would benefit from it.
As for the parts, there's a parts catalog online: https://epc.teslamotors.com/#/catalogs
We're not talking about past Tesla. We're talking about Tesla that needs to improve cash flow with Larry Ellison on the board. Do you really think this is hard to imagine?
This is not a new problem, and consumers have been fighting to get quality documentation from auto manufacturers for decades now, but manufacturers don't want to give it voluntarily because it cuts off their dealerships from recurring repair revenue, where they make most of their profits.
I think the only reason Tesla doesn't comply yet is because they probably don't have any physical presence in Massachusetts, which passed the law in 2013.
We should all be ashamed that our government is so bought and paid for by the auto manufacturers and dealers that this information isn't mandatory to be made available online.
Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.
(FWIW, it has worked for me, though yes it was annoying.)
Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs".
And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government.
In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted.
I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented.
Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...
A more recent one, for future reference:
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...
;)
In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1].
[1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-starte...
Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways".
Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works.
We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it?
All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving.
It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview.
Because when I read
> "As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!")"
I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.
As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.
No, the whole premise of capitalism is that people motivated by money will build things that make them money.
It's right there in the name - "capital"-ism. Capital is the means, motive and end.
It seems surprising that capitalism is so easy to argue against on moral grounds. Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it?
It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.
If you knew you'd be assigned at birth to a life of 10th to 90th percentile (by status/money/class) in a non-wartime country and it would be US, UK, USSR, or China and your birth year would be 1880, 1900, 1920, 1938, 1960, or 1980, how many would choose the USSR or China?
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands. Five of the wealthiest countries on earth, and generally considered five of the best to live in. None of those are Socialist systems. They all use the free market as the basis of their economic systems. Some with more or less government regulation, and with varying degrees of a welfare state. The same is true of the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, etc. All have private ownership based economies, allowing for the vast accumulation of private wealth via business and asset ownership. Germany for example ranks #3 in billionaires globally, and Sweden ranks near the top in billionaires per capita. That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
The existence of government regulation means these countries do not have free markets, and all welfare programs are socialist in that they involve the government taking wealth from the people through taxation and redistributing it to those who haven't earned it by trading their labor.
>That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
You seem to have communism and socialism confused here, and you seem to be failing to see that socialism and capitalism exist on a spectrum, and most countries don't practice one or the other, but a mix of both.
Capitalism can and does benefit society, but so can other economic systems. Nevertheless, the purpose of capitalism isn't to enrich society, it's to enrich the owners and shareholders by accumulating capital.
The correlation between the quality or morality of a good or service and its value in the market isn't a strong one, since there are forces other than supply and demand at work determining value, and markets don't often optimize for greater societal good. If they did, agriculture and electronics manufacturing wouldn't depend on immigrant and forced labor, blood mining, and other immoral practices. Consumers put up with those things because the end result is bananas year round and cheap consumer goods.
I think the mistake comes in demanding that societies prefer only one or another model, due to projecting moral dimensions onto them which may not apply, rather than accepting a balance between systems intended to benefit the few, and systems intended to benefit the many.
I hope not because that seems hopelessly naive.
Well it works like that for capitalism too. People optimize for the goal (money), not necessarily the hopeful outcome (useful things).
>There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than companies.
>And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
>Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to said company, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
>You need to think of companies the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about companies.
I don't see the problem here to be honest. If people want to continue giving money to Oracle for their mediocre products ... that's on them, not on Oracle really.
Both are greed.
So I came to accept that each of them (and there were quite a few!) left for the opportunity they saw at Oracle. As for why Oracle: at the time, they were building a de novo cloud, and they were doing it by hiring engineers away from other cloud providers, with a sharp focus on compensation. And in particular: for the ex-AWS'ers at Joyent, one of their former senior colleagues at AWS (Don Johnson) had gone to Oracle to take a leadership position[2]; I think it's fair to say that those who went to Oracle saw themselves as joining Don as much (if not more) than they were joining Oracle.
Of course, none of this made it any easier for me or for the team to swallow -- and it has been of little solace that those who left for Oracle have (of course!) discovered that Oracle is what it is, with several of them having now left Oracle for other opportunities[3]. They may have learned about themselves what Oracle taught me about myself: that in addition to the team I'm on and the problem I'm solving, the company's larger mission is, in fact, important to me -- and that Oracle's emptiness in this regard can be crushingly soul-depleting.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_o...
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seat...
What does "awakened consciousness" mean in this context?
https://www.google.com/search?q=awakened+consciousness&oq=aw...
Could also look at it as Spiral Dynamics Turquoise:
https://www.google.com/search?q=spiral+dynamics+turquoise&so...
The search results seem to indicate it's some vague mysticism not specific to any particular belief structure? Not an area I'm familiar with. Thanks for the info!
(Excuse my flippancy, I did my Master's on a subject related to System Dynamics and was turned off by the field's relativist philosophical outlook.)
It has little to do with gender. Please do not pay attention to gender and potentially downplay woman’s own intellectual power.
Right. Valuing people more or less depending on what chromosomes they have or how the flesh they have under their clothes is formed is wrong and dehumanizing. People should be valued by what they do and make, not by how they are born and raised. This is how you separate real social justice from embittered identitarians posing as "social justice" -- are they truly against valuing people on the basis of identity, or do they use and exploit such tribal impulses for their own ends?
This depends on context though, right? We all have our blind spots and our areas of unusual insight, and these are shaped partly by our life experience, which is shaped partly by our gender, race, economic background, etc. So if a group consists almost entirely of men (or women, or people who grew up rich, or whatever), it might genuinely have some avoidable blind spots and biases.
Treating women as superior or inferior to men is dumb, but caring about gender balance can make good sense.
[edit: the key point, which I didn't make explicit, is that this holds even if there was no significant bias in the hiring process that produced the imbalance. People who are great choices individually might not make the best team, if their strengths and weaknesses are correlated rather than complementary.]
First, you make the determination that people should be assessed based on objective metrics. Second, you then try to correct (unconscious) bias with necessary metric-correcting, like gender balance.
If you put gender balance as the underlying truth, and then to optimize your process to make it work, you will see various issues that eventually sabotage your goals.
edit: I see you wrote elsewhere in this thread that
> I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.
My argument is that gender balance (and other kinds of demographic balance) can be valuable independently of its use as a proxy for unbiased hiring. I'm suggesting that, even if an unbiased hiring process would produce a skewed gender balance,[1] this might not be a good outcome, because a heavily male/heavily female group might suffer from shared biases or blind spots that would be smoothed out in a more balanced group.
[1] I hope treating this as a possibility isn't too controversial; I think there are plenty of ways it could happen, regardless of the existence of any innate differences. For example, even when sexism is the problem, it might be acting mostly at an earlier stage inaccessible to the company doing the hiring (e.g. social pressures on kids to do 'masculine'/'feminine' subjects).
Not to mention now being a legal requirement in California.
I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.
Please do not read any more than what stated in the comments. Your comment implies I disapprove more women being helpful or something along the line of not valuing gender diversity, which is not being mentioned at all in the comment.
My theory is that innate talent (if there is such a thing) is probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races, so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount (of course, if everyone did this, the discount would disappear and we'd have meritocratic equality, which is kind of what we want).
Plus it increases the solution space you're able to efficiently explore due to a wider range of perspective and background.
I have had several women bosses, and they're pretty much all great. We'll know when we've achieved gender equality when it's just as common to have a crappy female boss as a male boss.
Oh, and folks suggesting we look at "objective" metrics alone... Well, there's no such thing. When hiring folks, there's an enormous amount of information that just can't be known at the time. You really do have to look at the outcome to judge how "objective" you're actually being, on net.
.
"Am I pretty much just hiring people who look like me?"
There's two answers to that question:
"Well, obviously people who look like me are naturally better than everyone else."
Or, my perspective:
"I'm probably missing something important so I should cast a wider net."
The trouble is, the world is still sexist and racist. So while you’d end up with a more capable workforce, your company would also be disadvantaged at every turn. Your sales people would be looked over by clients, your bizdev reps would be disrespected by partners, etc.
I think to exploit your insight profitably, you need to create an n-sided market of many companies all committed to diversity.
That opens you to other attacks, like how the Black Panthers were infiltrated by the CIA for trying to build a black separatist economy.
N-sided market problems are also really hard. Although I think this one can be solved with some clever software infrastructure. Once we start seeing some really capable “Ubers of Everything” these kinds of people plays become more feasible.
While some studies disagree, we can assume its true for the sake for discussion.
> so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount
There is a logical error here. The assumption is that the missing non-white men in the evenly distributed population would not be working. Instead what we see in countries like Sweden is that people segregate, so you got the non-white men dominating some fields, and white men dominating other fields, and so forth. A field which is dominated by white men that want non-white men has to compete with fields that are dominated by non-white men. Similar, there is no discount to get white men into fields that are dominated by non-white men because they have to compete with fields that are dominated by white men.
> if everyone did this, the discount would disappear and we'd have meritocratic equality
Logical error #2. If everything was equal we would not see every field being exactly 50% men and women, with exact race distribution as proportional to the population. Randomness would still apply. Unless the population is infinitive you will get random variation.