[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-...
You are a reporter interviewing Milton, owner of up and coming automotive manufacturer Nikola, currently being investigated for securities fraud.
"So what exactly is the problem?" you ask.
Milton looks at you as if he doesn't quite understand your question, but then smiles. "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard technology now."
"What does that mean?" You ask.
"It means it can do everything a human brain could ever want to do, and more!" Milton says excitedly. "You want to watch Netflix? You got it. You want to browse the internet for weird fetishes that will make you feel dirty? You got it. You want to play some games? You got it."
You don't really see the point in having such a system, but you stop yourself from saying anything.
"Why would anyone want all those things in their car?" You ask.
"Don't you think it would be handy to watch movies while driving?" Milton asks.
Intel Paragon XP/S 140 (#1 on the top500 list in June 1994): 143.4 GFLOPS [2]
Don't know whether to marvel at how fast a modern smartphone is, or how "slow" old supercomputers were.
(Yes, I realize GFLOPS is probably not the best comparison and I have no idea where gadgetversus.com even gets its numbers from, but I think they're at least in the ballpark).
[1] https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-a13-bionic-specs/
A cursory search on google shows that all the references link back to truckinginfo.com, so I wouldn't put too much weight on that.
Having talked to reporters before, there is a possibility that something more reasonable was said but then got garbled. Like, if during the interview someone said the UI is using HTML5, which is standard everywhere, so it will be easy for people to extend / we have lots of options; and also we're using ARM so we can build our own chips; ARM is in everything from smartphones to supercomputers. I can totally see a non-tech reporter getting confused and morphing that into the sentence above.
Obviously the other outlandish / false claims make it more likely that this is an example of BS as well.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/truckinjim/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000612021454/http://www.trucki...
If only it were just that. He appears to be a con-artist. It's always interesting how things can sound similar and have entirely different intent and reasoning behind them.
This guy knew he was spouting lies while talking about the HTML supercomputer (assuming it's a correct quote from the trucking site in question). He has now been caught doing it repeatedly and to a rather dramatic scale. His interviews are full of half truths and dodges. It appears to be the Theranos playbook: try to get to a certain line where some product finally becomes real, before the clock runs out on the con.
Intentions matter a lot. There's obviously a vast difference between someone quite innocently discussing / opining outside of their knowledge lanes on a hacker news forum, and someone intentionally spinning an epic scale multi-billion-dollar fraud in the name of the profit motive.
The point being, if someone is talking outside of their lane on HN, I have essentially zero inclination to think they're knowingly attempting to commit fraud (intellectual or financial) in the process, as on HN it's almost exclusively a common, innocent form of ignorance at play. As contrasted with the intentional deception of a con-artist.
If the situation with Nikola is really as bad it looks right now, he's going to be spending the next few years trying to stay out of prison as the Feds turn his company inside out, investors start filing lawsuits (claiming they had no idea what was really going on), and someone starts writing a best-selling book about all the fraud that went on. I don't think you want his future. That paper net worth could quite easily be negative a year or two from now, with various assets seized, civil lawsuits, and so on.
> That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips.
I guess he means that they built their own infotainment on HTML5 instead of some proprietary commercial car infotainment technology which would also come with its own chipset. So now they can use their own chipset as long as it can run HTML5.
> Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate.
I guess it means they built a standard data bus for the car and every component can subscribe/publish to it.
It was a highly proprietary process, but I later found out that everybody was doing it this way.