Movie Review: Musk | Hacker News Reader

Movie Review: Musk

variety.com

50 pointsandsoitis49 comments

3 hrs and 52 minutes of Musk.

I didn't even want to sit in front of a screen for 2 hours for Bob Dylan, sheesh.

I do believe though, the difference between the two is probably marginal when it comes to narcissism.

I mean, it's OK, artists need to have some of that trait.

Just coincides that neither of the two have created anything beautiful, at least in my mind. Unless of course, you consider money and fame beautiful in themselves.

Dylan: I don't like his singing, but some of his songs are quite beautiful.

Musk: The Tesla S and 3 are quite good looking cars. Much better than most of the 'blobs' on the road. The X and Y are a bit chunky. Cybertruck is ugly but audacious. And rockets are beautiful, even the ugly ones. Watching them launch, and watching the boosters land, is awesome.

Ah, I shouldn't have commented this way. It is an inflammatory topic and my comment was also needlessly emotional.

What I wanted to say though is that I in fact do not find any of Bob Dylans music beautiful, not what you wrote.

To me, what I said about Dylan applies to cars as well, regardless of them being by Tesla or not.

But it's absolutely pointless to discuss public figures in a such an emotional way on HN, so my bad. Regardless of whether you find rocket launches or cars or Bob Dylan songs beautiful.

And Musk,.. whatever I'd have to say about him (not much tbh), doesn't fall under the discussion topics that made me join HN. I do read political and social discussions here. But stating or reading opinions about Elon Musk is not really a thing that makes HN interesting for me, so I'll refrain from engaging in threads like this in the future.

>More than 60 fatalities have been linked to Tesla’s driver-assistance systems. Talk about something that could put a dent in your image!

That seems pretty low?

Driving is extremely dangerous.

It is. However, "Tesla statistically saved lifes" doesn't make an exciting news article.

Except absolute numbers are meaningless. You need to know driving hours or miles to know the scale. E.g. deaths per 100,000mi or deaths per 100,000hrs.

This site has numbers and sources: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

2013-2025 and only 2 linked to FSD ? The rest are human errors ? FSD sounds better than human drivers just going by that data. How many people have, for example, BMW killed in 12 years ?

They are all "human errors" since FSD and Autopilot are supervised systems, which is why statistics like these can't be used to make claims like "FSD sounds better than human drivers". At best, you could claim that [Autopilot|FSD]+supervision is better than a human driver, but even then there a a huge number of other variables to consider, e.g.: 'human only engages FSD when they are confident it will handle situation safely'->'artificially high miles/crash for FSD'

The great thing about robotaxi is we’ll get the real data. There will be no hiding when one seriously crashes and eventually kills someone.

Then we’ll get facts about deaths per miles driven etc.

"FSD has detected the car is about to crash, please take over control"

Yes and "linked" is a weasel word to imply something without making a definite statement for which there's no proof.

> you see that he’s a creator of mirages who promises more than he delivers

There is no doubt he has promised many things that have never been delivered, or delivered extremely late.

He (his companies/teams) have also utterly changed the space launch landscape to the point of making the rest of the world irrelevant. Changed the energy market across the globe, delivered exceptional electric vehicles and (finally) put a car on the road for public use with no mirrors, steering wheel or pedals. The production line is also world leading, as stated by every auto CEO that has toured it.

Does he over promise and exaggerate? Undoubtedly.

But he does also deliver.

>Does he over promise and exaggerate? Undoubtedly.

>But he does also deliver.

Shotwell deserves 99.99% of the SpaceX credit over Musk. anyone who says differently needs to take off their Musk-coloured glasses

also there are very good reasons no one else has released cars on public roads with no mirrors, steering wheels or pedals.

John Carmack says differently. What colour are his glasses?

Does he actually deliver? Isn't SpaceX ran by grownups that are not him? Isn't it well known that when he's actually involved in trying to deliver that he gets in the way and slows everything down?

> delivered exceptional electric vehicles

Tesla's ranking for quality and reliability and many cases of fraud regarding warranty repairs would disagree rather heavily with "exceptional".

And your analysis ignores his many, many business failures and his overall negative affect on things and culture.

John Carmack is someone whose opinion is worth a heck of a lot to me. If he vouches for Musk as a hands-on rocket engineer, I’m not going to argue with him.

Tom Mueller also seems to explicitly support this

One narcissist opining on another narcissist isn't what I pay attention to.

> If he vouches for Musk as a hands-on rocket engineer

Employees have said otherwise. There was one report where Musk barely understood how to run a Python script.

I’m sorry but Python ecosystem is a sick joke, and it is not discrediting that someone who doesn’t deal with python every day isn’t fluent on the magical commands for running pip3 within venv.

To this day I still don’t remember what the command is to activate a venv. I wouldn’t touch that horrible language[0] if I didn’t have an LLM to deal with it for me.

[0] that’s unfair, it’s actually a very nice language and I like it a lot, but the toolchain surrounding it is disgusting

He is the archetype of creation by exhortation. How many people destroyed their health trying to make FSD work by the end of this year for 10 years?

As someone who uses it everyday, it's a very impressive piece of technology, is it not?

What does FSD stand for, remind me.

Are their Teslas driving around Austin right now without human drivers - yes or no ?

If you need a geofenced area, you don’t have real self-driving! -- some real jerk in 2019

Something that it isn’t.

Ok and how about his character as a human being?

I’ve never met the guy, but many reports are very bad.

> Changed the energy market across the globe

... Wait, how's that?

> delivered exceptional electric vehicles

I mean, I'll give you 'exceptional'. Not exceptionally _good_, though.

> He (his companies/teams) have also utterly changed the space launch landscape to the point of making the rest of the world irrelevant

For now. Other countries are catching up, same as they are with electric vehicles.

> Other countries are catching up

Are they? Rocket Lab is near me, I know a lot of people working there. They haven't flown Neutron rocket yet. Meanwhile SpaceX is already planning to sunset Falcon 9 which is same scale as Neutron. I don't see them being very competitive with Starship, despite being so much cheaper.

countries implies plural. Mention two

News at 10: future products will surpass current products.

That is always true, in every industry.

until your civilisation collapses, then it stops being true.

Delivers an ungodly amount of space pollution that's for sure.

The other posters in this thread seem to blame Glenn Shotwell for that

SpaceX is amazing, and he may receive due credit for the "vision" of pushing forward the state of the art in electric vehicles and rockets.

We (society) often glosses over personal failings of popular figures. But given the level of outright lies he has funded in elections and how much money he has spent to get anti-democracy politicians in power in the US, one should not waver in their condemnation of the man's character.

Fascism and racism are more than personal failings when you splash around hundreds of millions of dollars to, for example, get neofascists elected in a German state.

Glad we agree. I can't tell if I'm being downvoted by anti-Musk people who didn't read the whole comment, or pro-Musk people mad that I called him out for funding disinformation campaigns.

Musk has pulled off a reverse von Braun. Von Braun was a Nazi who used slave labor, but whose past was overshadowed by later building cool rockets. Musk built cool rockets, but his past has been overshadowed by association with similarly evil people.

Monster.

That Musk dude needs a hobby.

Apparently, he has at least one. [0]

[0]: https://babynames.com/blogs/celebrities/all-of-elon-musks-ch...

Between this and the Elizabeth Holmes one, just adding to the 'positive' Silicon Valley/tech/VC public marketing right now... /s

(Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Doc Met with Shock and Awe at Secret Screening https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613598)

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