zlacker

Please. Elon's track record to take tesla from concept car stage to current mass production levels and building SpaceX from scratch is hardly comparable to Altman's track record.

>>treme+(OP)
Indeed, at least Elon and his teams actually accomplished something worthwhile compared to Altman.

>>treme+(OP)
But he is a manager, not an engineer although he sells himself off as such. He keeps smart capable folks around, abuses most of them pretty horribly, and when he intervenes with products its hit and miss. For example latest Tesla Model 3 changes must have been pretty major fuckup and there is no way he didn't ack it all.

Plus all self-driving lies and more lies well within fraud territory at this point. Not even going into his sociopathic personality, massive childish ego and apparent 'daddy issues' which in men manifest exactly like him. He is not in day-to-day SpaceX control and it shows.

>>treme+(OP)
SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. Their initial designs were based on NASA designs. Stop perpetuating the “genius engineer” myth around Elon Musk.

>>Techni+ea
By that logic nothing has started from scratch.

>>Techni+ea
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch You must first invent the universe”

…no one “started from scratch", the sum of all knowledge is built on prior foundations.

>>Techni+ea
Altman is riding a new tech wave, and his team has a couple of years' head start. Musk's reusable rockets were conceptualized a long time ago (Tintin's Destination Moon dates back to 1953) and could have become a reality several decades ago.

>>jajko+F6
"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”

>>Techni+ea
I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals.

We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.

>>colibr+ih
You seriously trying to take his credit away for reusable rocket with "nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.

"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”

>>KyleOn+Fh
The people downvoting have never read the Isaacson book obviously.

>>KyleOn+2j
More like ppl on this site know and respect Jobs for his talent as a revolutionary product manager-style CEO that brought us IPhone and subsequent mobile Era of computing.

>>treme+xj
Jobs was a bully through and through.

>>treme+Ih
No, in fact I'm praising Musk for his project management abilities and his ability to take risks.

>"nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." - Oscar Wilde

>>Techni+ea
SpaceX is still the only company with reusable rockets. NASA only dreams about it and cant even make a regular rocket launch on time

>>treme+mh
As is repeatedly spamming the same pasta

>>treme+xj
Mobile era of computing would have happened just as much if Jobs had never lived.

>>KyleOn+Fh
Someone far more deserving of the title, Dennis Ritchie, died a week after Jobs' stupidity caught up with him. So much attention to Jobs who didn't really deserve it, and so little to Dennis Ritchie who made such a profound impact on the tech world and society in general.

>>treme+(OP)
And don't forget StarLink that revolutionized satellite communications.

>>jajko+F6
You’re confusing mommy and daddy issues. Mommy issues is what makes fash control freaks.

>>837204+Hp
To be fair, who else could have gone toe-to-toe with the telecom incumbents? Jobs almost didn't succeed at that.

>>treme+Ih
What's wrong with weakness? Does it make you feel contempt?

>>837204+2q
I think Ritchie's influence while significant is overblown and not entirely positive. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs, who had many reprehensible traits, but I find it ridiculous to dismiss his genius. Frankly, I find Jobs's ability to manipulate people more impressive than Ritchie's ability to manipulate machines.

>>thefau+d31
> not entirely positive

I don't know if he was responsible, but null-terminated strings has got to be one of the worst mistakes in computer history.

That said, how is the significance of C and Unix "overblown"?

I agree Jobs was brilliant at manipulating people, I don't agree that that should be celebrated.

>>837204+Lp1
The main reason C and Unix became widespread IMHO is not because they were better than the alternatives, but rather because AT&T distributed them with source code at no cost, and their motivation for doing that was not altruistic, but rather the need to obey a judicial decree or an agreement made at the end of an anti-trust court case under which IBM and AT&T were ordered not to enter each other's markets. I.e., AT&T was prohibited from selling computer hardware and software, so when they accidentally found themselves to be owners of some software that some universities and research labs wanted to use, they gave it away.

C and Unix weren't and aren't bad, but they are overestimated in comments on this site a lot. They weren't masterpieces. The Mac was a masterpiece IMHO. Credit for the Mac goes to Xerox PARC and to Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, but also to Jobs for recognizing the value of the work and leading the first implementation of it available to a large fraction of the population.