I’ll start it off:

  • Windows is a perfectly fine OS, as long as you use Enterprise or Server (Home and Pro are crap)
  • Self driving cars are the future since the US won’t fully embrace mass transit
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[–] -2 points 5 days ago (9 children)

To go someplace that's sure to get me many downvotes, I think Elon Musk is quite good at making high-level engineering decisions and the success of his companies really are in large part attributable to the decisions he's made.

He's an evil slimeball and his involvement in politics has been a massive detriment to the US and the world as a whole, but too many people go from that to "and therefore he must be stupid and incompetent and all his success is due to luck" or similar such excuses. No, unfortunately one can be both evil and highly competent - they aren't mutually exclusive traits.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    Do you have any examples of good decisions he made? From what I remember he bought Tesla well after it was making money and not much has changed except his decision to remove lidar sensors and he keeps promising new cars or features that don't come out for 5+ years, I don't know what decisions he made with spacex, the hyperloop was never a feasible idea, twitter seems to have gotten worse since he bought it, and I don't knowb if the boring company is still around honestly. Plus there's the stuff like his Doge coin rug pull, doing an actual Nazi salute because Trump was elected, and the allegations about him helping rig the election for Trump, stealing taxpayer money and data, aiding the antagonists in the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Epstein-related claims.

    I won't try to claim he's done nothing positive, but I actually can't think of anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (2 children)

    From what I remember he bought Tesla well after it was making money

    Your memory is wildly inaccurate. Tesla was incorporated in July 2003, Musk got a controlling share in February 2004 (7 months later), and the company began production of its first car model, the Roadster sports car, in 2008.

    I don't know what decisions he made with spacex

    Basically everything to do with their reusable rockets and their decision to build Starlink.

    and I don't knowb if the boring company is still around honestly.

    I think you haven't actually been paying any attention to Musk's activities beyond what the "hive mind" has been telling you. Which is exactly my point here.

    That whole paragraph of stuff where you're complaining about how awful Musk is had nothing to do with engineering decisions.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    Like, autonomous vehicles should rely solely on visible light cameras? That went famously well indeed. What a smart man.
    Or that we should dig tunnels to drive cars in? Yes, we now see he was right all along. Or that the US government could save trillions of dollars by using tech instead of people for running things? One of the most successful ideas of Trump 2.0. And the list goes on. Tesla made a decent electric car, on par with other electric cars, just falling behind on self driving (fsd is not self driving, according to Tesla). Space X built some good rockets that can do what NASA can; just killed NASA in the process by siphoning away the federal budget. Starlink is good satellite internet. Exploiting an orbital space that nobody was brazen enough to just claim and take without any public approval. Got to give him the credit. He is good at taking away things and claiming for himself that nobody else dreamed of taking.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    And the list goes on.

    Yes, he's had a few duff ideas. But then the rest of your own comment is a list of things he made good decisions on, which have vastly outperformed the bad decisions.

    Also NASA couldn't do what SpaceX rockets do, and Starlink has full regulatory approval for what they're doing.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    For the sake of it: would you mind listing the top 3 high level engineering decisions he made that are particularly original and turned out to be game changing in a positive way? Maybe I just haven’t heard of them.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Full flow methalox for the new Raptor engines, stainless steel for the rocket body, the whole focus on full reuse (just the first stage for Falcon 9 but driving to the full stack in Starship). These are all basic things that nobody was doing before and now are being hurriedly copied as fast as can be done by competitors.

    I'm most familiar with his SpaceX work, mind you, so there may be comparable decisions over at Tesla that are part of what put electric cars into the mainstream that I'm not familiar with off the top of my head.

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