[tarsinge]

Curious for your take on this: https://venturebeat.com/ai/elon-musk-and-yann-lecuns-social-...

Or this: > I personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages & white pages on the Internet in the summer of 1995 in C with a little C++. Didn't use a "web server" to save CPU cycles (just read port 8080 directly). Couldn't afford a Cisco T1 router, so wrote an emulator based on a white paper.

Or maybe this: > I mean, man, you’re in charge of the servers and the programming and whatever,” Brown continued. “What is the stack, Elon? Take me from top to bottom. What does the stack look like right now? What’s so crazy about it? What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!

To which he answered: > Jackass

Or this: > They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.

Again I’m not speaking for rocket science, but as for software engineering and ML it seems he only has surface knowledge but does enough name dropping to maintain the illusion.

[mike_hearn]

What are you arguing here? That Musk knows how to write code but, in your mind, isn't a good enough programmer to ... I don't know. Do what? Run Twitter? Run SpaceX? Understand Twitter's tech stack?

The quotes you chose contain direct references to him coding, to code that he wrote himself. Where is the name dropping? Are you being confused by the reference to web servers in the first quote maybe? In 1995 the term web server meant something like Apache with CGI. Writing a custom implementation of HTTP in C was a fairly standard technique to improve performance back then. The first version of Amazon was written in C, Google's web servers were still frequently written in C++ when I joined.

I mean, you say he has only "surface knowledge" and is "acting" to "maintain the illusion", but how many programmers could knock out their own implementation of HTTP in C on their own, let alone implement BGP and all the other low level stuff you need to bring a T1 online? How many would even understand what Musk was talking about?

[tarsinge]

And what's his point? That he invented internet? Implementing a basic HTTP in C is like a first year CS lab (https://quip.com/Km9EAe5ARGZI). Without further information how do we know he is not inflating some toy week-end project any C programmer could have done back then? Also what's with specifying it's in C/C++? It was either that or assembly. Again hard to see his point. It gives me the same vibe than when he was proud of "direct flipping of CPU registers". All of this is very average if you were a hobby programmer at the time, we are not talking real world engineering like OS kernel (Linux/NT/...) or Game (Crash Bandicoot, RollerCoaster Tycoon, ...) just to name a few on top of my head.

My point is contrary to what he and his supporters claim he has has no deep understanding of the actual tech of his companies. I'm not arguing he doesn't know tech enough to run a tech company. It's common to find tech executives and VP that coded in their younger years. He might sit maybe a bit above a decent salespeople that has a good understanding of his product line, but below a Bill Gates and definitely not at the level of a ML researcher or Tech lead. He is maybe more invested that a typical CEO in day to day operations, but the aura of genius/inventor added on top is an illusion.

[chucksmash]

> What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!

The "...buddy? C'mon!" framing is simply obnoxious. Who would engage with such a person in the first place?