amunicio

Me three...

IMHO Elon Musk is very good at complicated problems, but not so much at complex ones.

By complicated I mean problems that can be decomposed into well-understood tasks with clear constraints, measurable completion criteria, relatively predictable dependencies, and short feedback loops. Think designing and building rockets, factories, data centers, going to the moon, etc. With these types of challenges, his style and strengths make a lot of sense:

- rethink from first principles

- identify the bottleneck

- challenge industry assumptions

- assign ownership

- remove the constraint

- iterate very quickly

Complex problems are a different story, and he doesn't seem particularly well suited for them. A complex problem has unknown unknowns, contains problems that cannot necessarily be decomposed because they are novel and not yet well understood, and has feedback loops that produce emergent behavior. You can't simply solve problem A, move on to B, and then C, because solving C can change the assumptions you made about A.

Examples of complex problems would be would be FSD, the Twitter ecosystem, curing some types of cancer, politics, etc.

Investors have a lot of faith in Elan because of his track record of achieving very unlikely challenges (design and mass produce electric cars, design and launch rockets, ...).

The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).

For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.

Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...

FSD would be a competitive advantage if it could Full Self Drive. Since it cannot, it doesn't matter how not remotely close any competitor is.

Shahed where originally designed and manufactured by Iran. Russians initially bought and licensed them. And I assume are now improving upon the original design.

Russian is top down innovation with a thick layer of corruption. No matter how much you want to claim strategic depth, they are always several steps behind Ukrainians. No matter how many advantages due to size they have.

Sorry you picked the wrong team.

> I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is.

That people will go with what is easier and works?

That open source and open standards don't win by default? That it takes a lot of persistence and effort.

> The trouble is that AMD just didn't take AI seriously.

Until a couple of years ago, AMD was in survival mode, fighting Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other. Two rivals that were making money hand over fist while AMD was bleeding money.

AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials, the hope being that the community could help pick up some of the slack. The community, understandably, went with the proprietary solution that worked well at the time and had resources behind.

The net results is that the Nvidia ecosystem has gained a dominant position in the industry and benefits from being perceived as a quasi-standard. On the other hand, open source efforts by AMD or others get viewed as "not serious".

The financial situation of AMD has improved somewhat over the last couple years. So AMD is "taking AI more seriously now". But it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has probably won.

> Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries?

Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products.

I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings. While economics is not an exact science (probably not even a science), you cannot ignore its principles.

If protectionist policies worked, we would have figured out by now. The truth is that limited protectionist policies might work to give a push to a nascent industry in the short to medium term. But it does hurt the country as a whole in the long term.

The same could be said about Apple. All their chips are made by TSMC.

Stock brokers track perfectly the transfer of people rights to stocks millions of times a day without any decentralized ledger. In fact, a SQL DB has worked quite well for many years now.

If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.

Don't they own GitHub which employs most of Electron's contributors?

Originally, SQL was sold as a way to make programmers redundant by allowing business people to write their own reports.

In theory, with SQL any executive could write his own report instead of having to wait for weeks for those pesky software guys to write the reports.

For many decades, different waves in the industry have tried to bring tools to the market to allow non-programers to write programs. The thinking is that the tooling or the grammar are the obstacles for regular people to write programs (applications).

The issue is that it is not the syntax or the tools that are the barrier. The barrier to write programs is that the author has to thing about all possible states and conditions and handle them. That requires patience and a certain mindset. If you are not able/willing to be that exhaustive, you will not be able to write general programs. Conceptually you could write programs (or web applications) that have been narrowed to very specific choices of workflows with most of the conditions already taken care of for you.

Creating a website with drag-and-drop tools is not that difficult; until you start to consider: what happens if the user shrinks the window below certain width? What happens if he views the site on a phone? What happens if I have to change the length of a piece of text?

This is not a good argument. It would be the equivalent of me asking: Does the trash pickup service, repairing potholes or patrolling the street cost more if the home owner just moved in than if has own the house for 30 years?

He doesn't have to move far and away, he can go live to the other side of the San Mateo bridge and pocket at least a million dollars on the house price difference.

And as others have mentioned, there are other mechanisms to defer the tax payment based on the house equity.

The real cruel thing is to lower the bar for the "have" (as in have a house in SV) and higher it for the "have not".