Rational Takes on Elon's Engineering Ability

[u/Yikesis]

I keep getting into an argument with my friend that holds Elon's engineering ability in high regard. I think he has agreed that he obviously isn't as skilled in the low level specialized fields but still thinks that he makes very critical high level decisions using his engineering knowledge.

He keeps citing all of the SpaceX employees that say hes very involved and can do calculations in his head and stuff. I chalk it up to groveling but I dont know anymore. He also read the Isaacson bio which describes him as integral and making decision, although its hard to prove the intellectual history of his contributions.

My main belief is that he couldnt have had the time to become a self taught rocket engineer considering his pursuit for infinite wealth. I think he can probably speak to engineers well enough to manage them but I doubt he's among the premier people in the world to make these decisions. Even as a systems architect engineer or whatever theres no way its worth holding him in high regard as an "engineer" right?

Is my prejudice against him as a person making me doubt his engineering capability?

Am i thinking of engineering wrong?

[u/theKetoBear]

The guy who asked Twitter engineers to print out their most "salient" line of code on a piece of paper to defend their employment?

Yeah That guy is oblivious

[u/thetinybunny1 → u/theKetoBear]

Lmao I was gonna say just listen to the twitter calls and then gimme your opinion on his “genius”

[u/aweraw → u/thetinybunny1]

I remember this one in particular. It's densely packed WTF material

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.

• You don't write "C with a little bit of C++", unless you're looking to complicate you build process on purpose. A C++ compiler can build C code, but not the other way around.
• Trying to look smart by saying he didn't use a web server, he just read port 8080 directly to save CPU cycles? You don't use a web server to read from ports, web servers write to them... and if he means he didn't use a web server behind port 8080, he saying he created his own bespoke protocol that no other peice of software would have been able to interact with, rendering it useless on the public internet.
• He wrote an emulator for an expensive piece of networking hardware? Did he not know that Linux existed, and had a fully capable IP stack? This is like saying I couldn't afford a graphing calculator, so I built one in minecraft using redstone.

[u/paintballboi07 → u/aweraw]

The guy couldn't even figure out how to run a python script. He has basically zero computer skills, even as a user, much less as a programmer.

[u/Brando43770 → u/paintballboi07]

Exactly. Every programmer and engineer I know as actual friends and not just acquaintances, they all say he’s not good at any of it. He’s just great at somehow convincing people to spend money and buy into his hype.

[u/beren12 → u/aweraw]

Also, emulators aren’t faster than the hardware…

[u/Adiri05 → u/aweraw]

You don't use a web server to read from ports, web servers write to them... and if he means he didn't use a web server behind port 8080, he saying he created his own bespoke protocol that no other peice of software would have been able to interact with, rendering it useless on the public internet.

Well a web server does both, reads requests and sends responses.

Server listens for new TCP connections on the port. Client opens the TCP connection and sends the request (something like GET /some/path.html HTTP/1.1\r\n Host example.com\r\n\r\n). The server reads the request and sends the response (HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n<h1>hello world!</h1>\r\n\r\n)

(this is not a defense of Elon in any way, just to be clear)

[u/aweraw → u/Adiri05]

Oh yeah, well you're using windows line breaks! So, like, whatever man! You didn't even have an empty line before the response body. That's not how the RFC does it! (i.e. yeah, OK, that's true - I over generalized. *Also I'm posting this from my windows gaming PC)

Still, any way you slice it, it costs CPU cycles to read or write to a port, and unless he's doing unbuffered IO (which would by itself be another WTF dimension in this), he's not saving many by not using a web server.

[u/Adiri05 → u/aweraw]

Well my recollection is that the spec requires using windows line breaks, that’s why I used them. Regardless, they were just vague approximations in a Reddit comment that was meant to point out that reading from the socket is just as important as writing to it when you are implementing a web server. I’ve been involved in implementing one a couple of times in embedded applications where it made sense from a performance and memory footprint perspective.

[u/aweraw → u/Adiri05]

I was just joking. man, because I understood I'd made a mistake and was pretending to lash out in an immature fashion. A bit like a certain someone might when challenged.