Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember Larry very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.” [0]
Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit.
That's putting it gently. Putting aside his twitter spats, Tesla is still prominently advertising "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars"[0] even though their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars[1][2].
Level 5 self driving is still theoretical at this point, and theoretically speaking, there is no reason to assume LIDAR is absolutely necessary for it. Computer vision based pipelines are theoretically capable of providing the same depth information as LIDAR, using stereo, camera arrays or even monocular SLAM.
The main obstacle for self-driving car is much more on the processing side than on the sensor side. After all, humans are able to drive with audio + stereo vision that's not even 360 degrees.
It could very well be that the reason Tesla's statement about "full self-driving car HW" is inaccurate is because of the lack of sufficient onboard computing power rather than the lack of sensors (IIRC they have an Nvidia X2 and GP106 onboard, which only have a total of about 4 SPFP TFLOPs).
No matter which way you slice it, Tesla should not be claiming the hardware required is present if the hardware requirements are, at best, theoretical.
They've given themselves enough wiggle room to never roll out Level 5 automation (and thus never admit they were wrong about what hardware it would require.)
>"Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval."
Tesla will in some form, though it’s hard to guess what color the money will be from the outside. It would be a goodwill jesture, so probably out of a marketing, customer retention or warrenty account.
If they upgrade hardware more than once I would worry about where the money came from.
>"Computer vision based pipelines are theoretically capable of providing the same depth information as LIDAR, using stereo, camera arrays or even monocular SLAM."
Are there any companies that are taking the purely computer vision approach then?
>"(IIRC they have an Nvidia X2 and GP106 onboard, which only have a total of about 4 SPFP TFLOPs)."
Can you say how far off is that compute power from what is actually required for a "full self-driving" car?
Human eyes don't work anything like cameras. The eye processes information that isn't just intensities of photons and their wave lengths—which is the only information collected by cameras. See Walter Pitt's "What the Frog Eyes Tell the Frog Brain" for an introduction: 'Fundamentally it shows that the eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors.'
A simple abstraction here: we put two high-quality monitors before our eyes and get all the data from them. Can we continue driving this way? Absolutely. This means that no matter how our eyes actually work, an array of RGB pixels is enough. I'd go further and say that a 64 x 64 grayscale camera at 10 fps is enough to drive a car. The real magic happens in the brain that reconstructs the 3D model and predicts what happens next.
> "64 x 64 grayscale camera at 10 fps is enough to drive a car."
If you had vision that bad, the State of California would not let you get a drivers license, they require at least one of your eyes to be 20/40. Anyway, the point of the GP is that the brain isn't the only piece of wetware doing image processing, but more to the point the current state of the art CV really is not up to the task.
And it really doesn't seem like it's going to be there anytime soon.
That is an analogy not an abstraction but if you had read the paper or the single quote I provided, you would know that even relatively simple eyes (such as those of the frogs which cannot see still objects) don't only process a distribution of light intensity and frequency. The eye measures other information that is lost by the camera including photon phase, arrival time, polarization, orbital angular momentum, linear momentum, and probably many more measurements. More so, this is done by specialized organelles of the eye rather than by the brain.
Humans can do a lot of things we don't understand how to convince software (...or other humans who don't intrinsically learn it very well) to do.
Lidar lets you get a high degree of accuracy for certain variables in your model - because you can know fairly accurately when and how strong the signal you sent out is, you can have a fairly high degree of confidence when you get reflection of how far away the object is, and feed that into your persistent idea of the world, versus having to use a bunch of heuristics to try and extract that from purely audiovisual data.
(That's my understanding, at least - I don't work in that industry.)
A good way IMO to think about it is by looking at airplanes. Birds fly by flapping their wings to generate thrust, but planes use turbines to generate thrust.
Just because humans use vision to drive, doesn't mean that we should restrict ourselves to vision for cars. Also, as another comment points out, our visual system does a lot more than just 'see' in the literal light/color processing sense that a camera does
Tesla's marketing team wants people buying cars to believe their Tesla will support Level 5 automation sometime within the usable lifespan of that car. They're not bold enough to claim it's a near future inevitability, but they're leaving that implied possibility open to get consumers excited about it.
Google/Waymo has obviously been throwing a ton of resources at nailing computer vision, their recaptcha that's plainly training such a system is doubtlessly just the publicly visible tip of an iceberg. Yet they're still investing into LIDAR as well. If Google/Waymo is bearish on a pure CV solution, I don't see any justification for Tesla thinking they can do it. Not in any near future.
LIDAR doesn't compute solutions, it's a sensor that gives you accurate information about the environment. Far more precise and accurate than any current computer vision system. What you do with that data is up to the rest of the system.
Elon has publicly trashed LIDAR plenty of times. I think you should treat his rants as defenses of his products' reputation, not earnest impartial engineering appraisals. If Elon were to admit that LIDAR will play a vital role in Level 5 automation, he'd be admitting that his company has been mistaken or lying for years. I think Elon's personality precludes him coming clean on something like this.
> "it's not enough to build a full self-driving vehicle."
As far as I know, nobody is trying to build a Level 5 system using only LIDAR. The serious teams who are working on this problem are all using LIDAR in addition to cameras and radars. LIDAR can't read a street sign; cameras and computer vision will obviously play an important role in Level 5 systems for that reason and more. But the teams that aren't trying to use automation hype to sell luxury cars don't share Elon's enthusiasm for CV/radar with no LIDAR.
> their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars
Calm down a second.
Elon/Tesla are trying to do things differently/do things that other people are not or think can't be done.
To name a few"
Every "export in the field" said you can't land an orbital class booster vertically.
Every "expert in the field" has not figured out how to save billions and years digging tunnels.
Every "expert in the field" seems to design electric cars that look like a cartoon joke.
Every "expert in the field" was pretty sure Tesla could never be profitable.
Don't confuse "has never been done before" with "Can't be done". Let the results speak for what's possible.
Besides, the fact that I can drive my car relying primarily on two eyes and a brain suggests that it must be possible to extract and process the information to drive a car with stereo vision, and without LIDAR. LIDAR may become cheap and small enough that it should be added purely from a safety perspective - more better information is better. However, I think plenty of experts would agree that theoretically it is possible without.
Even if they can make it work, they note that Tesla's hardware is still inadequate. Tesla boast 8 cameras providing 360 degree coverage, but the authors of that paper are unimpressed:
>"The autopilot feature [19] in cars produced by Tesla Motors enables autonomous driving on highways through a combination of a forward-looking camera and radar. Due to the limited field-of-view, these cars cannot execute autonomous driving in cities which require surround perception."
So while you may have found some experts who think Level 5 automation can be done using only CV, you've only reinforced my main point that Elon Musk is not a trustworthy person.
I'm saying that when you ask people not getting a paycheck from Tesla, they say that LIDAR is required. Very notably including Mobileye, who severed their connection with Tesla over this disagreement. Mobileye is particularly notable since they invested heavily into camera-only solutions; Mobileye has a strong financial incentive to dismiss LIDAR, yet they don't.
It's obvious why Tesla doesn't either put LIDAR in all their cars or remove the self driving hardware claims from their advertising; Elon wants to have his cake and eat it too.
More from mobileye:
> Level 3 – Autonomous Under Certain Circumstances [...] Mobileye expects this additional redundancy to be covered by additional sensors like radar and lidar (for shape and object detection) and by Mobileye’s REM™ localization map for identification of safe drivable paths and knowledge of intersections and other traffic signage or instructions.
Harsher words than mine, from GM’s director of autonomous vehicle integration Scott Miller:
>“The level of technology and knowing what it takes to do the mission, to say you can be a full Level 5 with just cameras and radars is not physically possible,” said Miller. He went on to add that Musk is “full of crap.”
An article about the angular resolution limitations of radar (overcoming this is exactly what LIDAR is for):
>Raj Rajkumar, who researches autonomous driving at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks those assumptions concern one of Tesla's key sensors. “The radars they use are apparently meant for detecting moving objects (as typically used in adaptive cruise control systems), and seem to be not very good in detecting stationary objects," he says.
>That's not nearly as crazy as it may seem. Radar knows the speed of any object it sees, and is also simple, cheap, robust, and easy to build into a front bumper. But it also detects lots of things a car rolling down the highway needn't worry about, like overhead highway signs, loose hubcaps, or speed limit signs. So engineers make a choice, telling the car to ignore these things and keep its eyes on the other cars on the road: They program the system to focus on the stuff that's moving.
If you search around for this, you'll find there are A LOT of people calling BS on Tesla's claims that cameras and radar are adequate sensors for Level 5 automation. Tesla's website hints at none of this. The only caveats I see from them are concerning software and regulation:
>Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval. Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.
Required for what, the self driving cars that don't exist yet? Radar and computer vision is simply a separate approach, not a wrong one. Tesla is as much an expert in the field as anyone, given that, you know, they have the best self driving commercial product by far.
>"Required for what, the self driving cars that don't exist yet?"
Required for Level 5 automation. Tesla claims to be selling the required hardware, waiting only on the software and legislation allowing it. All other players in this field are focusing on a combination of cameras, radar and LIDAR.
Since LIDAR is expensive and the self-driving hype is real, Tesla have a strong short term financial incentive to forgo the former while claiming to sell the later. Combine that with virtually every other expert in the field saying they're full of BS, and I think the picture becomes crystal clear. Elon covers for himself by promoting conspiracy theories about grand industry-wide plots to keep an underdog down, and that has worked very well for him so far. But like most conspiracy theories, this is one you should think critically about.
I work for an automotive tech company and have installed an L2 self driving system into my friends Camry, I don't think you've thought critically about this. LIDAR is currently a prohibitively expensive technology that provides a point map of the surrounding area. The LIDAR that Waymo uses is nearly as expensive as the car itself. This same point map can be done with computer vision/cameras, and good software. There are many other "experts" that think this is equally viable e.g. George Hotz at Comma AI or Anthony Levandowski at Pronto.
I am not opposed to LIDAR. I just think it is unnecessary and that computer vision is likely to get good enough before LIDAR gets cheap enough.
The last time I looked into it (which was admittedly a few months ago) Comma.ai was by their own admission a Level 2 system, and a somewhat sketchy one at that. While it's obviously really cool, it's a long way off from Level 5.
LIDAR currently being very expensive (and a bit bulky) is obviously the reason Tesla hasn't put LIDAR in their cars. I don't really fault them for that, I fault them for their deceptive advertising. The LIDAR industry has not yet progressed to the point where it makes sense to bring a car to market with hardware ready for Level 5 automation, so Tesla should stop claiming they've done so.
Assuming the current Level 5 automation hype doesn't fizzle then smoulder for decades like the AI craze of the 60s, then it's success will coincide with rapid advances in size and price of LIDAR.
I'm curious, because I honestly dont know, how does LIDAR perform in suboptimal environments such as heavy fog , a Midwest downpour or a blizzard? So far, everything I've read has these cars testing in sunny day (no pun intended) scenarios, with the worst environmental threat being night-time.
Every system known to man, including man, struggles in those sort of conditions.
But this is an important factor to consider when evaluating safety statistics. Humans operate cars in all sort of adverse conditions and human accident rates include accidents in those kind of conditions. Accident rates for autonomous systems that refuse to attempt operation under anything less than ideal conditions won't be directly comparable to human accident rates... but expect this to be glossed over by automotive marketing departments who will eagerly compare apples to oranges as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
This is basically my concern with the hype over automated driving. I live in the upper Midwest. 6 months or more of the year have unideal driving conditions. A purely autonomous vehicle is worthless to me if it can't get me to where I need to go half the time.
> But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.
To be fair, in my mind this is the one most common trait I find in successful entrepreneurs and leaders. I've seen leaders who I didn't think were particularly bright, or extroverted, or empathic, but man, did they not get stressed out by obstacles that came in their way. They either sidestepped them or overcame them, but they did not dwell on them and let those obstacles lead to self doubt.
This is one reason why I think sociopaths are over-represented in leadership positions. They are not burdened by a conscience that can lead to self doubt in times of stress. Of course, it's possible to have this "does not get discouraged by big obstacles" attitude and not be a sociopath, but it is certainly an area where sociopaths have a natural advantage.
I think there's a driver there that "the rest" of us just don't have. I enjoy an easy life. I don't want to work hard; that's not my driver in life. Therefore by this measure I will never be "successful".
Fortunately for me I'm happy with my own definition of "success".
Is it that they don't get stressed, or that they are great at hiding it to project an air of confidence at all times. And how would you tell the difference?
> Is it that they don't get stressed, or that they are great at hiding it to project an air of confidence at all times.
I wouldn't say it's that they don't get stressed, but that they are able to quickly compartmentalize it and move on without dwelling on it.
On the "are they just great at hiding" question, at least in my experience this isn't really possible. Personally, I have severe negative physical effects in response to long term, chronic stress. I sleep poorly, get severe intestinal issues, etc. At some point it becomes pretty impossible for me to just "hide it" - I'd LOVE to be able to quiet my body's physiological responses, but I'm just not capable. In seeing how some of my colleagues dealt with the same stressors, I can assure you they weren't just "hiding it" - if they were experiencing the same physical effects I was, at some point it would have been impossible to hide.
I agree but I'd like to add that in my opinion "successful" is probably quite risky to use in general, meaning that there are multiple levels (e.g. successful for yourself, for the company/government, for the investors/people, for the future maintainability, etc...) and timelines (e.g. now, in 1 year, in 10 years, ...). For example Stephen Elop can probably be considered "successful" as having managed to be CEO of Nokia for a while, but not the same could be said for the company itself (not sure about its investors)?
In any case I think that it would be safe to say that sociopaths have at least the embedded advantage of being "quicker", as they most probably ponder less than other people about in/direct consequences of their actions.
Agreed. I was referring to people that are able to get to the top of their games because they are able to "get shit done." Whether that shit is good or bad is another issue entirely.
Without getting too political, take Donald Trump, who in my mind kind of exemplifies this definition of success. Whatever your thoughts about Trump, he's definitely not lazy, and his early morning tweet storms seem to signify that he gets by on little to no sleep. Of course, he may cause WWIII in the process.
I hear this a lot, and while I generally agree with it, I feel like it ignores the significant counterexamples. You can argue whether Elon Musk and Steve Jobs were good leaders, but I think it's difficult to argue they weren't able to accomplish something uniquely remarkable. In my experience, good leaders may not micromanage but the best leaders are able to, and often do, "get into the weeds" and are actually able to understand and act on the nitty-gritty details even better than the people doing those jobs.
Whenever I hear those names I personally link immediately Elon Musk to "genuinely enthusiastic & a bit crazy", but in the case of Larry Ellison I get only "dark side"-thoughts... .
Edit: I would be absolutely interested in hearing Larry's wished next steps, but I don't think that board members usually release statements (I think that they only "steer" the CEO, help "facilitating" whenever issues arise and perform overseeing activities), right?
They do whatever the bylaws of the corp allow/require them to do, but yes, in general they are steering thr CxOs. And if we hear anything about what he says/does it'll be through Elon, I guess.
Larry Ellison is a visionary. Seems like all visionaries have been called liars by some. Steve Jobs is said to have had a “reality distortion field”. Elon Musk is a visionary. Are they all “liars” or do “visions” seem like stretching of the truth to us? Are visions simply extensions of the “truth”?
Where should I start? Ellison made the first commercial implementation of SQL. (Granted, Ellison didn't invent SQL, but he instantly recognized the importance of it and made it commercially successful, just like Steve Jobs didn't invent graphical interfaces, but instantly recognized its importance when he saw it Xerox Parc.)
Ellison has been talking about what he called "Network Computing" since the mid 1990s. He said "We need computers that do less not more". He was laughed at and ridiculed, but today Chromebooks are the implementation of his "Network Computer" vision. "Computers that do less" are now a reality.
What we know today as "cloud computing" was first envisioned by Ellison in the mid 1990s. He called it "network computing". He talked about why it is important to "centralize complexity" and keep the end-user devices simple. Meanwhile Steve Ballmer was touting the "power of the local hard drive". Ellison's vision seems like commonsense today, but it wasn't back then.
There are lots of other things. For example he was the first to move Enterprise applications to the Web when web-based applications weren't a thing yet. Oracle Parallel Server was his idea. He even wrote the first implementation himself.
I think you'll find that Ellison's "vision" of network computing was literally acquired when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Sun's fifth employee, John Gage, coined the phrase "the network is the computer" in 1984 [0].
Ken Olsen (Digital Equipment Corp) is also reputed to have shared this view as far back as 1987 [1].
>I think you'll find that Ellison's "vision" of network computing was literally acquired when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.
That’s incorrect. Acquisition of Sun cane much later. “Network is the computer” is very different from Ellison’s Network Computing because in Ellison’s vision complexity is centralized and end-user devices are glorified dumb terminals which is very different from Sun’s “Network is the computer”
He wanted to buy Apple just to be able to put Steve Jobs back in charge. He did not/could not buy it, but was given a board seat when Jobs was back. I remember him speaking very clearly at MacWorld about what Apple should do next.
After his failure, as virtually the only Theranos board member with a high-tech background, to provide any good advice on tech development to Elizabeth Holmes, this seemed incredible to me. Then, I read this in the statement: "Larry is also a big believer in Tesla’s mission, having purchased 3 million shares earlier this year."
So, Musk was required to introduce more outside independence to his board, per agreement with the government. He chose one of the least credible board members he could, and one who owned a lot of shares in Tesla to boot. Aha. I think I understand now.
Owning shares is not a negative. It's a positive. It means that he's more aligned with shareholders than with management.
Boards full of non-shareholders tend to prioritize the paycheck they get as board members, so they tend to not want to rock the boat or get into conflicts with mangement.
Those that are shareholders first tend to have a bigger incentive to confront or fire management if they start doing things that are bad for shareholders.
Maybe, I'm not sure. But I know I don't trust his idea of "good for the human beings inside Tesla cars, and the human beings on the road with Tesla cars."
I mean, these are related. If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them. If they're not safe for others, lawsuits will follow. Bad for these are bad for shareholders too. But certain people will ignore this to their own detriment, and I expect Ellison to be one of them.
> If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them.
The theory is good, but in practise it doesn't always work out that way.
As an example, take IBM. In IT circles they're very well known - for ~10+ years now - as an incompetent organisation, with an aggressive sales force targeting high level (non-technical) execs.
Their only real interest in being scoring short term sales wins, but their ability to deliver results for any useful length of time rarely lines up.
In theory, IBM should be having trouble closing sales these days. That's the equivalent of "If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them".
However, that doesn't seem to be the case.
And with IBM, when things go badly wrong (very common), IBM just breaks out the lawyers and attempts to shift blame. eg "it's the customers fault / hackers did it / competitor did it" (etc)
Telsla could unfortunately drive down the same dark road (for their customers).
Having Ellison anywhere involved is really not a good sign. :(
That's assuming car buyers are rational actors, and assuming the courts are fair. I think both are poor assumptions. What if the car itself isn't faulty if operated according to the fine print, but the marketing material for the car suggests to drivers the car has capabilities that exceed reality? Could Tesla theoretically be sued into compliance? Sure, maybe. But would it actually happen? Would Tesla defend their reputation by correcting their marketing material, or would Tesla defend their reputation for blaming the drivers?
And of course as you mention there is the possibility that Ellison is irrational.
I'm not sure how much the fine print matters if it fails basic fit-for-purpose standards.
Regarding irrationality -- see e.g. this[0] Shamus Young post about the video game industry. IMO, this general sort of irrationality is everywhere. Businesses in general tend to be irrational because they're run by suits, whose primary motivation is not actually accumulating money for the business but rather prestige for themselves, which you get by doing business-y things, regardless of whether those actually make money. For all his reputed greed, that's how I actually expect Larry Ellison to act.
Does this mean that a company should use somebody who owns a lot of shares during bad times (when some drastic measure is needed to bring the company back into profitability), and normal paycheck-people during normal times (to ensure that no big risk is taken without reason)? (genuinely asking)
> confused as to why someone who owns a lot of shares would want to take a "big risk" "without reason" during "normal times."
I wrote "normal paycheck-people during normal times (to ensure that no big risk is taken without reason)"
> Wouldn't a person with a lot of stock not want to take a big risk without reason at any time?
(honestly, I'm not sure if I understand the double negation correctly) If you got the stock (or options) for the price of "1" while becoming CEO or similar, you'll probably desperately try to raise that stock price above 1 while your "empire" lasts.
Shareholders that own a large enough chunk of the company often do get a seat on the board. That's pretty normal. The board is supposed to represent the shareholders' interests, after all.
It is two very large egos. But, wasn't Ellison a board member for Apple when Steve Jobs was CEO? So apparently he can get along with other big egos pretty well.
My thoughts exactly. I've lusted over the Model S for years, and the minute that they become available in my country I'll be the first in line.
But, now that means doing business with a company owned by One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison? I wouldn't dare. The way his most well-known company treats its clients is so grotesque that I wouldn't even want to work at a company that uses its products. They are extremely abusive.
For the first time in Tesla's history, with all its obstacles and negative press, I now fear for the brand reputation.
Tesla is not “owned” by Larry Ellison. He is just one among many directors in the board, who have a limited set of responsibility to advocate for shareholders and provide corporate governance. They don’t really play major role in execution let alone ownership. Tesla is a public company and is owned by shareholders.
They're absolute assholes during license audits and negotiations. They're one of only two companies to earn a spot on my "Never voluntarily do business with" list.
The other is Verisign, but I am far less passionate and communicative about that one as it was a result of a singular (albeit terrifically bungled) incident, not an on-going and top-down strategy to be a dickish company.
A tad late to the party. You find tons of information about Oracle's business model, which essentially is suing customers.
This report is a good starting point (PDF) [1]
Edited to add : Check the appendix at the end (Appendix – Anecdotal Feedback). It may cure you from the idea of ever wanting to license any Oracle products if you have any say.
Larry's second day:let's introduce a pricing model that confuses customers, nickels and dimes them constantly and requires enormously expensive upgrades to do things the current car and all our competitors already do for free.
Larry's third day on the job: Let's buy all our competitors and raise prices 5x and get rid of independent car repair shops and make Bluetooth and anything besides AM radio an ad on for the car stereo that's $5000 extra and licensed per unique phone you pair with it. You also can no longer plug in your car at home without an annual license fee and priced per watt of charger output and how many different cars will use it. You also have to pay an extra charge per pound of passenger and luggage in the car over 50. The car won't start if it detects you're overweight.
3 million shares. Am I doing the math wrong or is that somewhere in the ball park of 500M to 1B depending on when they were purchased? That's quite a display of confidence.
It's hard to think about the wealth of extremely wealthy people intuitively. Just for added perspective, he bought an entire Hawai'ian island called Lanai.
And Lanai is not just some some little place (140sq mi). It is about 1/4 the size of Oahu or Kauai [1]. 3% of the island is still own by other people/entities.
The same guy who encouraged Elizabeth Holmes to ignore her engineers in favor of over the top promotion. Also a board member who failed (or chose not) to detect the underlying fraud...
Every time I consider closing out my Tesla short position something like this happens and I get more confident that something is awry.
I'm no fan of Ellison or Oracle. But a guy worth $60 billion with decades long ties and influence in media and government investing in TSLA and serving on its board is not something that should make shorts happy.
This. It’s not surprising at all how emotional and “short” sighted people are being about Ellison because “Oracle sucks”.
I despise Oracle as much as the next guy but if I were in Elon’s shoes I’d want Ellison on my board. The car business is tough, really tough. At one point the database business was really tough. Ellison achieved a near monopoly. Despite our views on the quality his software. Tech people were not his customers, CIO’s were. He gave them exactly what they wanted.
Ellison is shrewd, not stupid. Churning out shit cars would be stupid. Helping Elon cut waste and increase sales would be shrewd. Perhaps Ellison, if anything, could temper Elon’s boundless optimism and pet projects.
It seems to me that you just made the argument for the opposition. We know that Ellison was successful in a business that involved selling big contracts to a small number of purchasers spending from a budget of company or taxpayer money. But that's not Tesla's business. Does Ellison know how to sell to individuals spending large amounts of their own money on a product with lots of similar competitors? Maybe? But he doesn't have a track record of doing that.
The retort here might be that people who have a track record of being "good at business" are good at all business. I personally don't buy that. I think too much executive decision-making is guesswork based on pattern-matching to prior experience for that to hold; if you have no prior experiences with a matching pattern, you're no more or less qualified than the next smart person making it up as they go.
I think too much executive decision-making is guesswork based on pattern-matching to prior experience
Well now we’re just tossing back and forth our own biases and hypothesis. I understand your point. It makes sense. Not sure I agree.
The only thing I would add is, cars are big purchases for people. Oracle was a big purchase for CIO’s. Don’t forget for a second that Oracle was sold to a person. Talk to some Oracle sales people about this. I think you’ll find it similar to car sales in many ways.
Hmm, that's a good point. I'm definitely more bullish on their power storage business, so if Ellison pushes them further that direction since it's more similar to the kind of business he knows, then maybe that's a good idea. Maybe Tesla is also big enough at this point to support multiple divisions with different customer bases and business models.
As far as I can tell, the positive qualities that Ellison could bring to the table (sales skills, toughness) are ones that Musk largely already has, and, what's more worrying, it seems likely that Ellison will enable the character flaws in Musk that the two share (hyperbole, unscrupulousness).
Meanwhile, Ellison adds nothing I can see in terms of manufacturing and and little in terms of adult leadership.
I would argue that the ideal director in terms of complementary skills would be somebody like Tim Cook (even though Tim himself would probably be too likely to have conflicts of interest to serve).
This guy built a company that services most of the data infrastructure of the world and pumps 15 billion of cash every year- but you remember him by what advice he gave to one person ; that just seems unfair.
Oracle does not serve most of the data infrastructure anymore. That is a thing of the past. They are struggling terribly and it probably will get worse considering how the big 3 cloud providers move successfully forward and Oracle loses ground daily.
Larry Ellison thought the cloud was a "fashion driven" software buzzword fad in 2008 [1][2], a miss as big as Ballmer with the iPhone. The cloud will ultimately probably kill off Oracle.
> The Oracle chief executive told shareholders at the company's annual meeting Friday that the technology is a fad that doesn't have a clear business model, despite the fact that Google , Microsoft and practically every other tech company is singing its praises.
> "I think it's ludicrous that cloud computing is taking over the world," Ellison told about 100 shareholders who attended the meeting at the software maker's headquarters. "We think it's very hard to make money in this thing."
This was my thinking... Ellison spend the early part of Oracle's career overselling, then locking people into a product which they were now stuck with using. It also had the double impact of pricing out honest competitors.
One of the BIGGEST things we need to do is STOP punishing honest companies and politicians.
In the 2008 financial crisis we BAILED OUT banks who basically gambled.
Banks who were honest didn't benefit by being honest. They should have been able to buy up the entire industry at a penny.
The political system has the same issue now. Trump lies and the GOP continues to support him. Honest politicians lose because people want to be told what they already "know" not hard truths.
It's impressive how if we just took women's allegations of sexual assault seriously we would also employ a lot less incompetent, over-compensated rich men to jobs they are terrible at.
Have opened and closed a tesla short multiple times and it only ever frustrates me more each time. I'm hoping this bear market will push it down where it should be for once and all.
Cripes. The "pedo guy" thing made me cringe and reaffirmed that Elon is a fallible human, but this is the first time as a Tesla owner I'm worried about the leadership of the company.
Lazlo Bock, who held a similar position at Google (head of HR) doesn’t seem to have had his own Wikipedia page until the publication of his book in 2015 (the coincidental timing suggests either people didn’t take note of him until the book, or his PR people helped get the Wikipedia article going).
I think the issue with these kinds of things is generally coming up with enough citable facts to create a full article. This seems easier with actors and musicians than with executives.
"Senior manager" isn't a remarkable achievement. It's just a role or position in a company that needs to be filled in. She happened to be the one who got picked (for various reasons). If she founded a company with $1B profits a year, it would be a different story.
This was downvoted, perhaps because people read your comment as being dismissive or contemptuous of her achievements, which I don't think you really meant to do.
I think the point you meant to make is that being a senior manager at a big company doesn't rate highly enough to warrant a dedicated Wikipedia page - which is more a comment on Wikipedia's notability criteria.
Let's agree that it is impressive and commendable for her to have achieved such a level of seniority at Walgreen's.
Part of it is that he has notoriously created a culture of selfishness and even dishonesty at Oracle. I once caught Oracle engineers trying to steal IBM proprietary source code while we were testing on-site at Oracle HQ. I watched them dismiss a unified-cache idea when my small company disclosed it to them under NDA, then add their own (inferior) implementation of the idea as a flagship feature in the next version of Oracle. I saw the many copies of "It is not sufficient for us to win, others must lose also" on Oracle employees' offices. I simply don't trust them, and a company that should have safety as a major goal (but unfortunately already doesn't) is the last place I'd want to see them involved.
Well, it's sort of weird. He's never really been involved in a company that manufactures, i don't believe. Plus his legacy is that of maximizing licensing fees which isn't really in Tesla's wheelhouse given their history of opening patents.
Maybe he's being brought in to fight the right to repair and help lock down Tesla's to maximize some sort of dealer /service model?
Or maybe this is some sort of long play to get Tesla stuck on Oracle's platform :-)
See comment above comparing Ellison to an amoral lawnmower.
He's a corporate sociopath who focuses completely on squeezing the maximum possible revenue from customers by any means possible. This strategy often takes the form of threatening to sue customers after aggressive software audits. It seldom takes the form of trying to meet the customer's needs via good customer service or quality software.
This is just the weekly Tesla hate thread. You will see this sort of negativity around essentially every Tesla-related news item. It's actually an improvement over the near-daily nature of these threads from earlier this year.
To answer your question, this changes nothing. He's been a major shareholder for a long time and now he's 1 out of 11 board members.
I'm a fan of Tesla. And it's not about Tesla now. It's about Larry Elison and Oracle. Oracle is the definition of evil in IT. Tesla has a lot of fans among IT people. IT people hate Oracle, and with good reasons. Read around here for examples.
I hate Oracle too. But I agree, it probably will have little to no impact.
Still, just thinking about Larry Elison makes me like Tesla a little bit less. Brr...
> You will see this sort of negativity around essentially every Tesla-related news item.
Not really. From the far end of any spectrum, someone in the middle looks like they're on the other side. To anyone else, it looks like there's plenty of Kool-Aid and astroturf all around, and the tone police are usually the worst offenders.
Seems like more of the same. He'll be a hands-off board member. The board will continue letting Elon do whatever he wants, including the occasional Twitter meltdown.
Yay, that settles it. Now I definitely can't afford a Tesla. The car maybe, but the legal team that should go with it, nope. Current owners, make sure you have a lawyer on retainer.
I think it is not good news. Ellison's preferred business model is to keep everything as opaque as possible, hide technical details away from the customer, obtain security through obscurity, and sic teams of aggressive lawyers on almost anyone and everyone.
And that's before I get into describing the Oracle business model of locking customers into platforms that are nearly impossible to migrate away from.
I think that it's good for Tesla & investors: Elon's discovery & revolutionizing era is over (at least for a while), now it's time for consolidation & stabilization & optimization etc... .
Dood, I am NOT a fan of Larry but he was a very, very booster of the cloud... and I'm not even a fan of that idea. But give credit where credit is due.
I would label it as extremely bad. You're talking about a guy who has no shame in using a publicly traded company (Oracle) to bail himself out of personal investments gone wrong (See Pillar Data). He's literally everything that is wrong with capitalism embodied. He's made a living off holding customers hostage and milking them for every last penny. Tesla has made a living off customer service.
> You're talking about a guy who has no shame in using a publicly traded company (Oracle) to bail himself out of personal investments gone wrong (See Pillar Data).
Kind of like using SpaceX to fund SolarCity and then using Tesla to bail out SolarCity so that SpaceX bond holdings doesn't go bust?
>Tesla to bail out SolarCity so that SpaceX bond holdings doesn't go bust?
Right... so SpaceX doesn't go bust. Not "so he can personally enrich himself". Nothing I've seen thus far from Elon indicates to me that his decision making is based entirely on his personal net-worth. In fact most of his moves show the exact OPPOSITE - that he doesn't care at all about his personal wealth and he cares about changing the world/completing his vision.
I have absolutely no issues with him using one company to prop up another because he needs both to reach his end-goal. If he was using one company to bail-out a failed investment so his bank account looks a little better I've got a LOT of problems with it.
And you think the reason Space-x exists is to make Elon richer? Or you think it's because he wants to see humans colonize the universe?
The entirety of Oracle's existence is to make Larry rich.
While I think Elon needs to get off twitter and never post another message there again, I think his reasons for founding Space-X and Tesla go far, far beyond personal wealth. There are a million other investments he could've gone in on to enrich himself without risking everything.
Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX are most certainly related. They share engineering teams. Tesla gets a big bump in the public’s eye with SpaceX’s accomplishments. People call Teslas “a spaceship for Earth” and there’s zero ambiguity about why that specific comparison is made. It’s pretty much the definition of a mutually beneficial relationship.
It doesn't matter what I think it's purpose is. As a TSLA officer, his job is to use TSLA resources to produce value for TSLA shareholders, not to bail out unrelated companies, especially ones that have a big friggin conflict of interest attached to them.
It doesn't matter if SpaceX's stated mission is a vanity Mars project, or something easier, and actually useful, like eradicating malaria, or stopping AGW, or bringing about the Worker's Paradise to Earth. You don't pilfer a publically traded company to fund it.
I'm curious what gives you this impression. I'm a Tesla owner and consider their customer service their biggest shortcoming at present. Fortunately, the quality of the vehicles and mission make up for it in my mind.
Given Tesla's current issues with how they have been reported to treat their workforce, while Larry might be useful in terms of finance and contacts, I'm more interested in discovering what Kathleen is bringing to the table and what her attitudes to things like unions and employee rights in general might be. I suspect that could be at least as make or break as anything Larry might do here.
Yeah, she seems clearly brought in to help with the safety and legal issues with the workforce. Hopefully she can help actually fix the problems and not just manage and price the fallout.
To put in context the remark that Ellison made
about lying to customers that is referenced in the top rated comment, this happened during a sales cycle to Bank of America in 1981-1983 timeframe (can’t remember exact year).
It’s featured in the 2006 Bloomberg Ellison video bio (link below) and it’s where Ellison wanted to exaggerate the number of Oracle programmers/engineers from 3 to 15. I have no sympathy for Bank of America, but that’s because they’re a bank who screws over regular ppl somewhat directly. Oracle has the decently to put a few middlemen in the process.
NOTE: I’m a liberal arts major who was hired straight out of college during the GFC of 2008 for a non-technical role by Oracle and then later they trained me and put me in an engineering slot (!) so I’ll always be in their debt/totally bias. The above story I thought was somewhat relevant / interesting nonetheless + I hate Bank of America and now bank at USAA.
The board appoints officers, officers run the day to day and establish the operational personality of a company. It probably won't affect the Tesla approach to customers, but it's a very young company so - time will tell. I think in the short term it'd be a bad idea to mess with what's been successful, and focus on the areas that need shoring up.
Tesla just reached profitability last quarter, and is likely to turn a profit this quarter as well. They might not even need to raise more capital if they keep up with Model 3 demand coming from the US, Europe, and China next year.
Quarter to quarter mentality is the biggest downside to becoming a publicly traded company. 'Maximizing shareholder value' has a nasty habit of crowding out all other concerns.
Technically, GM went out of business back in 2011. What is now known as GM today was a company formed in 2009, which then purchased the assets, brand, etc. from the "old GM" that went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The assets would definitely survive in some form, but would anyone think that Tesla brand owned by Ford is really Tesla? I don't think so.
Almost certainly a default would result in a purchase from one of the traditional car manufacturers that wants to destroy a potential rival, scoop up battery IP and get a hard start on automation. Ford even have the cash on hand to refinance the debt.
Tesla issued a bunch of bonds that come due in March. If the stock price is above ~350 then they can pay off the bonds in by converting them to stock. If it's lower than that they pay them off in cash.
"On or after Dec. 1, 2018, to the debt’s maturity date, the holders can decide to convert the debt into Tesla shares. If Tesla’s stock is above the $359.87 stock price, the holders will likely convert the debt into equity, relieving the company from using $920 million in cash required when the debt comes due in March."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/08/elon-musks-tesla-stock-boost...
Right now Tesla is really the only company selling even close to volume. No one else is even trying to hit the 500k to 1m volumes Tesla is aiming for. Over the next decade several others will join them.
Ellison is a butt, but he understands fierce competition very well. As other automakers start gunning for Tesla hos advice will be an asset.
We don't catch all of them, though. If people see two current threads about the same things with lots of comments, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com would be helpful.
Expect software updates for Tesla automobiles to become progressively more expensive and more difficult to install, they will also be packaged with adware.
All patents will be closed and litigation against all other electric car makes will ensue.
Tesla cars currently use CentOS 6. I could imagine Larry suggesting they move to Oracle Linux.
I would be less concerned with adware and more concerned about short-cutting best practices. For example, prior to Oracle acquiring Sun, they used to build packages that would move the compiler (out of the way) and drop in their own packages under /usr/bin to make Oracle re-linking happy. After the acquisition, all of the push-back on such practices were bypassed. They did similar things in linux RPM packages. Oracle RPM's would install files to /tmp, move files owned by other RPM's out of the way and move their files from /tmp to /bin, thus bypassing any dependency conflicts.
Now imagine them applying this mind-set to the Tesla cars. I am curious what could go wrong.
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
I've always wondered how Mr. Cantrill felt when in 2015, after years of hearing his vitriol about Oracle, more than a few of his Joyent team left him to follow Mark Cavage to Oracle including Node.js frontman TJ. This would have been a substantial hit to the tight US development team. Has Mr. Cantrill spoken on how he processed that?
I hit on some of this in the Reddit AMA that happened in 2015[1], but that AMA was asking the more general question about losing people, not the more specific question about losing people to Oracle. The answer is that it was of course gutting and surprising, and it took a while to process -- it was hard to not read it as a personal rebuke! But of course, people don't generally alter their career trajectory to spite others (that is, you don't hear "Yeah, my new job is a terrible team solving an uninteresting problem within an awful company -- but boy did I ever stick it to my former boss!"), but rather to seek their own opportunity.
So I came to accept that each of them (and there were quite a few!) left for the opportunity they saw at Oracle. As for why Oracle: at the time, they were building a de novo cloud, and they were doing it by hiring engineers away from other cloud providers, with a sharp focus on compensation. And in particular: for the ex-AWS'ers at Joyent, one of their former senior colleagues at AWS (Don Johnson) had gone to Oracle to take a leadership position[2]; I think it's fair to say that those who went to Oracle saw themselves as joining Don as much (if not more) than they were joining Oracle.
Of course, none of this made it any easier for me or for the team to swallow -- and it has been of little solace that those who left for Oracle have (of course!) discovered that Oracle is what it is, with several of them having now left Oracle for other opportunities[3]. They may have learned about themselves what Oracle taught me about myself: that in addition to the team I'm on and the problem I'm solving, the company's larger mission is, in fact, important to me -- and that Oracle's emptiness in this regard can be crushingly soul-depleting.
Probably best not to feed the obvious trolls, but I'd imagine somewhat vindicated when the self-same mistakes made by Cavage that took a long time to correct in Triton appeared in Oracle's cloud APIs a few years later.
Yes, Oracle is bad. No, I don't love or even like them.
But quoting Bryan's dramatic speeches every time Oracle or Ellison are mentioned is adding next to nothing to the discussion at this point. It's a great way to incite anger though.
My point is that this doesn't bode well for Tesla. My biggest complaint with Tesla is that they don't provide service manuals or have an open parts department for their vehicles. For comparison, pretty much every other major auto maker will sell you a book telling you how to fix anything on your vehicle, and will sell you the parts and special tools to do so. Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very much doubt he will encourage this to happen.
Apple started the path to normalizing this, and I believe it's core to being responsible for the entire user experience. Personally, I'm not a fan of this, but I understand the motives aside from profit.
If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the hit.
When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world. When a PC crashes, you also have the hardware manufacturer to blame for faulty hardware. What about OS and other system customizations the manufacturer puts in there? Those coukd crash it too? All the public hears is "My Windows crashed." and Microsoft looks bad.
No fault is brought upon the consumer who thought a $220 PC was going to be a quality machine, not does it fall to the non-brand foreign bargain PC manufacturer for building a $220 that's doomed to provide an awful experience. Instead, the world hears that "Windows Sucks."
Given this, I appreciate why a company would opt to do the things Tesla has done in order to protect its brand. However, I try to avoid doing business with companies who do this, as I value consumer freedom.
This are very bad excuses, Did BMW,Ford or other car manufacturer had issues because people use a car service that is not "official" but is very convenient?
Is Tesla planing to open car services in all locations were regular services are or you will have to send the car back to the dealer so they send it back to Tesla and wait 3 weeks like you have to do with Apple.
About Apple,
-1 Apple sells expensive products and non-Apple PCs and phones come in different price ranges, so in average Apple products will be better quality.
- 2 Apple products break too, I have such a laptop and many other people can confirm that they have hardware issues and we also see that until justice is involved the issues are not acknowledged
- 3 Apple always had a good image in some demographics and it is not correlated with the fact they are trying to hide the hardware schematics, try to stop third party to repair the products, the good reputation was because of the software and hardware.
For the Apple fans that will downvote, also leave some factual reason why I am wrong, something like why do you think the new anti-repair movement is increasing Apple branding or what fact I got wrong.
> Is Tesla planing to open car services in all locations were regular services are or you will have to send the car back to the dealer so they send it back to Tesla and wait 3 weeks like you have to do with Apple.
If you're really "lucky" it will happen while you're traveling out of state, and Tesla will tow your vehicle to the nearest facility and give you one of their rentals or partnered rentals, some of whom have "no out of state" policies on the replacement vehicle (remember, you're already 'out of state' - how are you planning to get home?).
All well and good -- solid arguments except when you consider things like:
Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on.
That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the upgrade, which is marked up 3X, 4X. Apple is recent -- anyone remember Sun?
The trashbin Mac Pro can also be upgraded - RAM, SSD, GPU and even the CPU. The problem is that the SSD and GPU use weird form factors and thus are hard to find and expensive.
Not just. I have a 2015 iMac. It was running out of memory so I went to upgrade it. Nope, soldered in. Ended up buying a new computer. Doesn't make me happy.
RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.
This can happen if a cache doesn't support more and turns itself off or into some horrible mode..
But the real fight on stable RAM was over ECC, IBM is the only giant that took an actual stand on insisting on quality at a price. Apple realized they could keep the price.
Hardly. A fatality collision is rarely the subject of an NHTSA investigation, and "serviced by unqualified/unlicensed auto repair facility" is one, a big get out of jail card, and two, hands a whole world of liability... to said facility, not Tesla.
> When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world.
My only consistent hardware error on a Mac was my 2005 iMac (the 42lb one) when I upgraded the RAM and chose the wrong speed/timing. Genius bar told me to replace it with the stock RAM and it worked fine.
So yeah, upgradability and easy-maintenance can easily lead to problems even with a reasonably knowledgeable consumer or repair shop.
Not sure about TVs, but car manuals have been around for ages. This link (not previously known to me) looks to have ones from early and mid last century:
> Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very much doubt he will encourage this to happen.
No, but he might put some board level pressure to get more rigorous about profitability. I know that's a dirty word around here, but Tesla is not exactly well known for it's cashflow prowess. Those are the types of things board members do...not figure out whether service manuals come with the product.
I expect an automobile company that is no longer considered a startup and is publicly traded to exhibit either (1) positive cash flow or (2) a clear path to positive cash flow.
This is not a new problem, and consumers have been fighting to get quality documentation from auto manufacturers for decades now, but manufacturers don't want to give it voluntarily because it cuts off their dealerships from recurring repair revenue, where they make most of their profits.
I think the only reason Tesla doesn't comply yet is because they probably don't have any physical presence in Massachusetts, which passed the law in 2013.
We should all be ashamed that our government is so bought and paid for by the auto manufacturers and dealers that this information isn't mandatory to be made available online.
They do. And every single item on there down to bolts says "Contact Tesla" who, multiple people have confirmed, will say "Sorry, not available to you".
It's meeting the letter of the law, not the spirit.
Just like how in those few states where access to service manuals is legislated, Tesla makes you 1) make an appointment, 2) pay a fee, 3) show up to a designated location, 4) not be allowed to take copies, or photographs, and only allow your own hand written notes (no computers allowed), and 5) sets a time limit.
"You have to go to a Tesla Service Center to get your wheels aligned. It costs 10x more than an alignment somewhere else but it's for your own safety. If you go to another shop to get an alignment our software will detect it and void your warranty. Welcome to the future!"
>This example is a bad one. In fact, when Tesla's repair system is busy, they'll send you to a standard tire store.
We're not talking about past Tesla. We're talking about Tesla that needs to improve cash flow with Larry Ellison on the board. Do you really think this is hard to imagine?
Honda sells workshop manuals like they sell parts and tools - you just need to know the code, and you can get it shipped from any dealer who can deliver OEM parts.
Really, modern vehicles require a subscription to a website. Hypothetically, you could pay for the 2 day access and scrape the site for your vehicle. For older vehicles, you can normally find the fsm/workshop manual with some creative googling.
Nope. Just called my subaru dealer, they don't have any additional manuals for sale that aren't on subaru website. I did find this website though https://techinfo.subaru.com/
While I think I would agree with you normally, I don't think it makes sense to offer service manuals for Teslas. There's no way that the goodwill they would gain from doing so would outweigh any of the negative consequences when someone fucks up a personal repair on their Tesla and the company gets a bad rap for it. The number of people that would even bother self-repair for a Tesla is likely so infinitesimally small that it makes it more costly for Tesla to offer and support those services.
Additionally, I can't imagine that a service manual would be valid for that long considering that a lot of the service on a Tesla is mostly on the software side. They'd have to offer a hardware manual for the extremely limited amount of hardware and then a separate software website/app/portal to handle the software side. You'd likely be paying a subscription and they'd need to separate off whatever platform they're currently using at the service centers. Again, doesn't seem very cost-effective for the tiny base that would benefit from it.
Yep, I've stopped being annoyed by seemingly repetitive comments. On any given topic there is always both a gtirloni who has heard it a million times and a warent who never has.
Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.
This is a great example of what I'm talking about. I'm pretty certain that concept put in those words was new to me in some HN comment at some point, and I'm even more certain it was already tiresome to tons of people by that time. This happens all the time.
There's herds upon herds who do not realise that "profound insight" because of a lack of transparency. So when truth is being unleashed about e.g. Facebook, it allows for people to be waken up.
(FWIW, it has worked for me, though yes it was annoying.)
I clicked through to these comments because I didn't know who Larry Ellison was and wanted to get an idea of what the HN community thinks of this move. Seeing this as the top comment gives me a pretty good answer about that.
I won't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, but since Larry Ellison is a person, and our broken US legal system consider Oracle a person too, then Oracle has already been anthropomorphized by judicial fiat.
Whenever I read this and the java guy Gosling they are incredibly negative about Oracle. One wonders if there is something behind all this as it appears they were figures of respect and authority at their previous company. But upon being consumed by Oracle was that still the case? I get the impression that there is underlying bitterness and resentment festering here due to something like that.
Well Java guy got his picnic canceled by Oracle as he detailed on his blog. If I had been dreaming of eating hot dogs at picnic for months and it got canceled at last minute I wouldn't be happy either.
Important detail is that the picnic was fully paid already with no refund; cancelled because why should ex-SUN have fun/higher salaries, when the rest of Oracle haven't?
Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?
In large part by exploiting government contracts, as I understand it. Government procurement is about as far from a free market as I can imagine, and is pretty easy to exploit.
Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game.
Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs".
And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society.
Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade.
In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1].
> As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade.
Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways".
Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works.
We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it?
All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving.
It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview.
Because when I read
> "As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!")"
I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.
Oracle weren't the only game in town then though. Sybase and db2 were around, widely deployed and enterprise worthy at the time. The sales and lockin tactics which earned oracle notoriety were not unique either but they did that part 'better'.
> Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property.
That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government.
In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem.
There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted.
I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented.
Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
For every one of those database migration success stories, there's a potential TSB style disaster though[1]. Problems with migration are real and potentially very serious. It's not just cost if it goes to plan that needs to be considered - for business critical systems, 'don't fix it if it isn't broken' is a good adage for a reason...
Uh? They switched from a JavaScript engine to a Relational Database Manager? Are you sure you don't mean a NoSQL DB rather than node.js? I googled a bit but couldn't find the article.
You know how when you give an AI shallow directives in machine learning, it'll start doing weird things? Like that Roomba that got stuck permanently driving backwards, or the game AIs that figure out that standing still is the best way not to die.
Well it works like that for capitalism too. People optimize for the goal (money), not necessarily the hopeful outcome (useful things).
Mediocre things are useful. They can be much cheaper when you don't require excellence. The part of that quote that's more an indictment of capitalism is that they're inflicting misery and screwing their customers. That's what's not supposed to be profitable.
I don't believe the accumulation of wealth is necessarily moral or immoral, rather amoral.
Capitalism can and does benefit society, but so can other economic systems. Nevertheless, the purpose of capitalism isn't to enrich society, it's to enrich the owners and shareholders by accumulating capital.
The correlation between the quality or morality of a good or service and its value in the market isn't a strong one, since there are forces other than supply and demand at work determining value, and markets don't often optimize for greater societal good. If they did, agriculture and electronics manufacturing wouldn't depend on immigrant and forced labor, blood mining, and other immoral practices. Consumers put up with those things because the end result is bananas year round and cheap consumer goods.
I think the mistake comes in demanding that societies prefer only one or another model, due to projecting moral dimensions onto them which may not apply, rather than accepting a balance between systems intended to benefit the few, and systems intended to benefit the many.
> Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it?
It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.
That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguably, immoral behavior is somewhat naive, in my opinion.
The contemporary competitors to the US with different economic fundamentals (China and the USSR primarily) also experienced/inflicted slavery, immoral behavior, and industrial progress, yet they didn't see nearly the same level of economic or societal development for the overwhelmingly vast majority of their population over their time of heavy-handed central planning economics.
If you knew you'd be assigned at birth to a life of 10th to 90th percentile (by status/money/class) in a non-wartime country and it would be US, UK, USSR, or China and your birth year would be 1880, 1900, 1920, 1938, 1960, or 1980, how many would choose the USSR or China?
How much of this is simply that capitalism is more efficient at producing weapons of war, and the US was able to force the USSR and China to spend significant resources on defense?
As per `Homo Sapiens` Slavery was a direct result of capitalism. Humans like all other resource were optimized for maximum o/p and profit, and if not for Hitler to have taken racism to home and to extreme. People may not have seen error in the way. Its how as society we don't rise against treatment of cows in factory farming.
There are no affluent, liberal Democracies that do not utilize a free market based economic system, ie some formulation of Capitalism.
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands. Five of the wealthiest countries on earth, and generally considered five of the best to live in. None of those are Socialist systems. They all use the free market as the basis of their economic systems. Some with more or less government regulation, and with varying degrees of a welfare state. The same is true of the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, etc. All have private ownership based economies, allowing for the vast accumulation of private wealth via business and asset ownership. Germany for example ranks #3 in billionaires globally, and Sweden ranks near the top in billionaires per capita. That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
>Some with more or less government regulation, and with varying degrees of a welfare state.
The existence of government regulation means these countries do not have free markets, and all welfare programs are socialist in that they involve the government taking wealth from the people through taxation and redistributing it to those who haven't earned it by trading their labor.
>That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
You seem to have communism and socialism confused here, and you seem to be failing to see that socialism and capitalism exist on a spectrum, and most countries don't practice one or the other, but a mix of both.
The "whole premise of capitalism" is that the economy and its profits are privately controlled. Whether that leads to building "useful things" for a country or the world is not a requirement.
The only way to make a profit in a privately controller economy is to show people that your things / services are so useful that they are willing to give you money for them.
As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.
To be fair, this critque is more a critique on companies inside capitalism and it works when you remove all the Larry Elliot bashing and replace it with the word company:
>There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than companies.
>And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
>Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to said company, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
>You need to think of companies the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about companies.
I don't see the problem here to be honest. If people want to continue giving money to Oracle for their mediocre products ... that's on them, not on Oracle really.
Its unfortunate if you viewed Tesla as a game changer or a rising star. Bringing someone on with the character to marginalize all value for the quickest return, that might bother some. So if you were someone who wanted to give money to Tesla now you might think twice. This isn't about Oracle this is about Ellison.
Come to think of it that is indeed relevant and I completely skipped over that. I am bullish on Tesla and financially have skin in the game as well. So far Tesla has been quite volatile but I'm bullish on the long-term.
It's even less of a critique than an observation at that point. Lawnmowers are useful, and if you thought they were friendly, you're using the tool incorrectly.
Sorry, I guess I shouldn't have said "in this context", I'm not familiar with the term at all. I was trying to differentiate from just the literal "awake" and "conscious", as in not asleep. I assumed it was some religious term.
The search results seem to indicate it's some vague mysticism not specific to any particular belief structure? Not an area I'm familiar with. Thanks for the info!
I think it's useful as a rough framework. Definitely overlays well over a lot of my own observations of life and people. And, yes, LSD is always helpful in these matters.
Glad to hear Tesla is adding more women. I truly think women in leadership are a grossly underutilized resource. EDIT: Doubly so women of color. If anyone needs a different perspective, it’s Elon. I hope he listens.
My theory is that innate talent (if there is such a thing) is probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races, so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount (of course, if everyone did this, the discount would disappear and we'd have meritocratic equality, which is kind of what we want).
Plus it increases the solution space you're able to efficiently explore due to a wider range of perspective and background.
I have had several women bosses, and they're pretty much all great. We'll know when we've achieved gender equality when it's just as common to have a crappy female boss as a male boss.
Oh, and folks suggesting we look at "objective" metrics alone... Well, there's no such thing. When hiring folks, there's an enormous amount of information that just can't be known at the time. You really do have to look at the outcome to judge how "objective" you're actually being, on net.
.
"Am I pretty much just hiring people who look like me?"
There's two answers to that question:
"Well, obviously people who look like me are naturally better than everyone else."
Or, my perspective:
"I'm probably missing something important so I should cast a wider net."
> probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races
While some studies disagree, we can assume its true for the sake for discussion.
> so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount
There is a logical error here. The assumption is that the missing non-white men in the evenly distributed population would not be working. Instead what we see in countries like Sweden is that people segregate, so you got the non-white men dominating some fields, and white men dominating other fields, and so forth. A field which is dominated by white men that want non-white men has to compete with fields that are dominated by non-white men. Similar, there is no discount to get white men into fields that are dominated by non-white men because they have to compete with fields that are dominated by white men.
> if everyone did this, the discount would disappear and we'd have meritocratic equality
Logical error #2. If everything was equal we would not see every field being exactly 50% men and women, with exact race distribution as proportional to the population. Randomness would still apply. Unless the population is infinitive you will get random variation.
I share your theory. Which points to a business opportunity creating diversity-friendly companies.
The trouble is, the world is still sexist and racist. So while you’d end up with a more capable workforce, your company would also be disadvantaged at every turn. Your sales people would be looked over by clients, your bizdev reps would be disrespected by partners, etc.
I think to exploit your insight profitably, you need to create an n-sided market of many companies all committed to diversity.
That opens you to other attacks, like how the Black Panthers were infiltrated by the CIA for trying to build a black separatist economy.
N-sided market problems are also really hard. Although I think this one can be solved with some clever software infrastructure. Once we start seeing some really capable “Ubers of Everything” these kinds of people plays become more feasible.
Please do not pay attention to gender and potentially downplay woman’s own intellectual power.
Right. Valuing people more or less depending on what chromosomes they have or how the flesh they have under their clothes is formed is wrong and dehumanizing. People should be valued by what they do and make, not by how they are born and raised. This is how you separate real social justice from embittered identitarians posing as "social justice" -- are they truly against valuing people on the basis of identity, or do they use and exploit such tribal impulses for their own ends?
> Valuing people more or less depending on what chromosomes they have or how the flesh they have under their clothes is formed is wrong and dehumanizing. People should be valued by what they do and make, not by how they are born and raised.
This depends on context though, right? We all have our blind spots and our areas of unusual insight, and these are shaped partly by our life experience, which is shaped partly by our gender, race, economic background, etc. So if a group consists almost entirely of men (or women, or people who grew up rich, or whatever), it might genuinely have some avoidable blind spots and biases.
Treating women as superior or inferior to men is dumb, but caring about gender balance can make good sense.
[edit: the key point, which I didn't make explicit, is that this holds even if there was no significant bias in the hiring process that produced the imbalance. People who are great choices individually might not make the best team, if their strengths and weaknesses are correlated rather than complementary.]
First, you make the determination that people should be assessed based on objective metrics.
Second, you then try to correct (unconscious) bias with necessary metric-correcting, like gender balance.
If you put gender balance as the underlying truth, and then to optimize your process to make it work, you will see various issues that eventually sabotage your goals.
I'm happy to reconsider my views, but from this comment alone I can't really tell how or why you disagree with me. I'll read a more detailed reply if you feel like leaving one.
edit: I see you wrote elsewhere in this thread that
> I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.
My argument is that gender balance (and other kinds of demographic balance) can be valuable independently of its use as a proxy for unbiased hiring. I'm suggesting that, even if an unbiased hiring process would produce a skewed gender balance,[1] this might not be a good outcome, because a heavily male/heavily female group might suffer from shared biases or blind spots that would be smoothed out in a more balanced group.
[1] I hope treating this as a possibility isn't too controversial; I think there are plenty of ways it could happen, regardless of the existence of any innate differences. For example, even when sexism is the problem, it might be acting mostly at an earlier stage inaccessible to the company doing the hiring (e.g. social pressures on kids to do 'masculine'/'feminine' subjects).
I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.
Please do not read any more than what stated in the comments. Your comment implies I disapprove more women being helpful or something along the line of not valuing gender diversity, which is not being mentioned at all in the comment.
Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-ellison-hearsay-we-c...