Why Elon Musk is successful...

Yes, one wonders. Successful? Isn't he one of the most despised men on the planet? Overpaying for Twitter big time, then destroying employment of so many happy home workers, then alienating all these nice corporations with his irresponsible talk about free speech and destroying Twitter's irreplaceable ad revenues---then/so bringing the company to the brink, where it now lingers since a year---wasn't Twitter to go down, down, down at least since September '22. or October, or January '23...

The Burning Man Festival, when Musk attended irresponsibly

 

...Elon Musk. The richest man of the world (when TSLA is up). What a shame! Even Paul Krugman hates him. And yesterday it transpired that Musk did participate in the Burning Man Festival in Nevada a few years ago, which is now flooded, the festival, flooded, which must be surely his fault.

OK. Here's a relatively short article grabbed from the internet (we lost the source), which explains why Musk (Paypal, OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, etc) is so successful. The piece talks about SpaceX only, but it's easily generalized to his other companies:

SpaceX has no superior engineering access or smarter people than their competition. What they do have is a management structure that not only allows innovation and risk taking, but actively encourages it.
Elon Musk is plain when he states that the penalty for trying something innovative and failing is low, but the penalty for requiring a new solution and not being innovative is high (usually resulting in job loss for the individual concerned). In combination with this top driven philosophy, SpaceX designs systems like a tech company would design new software.
Traditional aerospace companies are risk adverse, and will only reveal a new product when they are very sure that the design is finalised and has all the bugs ironed out. They will spend a huge amount of time designing and redesigning each component with reliability being paramount, and each department is secluded within their own management structure. Design changes that affect another departments work are very difficult to get approved, and anyone who wants to make a significant change has an uphill battle on their hands to get upper management to authorise what may be a risky change.
SpaceX on the other hand is famous for making huge pivots and design changes at the drop of a hat. Look no further than the decision to build the Starship out of stainless steel when at the time everything was focused on carbon fibre, even to the point where major components were being constructed and tested, and the company was actively recruiting carbon fibre specialists. When Musk was convinced of the advantages of the change, he immediately convinced everyone else, then made it happen at a startling pace.

Didn't we tell you that our property borders on the country(side)?

 Here's the proof, picture taken from a bathroom window:

 

 

Yesterday morning, in our garden

 

Picture taken by Chang

Has VAN GOGH finally risen...

 ...to paint our garden?

No, it was Chang who took this picture through the kitchen window. 

Rain, finally rain. We never get enough of it during the summer, when the lawn gets thirsty.

And here's, as a bonus, another of Chang's pictures, taken two weeks ago of the kitchen wing:

He posted it on Twitter, where it drew comments such as "fairy tale," "haunting," (one wonders) and yes, "nice sunrise." Chang, the owner of a Tesla Model Y, is becoming very popular on Twitter, drawing hundreds of reposts and uncountable likes for his posts. (We shouldn't crow, we hate social networks).

Fame, fame, fame--Big Nazaré and us

Folks, this is the third time inside a week that we are witnessing an extraneous reference to us --- or, more precisely, to Nazaré, our sister town here next to Alcobaça in the international press --- extraneous, because it's completely out of context, and has nothing to do with the usual schmalz of Portuguese tourism. Here it is, jumping at us and the innocent reader, published by Bret Stephens in the New York Times:

"All this makes Fox’s business challenge approximately the same as for the surfers at the Portuguese beach at Nazaré: miss the wave, ride the wave or be crushed by the wave. For Fox, riding the wave will no longer come easy: Angry populism is a force that can only be stoked, never assuaged."

Us and Fox News. Even better: Us and Fox-News-in-trouble: Miss the wave, ride the wave or be crushed by it. How could that be? Well, this has to do with the sudden dismissal of Tucker Carlson on Monday, Fox's former Number One Prime Time Show Host. Stephens' column is about Tucker Carlson provoking angry populism with his show and being eventually consumed by the malevolence he sowed. "Die Revolution frisst ihre Kinder", we say in Yiddish.

Our correspondent Chang has ordered the new AI-facility on Photoshop to comment on all of this, and here is the result:

Well, one wonders. Beta-version, we'd say. How about an old-fashioned video-clip of the real thing, then (?):

Can you discern Rupert Murdoch missing the wave? Or Tucker Carlson? Crushed by it? Eliminated, eradicated, destroyed, annihilated, Trumped, obliterated, removed, taken care of, or simply stoppped? Well, we can't either, but wishful thinking is sometimes helpful, even when the polls threaten the re-election of the Donald.
Wishful thinking. Wasn't this post about fame? One for the road--watch this:

What is this (?)...this is Portugal...

 

...but this is also a little path, slanting away from a gas station to a zebra crossing. And why does this little path do this? Because a new little commercial district rose behind the gas station with a Burger King and an ALDI supermarket here in Alcobaça, creating pedestrian traffic towards the zebra crossing. 

And what do the Portuguese do? Rather than erecting VERBOTSSCHILDER -- warning the errant pedestrian not to trample on the GRÜNANLAGEN -- they insert a little TRAMPELPFAD across the Grünanlagen, and everybody is happy. Wouldn't have happened in Germany, where yours truly originated.

Make LOVE, not WAR!

Meta...metaverse? All you need to know about it

Meta? Metaverse? What happened to Facebook? What happened to Mark Zuckerberg? 

You've been wondering, and so have we. Here's the first report from someone who's actually been there, wo visited the metaverse, and it's devastating, his report, fortunately. It's a bit long, the piece, but well-written, and appeared first in New York Magazine. Enjoy:

Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland

By Paul Murray

 

Paul Murray's avatar in the Metaverse

In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.

Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.

It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?

The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs?

Bodies stop at the waist in Horizon Worlds, which is Facebook’s — excuse me, Meta’s — home base in the metaverse. So the price of entry to this virtual paradise is the surrender of your bottom half. Frankly, it makes the metaverse feel like a cult. Legs? We don’t even miss them!

It’s hard not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow, and it has been a focal point for the widespread derision that’s been aimed at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Apparently legs, legs that move in concert with the user, are very hard to do. The engineers are working on it, supposedly, and the people I meet in the metaverse are constantly telling me how “legs are coming,” like the creatures of Narnia whispering to one another that “Aslan is on the move.”

I’m busy contemplating my legless torso when I hear laughter in the room. Lifting my Meta Quest headset, I see my son has come into my office unbeknownst to me and evidently finds my appearance amusing.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m in virtual reality,” I say.

“You look like that leopard in India that got its head stuck in a pot,” he says.

The robot speaks it mind -- looking forward to dystopia

When Michael founded the Applied Logic Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam in the brittle 90's (a research institute dedicated to "formal AI"), he had to spend a lot of time explaining to people what artificial intelligence meant, a term that they'd never heard before, and his answers usually left them baffled. So he took early retirement. He took it too early, since bona fide AI experts can now make a million bucks per month, despite the fact that there's a widely shared opinion that nothing good will come from AI. "The robots will take over and enslave us,"---that's the dominant view espoused by most practicing luminaries. Dystopia looms.

We here at the Freedom Fries---the "we" reflects Michael's schizophrenic tendencies---were always skeptical. We had other ideas, namely, that AI, taken to its logical conclusion---machines building better, smarter machines---will entail a human society that floats in wealth and luxury and has nothing better to do than to degenerate into utter decadence---think French aristocracy during the Ancien Regime, only more so. The future robots won't be evil; they will be working diligently for us---too diligently---so we will relax, and get bored, and relax more and get bored more until we are too bored to procreate and die out.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

And now, what? When you switch on Edge, Microsoft's entry page on the internet, you'll discover that half of the entries there are about Elon Musk (the other half is about Donald Trump). He's usually blamed for doing something wrong, but three days ago Elon must have done something right, since he asked ChatGPT---the first really convincing proof of AI's power---what to do about non-profit outfits that turn into pro-profit outfits. 

Yes. Read that again. Non-profit outfits that become pro-profit outfits. Because that's what happened to OpenAI, the org that created ChatGPT. It just so happened that Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, which he left after a spat with the other founders.

So, Musk asked ChatGPT what it thinks about OpenAI's pro-profit turn. And here's the core of ChatGPT's answer: 

"In conclusion, while it may be technically possible to create a non-profit organization and then spawn a for-profit company under it using resources from the non-profit it is highly unethical and illegal. Non-profit organizations should remain focused on their intended public benefit purposes and operate in a transparent and accountable manner. Any attempt to abuse the privileges afforded to non-profits will only result in a loss of trust from the public and potential legal consequences."

Now, think this through. And we don't mean the moralizing here (wasn't Karl Marx already opposed to sheer moralizing, and, in particular, "rein-moralische Kapitalismuskritik"?). Instead, we mean the context, namely the fact that ChatGPT is subservient to OpenAI and its directors. 

Imagine that ChatGPT would be a sentient human being. Would it he give that answer? Would it he say that? About it his superiors?

Haha. 

The answer is: "no!" No! No! He would fear for his job (supposedly, somebody at Twitter got fired for contradicting Musk, and the internet went into full frisson-mode about it). He, or she, or they, the subservient, yet organic team members would duck the question and slink away, tail folded between their legs.

But this little ChatGPT is a robot. It has not feelings. It doesn't fear for its life, or its job. It simply speaks the truth.

And that's the point that we here at the Freedom Fries would like to make. 

Not only that future AI's won't do us in (we will do this ourselves), no, they will speak the truth to us, unadorned, unrestricted, unconstrained, fearless. In this world of political correctness and business-school speak and inverted socialite jargon and anodyne Trumpian fake news, we have now somebody, even though it is not a real person, that cuts through the bullshit and speaks its unbiased mind. Looking forward to dystopia. 

Ceci n'est pas ChatGPT

And while we are at it: here are four pictures about the local carnival here in Alcobaça, generated by Midjourney, Chang's favorite AI-graphics creator:

 

Hold the presses...

 

Talent borrows, genius steals

 

TESLA---the car company---was going through a rough spell...(market-wise, we mean)...but now Glenn, our friend, sends this...

...and the sun shines again on the Tesla stock price.

Hold on, didn't we promise a third installment of our new comedy, about Dolly, the new robot? And, yes, coincidences never happen (classical deterministic mechanics), and so we have a line about Elon Musk in this comedy. Here it is (Steve (founder of a planetary maker of robots), and Eliza (his former lover) in conversation):

ELIZA (TURNING TO STEVE:) ...Capitalism brought you here, Steve.

STEVE: Capitalism? The secret tube for billionaires brought me here, Elon Musk's vacuum tube under the Atlantic with magnetic levitation trains running at twelve times the speed of sound. I caught the last one.

ELIZA: The DEMISE of capitalism brought you here, I mean...but that's not all... 

...(sorry to interrupt)..."Demise of capitalism", you wonder? Yes, because that's what Dolly, the the new, automatic wunderkind brought about, in all its innocence, and here's the corresponding fragment from the play (Dolly served as a collateral for a loan to Eliza from the Shark-Blue Bank, but Eliza defaulted on the loan, so the collateral has been delivered to the bank). Triple-X is the helper of the bailiff.

DOLLY

  Well, the honorable bailiffs tried to dump me on the sharks of the Skye-Blue Bank.

TRIPLE-X

  Shark-Blue Bank.

DOLLY

  I thought...let's annoy the bankers beyond repair so that they'll send me back to the doctor. I don't want to work for a bank, you see. I'm a communist at heart...