I agree with this, but it seems so crazy to me. How can money be a motivator when you're that rich. I'm not even "rich" but I'm already at a point where money is far from my #1 motivator.
I LOVE puppies, but if I had a trillion of them the last thing I'd want is another puppy.
An interview I recently read with Seth Rogen was very illuminating (from the NY Times):
"You know how every once in a while you read one sentence and it snaps your whole perspective into place? I remember reading that book “Going Clear,” about Scientology, and there was one sentence about how if famous people aren’t treated in a certain way, it makes them think they’re not as talented as they wish they were. Like, if I go to a restaurant and I have to wait 20 minutes for a table instead of them just seating me right away, am I not as talented as I thought I was? If someone has a nicer hotel room than me on the press tour, does that mean I’m not as good an actor as I thought I was? I think that’s how a lot of famous people interpret how they’re treated."
I think the same applies to Musk. The money is a proxy for how much everybody thinks he is a special genius. Anything in his life that makes him feel less special requires more validation that he is, and money is the easiest validation he is able to acquire.
Did he really win? His kids all hate him, his wives all left him, he has no real friends. Anyone he interacts with is purely after money and power they can get from him. He spends all day being angry on twitter.com.
I think the point of the Rogen quote is that there's no real way to win. This is not cope by the not mega-rich and famous. It's an inevitable result of wanting universal acclaim.
Musk has more money than most of us would dream of, but the game isn't over until it's over.
Speaking just for myself, I've lost respect from Elon Musk. I admire Musk's accomplishments, especially Starship and the Falcon rockets. But I don't respect Musk's personal judgement, his moral integrity or his ethics.
He doesn't know me, and he doesn't care about my opinion (or care about ethics for that matter). But there are a lot of people like me who used to respect him and no longer do. He's surrounded himself with fawning sycophants. At some level he's got to know this, and that the people pretending to pay him respect aren't themselves worthy of respect.
Musk is probably a clinical narcissist (NPD). If that's the case, no amount of power, status, or riches (or ketamine) will ever be enough
Their motivations are often cartoonishly superficial and... well... stupid. Stupid in ways that are baffling to most people (even most other neurodivergent). The kind of stupid that drives somebody to secretly pay pro-gamers to play games for them so they can pretend to be a pro-level gamer, only to then expose their own fraud by playing the game themselves on a live stream, without knowing how to actually play it. And then pretending to have connection issues when people start noticing.
I have no trouble believing Musk has simply internalized the identity of being the world's richest man and now has a pathological need to maintain that status, no matter what
It can't and it's just not. People use the word "money" for different things. He's not doing it for another bill or a number on some screens- neither are most employees of those companies. That's just projecting values on someone else.
The things they're trying to accomplish require extreme amounts of capital.
> The things they're trying to accomplish require extreme amounts of capital.
This could really cut either way. Like assume you mean he’s trying to do something good or noble (lmao) but the other obvious way to read this would be that he’s interested in becoming wealthy/powerful enough to bend the will of a nation before him and burn the world for a laugh.
It’s just funny how the markets seem to want to value him as some sort of AI visionary when his companies are not even in the top 5 for AI, despite his endless resources.
The way I see it, he's already well past the "wealthy/powerful enough to bend the will of a nation before him and burn the world for a laugh" but still needs to keep working to do his (and companies) stated "good or noble" goals. Why do the fervid anti-Elon people not even bring up his many flaws or mistakes and always concoct weird reality-orthogonal situations?
Ok sure I can be more more direct: how does aligning himself to the republican party and taking a detour to unwind as many social programs as possible in any way help his stated goals, corporate or otherwise?
The only answer is the dude is a self-service piece of shit. He has no principles and is not trying to accomplish anything other that exploit for the sake of exploitation.
That's not the only answer, it's just the one you want. There was a clear coup of the Democratic Party (or just shifting of values) that was jeopardizing both the actual climate change issues and the mission to mars. You can keep trying to find ways to justify the idea that he's just completely selfish, just wants money, or whatever, but you're going to have to do a lot more work.
I don't think you can describe his beliefs using booleans like that: you have to use a numeric scale. It would be be correct to say: Elon would need a hell of a lot of ketamine to believe a colony on mars is a possibility.
It's not exactly like Cookie Clicker. Many people definitely like seeing the number going up, but for most people that get to that point of wealth, the goal is power that the money represents. A human being may struggle to relate to them, but they really are motivated by the sole desire to own and control everything.
Yes you can. Money is a medium of exchange. Stock is a medium of exchange. But they buy the ability to effectuate your will in the world. If you have a vision of the world money, human capital, political power are not the measure of success or the goal. They are the instruments of executing a vision.
Some people aren't motivated by money, they are motivated by reputation, or pathology.
> If you don't want to do business with them just because you shun platforms
I don't do business with them because I can't access their hours, menu, services, etc... I've had this happen a few times. I'm not avoiding these businesses because I'm a snob. It's because I literally can't access the information. So, I go back to google and find a business that provides the information I need to decide if the business meets my needs before traveling to their location.
There used to be a particular restaurant I ordered from. It was a real restaurant, not a ghost kitchen. It was listed on Uber Eats and similar, but you could also order from them, which was significantly cheaper. We used to have an image of the menu and the phone number but eventually lost it. Because the restaurant was only listed on Facebook, none of us have a Facebook account, and Facebook aggressively tries to keep you out without an account, it was a royal pain to get the number back. But even after getting the phone number, it was WhatsApp only. Which I don’t use. Some of my friends do, so that was taken care of like that.
There was another place which was on the brink of closing and kept shifting its opening hours and days. I went there on occasion but because there was no official web presence I couldn’t trust the hours online (photographs of the schedule). So I called. Sometimes they picked up, sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, sometimes they were closed but other times were just busy and couldn’t come to the phone.
So no, you can’t always find a phone number, and you can’t always call and ask. Having a roughly up-to-date web presence is very useful. It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.
From my experience, you can't count on businesses to update their website to correctly reflect their working hours at all times either (especially if it's a one-off change, for example being closed for a day)
> It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.
> How do you know this place even exists without any information?
You want to find an antique book store in another state. How do you find it? You search the web. And what information bubbles to the top of the search results? Answer: businesses with websites.
If you are a business owner, you will lose customers without a website, because that is how most people will find you.
If I'm looking for a physical place I usually just look at Google maps. "Minneapolis antique bookstores." I'll look at pics, see if the vibe is cool, etc. Relying on Google SEO is a recipe for disaster in my experience because there's no guarantee that the bookstore is even in or near Minneapolis. Other people probably browse the web differently though.
I honestly would not expect an antique bookstore to have a website, unless they let you buy their books online.
> If I'm looking for a physical place I usually just look at Google maps.
Ah yes... I'm sure that is what 99% of people do. /s
You don't like reality... and that's fine. You do you. But, most businesses do need a web presence if they want be be discovered by the majority of potential customers.
I'd literally bet my house that most people do a simple google search. No one goes to google maps as the first option when trying to find things unless they are in their car. (Well, except for you, of course)
In 2026, companies who want their customers to easily find them will have some type of web presence. I'm sorry that it is such a hardship for you.
I do a simple Google search, or whatever search happens to be default on the browser I happen to be using. Then I click on Google maps, or the platforms equivalent. I'm not gonna waste time on the sponsored results that may not even be nearby what I'm looking for.
The phone. Wow. Great solution..... Literally the whole point of putting information online is so your employees don't have to waste time answering the same question 999999x per day.
> You can't even find a phone #? How about calling and asking?
Wait what? How does he contact the website if he can't find contact info?
I don't disagree with your point BTW — not everyone needs a website. But at the same time, a business often needs to meet customers where they are. If they're OK with losing a small subset of customers because their business info is only on <insert platform here> and some people don't use said platform, then I don't see what's wrong with that. But if they're not OK with that, then they'll have a presence on more platforms which could include their own websites.
At the end of the day I don't really understand why anyone's arguing about any of this. If a business finds value in a website and it serves their business interests, they'll probably have one. If not, then they won't have one. No amount of philosophizing over democratizing the web will make my local café make a website.
>Wait what? How does he contact the website if he can't find contact info?
The same way you find the website, you google it. I have never had a problem getting a phone number of a business that doesn't have a website. Am I living in bizarro world? Why does a small business need a website just to provide a phone #?
You are right that a small business does not need a website just to provide a phone number. But I think you are underestimating how many people truly do not want to make a phone call. Personally, if I see two businesses, one has no info but a phone number, and the other one has basic info even in their Google map profile, then I'm going with the one that doesn't make me pick up the phone.
OP mentioned using this to scale WordPress instances in one of the comments. So I assume that had something to do with the choice. It probably wouldn't be TOO hard to support multiple dialects of SQL in the future though.
So much that we presume in the modern cloud wasn't a given when Apache Kafka was first released in 2011.
kevstev wrote just above about Kafka being written to run on spinning disks (HDDs), while Redpanda was written to take advantage of the latest hardware (local NVMe SSDs). He has some great insights.
As well, Apache Kafka was written in Java, back in an era when you were weren't quite sure what operating system you might be running on. For example, when Azure first launched they had a Windows NT-based system called Windows Azure. Most everyone else had already decided to roll Linux. Microsoft refused to budge on Linux until 2014, and didn't release its own Azure Linux until 2020.
Once everyone decided to roll Linux, the "write once run everywhere" promise of Java was obviated. But because you were still locked into a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) your application couldn't optimize itself to the underlying hardware and operating system you were running on.
Redpanda, for example, is written in C++ on top of the Seastar framework (seastar.io). The same framework at the heart of ScyllaDB. This engine is a thread-per-core shared-nothing architecture that allows Redpanda to optimize performance for hardware utilization in ways that a Java app can only dream of. CPU utilization, memory usage, IO throughput. It's all just better performance on Redpanda.
It means that you're actually getting better utility out of the servers you deploy. Less wasted / fallow CPU cycles — so better price-performance. Faster writes. Lower p99 latencies. It's just... better.
Now, I am biased. I work at Redpanda now. But I've been a big fan of Kafka since 2015. I am still bullish on data streaming. I just think that Apache Kafka, as a Java-based platform, needs some serious rearchitecture,
Even Confluent doesn't use vanilla Kafka. They rewrote their own engine, Kora. They claim it is 10x faster. Or 30x faster. Depending on what you're measuring.
They explicitly don't have a "nostr coin" or do anything "on chain" which I applaud them for especially since the Venn Diagram of Nostr and the crypto community is basically a circle.
Very odd. This must be some kind of Ubuntu issue. Out of curiosity I tried it in Chrome, Firefox and Safari on MacOS 15.5 and saw very little CPU usage and no difference with/without the video playing. I don't have a Ubuntu Desktop handy to confirm. Looking at the video it's nothing special. Just a fairly small mp4 using a native html5 video element to play it. Really no reason this should be causing issues.
I LOVE puppies, but if I had a trillion of them the last thing I'd want is another puppy.
reply