Elon Musk: Elon is city

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Elon Musk: Elon is city

Should I step down as head of twitter This poll is closed.
Yes	420	4.43%
No	69	0.73%
Goku	9001	94.85%
Total:	9490 votes

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zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

madmatt112 posted:

gently caress I was gonna buy some Tesla puts today, forgot.

I don't think you're supposed to talk about buying Africans anymore. You should probably apologize to the Tesla putz.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2022 02:19

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 06:50

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Despite the massive regulatory risk exposure and the worryingly expedient massacre of capital this is still progressing exactly like a concerned netizen convincing someone to give them ops in IRC or becoming a mod on a webforum and it turns out they are an insane 16 year old and their ideas run counter to everything about the medium.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 20:10

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Data Graham posted:

Imagine Musk taking over Twitter because it's chump change for him and immediately deciding that the #1 top priority, even higher than making sure there are enough people employed who know the passwords to the servers, is to cut costs and make it profitable overnight

You want to go after bots? Fine, great, institute a new feature that makes people have to buy a badge with a credit card and if they don't they're relegated to bot ghetto, whatever. Either it turns into SA and improbably survives on subscriptions, or it dies a slow death.

You want to change the revenue model from advertising-driven to subscription-driven? Fine, also a real idea; try changing the rules, tweak the features, see above.

But the entire point of being a billionaire private owner with infinite money is that YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT MONEY IN THE SHORT TERM. Profitability is a years-out goal for people building a product with investor money! It should be the LAST thing on YOUR mind. You have all the freedom in the world to throw resources at changing what Twitter is and how it works. You can afford to run an experiment that takes months or years to play out. And the way you do that is by hiring more people, cultivating a better corporate environment, giving workers more perks. Not firing half of them and chaining the rest to their desks as though the most important thing in the world is showing black ink by Friday 8AM or they'll drag you to the Old Bailey

Elon is hardly an infinite money haver in this case. He's leveraged up to his elbows to have done this without getting out of Tesla and if he can't reap the payments he's gonna have to keep selling Tesla stock (which he's already started.) He needs something coming out today if he wants to remain half as relevant as he was before the sale.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 15:44

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Traffic is up and advertising is down!

What do you mean the first part is harmful without the second?

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 20:08

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Hollismason posted:

Any estimates on exactly how much money was lost by the tweet that crashed the insulin company?

Empirically speaking not enough, gently caress em.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 20:39

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

sebmojo posted:

Read that document I linked, not only did he buy it at 38% over the value he bullied the board into accepting the deal lmao

Musk is going to get his Ozymandias dream when Twitter is used as a mergers and acquisitions and/or hostile takeover case study for executive MBAs.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2022 03:49

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

The Saddest Rhino posted:

what does that whole series of tweets mean

They fired everybody who understood how their Git change management worked. The ghost in the machine is pushing patches that are experimental or proposed but not approved. So they just turned it all off and now a manager already working 20 hours a day needs to review every change personally like it's 1999 and we haven't had 2 decades of deployment management software and expertise developed.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2022 16:38

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Aramis posted:

Hear hear. I have no doubt that there are a lot of companies/offices that treat free food as a proxy for OT pay, but that's not been my experience at all at one of the FAANGs (circa 2010-2015). It was a very appreciated QoL benefit on top of the absurd pay, reasonable working hours, and extra pay when on-call.

The myth that the likes of Google do so in order to somehow fool their employees intro doing additional OT is ludicrous.

Even in my crunch-heavy videogame days, OT food was certainly never seen as "compensation". It was more like coffee: a bare minimum the employer was expected to provide.

The whole runaround is you don't consciously clock what's happening to count it as a benefit. Its just background enabling you to work through lunch or skip a 15 minute car ride to McDonald's. You personally might be getting one over or seeing it as a basic novelty but free lunches are exclusively used to maximize on task time during a work shift and are proven to do so by any study that has cared to try.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2022 21:06

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Ups_rail posted:

how does mars fit into that?

This is a good time to remind everyone that everything Elon does he does for Mars. He didn't buy Twitter out of some free speech altruism and he isn't tanking it out of spite, he truly believes he needs to fix it so he can leverage it as his Mars base newsgroup because the future is catturd poo poo posting about the mars slaves.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2022 01:42

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Durzel posted:

How much truth is there in the pervasive rumour that Twitter staff (and SV folk in general I guess) have a very cushy working life compared to what most others would experience? I can accept that it's a bit of a meme the whole "1 hour of work, the rest of the day in the rec room", but I wonder what substance there is to it. Obviously that culture is the opposite of what Musk wants, and his "40 hours in the office and you can work the rest of them from home" is too far on the other end of the spectrum. I guess I'm just curious as to whether Twitter was an outlier in terms of productivity vs wellness, or whether that's typical in SV, or whether it's all just hyperbole.

Quite happy to be told that I'm an idiot for even giving it any serious consideration.

Once you make it in mainstream IT you're generally given the latitude to do whatever the gently caress as long as you have proven output. There's a lot of low hanging fruit that looks impressive in nearly any circumstance so the 4 hour a week jobs certainly exist. There's also a lot of selection for protestant work ethic by the time you make it so there's often people self determining they need to crunch on 6 projects 70 hours a week like they were still a junior making a name for themself.

tuo posted:

It's a good way of getting rid of the people who don't have a problem finding the next job, even granting them three months of pay, and keeping the rest.

In my experience the opposite is a better way of running a business, but I'm no billionaire so I obviously have no clue about this.

When you have an entire office laughing their butt off at you and your cronies can't inquisition fast enough this is a good way to rebalance.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2022 14:58

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

"The server gets flooded by hurricane Katrina and the website goes down" is a very 2005 thing. Something like Twitter dies in weird and wonderful way involving service degradation as failover-reboot cycles don't perfectly recreate an instance because a cosmic ray hit the server so everyone in North America's tweet imbeds stop working or some middle manager sees 2faserv(1) and 2faserv(2) in the console and tells the junior to kill 2faserv(2) cause its redundant and Europe loses the 2 factor message sending.

I think there's 2 reasons we haven't seen a public blackhat owning: 1. all the easy hacks are 0day library exploits and they want to save them for something that isn't dumb or 2. they have and just haven't told anyone yet and no one is left at Twitter that could notice.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2022 16:40

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Strong Sauce posted:

At best it would be left to the CTO to understand this but Elon's short a couple C-Suite right now.

But yes at the very least a CTO would be given some kind of overview like this. Someone with some curiosity... say someone who had just purchased the company for a lot of money, would probably probe further in. But it should't take a huge team like that to show him this. A Product Manager could just give him this overview over lunch.

Asking product managers to run through a architecture flow chart of your single and only tech product is a very good presentation to take in before you make statements like "the headcount here has room for improvement" or "I'm going to buy you for 4x your valuation and fix this".

Laying off everyone of note and asking the remaining engineers "wait, what's our architecture actually?" is like Hitler in his bunker as the Red Army takes Berlin asking "is it bad outside?" while G�tterd�mmerung plays in the background.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2022 20:40

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Selling posts or likes is too obvious and not even as related to bandwidth or compute as you'd think.

What you want to do is sell boost and deboost. Give a discount for buying them for other accounts. Get paid for the forum wars you're starting on purpose by letting jorp and Babylon Bee back.

No reason to wait for boost and deboost to be implemented properly either. Just sell it now, who's going to be able to tell?

# ¿ Nov 19, 2022 21:49

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Funky See Funky Do posted:

I believe he was also, at some point, a practicing therapist.

Just imagine for a moment that Jorp was your shrink once upon a time.

Have you ever been trying to find a therapist? It's Jorps all the way down.

Sorry not sorry. There's a lot of good therapists with a wealth of learning and experience but they're all booked solid.

Preoptopus posted:

Honestly getting doing speed with a fragile constitution vibes.

He's definitely reaching the peaks of neurotically boring that comes with weeks on end of stimulants.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2022 05:41

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

golden bubble posted:

It's one of the good uses of middle management position. Where the entire point of the job is to protect your team from the obvious stupidity of upper management, people appreciate the position.

Why do we need good cop bad cop? Why can't we just have good cop good cop?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2022 05:50

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

toiletbrush posted:

100% guaranteed they've done gently caress all to improve anything and he's just hoping for a bit of confirmation bias from his most loyal stans

He's finally figured out which Michael services to turn off in the APAC server without losing things like 2fa. Next step, tightening up the back end on level 3.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2022 13:58

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

theflyingorc posted:

https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1595679136731004928?t=TDfUlxZCxJXO-R0iKCjLnA&s=19

Pictured: Genius

I did a summer camp class for 10 year olds once upon a time including explaining the classical description of technology as scientific application for any benefit to get them thinking harder than "technology is what happens on my hand me down iphone" and you know what, I think this geohot guy could benefit as well.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2022 06:26

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Frank Frank posted:

There has to be serious money in making a Twitter clone that isn�t a dumpster fire. Easier said than done but you�d think investors would at least be interested in helping to promote a replacement. Then again, Twitter wasn�t a huge money-maker and we�re heading into a down economy so I dunno.

A giant worldwide message board is more infrastructure than moneymaker. There's no money there without really labored pains to gently caress it up.

Like letting this gently caress up buy it and fire everyone with an inevitable result that the server farms become useless is the biggest crime against social technology since the US privatized energy gen/the grid. All options of replacement are going to work about as well as the Texan power grid.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2022 06:21

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Frank Frank posted:

There�s a power vacuum though. Someone could swoop in and make not-Twitter and maybe turn a profit. Seems crazy no one is trying yet - all of the alternatives offered aren�t even close to what Twitter is. Musk doesn�t own a copyright on �online news and humor blog� and even if someone copied Twitter entirely, it would be hard to claim any sort of copyright when there are tons of adjacent sites that do the same thing more or less

You don't simply copy Twitter. There a decade combo of bis dev and cutting edge distributed server technology. No service is ready to be Twitter except Twitter and it's about to fail at that soon enough.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2022 06:31

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Memory should always be suspected, especially your own and especially memories made during tragedies. You need to use context clues and corroboration to help understand certain gaps or incongruities. For example Elon is a shithead without empathy so we can probably rule out he was the babby holder.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2022 19:07

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Do you think Twitter Blue got pulled back when Musk saw the balance raked in and noticed the Apple store cut?

I hope so because it means he's since had the Twitter Blue team focused on rolling their own payment processing function which is going to work super very well if they build it in 1-2 months instead of license someone elses with a 15% cut only for Elon to pull it back again when he finds out the Mastercard vendor agreement cut is 3%.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2022 21:04

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Come on guys, Elon isn't saying we should be run by a fascist. He simply wants us to give fascist ideas a chance because they might have some good ideas. For example the intersection of minorities and forced labor.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 15:31

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

If there one thing an infrastructure company with a fun front end app needs, it's weekly pushes to production.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 16:23

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

TulliusCicero posted:

That's what I don't get: why do all these morons think Twitter is so powerful? It's just a stupid site where you post your toilet thoughts or journalists lazily break news: it's not "HE WHO CONTROLS THE TWEET CONTROLS THE WORLD!"

He's not the first Right Winger to heavily value the shitpost site either: look at Loomer

Just post somewhere else, christ

The availability and reach was impressive for a single platform. It was not omnipotent but you could punt something out and reach a lot of people who'd tell their friends and family with a message that looks official, important, and/or interesting.

The extremely online are the loudest about 'what now' with it quickly approaching unusable echo chamber or just plain going away. But there's a lot of government agencies, news agencies, or scientific journals or networking groups scratching their head on what now as any other online forum has problems in reach, appearance etc. And why everyone was ready to sign the death certificate as soon as blue checks became pay at the same time moderation was gutted.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 16:31

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Elon has his laundry list for Blue etc. that all need substantial work already so I don't think asking for big loads of code all over his face is a matter of pure busywork.

Weekly publishing of muchly voluminous code is just a pure recipe for disaster if you do aren't overstaffed with the literal best in the business. There's ways to do that but you need to mitigate the risk with among other things a huge support staff of people who aren't coding because they are busy making sure the coders in Team A don't completely bring down the application features from Team B while making sure there isn't a duplication of effort with Team C who has a similar but vague demand from a product manager. Meanwhile a bunch of gearheads can't write code because they are busy singing the server hymns to the on premise servers to drive away the bit rot demons and ensure the air conditioning keeps running. While a team of lawyers make sure you aren't making extremely illegal data management schemes and a bunch of nerds figure out how to test everything on a weekly basis that may involve script that could appear like code to a manager but with a whole lot of their own server hymns singing.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 17:12

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Light Gun Man posted:

I dunno enough about either to know how apt it is, and I'll throw it out there anyway. saying "fix the problem with more code" is sort of like saying you should fix a painting by adding just buckets of more paint? like the addition of more does not mean it's improving. it's a process of deciding where and how much you want to use to achieve the look you are going for.

musk is also kind of falling for this with his posting. he just keeps posting more, going for volume I guess, without regard for the quality of said posts.

It's hard to make physical analogy and this is what breaks MBAs brains. Code is a thing, why not done after 16 mythical manweeks etc.

There's process analogies but they might be even more obscure. This is taking a concert orchestra and telling the concert pianists and the gaffers that they better start writing music. They can, the pianist is classically trained in music theory and the gaffers has been playing guitar since he was 8. But the whole thing starts falling apart once the pianist loses the time to practice and the gaffers dont get a chance to set up the sound system that pipes everything back in the teams ears that lets everyone hear if they're playing true at that moment. And all for nothing cause the producer is just going to grab a bunch of sheet music from GitHub and the conductor will just arrange it in a pleasing way and we can either throw out the stupid contributions or incorporate them and make everything worse.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 17:42

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Kafouille posted:

Elon is all about engineering, or rather what he thinks and dreams engineering is. He loves the nuts and bolts and clever little technical details, all the fancy little tricks real engineers sometimes do, and thinks it's ALL about those things. He seems to think that the entire job is to come up with novel and inventive solutions, and assumes everything beyond that is easy and will just fall into place on it's own, not something that is worth his time.

Hence he is fundamentally incapable of understanding what people at Twitter actually do, if you're not busy coming up with a BRAND NEW REVOLUTIONARY FEATURE why am I even paying you for, right ?

Turns out social media isn't really about about solving technical problems, it's about fostering a social dynamic. Features on something like Twitter aren't something you just slap on because you can, it's about steering the dynamic. It's not like the character limit is a pesky technical limitation they haven't been able to solve. The whole checkmark fiasco really embodies how he's fundamentally incapable of understanding that even on the most obvious and basic level.

I think that's where the obsession with code comes from, in his mind the Twitter product is an app with a text box. How hard can that be ?

The character limit is a pesky technical limitation with impacts on in-motion and at-rest infrastructure and UIX. Like it could be bigger but it was chosen not to be and if you wanted to change it again good luck.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 18:33

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

A farting mink posted:

gently caress all. Neither Elon nor anyone else is actually looking at the code presented. Elon fires the ones he decides there and then that he just doesn't like. The coding thing is just a lovely fratboy hazing ritual.

Musk may be firing people based on unrelated things using the code review as an excuse to weasel out of labor obligations but he is definitely going through the code going "mmhmm mhmm, yes how peculiar" because it makes him feel 20 again.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2022 18:53

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

While dense and intense describes the BMs I save when I'm due for an onsite town hall or workshop, it's a good way to manage a technical bullpen. Between cross pollination or cross referencing you want the walls between tech employees to be nonexistent.

It's just, it's 2022. If you weren't someone who figured out how to do this online by consulting or contracting in the 2010s, everyone figured out how to be dense and intense in chat by the time COVID rolled through.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2022 02:23

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Some liberal replied "handled these" to Hunters dick and this isn't news? Smdh.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2022 06:25

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Can't think of a better way to spend the Christmas downtime than wallowing in my own filth sleeping in conference rooms doing hardcore coding.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2022 16:51

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

My 20 year ago RexExitium on IRC memory is he learned about the physiology of jerking off and he got in IRC to tell everyone we were jerking off wrong with weak American technique, only asians truly know how to jerk off.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2022 17:28

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Wait do people go on Twitter to ask where to buy sandwiches? I thought it was 100% discourse.

Seems like if you're going to use Al Gorithm its to give sponsored ads and tweets about sandwich shops if you're busy arguing about hot dog is a sandwich.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2022 17:45

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Anyway, Geohot is right that its crazy easy to license a cheap AI question answering framework and feed it a whackload of data and some structure info and get coherent responses. Its just if he does that to Twitter without 2 years of data clean up analysis its going to instantly be Nazi Tay.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2022 18:47

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

The Saddest Rhino posted:

I want that "fiduciary!" emoji

# ¿ Dec 9, 2022 15:47

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Tarkus posted:

Realistically though, what could the EU do to Twitter in the case of losing in court? Assuming he doesn't care about the EU side of thing.

Take the server hardware and kick them out of any office or datacenter buildings, freeze EU bank accounts, pursue associates, customers, or venders still trying to do business with Twitter and just generally end the ability to reasonably serve a euro Twitter user or collect euro advertising bucks. It's usually a bad thing to get on the wrong end of a government if you want to do any sort of business somewhere it controls.

Like if Musk just wanted to say gently caress the EU and phone in Twitter into the EU internet in the least performant but least controllable way there's ways to liquidate and recover some of the capital involved instead of just generally asking the EU to destroy all that capital out of spite or incompetence.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2022 23:56

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Might be a dumb question but is a passenger seat useful in a truck?

I think according to Musk the driver seat isn't super important either except for some pesky legalese that means they need a sack of meat in the seat to get sued when it runs over a kid because the AI is unimpeachable unless it turns off.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2022 02:40

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Steadiman posted:

https://twitter.com/PopCrave/status/1601935684415225860
I mean at this point just make it LiveJournal, why even stop at 4000 characters. I knew he wanted to raise the character count but I figured it would be 420 characters because lol so zany amirite? Was literally anybody even asking for this?

There are people who think Twitter being awful for 1/313 tweet threads is a problem with Twitter and not the OP.

e. This probably has a lot to do with the Twitter Files being absolutely garbage in the format in spite of Elon making sure Twitter retained first publishing rights.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2022 16:44

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Data Graham posted:

"I want the world to be simple"
"I don't want to have to press 1 for English"
"I don't want to have to think about whether that guy I know is gay"
"I want there to only be white people"
"I want everyone to be Christian"
"I want there to only be two genders"

"If the world gets complicated in any way it means I have to think about things and that hurty breain. WORLD GOING DOWN THE TUBES"

These people aren't necessary looking for simplicity although it can be summarized that way. The Reawakening absolutely poisoned American sentiments for going on a century now. A doctrine of Christian sin defining many people's moral compass distills into an idea that you can't be all of happy, yourself, and Christianly. They see all these LGBTQ+ people being themself and being happy and just don't understand why they get that privilege and obviously while they are being themself they are indulging in the pedophilic, rapey, or murdery vices that they think everyone has because those are the thoughts they are busy suppressing.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2022 17:26

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 06:50

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Dacap posted:

https://twitter.com/iamraisini/status/1604619857257025537?s=20&t=trSDviL-RE9MTxeFs4nkeQ

Lmao with these requests for funding rounds and Elon saying he's ready to step down with no replacement, somebody finally did the math on what it takes to run Twitter and figured out it's more worth it to chuck the whole thing into custodianship with the current debtors. Gonna be a fun Christmas for those banks.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2022 01:38

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