411–420 of 1001 posts
Are people who still want to argue that Elon isn't destroying Twitter?
You really can’t argue when twitter works fine right now and everything is just talk till it happens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Multiple entire teams that run critical systems have reportedly left. It’s over. Dead site running. Such a horrible loss. Glad the stockholders are happy. This was clearly better than the lawsuit. /s
No excuses. No redirecting blame. This is 100% on Musk.
I need everyone to think very carefully about the attack surface, and how long it has been left unprotected, and how long it will be unprotected. Now, I need you to consider the following proposition: that eyeballs are to codebases, dashboards and telemetry as floss is to tooth and gum. Then, I need you to go to your phone and uninstall Twitter. Also, when you do visit it, visit it in Firefox. Use a Firefox Container…
Thanks for the heads-up. I got too focused on schadenfreude. I've added https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JackCuthbert/pihole-twitte... to my pihole and flagged this in our security forum at work.
Any APT worthy of the name will be already moving.
Personally? I'd be really worried for folks checking Twitter from Ukraine. That's a whole lot of compromising data and I know who wants it
So who's building Twitter 2.0 right now, featuring decentralization?
Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.
> Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up.
> If you need help just ask.
As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight
That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I also can't imagine carrying water for or "simp-ing" for a billionaire, especially one who treats people so terribly (this "work yourself to the bone or resign" ultimatum was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in tech, I'm appalled at the people defending it as some genius move).
Really I feel bad for the people who have no choice but to stay at Twitter, the H-1B's and the like. The brain drain is going to be (/already has been) massive and all that will be left are the people who have no choice, can't find a better/different job, or are true sycophants. None of that makes for a healthy work environment and isn't conducive to making good products.
[0] https://twitter.com/MichaelGuimarin/status/15934156421110456...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter. One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?). There are indeed high morale high ch…
One of the things I do to ground myself in situations where I'm facing a death march, or find myself working at a company that does a pivot is listen to the song "Road to Nowhere" by the Talking Heads. If the intro lyrics cut too deep, I start looking. Well, we know where we're goin' But we don't know where we've been And we know what we're knowin' But we can't say what we've seen And we're not little children And we…
"We're on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But we're together so who cares!"
Twitter isn't going anywhere because of two critical facts: a) attention whores and rage/doom scroll addicts b) Those people can easily find each other and talk to each other. Mastodon and Activitypub decentralize which means it is a lot harder to proverbialy whore yourself to the attention of the masses and and those attention whores (politicians, journalists,etc... not just celebrities and influencers) can't have t…
All of this is predicated on Twitter remaining accessible, or existing at all, in the medium to long term which is seeming increasingly less likely.
I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…
> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a comp…
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
I am chalking this up to Russia syndrome. Personality types driven to do great things aren't easily satisfied. Most are perpetually dissatisfied & they need to raise the stakes. They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It wi…
When the revolutionary politicians in France submitted to Napoleon, during his coup (1799) and his subsequent coronation as an emperor (1804), it was under the implicit premise that he would be the one who would be able to militarily keep Belgium, because the Revolution had seized Belgium but wasn't able to hold it.
So Napoleon's power was tied to keeping Belgium, although England would never allow any continental state to be that unbalancedly powerful.
Thus Napoleon has no choice but to subjugate England. To that end, as his fleet had been hit hard in Aboukir (1798) then smashed in Trafalgar (1805), he could not rely on an old-school invasion: thus he tried to subjugate all of Europe and cut commercial links with England to besiege the island at a continental scale. This was called the Blocus Continental, and it was bound to fail as long as Russia wouldn't participate. Thus the desperate attack in 1812.
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[1] Les conséquences politiques de la paix_, (https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Cons%C3%A9quences_politi...) is a book in which Bainville predicts, in this exact order and in the year 1919, that Germany will annex the Sudeten, then Austria, then Poland, then attack western Europe, and that Italy will be their allies.
[2] In his biography of Napoleon.