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Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#571
post #472
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.

Highest DAU for xx% less overhead is literally winning. That's why people have lost their minds. They want him to fail so badly and they're getting the feeling that he won't, so cognitive dissonance is through the roof.

Twitter has not changed as a product. His Twitter blue has been a disaster so far. Hes getting attention for his much larger failure, being the worst tech company manager we've seen in a while.

You cant take credit for positive outcomes if you done nothing yet.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#572
post #51

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…

> On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it.

What random features? https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... is what we’re working on currently. Pretty sure the Matrix community would accuse us of losing focus if we were investing tine in cloning twitter or email over Matrix at this stage…

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a crazy idea: 1) get rid of most of the existing code base and simply re-implement and migrate existing content and remaining users to the new thing. 2) get some small team together that does this. 3) stop bleeding cash while that plan is being set into motion. 4) keep the existing code base limping along while that is being put into motion. I'm pretty sure that that's the plan Elon Musk is executing. It's sim…

> It's a micro blogging platform with a fairly simplistic feature set. Yeah, you can do Twitter on a weekend… if you only use it yourself and a few friends. But we are talking about a platform with millions of users, all of which want real-time access to tweets written from anywhere in the world, including image and video content. Just getting to “no outages” and “low enough latency” parts is going to take a lot of e…

Yep, just like Whatsapp. That team had about 50 people when Facebook bought them and a billion or so users. Twitter as it exists today is complicated and bloated. Doesn't mean that that's the only way to do it.

I bet mastodon doesn't have thousands of very active committers. They are taking a lot of users right now. With a hacked together pile of ruby and javascript. Easy to forget that that is how Twitter once started out as well. The bloated org chart came later.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#574

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…

If I'm giving Elon the benefit of the doubt, A. he's intelligent B. He has 20+ years of corporate experience running companies, I would assume that there was some method to this madness. If I had to guess, he came in with the assumption that forces in the company would be hostile to him based on their beliefs. In order to weed those forces out, he engineered some of this madness to shake those people out. Unfortunate…

He is playing Candyland while everyone else is playing chess

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#575

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…

The way I see it Elon boasted 'hardcore!' .... and most of Twitter's employees called his bluff, now he's screwed.

All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#576
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.

There's an old tweet in Norwegian that constantly gets retweeted, or just referenced as "balloon animal". It goes something like: > [me running naked through the library with a balloon animal on my head] > The fact that you're talking about me means that I hit a nerve https://twitter.com/kaffekjele/status/586625003661197312

I think the equivalent English meme would be this exchange from Pirates of the Caribbean: "You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of"/"But you have heard of me"

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So not only are they going to find a vulnerability on twitter’s backend that allows them to remotely execute code on the Twitter servers, but then they’re also going to find some vulnerability in the app that is accessible from the previous vulnerability on the backend that allows them to execute arbitrary code on my phone, without pushing any sort of app update to the Apple store, and then they’re going to use that…

I'm more worried about cold path logs. Like, what if Twitter just randomly has the past year's worth of geolocation data on so-and-so, and it happens to be exposed in an SQL query, and that query happens to get run and the results exfiltrated. It depends a lot on what Twitter keeps and for how long, but e.g. consider American soldiers being used to pinpoint nuclear silos, for example. Imagine being able to map where…

"Only the paranoid survive." - Andy Grove

Though I'd like to think this was all unlikely, I appreciate the heads up and explanation of why you're concerned. Mensch.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#578
post #92

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…

So not only are they going to find a vulnerability on twitter’s backend that allows them to remotely execute code on the Twitter servers, but then they’re also going to find some vulnerability in the app that is accessible from the previous vulnerability on the backend that allows them to execute arbitrary code on my phone, without pushing any sort of app update to the Apple store, and then they’re going to use that…

You can use Twitter with a third party app. In this regard Twitter stands out from the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc. and is the reason I use it and none of the others.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#579

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…

> to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring.

He said several times he wants to make it into a western Wechat equivalent, very dystopian with overall negative value to society and positive value for him and the government agencies.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#580
post #92

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…

You can use Twitter via third party apps. That is probably more secure than using any browser.
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