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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#351

Post by matthewdgreen »

JasserInicide wrote: post #103
belligeront wrote: post #15

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.". It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff). [1] https://twi…

Obsession with politics is a cancer that infects even the brightest

Obsession with weird/extremist polarizing politics is a cancer. I don't think you're necessarily going to become incompetent just because you decided to get involved in city government. The critical thinking capability that keeps you from wasting time on QAnon and conspiracy theories is the same stuff that lets you accomplish useful things in the world.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#352

Post by wardedVibe »

starik36 wrote: post #122
ALittleLight wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I could see Twitter's internal dashboards. One thing I have a hard time estimating is, outside of my bubble, how is Twitter doing? Are these things hurting Twitter? Is the controversy helping it? I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.

Wasn’t the only mastodon account banned the one that was posting links to the doxer account?

It was any server that shared links with the server which hosted that. So mathstodon.xyz, for example, which is where a bunch of math Twitter ran to, and not particularly political, was also hit. Even if you endorse banning links to someone sharing public information, it was an extremely broad brush.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#353

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #238
dahdum wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as long as Elon continues his trend of acting progressively stupider. At least to me, there’s a stark difference in his public appearances. He used to appear intelligent, thoughtful, and nuanced. Now he’s disjointed, often tired, and quick to deflect with jokes or political controversy. Doesn’t seem like the same man.

I've seen people that were super intelligent and compassionate go on drug binges and come out like Musk. Just as intelligent, but now no longer able to empathize with others and using whatever intelligence was left for malice and damage.

[deleted]

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#355

Post by rvz »

tekla wrote: post #235
ryukafalz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few browser extensions that help with that. I just started using this one, it's pretty slick: https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.

Wow, why the hell would any normie use this?

That's why you see Mastodon customer support here and on Mastodon itself by the techies here just for choosing an instance and even explaining why it is all slower than Twitter. For example: [0]

Normal people do not care enough to go on a safari hunt for finding instances, user names of those claiming to have left Twitter or deleting their accounts or even bothering self-hosting just for a username on their own instance.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042216

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#356

Post by photochemsyn »

zzzeek wrote: post #22

This should cause a significant degree of cognitive dissonance for quite a lot of Hacker News users. fascinating to see two members of the billionaire tech class disagree publicly like this.

As an HN user who is mostly interested in open source projects of various sorts, I don't really care that much about 'billionaire tech class' conflicts. I do appreciate Elon Musk's successful effort with electric vehicles and reusable rockets, though I expect others to eventually catch up, as is normal with tech innovation (VW electric vehicles are looking good).

As far as social media, if it all goes away I wouldn't be that concerned. Net neutrality and access to basic Internet services for all is a much more important issue, IMO. Blocking servers from the Internet (unless they're actually hosting criminal content and taken down by legal prosecution) would be the more serious free speech violation.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#357

Post by eikenberry »

threeseed wrote: post #21

There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG. Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.

I've met PG at a book signing and he was quite pleasant. I asked about when Arc would be released (this was a while back) and he laughed and joked about it. Really nice guy.

Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#358

Post by duckfruit »

belligeront wrote: post #15

Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.". It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff). [1] https://twi…

Social media promotes a vicious callout culture where everything you say in the past is permanently used against you in the court of public opinion whenever you change your mind. While I did not share PG's opinion at the time I also don't think it was completely unreasonable to think that someone like Musk would be capable of running Twitter judiciously after the acquisition. I appreciate that instead of digging in his heels PG seems to have evolved his judgement after recent developments.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#359

Post by tedunangst »

bestcoder69 wrote: post #182
threeseed wrote: post #21

There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG. Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.

Dude the other day he said "Automation is inductive proof that Marx is wrong"! A mistake you wouldn't make if you sniffed Marx's wikipedia page, let alone opened your eyes to read it. pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944 (...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.) e: Reading…

I hope he got a refund from the ghostwriter for that one.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#360

Post by geerlingguy »

tekla wrote: post #235
ryukafalz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few browser extensions that help with that. I just started using this one, it's pretty slick: https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.

Wow, why the hell would any normie use this?

Having to install a browser extension makes it a hard no for many, the most annoying thing for me is there's no app like Tweetbot for Mastodon that's even like 5% as useful.

I know many people used Twitter.com or their official app, but many people find a simpler native app experience much more useful.

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