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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#981

Post by randomcarbloke »

mcv wrote: post #658
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

> His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype. No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things. The impression he's bee…

He's good at finding the right people and putting them in a room, and convincing other people to give him money...that's it.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#982

Post by qwertox »

davidbarker wrote: post #538
qwertox wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only see a spinning circle. What a future.

The server is probably overloaded right now — which, I agree, is frustrating. Even the biggest instances are struggling tonight. You may be able to load it via one of the bigger instances, though. Try going to https://mastodon.online/@paulg@mas.to .

Thank you for pointing out the possibility of loading it via other instances, that is interesting.

Is this always possible or is there a certain requirement, for example that this other instance has pre-fetched the posts beforehand?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#983

Post by kybernetikos »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

Would you mind posting your mastodon link here? Twitter have replaced the 'my site' link in your tweet.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#984

Post by AnonCoward42 »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #584
AnonCoward42 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone that does not hate Elon Musk is following a personality cult. I have not much of an opinion of Elon Musk in general and kinda ignore the person himself, but what he did to Twitter is awesome for everyone, but the woke bubble. It's definitely fun to watch it.

I think the fact that pg himself is frustrated and pausing his Twitter presence is evidence enough that this is not awesome for everyone except those in the “woke bubble”. Paul Graham is very obviously not a “woke” guy. You are very obviously inside an “anti-woke” bubble yourself if this nonsense is your main takeaway from Musk’s tactics as Twitter CEO.

It is evidence that Paul Graham is frustrated with Twitter politics. Now using him as evidence for anything else is more of a personality cult around Paul Graham.

> You are very obviously inside an “anti-woke” bubble[...]

Anyone outside the woke bubble is considered anti-woke. If you're not part of them you're the enemy. I find it really refreshing to see them whine about reinstating accounts of "the enemy" which is as I said basically anyone of differing opinion. It's also fun that people on here throwing a tantrum about this. So sweet.

PS.: Delicious was the word I was looking for. The only tool they have here is downvoting, which is like confirmation in this case. Delicious!

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#985

Post by ZacnyLos »

jansan wrote: post #732
ZacnyLos wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the one using HNews which looks like it's from the 90's lol

HN is minimalism with less than 65kB resources to download. This is a deliberate decision, it works very well and it is usually very fast (not right now though). Mastodon on the other hand downloads 2.6MB resources to display what exactly? Some tiny images, three posts and an ad. That does not look like a winner.

You can use any ActivityPub frontend you want to see the same content, it can be very light Pleroma for example.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#986

Post by ShredKazoo »

pg wrote: post #498
baxtr wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!

Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible. If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is…

@dang does a great job moderating HN. Perhaps he should reach out to Elon and share advice?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#987

Post by ShredKazoo »

mcv wrote: post #658
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

> His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype. No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things. The impression he's bee…

I read this book a few years back: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/... Here are my recollections/opinions (stripping out further qualifiers to save space)

The truth is somewhere between what the boosters want you to believe and what the detractors want you to believe. Elon's very smart and works incredibly hard, but has a serious ego problem and isn't pleasant to work for. A bit like Steve Jobs maybe.

No CEO can succeed without attracting talented people and inspiring them to excel, and Elon has been very successful at that. By working incredibly hard, thinking incredibly big, and setting high expectations, he inspires everyone else in the company. But he's also capricious in a way that demoralizes people and burns them out.

We like the story of a lone hero who does everything. But there are many people who worked at Elon's companies and played a key role, but feel underappreciated in a way that the author seemed sympathetic to.

The "people managing Elon" thing is true to a degree. It so happens that I've spoken to a couple employees (one SpaceX one Tesla) who both told me stories like this. (Specifically the two stories were something like: (1) "We adjusted the Tesla to optimize for the route Elon drives, even though that hurt autopilot performance overall" and (2) "We keep having to explain to Elon the basic probability math that explains the importance of continually testing rocket components")

At the same time, "he's mostly there to bring money and hype" seriously underplays his role. As an extreme analogy, imagine you had a toddler who told you "[Mommy/Daddy] I designed an awesome treehouse and I want you to build it". You keep saying you're busy and treehouses are impractical. But your toddler gets you to buy into their vision, and challenges you to overcome obstacles until an awesome treehouse is built. Even if you did all the work in this analogy, you have to give your toddler some credit. The power of visionary leadership and extreme determination was one of my big takeaways from the book -- again similar to Jobs with the "reality distortion field", I guess.

Social media moderation requires a humility and good judgement -- not Elon's strengths. But it's definitely not a coincidence that he's started so many successful companies.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#988

Post by bestcoder69 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #455
bestcoder69 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoting the GP tweet to the one you linked: > You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees. Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?

Disagree that this is even the question. The role of "founder" is mostly tangential to the discussion - rather it's the "owner" that Marxists would argue don't deserve their wealth (and if it's the same person, you have to separate the roles in your head - the 'founder' role produce some irreplaceable value, while the 'owner' role is easily replaced.)

The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?

What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.

e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#989

Post by stiltzkin »

axlee wrote: post #871
ehsankia wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, Twitter is absolutely nothing like SpaceX or Tesla. Twitter's problems aren't engineering issues, they're political and related to moderation. Content moderation is one of the hardest problems current which no company has managed to solve. Especially when you have the user-creator-advertiser triangle. It was clear from the very start Elon has no clue what he was walking into.

TikTok seems to have managed it well. Well, except from being chinese-owned.

Not sure what makes a big tech company great being totally American controlled. If TikTok is managed well it could be the same with Twitter.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#990

Post by wwweston »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #367
wwweston wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to be smart all the time, and you don't have to be stupid to be wrong.

what you have to do is correctly assess yourself, which is impossibly rare among people who made a bunch money

Really like this comment -- dovetails nicely with Bill Gates "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose," and helps illuminate the fundamental problem: status insulates you from accountability, but without accountability you lose a crucial form of feedback essential in nearly everyone's ability to correctly assess themselves.
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