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Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

haraldurthorleifsson.com

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Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#201

Post by yamtaddle »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #169
hintymad wrote: post #80

[flagged]

> did this guy do his job in Twitter, or did Musk lie? Honestly, that is completely irrelevant in my opinion of Musk. Musk just continues to delight in being a grade A psychopath and asshole, that's why I wish he would just shut up so I don't have to continually hear what assholish thing he does next. To start with, the Director of Twitter HR was not even able to tell the employee if they still worked there . That is…

> Musk has proven again and again that he is simply a lying asshole. I honestly don't care how much he's worth or how successful he is. He treats everyone around him like shit, and I don't understand why anyone would idolize that.

Andrew Tate truly had (has!) a huge following among teen boys and adult men with a brand that was pretty much openly "psychopathic shitbag guru". Trump constantly told blatant lies and was widely known to be a scummy, lying businessman (he was a bi-partisan punch line for that exact reason for a solid two decades before his followers forgot that they used to laugh at what a pathetic, unethical, shitty joke of a human being he was! I literally remember Limbaugh cracking those kinds of jokes at his expense!), and had a cult-like following.

I don't get it either, but it's really common.

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#202

Post by darth_avocado »

93po wrote: post #160
JeremyNT wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "right" way and a "wrong" way to go about reducing headcount. I'm not exactly sure what the "right" way is, but I'm pretty sure that Elon's way ain't it.

You mean by providing several months of severance? And not doing it wave after wave like other big tech companies are doing?

What severance? There is only 1 month of severance. People are on payroll for 2 months because of the WARN act and not because he’s generous. Every single tech company has months of severance on top of the WARN act.

But that’s what he’s said he’ll pay, but in reality he’s not even paying people what they’re owed. There’s already quite a few lawsuits on how he’s not paying things.

He’s not paying anyone last year’s bonus, he’s not paying people’s buyout payments for terminating early, he’s firing people instead of laying them off because he doesn’t have to py severance, he’s not honoring anything agreed upon in the acquisition agreement. Please be informed before you actually talk about this.

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#203

Post by espadrine »

clockworkhavoc wrote: post #63
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #49

Halli is a master of voice, as evinced by this site. This is deep, strong branding.

The site design is a blatant ripoff of ligne claire [1], famously pioneered by French comic artist Hergé, creator of The Adventures of Tintin series. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_claire

It predates Hergé. Bécassine did it two decades prior. It is so old that it will enter public domain next June (death of the artist + 70 years in France).

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#204

Post by darth_avocado »

starik36 wrote: post #116
JeremyNT wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "right" way and a "wrong" way to go about reducing headcount. I'm not exactly sure what the "right" way is, but I'm pretty sure that Elon's way ain't it.

The only thing that matters is what you take from it. Severance. Everything else is completely and utterly immaterial.

The 1 month of severance?

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#205

Post by darth_avocado »

93po wrote: post #162
Pxtl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not just somebody being let go. Publicly grilling your employee with the mocking "what would you say you do here" on Twitter is ludicrously unprofessional, following up with trash-talking him about using his disability as an excuse for not producing. I honestly question Musk's sobriety at this point.

The employee made this public, not Elon.

Because none of the HR emails respond. People don’t have health insurance and need employer verification and none of those emails respond to you. How else do you resolve this?

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#206

Post by wpietri »

toss1 wrote: post #184
93po wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon didn't make this public, the (independently very wealthy) employee did that.

Yes, Elon did exactly that. Thorleifsson repeatedly inquired of HR, then made a single tweet to Musk. As I pointed out, Musk could have 1) simply ignored it, 2) ignored it and cc'd HR to reply, or 3) publicly replied something brief and to the point, such as "Yes, terminated, cc:HR to close out paperwork". Yet, musk chose to do none of the above, instead choosing to escalate the situation, evidently while underestima…

Very well put.

Somebody once pointed out to me that the reason Instagram became so much more popular with celebrities than Twitter is that Instagram has filters to make you look prettier, but Twitter doesn't have anything to make you look smarter or funnier.

Musk is clearly desperate to be The Best At Social Media. But he's just not. Which should be fine! We can't all be good at everything. But he can't let it go. So much so that he spent $44 billion to win at Twitter. And when that wasn't enough, he ordered people to fix it for him: https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...

I saw the Twitter purchase described as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory" and that gets truer by the day.

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#207

Post by wedn3sday »

gWPVhyxPHqvk wrote: post #91
1-more wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot understand the Stan culture for Elon. I get it for the military guys who tell you to lift and make your bed. I get it for Joe Rogan. I get it for the MMA masculinity influencers. I get it for Trump and DeSantis. I do not get it for Elon.

Maybe I'm just a effeminate big-city lefty liberal but it seems like the stan culture for Elon is the same as for Trump, Desantis, Joe Rogan, and all the other guys who peddle easy answers for a difficult world.

Only somewhat more seductive, because for a while there Elon was actually involved in some very cool new technology development before he totally went off the rails, so there's still some latent "hey isnt he the guy that landed a rocket" psychological/cultural energy.

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#208

Post by wedn3sday »

93po wrote: post #167
Orangeair wrote: post #140

Surreal to me to see how many people in this thread and trying to steer the conversation towards whether or not the firing was justified based on his job performance. What the actual fuck does it matter? In what world is it okay to fire someone without communication and then publically mock them like Elon did here? I'm truly unable understand the willingness some people have to jump to the defense of billionaires.

Elon isn't mocking him - the employee made this public and Elon is defending his choice to fire him. It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work, because it's clear he didn't. Instead he's tweeting "Let me know if you are going to pay what you owe me?" at Elon, which is only furthering Elon's stance that this dude is looking for a payday and went to publicly smear Elon to bully him into pa…

Yes he's looking for a payday, i.e. the day you get paid for the work you did. He's not looking for extra special bonus dollars, but the dollars he's contractually obligated to get paid for the work he performed while employed. Im honestly struggling to see the issue here.

>> Elon isn't mocking him.

He literally posted a meme joking about how he cant feel his legs

>> It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work.

Halli needed multiple tweets to fit in the list of major projects he worked on while at the company

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#209

Post by danpalmer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #146
danpalmer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it. Watching some of the videos of him giving tours around the SpaceX facilities, he comes across as a real first-principles thinker. So much of tech disruption is applying first-principles thinking to problems and coming up with better solutions. Given that he's so great at it, I can see why people look up to him for it, his companies are clearly successful for having built things from first-principles – elect…

> Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1]. The established car makers still , over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just ho…

Yeah you're right, I was simplifying a little. I think the main thing is that almost every "first-principles" company ends up hitting up against "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that", and it's just down to naivety.

Re: Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

#210

Post by wedn3sday »

93po wrote: post #177
mschuster91 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are sick and tired about constant news about Musk's latest crap antics, just like with Trump - basically, at least here in Europe, you can't go to bed and wake up without yet another newsflash of either a large Twitter outage or Elon Musk shitposting again. I get why people are exhausted, but the desensitization is dangerous on its own - when there are no consequences, people escalate their behavior... and Mus…

> Musk already has intervened to make Starlink less usable for Ukraine. and here you are perpetuating the fake shit about Elon that gets everyone engaged. Elon doesn't want Starlink to be directly used on weapons to kill people. Would you also fault the World Nuclear Association for being willing to provide uranium to power Ukraine, but refusing to provide the same material for nuclear bombs? He has a right to determ…

>> He has a right to determine whether he wants his technology to be used directly for offensive war efforts.

Perhaps this is laudable if true, however I havent seen this actually used in any justification for not allowing the use of starlink (by people involved, not internet commentators). Its also a bit of a stretch to call anything the Ukrainians do here as "offensive war efforts" when they're defending themselves from annihilation. Who-invaded-who is kind of an important part of this story.

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