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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

nytimes.com

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Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#201

Post by mrweasel »

moomin wrote: post #184
mrweasel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there. The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember tha…

I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.

Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#202

Post by ethbr1 »

falcor84 wrote: post #195
madeofpalk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.

Indeed. It was such a paradoxical situation from the start, with her both reporting to Musk as the chairman and owner, while at the same time "managing" him as the CTO. I'm surprised that the charade went on for as long as it did.

I'd imagine the paycheck helped resolve the quandary.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#203

Post by phillipcarter »

coolKid721 wrote: post #74
Bender wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they ofte…

It's just the prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50... People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are n…

We have no evidence to suggest that they just made a prompt change and it dialed up the 4chan weights. This repository is a graveyard where a CI bot occasionally makes a text diff, but we have no understanding if it's connected with anything deployed live or not.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#204

Post by ToucanLoucan »

mandmandam wrote: post #126
josefresco wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame. Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.

> she was not to blame. Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall. My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM. Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a nu…

See my only counterpoint to this theory is Musk has a long and well documented history of being absolutely stone desperate to be cool, which is the only thing he can't buy, and he simply revels in his ownership of Twitter even as he comprehensively runs it into the ground as a business.

Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.

Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#205

Post by ceejayoz »

snickerdoodle12 wrote: post #95
Xiol32 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.

You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.

Unless you think said job is edging into "oh shit I might be part of the Nuremberg Trials II" territory.

Life got short for quite a few historical Nazis.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#206

Post by rsynnott »

duxup wrote: post #83
ceejayoz wrote: post #5

I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted this long, honestly.

Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?

The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...

It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#208

Post by amrocha »

mrweasel wrote: post #180
threetonesun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform. And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.

I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to…

Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#209

Post by rsynnott »

rtkwe wrote: post #76
perihelions wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ( "Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts" —16 hours ago; 89 comments)

"Weirdly" always gets flagged almost immediately even though it's quite tech relevant.

Naughty Ol' Mr Car's fanboys tend to flag anything that makes Dear Leader look bad. Surprised this one hasn't been nuked yet, tbh.
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