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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

nytimes.com

231–240 of 1001 posts

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

I think you and the parent poster are doing a good job of describing the same thing from different angles. Both observations are true.

Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.

It's really different facets of the same thing, right?

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#232

One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever. I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.

Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out to do.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.

Right but the point was: > *I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her* but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept. What was there to thank her for?

Nothing! That's why I didn't comment on that. I commented on "remarkably inept."

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#235
post #26
post #5

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

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…

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Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#236

[flagged]

All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.

In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#237
post #58
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot. No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis

Curtis Yarvin’s writing is insufferable and many of his ideas are both bad and effectively Nazism, but clearly he’s very smart (and very eager to prove it).

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Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.

There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users. The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.

There is also no technical reason people have to stay, because tech isn't the problem here. The value in these platforms aren't in the range of features they provide, but the engagement between individuals and the community and the value of the information it generates.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#240
post #50

X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.

X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.

Oh for sure, it's so important we should restart the count of years to mark the significance. 2022 will be year 1, the rest 'Anno X'
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